Villy Tsakona: Recontextualizing humor. Rethinking the analysis and teaching of humor

The book by Villy Tsakona is one of those that break a new ground, and thus is a satisfying read. It is also well constructed and has a leading theme of context as a major aspect in humor analysis, which takes the reader right through the book.

The introductory chapter sets the ground for the ensuing discussions and analyses by identifying crucial features of context in the preceding studies of notable humor scholars (Victor Raskin, Eliott Oring, Neal Norrick, Ksenia Shilikhina, Ibukun Filani, Jan Chovanec, and Villy Tsakona herself). Following it, there are four major chapters in the book, each of which makes interesting claims.

The second chapter is devoted to metapragmatics of humor, the genuinely under-researched area of humor studies. Based on the corpus of examples of comments and reactions by internet users to Greek financial crisis jokes, as well some other examples such as a clearly sexist Greek advertisement, she develops an approach that distinguishes three elements (pp. 24–25): metapragmatic stereotypes (that is users’ opinions on certain pragmatic phenomena, such as humor), metapragmatic indicators (e.g. lexical or graphic ones that reveal these opinions), and their sociopragmatic functions (the polarizing or unifying effects of the stereotypes). She uses the approach to advocate the revision of what she calls “traditional approaches to humor” (these she seems to associate with Victor Raskin and Christie Davies, whose studies focused on jokes) that assume that there exists a single context-less interpretation of a humorous text accepted as funny by all recipients, that humor is fictitious and does not offend, and that “anything can be said in a humorous manner without any sanction” (p. 61). She favors a new, revised approach that recognizes the role of recipients in interpreting or assessing humor, emphasizes the variety of its valid interpretations, notices that humor does reflect reality to some extent and may be found offensive, and thus that there are clear “limits to humorous expression” (p. 61). In methodological terms, Tsakona praises the advantages of adopting emic (participant-oriented) over etic (analyst-oriented) criteria to develop a theoretical model she outlines in the following chapters.

In the third chapter she makes a major claim on the role of genre in humor analysis; she argues that, on the one hand, the use of humor is genre-related, and there are certain expectations as to the presence of humor in particular genres, and on the other, that the use of humor may contribute to redefining genres and creating new ones. In this connection, she proposes a classification of genres from the most to the least humor-accepting, and at the same time admits the role of the cultural and temporal factor. The latter is particularly true in the digital world, where new genres emerge, reshape and disappear much more quickly than offline. As she strongly emphasizes the role of creativity in humor, she applies the “joint fictionalization” phases of an offline conversation (initiation, acknowledgment, creating the imaginary and termination), proposed by Winchatz and Kozin (2008), to the analysis of online humor, and finds the approach generally applicable. This is convincingly illustrated on the example of the Crete crocodile story (pp. 88–99), where the acknowledgement phase was very quick (boiling down to Facebook likes or subscription decisions), and so was the termination phase (no more contributions after the story was resolved), while the phase of creating the imaginary story was particularly long and developed, with all types of verbal, visual and mixed contributions and reactions, some of them memetic and elaborate. The chapter also offers very nice examples of how the “monological fictionalization jokes” and “intertextual jokes” developed as new subgenres (pp. 81–85). The conviction that Tsakona seems to have at the back of her mind while discussing genres is expressed well by Nancy Bell (2015), whom she quotes on page 128: “despite the common understanding of a sense of humor as a deeply personal, often idiosyncratic character trait, our humor preferences are socially constructed.” This is true, a human being is a social animal, but the role of the mind cannot be underestimated either.

The problem of mind comes up again in the fourth chapter, which is central to the book as this where Tsakona’s Discourse Theory of Humor is proposed. She lists Raskin and Attardo and their competence-based theories of humor (SSTH and GTVH) among her major sources of inspiration, and at the same time she postulates the revision of their original approaches in a rather fundamental manner. All the proportions retained, I cannot help thinking of Noam Chomsky’s student George Lakoff, who in his (1971) article had used a controversy on the status of lexicon in his mentor’s theory to advance the idea of the primacy of semantic representation; by doing so he undermined the major assumption of Chomsky’s theory – the primacy of syntactic representation in language, and started the new, cognitive school in linguistics. In Tsakona’s case, she first attempted to modify the GTVH by adding the Context KR to the existing six Knowledge Resources^[1] (Tsakona 2013), and then she decided that there was no point adding new KRs since she was going to build the separate performance theory of humor.^[2] This is what she does in chapter four by identifying three Analytical Foci:

1. Sociocultural assumptions – these cover all kinds of background knowledge and cultural assumptions necessary for humor to be understood, including metapragmatic stereotypes; they replace the Context, Script Oppositions, and Target KRs;

2. Genre – this covers all kinds of “sociopragmatic goals and functions of humor … [and is] an elaborated version of the Narrative Strategy” (p. 124);

3. Text – this covers semantic, stylistic and visual elements, as well as – crucially – contextualization cues and meanings derived from reactions to humor, which is thus treated holistically; it replaces Language, Situation, and Meta-Knowledge resources.

Given that what is known as a “humor frame,” built by the “this is unreal” signal at the outset of a joke and the closing laughter signal or other reactions at the end (cf. the classical approach by Fry (1963), notably unmentioned in the book), is now included within the Text Focus, this approach is well applicable to treatments of humor failure and humor quality as presented in Section 4.5 of the book. Generally, this pragmatic approach is very much commendable, as a step forward towards making humor theory compatible with communication theories. It is also a step towards literary theory, with the notion of “resistant reading” of humor being used in the study, not to mention the compatibility with the notion of “unlaughter,” developed within humor theory (cf. Marsh 2015).

Tsakona goes to great lengths to argue (perhaps contrary to Lakoff in his time) that her theory is an evolution, not a revolution; that elements of context were present throughout the previous humor research (see a table on pages 119–21), particularly in the GTVH, where in her view only sociocultural assumptions were missing, while all the other elements were latently present.

What she herself admits is missing from her own revision of the humor theory is the Logical Mechanism, but she treats her theory as only the first model (let us dub it DTH1), “so further elaboration on this model in the future may allow us to account for purely cognitive aspects of humor resolution as well” (p. 126). This is, in my view, a central concern with regard to Tsakona’s theory, as discourse interpretation generally revolves around the user’s mind(s) and is determinable by the Mind-Text-World triad, while cognitive linguists even argue this is just Mind-Text, while the world can be ignored in a representation. In Tsakona’s book, we are dealing with a socio-pragmatic approach, which ignores “the Mind” almost entirely and rings deconstructive tones; thus, it advocates largely the Text-Society dyad, which is even strengthened by stressing the goal orientation of all genres (p. 124). Here the question arises: do people have specific goals in mind when using established genres? Do people have specific goals when telling jokes or amusing anecdotes or even inserting one-liners into a conversation, not to mention using humor in a news article, funeral speech or a court decision? Not that I am a Freudian, but the goals might be complex or implicit for the speakers or writers themselves. I am glad there is a chance of DTH2, as the roles of the individual mind or mental schemata in humor generation and evaluation need to be recognized.

The last chapter of the book breaks another type of ground – it discusses the applications of DTH to teaching, especially teaching about humor. Tsakona makes an argument for introducing humorous materials (such as jokes, cartoons, memes, especially those that raise specific political, gender or racist stances) to teaching curricula as a way of promoting critical literacy and encouraging students to express their opinions and offer interpretations, or even create or perform their responses. As the chapter unveils, the reader tends to resist the idea, but later on with all the arguments and examples, they warm up to it. Goals of critical literary courses and teaching about humor indeed seem to converge. Teaching about humor within the frame of critical literacy does not have to be boring, or threaten the stability of the classroom and authority of the teacher, and its forms may be adjusted to the needs of a particular classroom. What I find somewhat disconcerting is the idea that such courses might possibly boil down to an attempt to influence student opinions in line with political correctness or cancel culture. In other words, I would not want to see Society overcome the Mind, to go back to the text-interpretation issues raised above. Tsakona, however, does argue for a more open-minded approach.

Overall, this book is definitely an achievement of humor scholarship and as such should be recommended to researchers across humor studies, especially in linguistics and social sciences. Still, I am looking forward to Discourse Theory of Humor 2.