Volume 17, Issue 4

The article looks at the assumption of SSTH/GTVH that two fully or partly overlapping semantic scripts in opposition are central to humorous communication. On empirical and technical grounds, it is suggested that the script analysis should be complemented by identifying additional script constellations, i.e. manipulation within one script, the interplay of more than two scripts, and the collision of scripts from different planes of analysis. These suggestions support the idea of multiple incongruities (Attardo et al. 2002: 28), and the category of staggered escalation is put forward for incongruity clusters in addition to Attardo's (2001) strands and stacks.

Despite its strong cognitive orientation in recent years, humor research still has paid relatively little attention to the paradigm of Cognitive linguistics (CL), which in light of its dynamic view on cognitive and semantic aspects of language in use, seems to provide an adequate framework for the analysis of humor. With regard to the “cognitive construal” of human experience as one of the basic notions of CL, this paper describes for three types of humorous texts in what ways construal operations are exploited, combined, and embedded in humorous discourse, as well as the way in which they relate to the achievement of humorous effects. It is demonstrated, accordingly, that CL contributes to a holistic account of humor as a highly marked and complex, yet structurally not irregular kind of language use. In this respect, this contribution is particularly critical about the category of Logical Mechanisms, defined in the GTVH as humor-specific operations that guide the process of incongruity resolution in humor interpretation. Instead, the present account advocates a prototype model of construal operations, in which incongruity and resolution appear as two perspectives of the same cognitive construal.

Victor Raskin's clear delineation of the differences between humorous and bone fide serious communication and his systematic formal account of how jokes work was not only a major contribution to linguistics but also made possible revolutionary advances in other areas of the social sciences of humor. It was Raskin's account of the fictional, conventional, and mythical scripts used in jokes that freed us from the earlier tendentious and misleading analyses of jokes in terms of “stereotypes.” The General Theory of Verbal Humor enables us more easily to explain, transform, unpack, and compare quite disparate kinds of jokes from elephant jokes to Polish jokes and to explain how and why jokes have evolved over time. Raskin's contribution to humor scholarship has been that of a master.

Based on a larger project on punning, this paper outlines the application of the General Theory of Verbal Humor to imperfect puns. The aim is to illustrate the intricate mechanisms of this seemingly simple joke type. Application necessitates the expansion and further formalization of the linguistic tools available for the description and explanation of humor, in this case centrally the knowledge resources for script opposition and logical mechanism. This elaboration of the GTVH is possible, because of its explicitly theory-based and formalized nature. Key results are the distinction of punning and wordplay, as well as verbal and referential humor.

According to Raskin's script-theory, five factors are necessary for verbal humor: 1) a switch from the bona fide mode of communication to the non-bona fide mode of joke-telling; 2) the text of an intended joke; 3) two (partially) overlapping scripts compatible with the text; 4) an oppositeness relation between the two scripts; and 5) a trigger, obvious or implied, realizing the oppositeness relation. I argue that although this theory works well with prepared fictional jokes, it does not explain all verbal humor. The reason is that prepared fictional jokes are a sophisticated kind of verbal humor with features which are not shared by other kinds of verbal humor. I illustrate with examples of semantic, phonetic, and pragmatic techniques for creating verbal humor without switching scripts and/or without switching to non-bona fide communication.

Many jokes fall outside the province of script theory, because they depend on performance in various ways. Interactional features of the joke performance, along with pantomime, gestures, voice shifts, and so on, require modes of description separate from the verbally oriented script theory. There are significant differences between the written joke text and the oral joke performance, and these differences cast doubt on the simple extendibility of script theory from written joke texts to the spoken joke performance.

This paper examines the treatment of literary humor. Attardo has extended the SSTH/GTVH (Raskin 1985; Attardo and Raskin 1991) to longer humorous literary texts, not simply sequences of jokes (Attardo 2001; Attardo et al. 2002). While the GTVH knowledge resources may be the necessary conditions for the presence of textual humor, I maintain that they are insufficient to completely describe the humor of any literary text. Literary texts do have the formal properties of all texts, but they are also art, and as such resist purely formal interpretation and description. To reduce literary art to linguistic formalisms would be deeply disturbing; therefore, the linguistic method should, at a certain point in the analysis, be supplemented by the literary method. This assertion is supported by the discovery of humor enhancers in humorous texts, which condition the reader for humor reception, thus enhancing humor while containing no discernible script opposition. These enhancers are both outside of Raskin's formal description of humor and Attardo's formal description of textual content. Subscribing to Raskin's theory of limited applications and recognizing Attardo's ability to push the GTVH into literary analysis, I suggest that literary humor is best treated by its own theory and propose the enhancers as its components.

Humor and incongruity appear to be constant bedfellows, for at the heart of every joke one can point to some degree of absurdity, illogicality, or violation of expectation. This observation has lead many theories of humor to base themselves around some notion of incongruity or opposition, most notably the semantic-script theory (or SSTH) of Raskin and the subsequent general theory (or GTVH) of Attardo and Raskin. But correlation does not imply causality (a reality used to good effect in many successful examples of humor), and one should question whether incongruity serves a causal role in the workings and appreciation of humor or merely an epiphenomenal one. It remains a key question for humor researchers as to whether listeners react to incongruities by constructing humorous interpretations, or whether they collaboratively create these incongruities as a result of opportunistically constructing humorous interpretations.