Volume 18, Issue 4

The present paper describes an interdisciplinary effort, in which results based on the same material, but analyzed with tools from two different disciplines are brought together for mutual evaluation. The set of 70 jokes and cartoons from the 3 WD (Ruch 1995), which has been extensively studied psychologically for its affective properties, is analyzed linguistically for its internal morphology based on the General Theory of Verbal Humor— GTVH (Attardo and Raskin 1991). The correlations between the stimulus properties and their effects are discussed, as well as the relevance of these results for the respective theories and the disciplines that use them. Additional emphasis is placed on highlighting the problems and considerable benefits of such interdisciplinary research as the most apt approach to complex phenomena like humor. The results show that there is indeed significant overlap between stimulus properties as they can be distinguished linguistically and affective responses as they can be identified psychologically. Of the six GTVH categories, it is primarily script opposition, narrative structure, target, and logical mechanism that contribute to the separation of the three humor types with respect to effects on recipients. The results also suggest that initial and residual incongruity, as operationalized with the GTVH, are central cognitive aspects of humor with an impact on affective factors and, consequently, their distinction. While this may appear to be commonsensical results, their scientific reproduction is a major step forward, in this case for humor research.

The relation between humor appreciation and comprehension difficulty has been described as an inverted U function. That is, when a joke is too easy or too hard to understand it will be less funny than a joke of intermediate difficulty. Humor appreciation might, however, be a kind of expert skill. Then the easier it is to get a joke for the experienced language user the funnier the joke will be. Two experiments found the relation between the latency of recognizing a message as a joke and the funniness of that joke to be primarily negative and linear. There was no evidence of an inverted U with this material. Funnier material was reacted to more quickly than less funny material providing some evidence for the expert skill hypothesis. Some jokes congruent with male gender stereotypes, however, resulted in higher humor ratings by females but did not affect recognition latency. This finding suggests the possibility of an implicit structural and a more explicit content factor in humor appreciation.

Can use of humor in a disorganized speech mask audience perception of disorganization? Employing a 2 × 2 factorial design, findings reveal that use of humor can cause a disorganized speech to be evaluated as better organized than a serious disorganized speech and as comparable to a serious organized speech. By dividing attention, listeners seem likely to focus on the more attractive alternative. Also ratings of speech humorousness and audience member’s levels of sense of humor influence assessments of speech disorganization.

Jessica Milner Davis: Farce Mary Ann Rishel   Phillip Glenn: Laughter in Interaction Salvatore Attardo