Volume 19, Issue 1

This article describes ethological analyses of the arts, and notes parallels between the arts and humor. Artists create novel, mentally challenging, informative stimulus arrays that exploit our evolved stimulus preferences. We appreciate these artistic offerings, and reward the artist. Similarly, jokes are informative, elegant, and appreciated. As in the arts and in primate social play, the humorist signals an intention to entertain and then provides the enriching experience. The recipient acknowledges this benefit, and returns the favor somehow; both parties gain in fitness. This explanation, that humor is edifying and mutually beneficial, is consistent with various features of humor and with evolutionary theory. For example, jokes often have a butt, from whom we can learn to avoid missteps. Similarly, jokes often pertain to fitness-salient topics such as sex. This theory is contrasted with other functional explanations. Research findings in neuroscience, genetics, and animal behavior are integrated with the theory.

Both Goffman's dramaturgical paradigm and the humor of the television program Seinfeld often have been interpreted as being non-political and non-critical in intent. In its use of recurring characters, social archetypes, and commentary on societal rules, the program often uses dramaturgical conceptual categories such as impression management, regional behavior, and teams. By bringing a dramaturgical interpretation to Seinfeld , the program's hidden critique of the rules and ethos dominating modern American society is revealed.

The “comic” and the “ironic” have been embraced by certain strands of contemporary literary theory as ambiguous, self-reflexive modes of expression that are particularly appropriate to the crisis of representation which characterizes the postmodern mood. This approach is implicitly based on an understanding of the comic as incongruity strategy and, following Freud, on the assumption that humor has important psychological functions. However, literary theory has been slow to integrate these two assumptions in an explicit manner and has not done enough to assimilate humor research in other areas of scholarship. Although the role of humor in interpersonal relationships is well documented in research in anthropology, linguistics or psychology, it is rarely applied systematically in analyses of the structural role of the comic in literary texts. At the same time, an over-reliance on the psychological dimensions of humor may produce a generalized approach that fails to take into account the specific nature of the comic as distinct from other modes of textual creativity. This can lead to a situation, typified by some postmodern criticism, in which the boundaries of the comic become undermined. This article critically examines theories by Susan Purdie, Jerry Flieger, and Jerry Palmer that exemplify some of these difficulties, but may also offer a means of conceiving of the comic in a more holistic manner.

Based on an audience-centered model of television discourse, we show that verbal interaction is one of the principal means of characterization in film. One of the linguistic phenomena screenwriters exploit and manipulate to develop their characters is verbal humor. For instance, the ways in which interactants on screen produce and respond to jokes is critical in their characterization. We look at an episode of the US American sitcom Ally McBeal, in which two women tell dirty jokes. We show that although the structure of both jokes as well as their respective performance equally meet the demands of good (tellings of) jokes, the screenplay is constructed in such a way that one of them fails to elicit laughter. This is achieved through creating expectations in the viewer prior to the telling of the jokes and through having the women frame their jokes dierently. This research has implications for the study of both gender and humor in conversation, for even though we look at constructed dialogue, it yields insight into underlying knowledge about real conversation.

Mikita Brottman: Funny Peculiar: Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology of Humor . Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2004. xxiii + 153 pp. $29.95. Rachel Giora: On Our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative Language . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. ix + 259 pp. $55.00.