Volume 19, Issue 3

Ever since the publication of Victor Raskin's seminal work on the Semantic Mechanisms of Humor (1985), linguistic humor research has had a decidedly cognitive orientation. The cognitive psychological roots of the Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH) presented in the aforementioned book, have been adopted in a large number of studies that have appeared since. In this respect, Attardo, in a recent discussion on the cognitive turn in literary studies, points out “that linguists who study humor may well be pleased to find out that they were doing cognitive stylistics all along” (2002: 231). Indeed, the two most influential linguistic humor theories of the last two decades, the SSTH and the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH, Attardo and Raskin 1991; Attardo 1994, 1997, 2001a), along with a number of other theoretical studies (Giora 1991; Kottho 1998; Yus 2003) share some significant features with the broad linguistic framework that is the methodological angle of the present thematic issue, viz. Cognitive Linguistics (CL).

We describe the space structuring model, a model of language comprehension inspired by ideas in cognitive linguistics, focusing on its capacity to explain the sorts of inferences needed to understand one-line jokes. One process posited in the model is frame-shifting, the semantic and pragmatic reanalysis in which elements of the existing message-level representation are mapped into a new frame retrieved from long-term memory. To test this model, we recorded participants' eye movements with a headband-mounted eye-tracker while they read sentences that ended either as a joke, or as nonfunny controls (“She read so much about the bad effects of smoking she decided to give up the reading/habit.”) . Only jokes required frame-shifting; nonjoke endings were consistent with the contextually evoked frame. Though initial gaze durations were the same for jokes and non-jokes, total viewing duration was longer for the jokes and participants were more likely to make regressive (leftward) eye movements after reading the “punch word” of a joke. Results are consistent with the psychological reality of some process like frame-shifting, suggesting readers literally revisit aspects of the prior context while apprehending one-line jokes.

It has often been observed that many jokes rely on the audience reinterpreting the initial part of the joke once the punchline is encountered. In order to elaborate on this account, we outline how these reinterpretations may happen in various ways. The examples we consider suggest that the generalization is best stated not in terms of syntactic or even semantic forms, since the same mechanism seems to occur in jokes presented visually or partly verbally, partly visually. We sketch an analysis using separate but related viewpoints (expressible in terms of mental spaces), concluding that the revised interpretation may occur in any nested viewpoint, and need not be adopted by the audience as a factually correct interpretation.

In this paper, I combine pragmatic theorizing with empirical interaction analysis to analyze conversational humor. By taking dialogic structures and the level of performance (utterance formulation, conversational sequencing and emergent genre construction) into consideration, I also hope to offer insights for cognitive linguistics. One key to performance analysis is that utterances always provide information, often called contextualization or framing procedures, on how they should be understood. Pragmatic modeling should take framing procedures and the reconstruction of various forms of knowledge invoked in normal, everyday communication into account to explain inferencing in humorous interaction. In most humorous activities, non-standardized inferencing forms the core of the humorous potential. It arises either from a sort of script opposition (Attardo 1994) or from playing with formulation standards and expected ways of speaking within conversational sequencing. To frustrate expectations is to invite unusual associations. I distinguish between comical interaction modality (keying and framing) and punch-line humor. Both invite listeners to make complex inferences. Besides this, they work with allusions. The listener must draw on life-world knowledge in order to understand the allusions that are central to both sorts of humor. I favor retaining the Gricean cooperation principle and its maxims for the analysis of humor and try to link the Gricean pragmatics of cooperation to performance analysis (framing, keying, layering, contextualization). Clark's (2004) plea to take into account the distinction between primary and collateral signals is highly suggestive of possible ways to grasp the functioning of emergent humorous interaction. In this paper, I apply pragmatic theories to two examples of emergent conversational humor not belonging to well-known conventional humor genres and consequently hard to classify using conventional folk taxonomies. Using these examples, I show what a pragmatics of performance can and should contribute to explaining how interlocutors co-construct humor and process various layers of meaning. Only when combined with a performance analysis that takes into account the layering of meaning and social and cultural knowledge can pragmatics explain the joint production of humor.

In this paper, we provide an in-depth cognitive analysis of a specific humor strategy we coin “trumping”, a multi-agent language game that revolves around the subversion of the linguistic forms of exchange. In particular, we illustrate how, in a conversational setting, agents can “reflect” and “distort” the linguistic-conceptual construal of each others' utterances. Because this reflection or parallelism in the trumping game can be situated on different levels of linguistic organization, a multi-dimensional semantic-pragmatic account is proposed. Using insights from cognitive linguistics, we show that adversarial agents exploit the conceptual mechanisms underlying the opponent's utterances in order to turn the tables in the humor game. In doing so, an agent can trump an adversary by demonstrating a “hyper-understanding” of the lexico-conceptual meaning of an opponent's utterance. This subversion of construal operations like metaphor, metonymy and salience leads to a sudden manipulation of the discourse space that has been set up in the previous utterance(s) (Langacker 2001). In general, by providing an analysis in terms of basic principles of semantic construal, we argue that a cognitive linguistic treatment of humor has an ecological validity that is lacking in most linguistic humor research.

There are a number of problems with the articles in this issue. As I read the articles in this guest edited issue of Humor , I could not help being reminded of George Santayana's (1863–1952) point: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” One of the problems is certainly that most of the authors (with the exception of the guest editors) simply failed to do their homework (i.e., read the relevant literature) or chose to ignore it. As for the other problems, let me state bluntly two points, to which I will return in my conclusions.

Jessica Milner Davis (ed.): Understanding Humor in Japan . Cleveland, OH: Wayne State University Press, 2006. 249 pp. $29.95. (Joe C. Sample) John A. Lent (ed.): Animation in Asia and the Pacific . Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001. 270 pp. $44.95. (Arthur Asa Berger) Marguerite Wells: Japanese Humor . Oxford: Macmillan, 1997. 164 pp. $55.00. (Neville Nickels) Howard Hibbett: The Chrysanthemum and the Fish: Japanese Humor Since the Age of the Shoguns . Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2002. 212 pp + index. $28.00. (Patricia Welch) Ram Kumar Panday: Nepalese Humor . Kathmandu: Muskan Prakashan, 2000. 90 pp. $10.00. (Goh Abe)