METAPHOR vs. JOKE?
Figurativeness vs. funniness?
Arvo Krikmann
The 3rd AIP-IAP Interdisciplinary
Colloquium on Proverbs
(Tavira, Portugal, November 8–15, 2009)
The presentation is based on the article
"On the similarity and distinguishability of humour
and figurative speech"
(Trames 2009, vol. 13, no. 63/58, pp. 14–40),
available at the address:
http://www.kirj.ee/public/trames_pdf/2009/issue_1/
trames-2009-1-14-40.pdf
or see the link at the address:
http://www.folklore.ee/~kriku/HUUMOR/
It is easy to recognize that the metaphor and
punchlined joke have much in common.
Both of them are embodied in texts with two planes of
meaning.
When a recipient encounters such a text for the first
time, he/she encounters a semantic contradiction
(inconsistency, incompatibility, ambiguity) and feels a
need for it to be disambiguated (conceptualized,
interpreted, construed) via certain semantic
alterations using his/her linguistic competence and
encyclopaedic knowledge.
To succeed in this, a certain intersection (similarity,
analogy, ambiguous element, causal link, inferential
chain, etc.) must be found between the two planes of
meaning.
A famous example from Aristotle's
"Poetics" (Chapter XXI)
– the so-called fourth type of metaphor:
as old age is to life,
so is evening to day.
Evening may therefore be called,
'the old age of the day,'
and old age,
'the evening of life'
Koestler
Greimas
Arthur Koestler "The Act of Creation" (1964):
There are three fundamental forms of creativity –
humour, discovery, and art.
All of these are founded on bisociation:
in the case of humour –a comic collision or
oscillation between two frames of reference ~
worlds of discourse ~ codes ~ associative
contexts;
in the case of scientific discovery – objective
analogy,
and in the case of art – the image.
Algirdas Julien Greimas "Structural Semantics"
(1966).
Greimas uses the common term isotopy to
denote different readings of ambiguous
expressions, including metaphors and jokes.
NB! the joke example punning with toilettes
meant as 'evening dresses of ladies', but
understood as 'toilets'.
Terms used to denote the colliding and incompatible parts of
metaphors and jokes:
Ivor Armstrong Richards:
tenor and vehicle
George Lakoff & Mark Johnson etc.:
target and source
Gilles Fauconnier & Mark Turner:
(input) mental spaces
Victor Raskin:
the first script and the second script
Terms used for the phenomenon of incompatibility itself
and the way to handle with it:
Jerry M. Suls,
Thomas R. Shultz:
incongruity and resolution
Suls
Shultz
Victor Raskin: script opposition
Seana Coulson:
semantic leaps, frame-shifting
Coulson
All these and others are different names for
one and the same couple of twins and their
relationships.
But only quite recently, researchers have
begun to ask further questions, like:
 in what exactly do they differ?
 do they differ only in degree, or in
something deeper and more fundamental?
 is there something special and specific in
humour that distinguishes it from all the rest
of communication types, including figurative
speech?
Intuitively, humorous items seem to have a
more complicated semantic (or conceptual,
or cognitive) structure than the average
figurative speech.
It is a quite commonly known fact that
children in their language acquisition firstly
learn to understand metonymies, later
metaphors, and still later, only in their
early teens, they begin to adequately
understand and use jokes and other, more
complicated forms of humour.
Attardo
Grice
Salvatore Attardo’s
hopes based on violating Paul Grice’s Cooperative
Principle and conversation maxims in jokes:
 Initially problem of maxims is presented as a
paradox: jokes seem to violate Gricean maxims
very abundantly, but, on the other, they may be
understood with an amazing ease and speed, and
can convey information.
 Attardo discusses also the problem of who is
"guilty" in maxim violations.
 His final conclusion:
A radical dichotomy between serious and
humorous uses of language cannot be maintained
in reality. Grice’s hypothesized speaker, totally
commited to the truth and relevance of his/her
utterances, is merely a useful abstraction. In
reality, speakers use humorous remarks, and
hearers decode and interpret them, as such,
along with other information to build their vision
of the communicative context.
Feyaerts
Brône
Kurt Feyaerts and Geert Brône:
hopes based on metonymy.
Ronald Langacker claims that metonymy is the
best entering point into the topic of discussion.
F&B assert: In humorous units the default
process of understanding is interfered. The
processing difficulties cannot be too great
either. Therefore they speak of the balanced
processing difficulty that is measurable via the
length of the causal chain, that is, the number of
causal "steps", or "moves" that are necessary to
reach the metonymical target concept.
For example, in the German phraseologism
Bei deiner Geburt ist wohl etwas Dreck ins Hirn
geraten the alleged length of the causal chain is
only one step.
The phrase Als dein Vater dich gesehen hat, hat
er doch den Storch erschossen, on the contrary,
requires the building up of two causal chains
embedded in each other.
Intuitively, it seems appropriate to think that
metonymic utterances of different semantic
complexity also need a different amount of
'mental work' to decode them.
However, it is hard to believe that this amount
could be measured solely via discretely
numerable causal steps.
Further, the idea of balanced processing
difficulty hardly aims to include a tacit
implication that the longer the journey from the
'lexical surface' of a metonymy to its actual
sense, the funnier the 'mental output'.
Seana Coulson’s analysis of the
cartoon by Jeff MacNelly
"William Washington Clinton"
– hopes based on blending.
Already the capture primes the
blended character of the
cartoon:
it is composed from first,
middle and familiy names of
different presidents of the
United States.
Further, inputs of the cartoon
are life episodes of two
American presidents,
Washington and Clinton:
1) the apocryphal story about
how the young Washington
chopped down his father’s
cherry tree;
2) the reference to Clinton’s
sex scandal with Monica
Lewinsky.
So, the blended text in the
cartoon reads:
"When I denied chopping down
the cherry tree I was legally
accurate".
The other elements of the
cartoon are also blended:
the man is holding a modern
chain saw in his hand, not an
axe;
his face looks like Clinton’s,
but he is dressed like
Washington.
Many blends, quite obviously, appear to have a
strong natural capacity to feed fantasy and
produce humour.
Yet the analyses do not detect more exactly,
which blends do result in humour and which
ones do not.
As a whole, the conceptual integration theory
is conceived to be a universal "theory of
everything" with an immense area of
applicability.
So here again we have to do with different names
for one and the same baby.
We can call it also
"processing difficulties",
"highly complicated semantic structure",
or otherwise.
That is,
the many-level violations of pragmatic maxims,
long multilevel chains of pragmatic inferences
(metonymical or other),
blends and other complicated relationships of
mental spaces
– all they are actually the different names for one
and the same baby.
It is very obvious again that a lot of things
exist which are humorous and figurative
simultaneously.
So it is natural to suppose that the share of
humour in various specimens of human verbal
or non-verbal creation is not 1/0 distinct, but
gradual, somehow multidimensionally gradual.
Nevertheless the question remains:
What, after all, does make some some textual
or non-textual items funny?
The other set of examples concerns the problem of
technical distinguishability of humour and figurative
speech, or prototypically again, jokes and metaphors.
Mark Turner’s maxim in "Reading Minds":
"The target comes first and the source comes second".
Thence, somebody could ask:
But as they are incompatible, which of them wins?
This, in turn, arises another question:
Which of the incongruous components of the joke is the
target and which one is the source?
If we use some more symmetrical terms like scripts or
isotopies, the answer becomes evident:
IN THE METAPHOR, IT IS THE FIRST SCRIPT WHO WINS,
BUT IN JOKE THE SECOND SCRIPT.
Pollio
Giora
In the existing literature, one can find some
variants of the same answer in a more
sophisticated form,
given e.g. by Howard Pollio
and especially by Rachel Giora
in the context of her discussion on the
requirements for the "well-formedness of
texts", like
Relevance Requirement,
Graded Informativeness Requirement and
Marked Informativeness Requirement
– see p. 32 in my handout.
A (fresh) metaphor
crosses the border,
reaches the obstacle,
backtracks to the left,
looks around,
returns to the right,
takes something along,
returns to the left and remains.
Joke
crosses the border,
reaches the obstacle,
backtracks to the left,
looks around,
takes something along,
returns to the right and remains.
But there are some residual complications that Giora’s
theory leaves unresolved.
Metaphors can be embedded in jokes, that is, jokes can
be based on the literalizing, extending, twisting or mixing
of metaphors, the "awakening" of dead metaphors,
parodying of proverbs, etc.
Pollio’s example of a funny mixture of metaphors:
 A virgin forest is one where the hand of man has never
set foot
Proverbs can sometimes be funny enough, too.
Some Estonian examples:
 Vaese inimese uhkus on nagu kampsuniga magamine:
tõmbad pee peale – pea paljas, tõmbad pea peale – pee
paljas
(Poor man's pride is like sleeping in a sweater – you pull
it over your bum and your head is bare; you pull it over
your head and your bum is bare)
Examples of X is the Y of Z (or briefly: XYZ) structures.
Some of them are (or include) conventional unfunny
metaphors, or fresh unfunny metaphors, or funny nonmetaphors, or otherwise.
 Death is the mother of beauty < Wallace Stevens: nonhumorous
 Vanity is the quicksand of reason < George Sand?
associative and witty, but, to my mind, not funny.
 Cheese – milk's leap toward immortality < Clifton
Fadiman: witty, ironic and obviously funny
 Sex is the poor man’s opera < George Bernhard Shaw?
–sadly humorous,
parodying perhaps another aphorism
 Music is the poor man's Parnassus < Ralph Waldo
Emerson?
or exploiting a productive proverbial pattern.
Some counterparts of X is the Y of Z structures in proverbs
where Z = 'poor man'
from Wolfgang Mieder’s "Dictionary of American proverbs":
 Ability is the poor man's wealth
 Cleanliness is the poor man's luxury
 Gratefulness is the poor man's payment
 Hope is the poor man's bread
 Snow is the poor man's fertilizer
So-called counterfactuals are very often designed to be funny:
 If Clinton were the Titanic, the iceberg would sink
The same pattern largely appears in proverbs, some of them
being serious, some somewhat funny, some extremely funny:
 If there were no failures, there would be no successes
 If things were to be done twice, all would be wise
 If there were no listeners there would be no liars
 If our foresight were as good as our hindsight, we would
never make mistakes
 If wishes were horses, beggars might ride
 If "ifs" and "ands" were pots and pans, there would be no
need for tinkers
 If there were no bad people, there would be no good
lawyers
 If idiocy were pain, there would be groaning in every house
 If a beard were a sign of smartness, the goat would be
Socrates
 If the aunt had balls, she would be called a uncle
 If the dog had not stopped for a shit, it would have caught
the rabbit
Some examples of hyperbolic X is so Y that Z structures
whose folkloric-phraseologic representatives the
Finnish folklorist Anna-Leena Kuusi (Siikala) has
termed consecutive phrases.
Their degree of funniness can also vary from zero to
infinity.
Benjamin Bergen & Kim Binsted juxtapose the following
two sentences :
 It was so cold where I live, we found dogs huddling
for warmth
– an example of an "ordinary" non-humorous utterance
 It was so cold in New York that flashers in Central
Park were just describing themselves
– a representative of the so-called scalar humour
The same holds for folkloric similes.
On the lowest end of their funniness scale stand trivialities
like cold as ice; hot as fire; white as snow; black as coal,
which have completely worn out any figurativeness of their
vehicles, functioning just as hyperboles meaning 'very'.
On the highest end, there are similes whose vehicles
represent not single words or syntagms, but various
bizarre, fantastic, grotesquely funny scenes and situations,
like the following Estonian items:
 hädas nagu koer kolmanda julga peal
(troubled like a dog on its third turd)
 nagu lammas situb kobrulehe peale
(like a sheep shitting on a burdock leaf
'about fuzzy, mumbling pronunciation')
 edeneb nagu koeral sibulasöömine
(successful as a dog eating onions)
õpeta nagu oma last leede sitale
(like teaching one's own child to shit in the fireplace)
If figurative and funny textual units are located on some
continuous or gradual "cognitive scale", the question
remains as to what the increasing complexity of conceptual
structure of the "well-formed" texts could, finally, achieve.
One (intermediate?) stage is obviously humour.
But even the shortest casually generated and preselected
nonsensical word strings can be divided into simply
nonsense and funny nonsense.
Yuri Lotman claims that the best poetical metaphors are
precisely those which outside of their concrete context
qualify as nonsense.
Samuel Levin, in turn, finds that there is no reason at all to
speak of poetical metaphors, because poems build up their
own individual possible worlds, inside of which metaphors
do not need any special construal.
Jaan Undusk, the well-known Estonian theorist of
literature, culture and rhetoric, is convinced that
oxymoron, the condensed unity of sense and nonsense, is
the deepest basis and origin of all poetical and rhetorical
creation.
THANK YOU!