Semantic Mechanisms of
Humor
Caitlin Tweedy
February 2, 2007
“Different people will not necessarily find the same things funny—many things
which will strike one group as funny may bore another group; some jokes are
private or individual...
…[but] the ability to appreciate humor is universal and shared by all
people…”
--Victor Raskin
Raskin: “Laughter is a way of human communication which is essentially and
exclusively human.”
vs.
Rapp: “Do animals have a sense of humor?”
What do we laugh at?
According to Hazlitt
• Absurdity
• Deformity
• Dress of foreigners, and they
at ours
• One dressed in the height of
fashion
• One quite out of it
• Mischief
• What we do not believe
• To show satisfaction with
ourselves
• To show contempt for those
around us
• To conceal envy, ignorance
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Fools
Those who pretend to be wise
Extreme simplicity
Awkwardness
Hypocrisy
Affectation
What characterizes the humor act?
1. Human participants
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Speaker and one or more hearers
Writer and one or more readers
Person on television and one or more viewers
2. A stimulus
3. Life experience of an individual
4. Psychological type of individual
5. Certain physical environment/Situation
- provides context
6. Society
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cultural context
Laughter is seen as…
(+)
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Pleasure giving/pleasurable
Purposeless movement
expressing joy
Freedom
Release of aggression
Healthful
A reflex
i.e. tickling…can trigger
other reflexes WATCH OUT
Telling of society
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Sinister
i.e. The Bible—no jokes here
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Concealing state of mind
i.e. shame, shyness, anger
Cowardly
A detriment to mankind’s progress
Born out of hostility
Ridiculing
Is humor good or bad?
Other undefined phenomena in this way:
Love
Happiness
Marriage
Faith
Success
The electoral college
Donald Trump’s comb-over
A good verbal joke is…
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Not too long
Not too short
Not too trivial
Not too hard to understand
Has an element of surprise →
Not given away too early
Has adequate amount of detail
Known to be a joke
Accompanied by gestures, facial expressions
…JUST RIGHT!
Advice from Fry:
“For the presenter to laugh occasionally and
to be mildly amused by his [or her] own
joke increases the power of its humor.”
Advice from Fry (cont.):
“For the presenter to laugh immoderately
and to be obviously carried away by his
own joke spoils the joke for the
recipient…”
• Seeks to model the semantic competence of the
native speaker
• Script-based contextual semantics
• Cannot account for ALL meanings of every
sentence in every possible setting
• No sentence occurs in isolation (context!)
• One needs semantics (knowledge of language)
and pragmatics (knowledge of world) to correctly
calculate the meaning of a word in a context
Elements of Contextual Semantics
• (1) Lexicon: to model the
native speaker’s knowledge of
the meaning of words
• Extra lexical info
• Ex: Mary saw a black cat and
immediately turned home.
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Script-based lexicon
Script: a large chunk of semantic
info surrounding the word or
evoked by it
- Represents native
speaker’s knowledge of a
part of the world
- Common sense
- Basic situations
• (2) Combinatorial Rules: to
model the native speaker’s
ability to combine the
meanings of the words which
make up the sentence into
meaning of the whole
• Usefulness of a dictionary?
• Ex: The bill was large.
• The bill was large, but we
paid it anyway.
• Ex: She could not bear
children.
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DOCTOR
– Subject [ Human ] [ + Adult ]
– Activity: > Study Medicine
= Receive patients:
- patient comes or doctor visits
- doctor listens to complaints
- doctor examines patient
= Cure Disease - doctor diagnoses disease
- doctor prescribes treatment
= (Take patient’s money)
– Place: > Medical School
= Hospital or doctor’s office
– Time:
> Many years
= Every day
= Immediately
– Condition: Physical contact
Where > stands for past and = stands for present
Importance of Scripts in
Understanding Semantics of Humor
• “It is obvious that our entire civilization is a large number
of scripts, that the more scripts one has internalized the
deeper one’s comprehension, which could be amply
illustrated by jokes, literary allusions, and other texts
inaccessible to the non-initiated.”
--Victor Raskin
• Script overlap
ex: “Is the doctor at home?” the patient asked in his bronchial
whisper. “No,” the doctor’s young and pretty wife whispered in
reply. “Come right in.”
DOCTOR and LOVER
• Script oppositeness
- Script 1 vs. Script 2
ex: “Who was that gentleman I saw you with last night?”
“That was no gentleman. That was a senator.”
Senators are gentlemen vs. Senators are not gentlemen
ex: “The first thing which strikes a stranger in New York City is a big
car.”
Collision vs. Impression
Three Types of Script Opposition
1.
ACTUAL SITUATION vs. NON-EXISTENT SITUATION
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2.
NORMAL, EXPECTED STATE OF AFFAIRS vs. ABNORMAL,
UNEXPECTED
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3.
“He used such nautical terms.”
“Yes, sailors always talk dirty.”
He’s a man of letters. He works at the Post Office.
Should a person stir his coffee with his right hand or his left hand?
Neither. He should use a spoon
When is a joke not a joke? Usually.
PLAUSIBLE SITUATION vs. IMPOSSIBLE, OR LESS PLAUSIBLE
SITUATION
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His teeth have so many cavities, he talks with an echo.
Common aspirin cures my headaches if I follow the directions on the
bottle – Keep Away from Children.
Classification of Humor
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Ridicule
Deliberate ridicule
Humor at speaker’s own expense
Riddle
Conundrum
Pun
Suppression/Repression
Wisecrack
Epigram