On the discourse of satire: towards a stylistic model of satirical humor

On the Discourse of Satire

Linguistic Approaches to Literature Linguistic Approaches to Literature (LAL) provides an international forum for researchers who believe that the application of linguistic methods leads to a deeper and more far-reaching understanding of many aspects of literature. The emphasis will be on pragmatic approaches intersecting with areas such as discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, rhetoric, philosophy, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and stylistics.

Editors Gerard J. Steen

Willie van Peer

Peter Verdonk

Free University Amsterdam

University of Munich

University of Amsterdam

Advisory Editorial Board Timothy R. Austin

Paisley Livingston

Loyola University Chicago

University of Copenhagen

Douglas Biber

Colin Martindale

Northern Arizona University

University of Maine

Lubomir Dolezel

Sara Mills

University of Toronto

Sheffield Halam University

Donald C. Freeman

Mick Short

University of Southern California

Lancaster University

Harald Fricke

Michael Toolan

University of Fribourg

University of Birmingham

Raymond W. Gibbs Jr.

Reuven Tsur

University of California, Santa Cruz

Tel Aviv University

Rachel Giora

Jean Jacques Weber

Tel Aviv University

University Centre Luxemburg

Volume 2 On the Discourse of Satire: Towards a stylistic model of satirical humour by Paul Simpson

On the Discourse of Satire Towards a stylistic model of satirical humour

Paul Simpson Queen’s University Belfast

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam
/
Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Simpson, Paul, 1959On the discourse of satire : towards a stylistic model of satirical humour / Paul Simpson. p. cm. (Linguistic Approaches to Literature, issn 1569–3112 ; v. 2) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Discourse analysis, Literary. 2. Satire--History and criticism-Theory, etc. I. Title. II. Series. P302.5.S56 2003 808’.0014-dc21 isbn 90 272 3333 0 (Eur.) / 1 58811 439 2 (US) (Hb; alk. paper) isbn 90 272 3334 9 (Eur.) / 1 58811 440 6 (US) (Pb; alk. paper)

2003055682

© 2003 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents

Preface

vii

Acknowledgements xi List of figures

xiii

Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Satire as humorous discourse 1 1.2 The model: In brief, and in abstract 7 1.3 About this book 11 Chapter 2 Linguistic approaches to humour 2.1 Introduction 15 2.2 Linguistic approaches to humour 16 2.3 The Semantic Script Theory of Humour 29 2.4 The General Theory of Verbal Humour and beyond 37 2.5 Review and conclusions 44 Chapter 3 Literary-critical approaches to satirical humour 3.1 Introduction 47 3.2 Literary-critical approaches to satirical humour 48 3.3 Problems and issues in literary-critical approaches 57 3.4 Summary and extension 63 Chapter 4 Satire as discourse 4.1 Introduction 69 4.2 Satire as a discursive practice

1

15

47

69 72



Table of contents

4.3 Satire as irony within irony 90 4.4 Satire, irony, discourse: Applying the model of analysis 97 4.5 Summary and conclusions 108 Chapter 5 Ways of doing satire 5.1 Introduction 111 5.2 Theoretical preliminaries: Satire, parody and irony 113 5.3 Metonymic and metaphoric satirical method 125 5.4 Conclusions 149

111

Chapter 6 Satirical uptake 6.1 Introduction 153 6.2 A model for satirical uptake: Habermas and “universal pragmatics” 158 6.3 Validity claims and satirical uptake 165 6.4 Summary 185 Chapter 7 When satire goes wrong 7.1 Introduction 187 7.2 Developing a case study: Alan Clark vs. the Evening Standard 7.3 Analysis, overview and commentary 194 7.4 Extension and summary 205 Chapter 8 Analysing satire as discourse 8.1 Overview 211 8.2 Extension 214 8.3 Development 218 References 221 Name index 233 Subject index 237

153

187 188

211

Preface

I suppose it would be accurate to say that the “idea” for this book arose out of an experience during a university seminar which took place, alarmingly, over two decades ago. I was then still a fresh-faced and follically-unchallenged undergraduate reading a degree in literature and linguistics, and the episode in question occurred during the week when we were “doing” that (in)famous Anglo-Irish writer, Jonathan Swift. Swift of course cannot be “done” without some reference to his famous skit, the “Modest Proposal”, in which an unassuming persona urges the eating of children in order to solve the problem of Irish overpopulation. A programme advocating the lessening by cannibalism of “the number of Papists among us” proved to be as contentious a hot potato, so to speak, in the Northern Ireland of the late nineteen seventies as it no doubt was in eighteenth century Dublin. As to Swift’s ironic purpose in the skit, everyone, bar one student, reached a satirical interpretation. Unusually for an otherwise parochial undergraduate community, the student who “didn’t get it” happened to have been born and raised several thousand miles away from Northern Ireland. His objection to Swift was resolutely framed: the proposal was “disgusting” and that if this was the best Ireland could do literary-wise, then it was a very poor show. The tutor’s riposte to this was perhaps the predictable one. But Swift didn’t really mean it, it was literature, it was, well, ironic. To which the student replied, with inexorable logic, that of course he meant it because he said it. And so it went on, as an ever widening interpretive chasm pushed the two positions further and further apart. Some twenty five years later – such it seems is the necessary gestation period for my academic output these days – I came to the idea of a project which explored the interpretative chasm between the two positions taken up in that seminar. No-one was wrong in that interchange, although no-one was completely right either; both arguments could be sustained with some degree of validity. Quite why such a duality of interpretation is possible, and what that says about the particular form of discourse that is satirical humour, is one of the main preoccupations of this monograph.

 Preface

The book comes principally out of the academic tradition of modern stylistics. That simply means that it applies to text a variety of models of language, linguistics and pragmatics. While that tradition reflects best the type of methods used and the sorts of analytic frameworks applied, this study departs from much other stylistic work in that its principal emphasis is neither specifically, nor necessarily, on literary discourse. The emphasis is, rather, on satire’s status as a culturally situated discursive practice. This direction has not been taken because of any antipathy towards “classical” literature or towards the practice of literary criticism. It is simply that satire’s “everydayness” as a vibrant and dynamic form of verbal humour has been significantly neglected in terms of the amount of attention it has received within the academe. It is indeed a central argument of this book that a “non-literary stylistics” of satire is much needed, simply because continued interest over the decades in canonically literary examples has tended to draw a veil over the day-to-day functions of satire in contemporary social and discourse contexts. That said, it is hoped that the broad design of the model proposed is sufficiently watertight theoretically to be applied across to the canon of classical satire, although such a study is of course well beyond the remit of the present project. Writing about humour can be a strange and somewhat disorientating business. Humour is glued into social, cultural and even national contexts, so writing a monograph which hopefully draws an international readership forces one to tread a fine line when “unpacking” humour texts; a fine line that is between, on the one hand, stating the obvious in the explication of humorous material, or, on the other, risking losing readers because the topically and culturally situated references within those texts have not been made sufficiently transparent. In this book, although the data derives primarily from humour practices in Britain, Ireland and the USA, the theoretical model advanced is designed to have generalised application. In the design of that model I hope to have contextualised sufficiently the data so as to make it accessible without insulting the intelligence of my readers. But please forgive me if I do. Another thing about writing about humour, a fact brought home to me midway through this project, is that while humorous texts become progressively less amusing the more one pays attention to them, research on humour concomitantly starts to seem very strange indeed. I was struck particularly by one well-intentioned experimental study, written many years ago, on the impact of conflict on the basic humour mechanism. Victims of war-induced trauma had flashed before them a series of cards containing “jokes”, to which their responses were noted. As it turned out, the war veterans really didn’t find the experience very funny at all; in any case, the jokes themselves are “clas-

Preface

sified” and now rest with the relevant Department of Defence of the august international power from which the research stemmed. By dint of curious coincidence, around the time of the publication of that article, an episode from the renowned Monty Python television series featured a sketch where someone had discovered a joke so funny that it had the power to wipe out entire armies. So potent was this joke that parts of it had to be shown on cards by individual soldiers in relay so as not to endanger the troops on one’s own side. After spending so much time on humour research, I frankly cannot tell which of the two scenarios, the academic study or the Python comedy sketch, is the more bizarre. Such is the nature of research into humour. An editorial comment made many years ago in the first issue of the journal Humor points to a central dilemma in humour research; namely, that hoping to derive amusement from an academic study of humour is akin to hoping to enjoy gastronomically the recipe for delicious meal. Well, the present book offers a fairly largish menu, comprising several courses, of a very particular type of cuisine. I can only hope that this “food for thought” does not spoil your further enjoyment of the meal.



Acknowledgments

It is not easy to find a natural starting point for a sequence of acknowledgments to the many friends and colleagues who in different ways and in various capacities have helped directly in the development of this project. It is perhaps appropriate therefore to begin by extending blanket appreciation to my colleagues in the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), an association with a reputation for strong academic solidarity and improbably cheap membership fees. Of my colleagues in PALA, a particular debt of gratitude goes to Peter Stockwell, Cathy Emmott, Martin Montgomery, Lesley Jeffries, Michael Burke, Joanna Gavins, Katie Wales, Mick Short, Michael Toolan and to nominal stylistician and good friend, Hilary Short. Their expertise in all manner of things stylistic, combined with their all round good craic, has helped, among other things, to sustain the project amid the otherwise bleak solitude of an Irish winter. I would also like to extend my thanks to my colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast: Mark Burnett, Joan Rahilly, David Johnston, and especially to Moyra Haslett who generously managed always to find time for discussion of matters satirical in spite of her many other commitments. I am particularly grateful to the Queen’s librarians for their unstinting patience, especially to Florence Gray at the inter-library loans desk, who processed on my behalf God-knows-how-many loan vouchers over the past year, and to John Knowles whose expertise opened up to me the arcane, Kafkaesque labyrinth that is the law library at Queen’s University. I would also like to thank my colleagues in the International Society for Humour Studies, in particular Josie Boutonnet and Sammy Basu. I am also especially grateful to Mark Kermode and Linda Williams for their help and advice with various aspects of the project; to Bill Nash, who proves that you can be both a humorist and a humorologist, and to Helen Hunter who proves that you can retain a sense of humour even when looking after Bill. A particular debt of gratitude goes of course to the Benelux quartet: to series editors Willie van Peer, Gerard Steen and Peter Verdonk, and to editor Kees Vaes at John Benjamins. I am grateful to them for their energy and fastidiousness, for their

 Acknowledgments

encouragement and support, and for their searching and detailed comments on an earlier draft of this book. I hope the end product has not let them down. I am also indebted to my friends, John and Catherine Neely, especially for allowing me to hole up in west Donegal during a silly week in Belfast when it seemed that every house in the street was undergoing major building work. And to my family I owe special debt of gratitude. Thanks are due to my son Rory for donating a few “joke bearing texts” to the project and to my son Danny for trying to donate a few joke bearing texts to the project. I’d like to thank my nearly-three-years-old daughter Ruby for, er, being Ruby. My partner Janice, I must thank yet again for putting up with another “Paul book experience”, and especially for soaking up, way beyond the call of duty, the many and varied needs of our delightful though demanding young trio. Finally, I would like to thank my formal sponsors. This research project has been part funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (reference number: RLS-AN2220/APN13385). I would also like to thank Private Eye magazine for their cooperation with the book. All relevant illustrations and textual material are reproduced with kind permission of Private Eye Magazine.

List of figures

Figure 1 From lexico-grammar to register (Chapter 4) Figure 2 Satirical discourse within a systemic-functional framework? (Chapter 4) Figure 3 The triadic structure of satire as a discursive practice (Chapter 4) Figure 4 Habermas’s model of Universal Pragmatics (Chapter 6)

Chapter 1

Introduction

There is no more dangerous symptom than a temptation to write about wit and humour. It indicates the total loss of both. George Bernard Shaw

. Satire as humorous discourse This is a book about satire. To be more specific, it is a book which develops, tests and attempts to justify a theoretical model for the study of satirical discourse. The book’s emphasis on satire as discourse is significant insofar as it seeks to incorporate other associated areas of study such as “satirical technique”, “the satirical text”, or “the language of satire”. In keeping with contemporary definitions, discourse is understood here in the first instance as a level of language organisation that supersedes that of the sentence and in the second as a type of meaning potential that arises out of the interaction between text and context. Notions like “satirical technique” and “the language of satire” are thus subsumed within this higher-order framework of discourse. By exploring specifically “the discourse of satire”, this book seeks to position this type of verbal (and pictorial) humour against a dynamic, interactive framework of actions and beliefs. Satirical texts are understood as utterances which are inextricably bound up with context of situation, with participants in discourse and with frameworks of knowledge. The book’s key rationale is therefore to capture the special discoursal and pragmatic features that characterise this pervasive and popular form of contemporary humorous discourse; it is, in this respect, as much concerned with “how” satire means as it is with “what” satire means. It is a simple and straightforward assumption of this book, as of work in humorology generally, that humour is basically a good thing. Skill in the delivery of humour, in whatever its precise style or genre, is a prized asset in human societies and cultures. Wherever the particular academic vantage point may be situated, scholarly research on humour consistently affirms its importance as a solidary mechanism in the day-to-day experiences of ordinary people and its



Chapter 1

capacity to help bond, galvanise and sustain human relationships. The possession of a good sense of humour is also much coveted, evidence for which is certainly easy to come by. The “personal ads” and “lonely hearts” columns that proliferate in our newspapers and colour supplements ask that a prospective partner possess a “GSOH” (Good Sense Of Humour); so de rigeur is this stipulation that the quality sought can be captured by abbreviation. The obverse, that a future soul mate possess “No Sense Of Humour”, is, in the present author’s of course limited experience of the genre, nowhere to be found in the small ads. The scholarly literature constantly emphasises the absolutely central place that humour, and its sometime attendant respiratory convulsion, laughter, occupies in everyday spoken and written social interaction. The emphasis across the discipline is resolute and unwavering, irrespective of whether it stems from linguistics and language studies (Nash 1985), from sociology (Mulkay 1988), from politics (Basu 1999), from philosophy (Morreall 1987), from psychology (Goldstein & McGhee 1972) or from clinical psychotherapy (Fry & Salameh 1987). Humour accomplishes many things: it relieves embarrassment; it signals aggression; it displays courage in adversity; it serves as a coping mechanism; it functions as an instrument of social influence; it rehearses and redesigns the categories and concepts of serious discourse. Because it is perceived as play, humour also offers a “way out” in discourse because it allows a humorist to take back what he or she says: “it was only a joke” is one oft-voiced disclaimer (Kane et al. 1977: 13). Given this highly variegated function, humour is, as Miller notes, a “very difficult subject to talk about, and it is an even more difficult subject to be scientific about” (J. Miller 1988: 6). It is also a feature of humour that its use is circumscribed with respect to context, so, perhaps to state the obvious, not every discourse context “allows” humour and not all humorous material is suitable for every discourse context. Aside from this issue of taboo, there are occasionally certain wider, cultural restrictions on humorous communication. Bauman’s study of the speech of seventeenth-century Quakers notes how their “plain style” stemmed both from a requirement always to tell the truth and from a biblical injunction against idle words (Bauman 1983: 54–55). Implicit to these strictures is a distrust of verbal humour as a form of “idle” or “untruthful” talk, although one can only speculate on how this restriction was encoded, if at all, into the day to day language practices of this speech community. A workable formal taxonomy of humour, accounting for its many different discourse functions, is admittedly not easy to find. This in turn has implications for how satire might be located and classified within a global framework of humorous discourse. Ziv does offer a useful starting point, however, in his

Introduction

study of that most elusive of discourse practices, humour in married life. He proposes five key humour functions: the aggressive, the sexual, the social, the defensive and the intellectual (Ziv 1988: 225; see also Ziv 1984). Of these categories, the sexual function, where laughing about sex is seen as a way of dealing with the topic in a socially acceptable way, is probably better classed as a subcategory of the defensive mode, given that that function accommodates the use of humour to deal with a whole range of “anxiogenic” or difficult topics. It is the remaining three functions which appear to be most directly relevant to satirical discourse. The aggressive function always ridicules or makes fun of a victim, allowing the non-victim a feeling of superiority. The social function can serve to reinforce intra- and inter-group bonds, strengthening the cohesiveness of interpersonal relations. The intellectual function, which is based on absurdities, word play and nonsense, provides pleasure in “the temporary freedom from strict rules and rationality” (Ziv 1988: 225). Ziv’s classification, like many comparable taxonomies in humorology, assumes that the functions are relatively discrete and anticipates that a particular type of humour normally manifests in a specific function. What is significant about satire is that it synthesises at least three functions and carries them out simultaneously. The precise means by which satire performs this “multifunctionality” will be justified thoroughly over the course of the book, but it is worth making a few more informal observations here. Satire clearly has an aggressive function. It singles out an object of attack; in fact, it cannot, strictly speaking, be satire unless it demonstrates this capacity. Satire also has a social function, in the terms of Ziv’s model, because inter-group bonds, in particular, are consolidated in “successful” satire. Yet it also has, perhaps in greater or lesser degree depending on the particular satire, an intellectual function because it relies upon linguistic creativity which extends the full resources of the system of language. Compared to “racist humour” where the aggressive function dominates (Davies 1988), “coping humour” where the social function dominates (Henman 2001) or “absurdist humour” where the intellectual function (arguably) dominates (Simpson 1998), satire simply cannot readily be assigned a single discourse function. Even when satire is mapped onto other taxonomies of basic humour functions, the same multi-functional characterisation emerges. Take for example Basu’s classification, which renders down the basic humour mechanism into three functions: as “lubrication”, “friction” or “glue” (Basu 1999: 391). Humour acts as a social lubricant, venturing ice-breaking goodwill and demonstrating an ability to laugh. Humour may also act as “a fine-grained social sandpaper”, because comedy makes frankness less threatening and conveys criticism less



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Chapter 1

contentiously. Thirdly, humour can act as a social glue in that this rhetorical skill can relax and entertain, and can incline one towards empathy with others (Basu 1999: 390–394). There is again good cause for aligning satire with all three functions, as the glue, lubricant and sandpaper engendered by a particular kind of discourse phenomenon. And as will be argued at length throughout this book, satire is a preeminent form of humour which, when successful, accomplishes simultaneously a number of humour functions. It is odd, in the light of these remarks, that satire is so rarely the object of scrutiny either in the broader tradition of humorology or within that narrower tradition of linguistic research on verbal humour. True, satire has received a great deal of attention in literary criticism, as chapter three of this book demonstrates, but in comparison with specifically focussed humorological studies of jokes, witticisms, puns, humorous anecdotes and narratives, its coverage has at best been marginal. This is indeed strange given that, as will be argued below and passim, satire is as much a common part of everyday spoken and written interaction as any of the other easily recognisable humour practices. The term satire is itself a curious and rather elusive one, perhaps fitting of its enigmatic position in the broad inventory of humour types. Scholars seem unsure about the precise etymology of the word but it seems most likely that it emerged as a blend of two unrelated words, satyr and satura. The former refers to the Satyr, to what Carpenter calls the “boozy, randy half-goats, half-men of Greek mythology” (Carpenter 2000: 91). The latter, from the Latin expression lanx satura, describes a platter of mixed fruits offered to the deities at festival time (see further Hendrickson 1927: 46–60; Clark 1991: 51; Draitser 1994: 101). The term “satyr”, with a meaning roughly approximating the contemporary sense of the term, was allegedly first used in the English language in 1509 in Barclay’s prologue to The Ship of Fools (Campbell 1971: 85), although much writing before that period had of course been satirical in all but name. Whatever its linguistic origins, it is a key point of departure for this book, affirmed constantly throughout forthcoming chapters, that satirical discourse suffuses the general humour resources of modern societies and cultures. It is not an alien form of humour, not something remote from everyday social interaction, but is as much part of the communicative competence of adult participants as puns, jokes and funny stories. While satire may be relatively complexly ordered and structured, that complexity does not place it beyond the ken of ordinary participants in discourse. Although justification for this point will, again, be offered as the book progresses, here is an informal illustration of what I have in mind. The series of excerpts below are taken from Radio Times magazine (web), a weekly British publication which lists televi-

Introduction

sion schedules for all terrestrial and satellite broadcasts. The excerpts have been culled from the two pages which cover the programming schedule for a single evening. That evening has no special significance other than to underscore just how routine and unexceptional is the place of satire in ordinary mainstream television viewing. 9.00 (BBC 2) New series. The Friday Night Armistice. The acclaimed comedy show returns, aiming its incisive and topical brand of satire against a wide range of public targets . . . 10.00 (Film Four) Primary Colors. American political satire that follows an idealistic first-time aide as he manages the election campaign of a presidential candidate. 10.20 (BBC 1; N. Ireland only) Two Weddings and a Ceasefire. Radio Ulster’s comedy troupe, the Hole in the Wall Gang, present this satirical comic tale . . . 11.05 (Sky Premier 3) Fight Club. This visceral satire stars Brad Pitt as a bare-knuckle moralist. (Radio Times magazine; listing for 9/01/2000, my emphasis)

What is remarkable about this pattern is that the concept “satire” is not only clearly well within the interpretative compass of the several million television viewers who read this magazine, but that it is also amenable to subclassification in terms of the particular humour function it serves. Witness, for example, how premodifying elements are used narrow down the scope of reference of a particular satire: Sky Premier’s satire is “visceral”, BBC2’s is “incisive” and Film Four’s “political”. Aside from the general recognition of satirical topicality, other insightful indicators of the popular conceptualisation of satire draw out its aggressive (viz. “incisive”) function. Also highlighted is satire’s capacity to manifest in different genres of discourse: the BBC2 “comedy show” format is clearly differentiated from the narrative format of BBC1’s “comic tale”, for example. True, its boundaries may be blurred and the term may possibly be over-used, but satire is clearly a concept that has some real currency in everyday usage. Furthermore, it is especially important to the rationale of this book, as will argued in detail later, that the discourse of satire be wrested away from existing academic studies of “classical” satire and, by imputation, from qualitative judgments about what constitutes “good” or “bad” satire. Rather, satire should be viewed as a familiar part of the territory of everyday humour practices. It is of course very difficult to assess what proportion of this more generalised praxis is





Chapter 1

made up by satire. In the context of the television listings exercise above, a poll conducted by Market and Opinion Research International (MORI, web) indicates that comedy is the preference of 32% of all television viewers in the UK, so it is feasible to suggest, as the admittedly informal evidence above indicates, that a solid component of this comprises satirically-oriented humour. Moreover, there is no reason to think that this type of humour preference would not be replicated in televisual cultures around the world. A final question, perhaps the most challenging, concerns the sorts of theoretical issues that satirical humour poses for the discourse analyst. What, in other words, does an analysis of the discourse of satire involve? Consider in this respect the following short example, Text A. This (complete) text is the first of a number of examples developed across the book to be taken from the British satirical magazine Private Eye (see below §1.3, for further details). I make no particular claims in advance of this somewhat unprepossessing little text other than to say that it is satirical and that it is, at the time of writing, topical. The impetus for the text, for the record, comes from the satirist’s perception of the poor performance of the British Labour party since its election to power in 1997. Text A

Introduction

It would inappropriate to try to develop any sort of rigorous analysis of Text A in advance of the development of the theoretical model itself, so more detailed scrutiny of this example will be held over to a more appropriate slot in Chapter 5 of this book. However, it might be worthwhile to try to isolate some of the research questions this unassuming text raises. Here are just a few of those questions: –

–

–

–

–

–

What does this text do in and with discourse? In other words, what general lexico-grammatical and linguistic-stylistic operations underpin A’s composition as text? What other discourses are present in Text A? In other words, to what extent does this text echo, subsume or distort other genres, registers and styles of discourse? What in the text’s design and reception makes it critical? In other words, what collaborative inferencing strategies, for instance, need to be brought into play so that an addressee derives a critical message from the text? What assumptions does the producer(s) of the text make about the addressee? In other words, what a priori calculations have been made about, on the one hand, the addressee’s cultural and encyclopaedic knowledge, and, on the other, their knowledge of contemporary events and current affairs? What is the “shelf life” of this particular text? In other words, and related to the previous question, what are the contextual constraints, in terms of place and time, that enable its success as a piece of satirical discourse? What happens if the text does not work? In other words, what are the repercussions in discourse for the success or failure of a satirical text and for the interactive relationships between the participants in that discourse event?

Although not addressed any further here, these are precisely the sorts of questions that frame the broad aims and scope of this book. What needs to established more clearly now, as a corollary of these research questions, is a better picture of the composition and rationale of the proposed model of satire. To this effect, the following section offers a thumbnail sketch, in outline only, of the main tenets of the model of satire proposed in the book.

. The model: In brief, and in abstract To give a global picture both of the type of research paradigm adopted and of the general academic direction taken in this book, it is worth setting out in





Chapter 1

abstract terms the core rationale of the analytic model that will be developed, applied, and reviewed across the following chapters. The theoretical assumptions which underpin the categories and principles highlighted are, of course, defended and justified in relevant places throughout the book, as are the particular research traditions which have inspired each component in the analytic apparatus. The model operates from the premise that satire is a discursive practice. That is to say, satire functions as a higher-order discourse, in the Foucaultian sense; higher than what systemic-functional and other linguists classify as genre or register, and certainly higher than what literary-critics traditionally mean by the term “genre of literature”. Satire requires a genus, which is a derivation in a particular culture, in a system of institutions and in the frameworks of belief and knowledge which envelop and embrace these institutions. It also requires an impetus, which emanates from a perceived disapprobation, by the satirist, of some aspect of a potential satirical target. As a discursive practice, satire is configured as a triad embodying three discursive subject positions which are subject to constant shift and (re)negotiation. These are the satirist (the producer of the text), the satiree (an addressee, whether reader, viewer or listener) and the satirised (the target attacked or critiqued in the satirical discourse). Two of these three participants, the satirist and the satiree, are ratified within the discursive event. The third entity, the target, is ex-colluded and is not normally an “invited participant” in the discourse exchange, even though the target is what provides the initial impetus for satire. The non-ratified, ex-colluded discourse participant that constitutes a satirical target may be an individual person, an episode involving human agents, an aspect of more fixed or stable experience or existence, or even, crucially, another discursive practice. The interactive bonds between the three subject positions in satire are, moreover, open to redefinition in the context of particular satirical humour events. Whereas satire which is successfully “taken up” may draw closer the satirist and satiree, a failed or “misfired” satire tends to destabilise and reshape the relationships in the triad by serving on the one hand to distance the satirist from the satiree, and on the other, by drawing together the satiree and the satirised target. To this extent, a certain amount of calculated interactive risk attaches to the creation and dissemination of satirical discourse. In terms of its linguistic properties, a satirical text functions through the instantiation of a discoursal prime. A prime activates a putative or real anterior discourse event, mediated intersemiotically, which may be, but is not restricted to, another specific text, or another genre or register of discourse. The prime is in this sense an “echoic” utterance to the extent that it is predicated on

Introduction

someone else’s discourse, but over which ironic distance is placed through the repositioning of the ostensible speaking source of the text. The constitution of the prime as echoic discourse is one of the three principal ironic phases in the creation of a satirical text. The prime, however, needs to be supplemented with another, key device that operates within the satirical text. This is a textinternal dialectic. The dialectic is so-named because it functions as an antithesis which, in the Popperian sense, induces a collision of ideas or appeals to a line of reasoning that falls outside the straightforward. Both the prime and dialectic components are abstract constituents, best thought of as elements of structure or as structural slots in discourse. It follows then that the prime and dialectic elements of structure are expounded by specific features of the discourse of satirical texts, some of which are sketched below. Whereas the textual exponent activated by the prime is interpreted through a framework of general knowledge, the dialectic is accessed through a framework of knowledge of typical text structures, such that a schism or fracture occurs between between these two frameworks. This oppositional relationship, between the prime and dialectic elements of structure, is what constitutes the second ironic phase in satire. It is the presence of both prime and dialectic, the interpretation of which is reliant on access to different types of knowledge resource, which, within the modest terms of the present study, constitutes a core principle of satirical discourse. In the model proposed, satirical method refers to the linguistic means used by a satirist to create both prime and dialectic elements of structure in a piece of satire. Method is thus grounded in palpable discoursal operations that can be accommodated within frameworks of stylistics and pragmatics. Several of the compositional techniques used in satire can be captured by analogy with the terms metonymy and metaphor. The umbrella category of metonymic satirical method embraces stylistic techniques that sustain a collision in-text that stays within the same conceptual domain; exponents of which include saturation (the device of “inflation” in discourse), attenuated focalisation (the device of “deflation” in discourse) and negation (the device of inverting positive polarity in discourse). Metaphoric method embraces a more generalised set of cross-generic mapping techniques which includes, but is not restricted to, the strategies of combination, merging and interdiscursivity. Although useful as an analytic tool, the metonymic-metaphoric distinction is ultimately a continuum on which is arranged a series of interconnected and overlapping textual procedures. Further to its method of composition, satire is also conceptualised as a type of macro-structure of discourse into which a variety of narrower techniques of verbal (and visual) humour may be factored. Connections between the features of discourse that expound the prime, on the one hand, and the



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Chapter 1

dialectic on the other, are often established, embellished and sustained by puns and other forms of verbal word-play. These bivalent lexico-grammatical devices, that help bind together the two (colliding) elements of textual patterning, are referred to as stylistic hooks. Whereas the model of satire postulates that both prime and dialectic elements be present in a text, it further stipulates that the lack of congruence between these elements be recognised by a reader or listener. In other words, it is the dissonance between the domains of prime and dialectic which creates an interpretative pragmatic framework for satire and brings about the style-shift necessary to place the reader-listener on a satirical footing. Furthermore, it is argued that satirical “uptake” depends to a great extent on the interplay between what Habermas terms universal validity claims. Satirical uptake requires a special configuration of the three principal claims of sincerity, appropriateness and truth. Specifically, the recognition of a non-isotopy or disjunction between prime and dialectic elements serves to rescind the validity claim of sincerity, an action which resonates across the interpretation of the other two claims. This results in a configuration for “successful’ satire which comprises a suspension of the claim to truth, a ratification of the claim to appropriateness and a recognition of a rescinded claim to sincerity. The relationship of the satirist and satiree to the validity claims is developed through the mnemonic of the three “Rs”: one subject position raises a particular claim while the other recognises it, with the claim ultimately redeemed across both positions. The model of the three Rs also extends to negatively framed participation in discourse: one subject position may choose not to raise a particular claim, another may not recognise a particular claim and the claim may not be redeemed across both positions. In this respect, and importantly, the pragmatic validity claim model thus serves to explain satirical “misfire” as well as other more indeterminate consequences in discourse. Various scenarios are detailed to this effect, where the rescinding or non-redemption of certain claims impacts upon general interactive outcomes. Ultimately, irony must be conferred upon a satirical text, and this is what constitutes the third ironic phase of satirical discourse. The model, as outlined here in abstract and in brief, makes little reference to the idea of “satirical intent” or to “satirical purpose”. Doing so would presuppose to some extent that satire works through the recovery of a satirical “meaning” which has been deliberately placed in a text and over which an author has a degree of control. The model also, perhaps a little more contentiously, has little to say about the “ideology” of the satirist. Doing so would presuppose that the sociopolitical orientation of a satirist can be read directly off a satirical work. These are just two of many such presuppositions that, while com-

Introduction

monly accepted in many studies of satire, will not be advanced in the present project. Quite why they will not be advanced is a matter best resolved in the main body of the book, where all of the principal tenets and categories of the model sketched here will be defined, justified and illustrated.

. About this book Over the course of the forthcoming chapters, all of the principal tenets of the suggested model of satirical discourse will be illustrated through the analysis of text. As signalled earlier, the principal source of the examples used for the more extended analyses, accounting for roughly two-thirds of that material, is the controversial British satirical publication, Private Eye magazine (web). Wherever necessary in these analyses, explanations will be provided for a relevant feature of context or a significant topical allusion so that readers unfamiliar with the narrower cultural reference points will still be able to disambiguate the basic humour mechanism. That said, most of the texts analysed tend towards generalised satirical reference, and wherever possible examples which function within a more restricted cultural backdrop have been avoided. As with all studies of contemporary humour, however, the problem is how to reinvigorate textual material that has been dislocated from its original time and place of production, a dislocation which manifests in what Nash calls “instances of red-hot topicality gone stone-cold” (1985: xii). Contemporary political satire is by its very nature ephemeral. In that respect, all one can really do by way of analysis is to try to restore, through sufficient contextualisation, at least some of the immediacy and immanence of the text’s original context of use. Given its prominence in the data covered in the book, it is worth offering some general observations on the background to Private Eye magazine. Carpenter’s excellent history of the “satire boom” of 1960s Britain makes the pertinent observation that Private Eye is the only serious “satirical format” to have survived intact from that period to the present day (Carpenter 2000: 2, 155–169). The first issue of Private Eye was published on the 25th of October 1961, in an initial print run estimated at 500 copies. The design of the journal was to alter markedly over its first few issues, with only the fourth instalment settling down into the broad style and format which characterises the contemporary publication. That fourth issue was the first to carry real, as opposed to joke, advertising. It also established a pattern for the front cover of the magazine by placing, under the Private Eye masthead, a photograph reflecting an area of public or media interest from the relevant period. Allegedly

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Chapter 1

at the suggestion of the late comedian Peter Cook (Carpenter 2000: 166), that photograph was “doctored” by the addition of a spoof banner heading and by the superimposition onto the photograph of (ironic) speech bubbles. Almost all Private Eye covers since then have employed this format (and see further Chapters 6 and 8). Now in its fifth decade of publication, and enjoying a circulation in excess of 200,000 copies (Barendt et al. 1997: 152), this fortnightly magazine balances humour with more serious investigative journalism. The humorous element is developed mainly through the material positioned in the central section of the periodical, referred to in-house as the “funny pages”. This material takes the form of jokes, spoofs and short squibs, verbal or visual, which often number several to the page; Text A, for example, was one of several individual texts that were incorporated onto the same page. These short skits may be directed towards a variety of satirical targets – individuals, episodes, experiences, practices – all is fair game in the satirical purview of Private Eye magazine. The emphasis on Private Eye is not to suggest for a moment that this publication is the only viable source for satirical data. Many other suitable candidates for analysis present themselves. In the USA, The Onion (web) is a weekly satirical publication which has much in common with the format and content of Private Eye, right down to its spoof front page and its blend of humorous text with investigative journalism. To this extent, there are good grounds for a future comparative study of the type of satire developed in each publication. Another contender for inclusion in a project such as this is Britain’s venerable Punch magazine. In spite of its historical pedigree, this once famous satirical publication, whose early political cartoons continue to draw serious academic scrutiny, has tended to fall from public favour in recent years. At the time of writing, Punch is owned by business tycoon Mohammed Al Fayed, a proprietor who certainly believes in a “hands-on” approach to running a humorous magazine. Opposite the regular advertisement for his London department store is the owner’s own centre page editorial, entitled “The Thoughts of Chairman Mo”, in which Al Fayed communes with his readership on matters all and sundry. That editorial’s subtitle describes the magazine’s owner as “the angel behind Punch”, an astonishing piece of solipsism which is delivered without any suggestion of irony. It is axiomatic to the present study that satirical discourse inheres in a complex matrix of ironic phases, the upshot of which is that discourse without irony, of which Punch in its contemporary manifestation is a clear example, simply cannot be satire. So Private Eye it is then, at least as far as the dominant exemplar of satirical discourse in this book is concerned. However, use of this source is not intended

Introduction

as some sort of homage, what journalists might call a “puff ’, for the publication; nor is there any intention to sift from the periodical only those examples which provide “safe” or straightforward illustrations of the particular feature of the analytic model under scrutiny. Problematic and exacting examples will be used, whether their difficulty resides in a challenge to the categories of the model (see §4.4), or whether it stems from their perceived failure as satire in the public domain (see §6.3). Having sketched the primary source for many of its illustrative examples, the task now remains of mapping out how the model, outlined in abstract in the previous section, will take shape across the individual chapters of this book. The next chapter details the research background to the study, locating its origins in studies of the language of humour. More specifically, the chapter reviews and critiques a number of influential models in linguistics and language study which have been specially designed for the analysis of verbal humour. It seeks to pinpoint precisely where, in the context of this research background, the present study should be situated theoretically, and it also indicates which parts of this research background will be factored into the model of satire, and which will not. Chapter 3 surveys a body of academic research which has, over the years, addressed satire consistently and in depth. Literary critics, unlike stylisticians and humorologists, have written a great deal on satire and that research tradition houses most of the available scholarly work on the topic. Chapter 3, while covering a broad sample of this research, suggests that much of the critical work has tended in certain respects to skew the perception of how satire functions in social and cultural contexts. In opposition to the literary critical perspective, the chapter argues for a theory of satire as discourse, and to that effect begins to sketch, towards its conclusion, the form such a model might take. Chapter 4 is in several respects a pivotal chapter in the book. Although it draws a number of its terms and categories from the previous two chapters, its main purpose is to set down the ground rules and establish the basic stylistic blueprint for a model of satirical humour. This more wide-ranging chapter, which draws in a range of additional theories of discourse and pragmatics, builds an argument for satire’s status as a discursive practice. Factored into the model are a number of linguistic criteria for the definition of satire as discourse, of which irony, in particular, is highlighted as an important pragmatic device. Chapter 4 also contains the first of the detailed analyses of satirical texts that will be carried out over the remainder of the book. Chapter 5 is about ways of “doing” satire. Focussing mainly on the methods of satirical composition, it applies to textual examples the categories of

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Chapter 1

the theoretical model advanced in chapter four. Working by analogy with the terms “metonymy” and “metaphor”, it provides a series of illustrations of how these conceptual principles can help explain and organise into sets certain of the discourse techniques used in satire. The chapter also seeks to “fine tune” some of the theoretical concepts broached in the earlier chapter, especially the concept of irony, while further observations are made about how satire intersects with or contrasts with other “irony-bearing” forms of verbal humour such as parody. Chapter 6 marks a shift in emphasis, away from the text-forming strategies employed by the satirist and towards the text-processing strategies employed by the satiree. It highlights the active and to some extent collaborative process whereby the satiree, having worked through the ironic phases embedded in satire, reaches “satirical uptake”. This chapter explores satire’s perlocutionary aspect and investigates the structured patterns of inferencing which result in the status of satire being conferred upon a text. Although the text-analytic component of this chapter is built around a variety of materials, particular attention is given to a problematic and somewhat disturbing example of a satirical text which, for many of its readers, badly misfired. The notion of satirical misfire is one of a number of themes followed up in Chapter 7, a chapter which also signals a further shift in emphasis by bringing to the fore the constitution of the satirical target. Specifically, the chapter provides an extended case study of a particular discourse event which resulted in formal litigation being brought by the target of the satire against the publishers of the satirical text. The progress and outcome of this case are analysed using all the relevant components of the proposed model of satire, the result of which makes for, inter alia, a productive comparison later in the chapter with a similar legal case played out in another cultural and discourse context. The final chapter, Chapter 8, offers an overview of the general implications of the book. It synthesises a number of the issues arising from the model of satire, and provides additional pointers as to the direction future studies might take and as to how and where subsequent research might be focussed. This chapter reiterates many of the central aims of the book, not least of which is its claim that an account of the discourse of satire should be grounded in a framework of actions and events which acknowledges the palpable outcomes that this special form of humour has for its participants. Whereas the full compass of such a discourse framework is elaborated progressively over the course of the book, some of its basic organising principles can be found in existing linguistic research on verbal humour. It is to that tradition of research that we now turn.

Chapter 2

Linguistic approaches to humour

The best humour doesn’t bear any analysis at all. “Monty Python” team member Michael Palin

. Introduction In its broader design, this book is about the discourse of humour; in its narrower, it is about the stylistic and pragmatic characteristics of one particular type of verbal humour. The purpose of this chapter, then, is to attempt to locate the present study within a framework of verbal humour and, over its course, the chapter will review a number of the significant directions and developments in linguistic approaches to humour, synthesising work by stylisticians, applied linguists and discourse analysts. The next section offers an overview, couched in very general terms, of studies in humour which concentrate largely on puns and related forms of word-play. As the chapter progresses, its emphasis becomes more theoretical, switching from a discussion of particular tropes and types of verbal humour to a consideration of how research in “linguistic humorology” can be used to model the broad mechanics of humour production and delivery. Reflecting this shift, the central part of the chapter summarises and critiques the “semantic script” theory of verbal humour alongside some of that theory’s offshoots and derivations. Ways are suggested whereby this more generalised linguistic model of humour might be enriched or modified if it is to play a part in the analysis of satirical discourse. The chapter thus seeks to ground the proposed model of satire in a tradition of research on the language of humour, and to this effect its concluding section will highlight areas of relevance, locate points of intersection or divergence, and target those aspects of linguistic humorology that can usefully be integrated or, at least, aligned with a model of satirical discourse.

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Chapter 2

. Linguistic approaches to humour The period from the 1980s to the present has witnessed sustained and progressively heightened interest among language scholars in linguistically based accounts of verbal humour. This is not to suggest that humour had previously been an entirely neglected area in language and linguistics. There was, indeed, a fairly steady output of shorter essay length articles covering many aspects of the discourse of humour (Brown 1956; Heller 1974; Hockett 1977a [1967], 1977b [1973]). There were also earlier studies which incorporated language analysis to some extent but which tended towards the informal or populist in their approach (Farb 1973; Fry 1963: 137–171). Alternatively, some studies emerged largely as the by-product of a broader project of which the principal object of attention was not humour. A case in point here is Sacks’ ethnomethodological work on the place of puns and jokes in conversation, although humour is viewed as just one resource among many that conversational participants employ in organising their everyday interaction (Sacks 1973, 1974). A decade after Sacks’ work, the publication of seminal book-length publications like Nash (1985) and Raskin (1985) served to ground the discourse of humour as an important focus for academic scrutiny within the disciplines of language and linguistics. Interest thereafter was unabated, leading to further book-length studies of humour in which language structure and function was the core object of attention (Norrick 1993; Alexander 1997; Cook 2000; Redfern 2000; Attardo 1994, 2001). Some of these studies emerged as a corollary of scholars’ interest in creativity in language generally, and so the theoretical vantage points which inform these studies are drawn from various positions including stylistics, literary studies and theoretical linguistics. Furthermore, this interest in linguistic creativity has in itself led to a series of useful introductory treatments of humorous language (Chiaro 1992; Crystal 1998; Ross 1998) which makes accessible the concepts of verbal play for beginning students of language and linguistics. The main aim of this section will be to consider a broad range of this work in terms of what it offers the model under development. One issue which surfaces across many linguistic treatments of humour concerns the position of an intending humorist or joke teller relative to the audience or addressee. At first glance, the framework of participant slots for a humorous event seems not to be particularly complex. To put it bluntly, humour can be deliberate or accidental. The following set of scenarios maps the attitudinal positions a speaker may adopt relative to a humorous utterance: i.

you mean to be funny and you are funny;

Linguistic approaches to humour

ii.

you mean to be funny but you are not funny;

iii.

you don’t meant to be funny but you are funny.

A fourth scenario, situated outside the context of a humorous speech event, is the perhaps rather self-evident position where: iv.

you don’t mean to be funny and you are not funny.

It is often suggested that (iv) is a kind of pragmatic default position because it represents a mode of discourse where there is no departure from or flouting of the four conversational maxims presented in Grice’s well-known model (Grice 1975). Various scholars have in fact demonstrated how flouts of Gricean maxims can act as humour producing mechanisms (Raskin 1985: 101–104; Chiaro 1992: 44–45; Attardo 1994: 270–292; Okada 2001: 148–164), a corollary of which is an implicit assumption that non-humorous discourse is to some degree “maximally efficient” discourse. However, caution needs to be exercised with regard to the sorts of discourse strategies that can be realised by position (iv). To decide not to be funny does not foreclose on the possibility of being creative, experimental or innovative (in other ways) with language. Moreover, certain forms of discourse such as irony, upon which humour is not necessarily contingent, are nonetheless very much a consequence of marked departures from so-called Gricean rational efficiency. While this is an issue which will resurface, appropriately, in the later discussion of satire as irony (§4.3), it is still worth making the point here that the flouting of a Gricean maxim is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the generation of verbal humour. If, for now, the three generalised scenarios for a potentially humorous interchange can be accepted in principle, then the two interactive contexts which actually produce humour, (i) and (iii), realise two further distinctions: humour that is produced intentionally and humour that is produced unintentionally. On the face of it, this distinction looks, again, reasonably watertight. There are, for instance, some rather obvious categories of unintentional humour which have not been consciously planned by the speaker. One such category is the “slip of the tongue”, or to put it more accurately, a slip in whatever physical mechanism is being used in language production, whether that be for the purposes of speaking, writing or signing (Fromkin 1980). The so-called “Freudian slip” is a specific case in point, where a speech error is activated, so the theory goes, by some suppressed thought in the subconscious. In terms of this sort of “relief theory” model of humour, joking serves as a safety valve for hidden feelings and thoughts, such that the (unintentional) slip expresses that which is inhibited, with the energy of the inhibition being “released” in laughter (Freud

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Chapter 2

1976 [1905]; Morreall 1987: 112). Thus, in the following example from Chiaro, a letter writer inquiring about tourist facilities asks about: (1) pubic (sic) transport in Naples.

(after Chiaro 1992: 18)

In the terms of the specifically Freudian definition, a sexually induced error is activated in (1) by some sort of eruption from suppressed subconscious. However, the theoretical foundation of the Freudian slip is contentious, if not among Freudian psychoanalysts, then certainly among linguists. Without developing this debate here, it is worth noting in passing that the validity of the “suppressed desire” hypothesis tends to crumble in the face of empirical linguistic investigation. The fact that speech errors like (1) can be elicited in experimental, laboratory conditions by exposing informants (and no Freudian slip intended there) to various stimuli of a sexual nature, suggests that the interfering thought lies anywhere but in the unconscious (Fromkin 1973: passim; and see MacMahon 1995 for an overview of the stylistic significance of Freudian slips). The set of ostensibly “unintentional” jokes also includes phonological errors which stem from segmental substitutions across word boundaries. Anticipations (“reek long race” for “week long race”) involve the insertion of a sound which occurs later in the utterance while perseverances (“irrepraceable” for “irreplaceable”) are where the interfering segment precedes the affected segment. Metatheses (“teep a cape” for “keep a tape”) go one stage further and reverse the two segments, although, as with the other two types of substitution, the resulting string is phonologically “permissible” in whatever particular language embraces the metathesis. Metatheses are of course popularly known as “Spoonerisms”, after the eponymous Reverend William Archibald Spooner, Oxford don, among whose hapless errors is reputed to have been the following rebuke to one of his undergraduate students: (2) You have hissed all my mystery lectures. You have deliberately tasted two worms and you can leave Oxford by the town drain. (reported in Simpson 1992: 284)

Resembling a metathesis in terms of its psycholinguistic profile is the malapropism (after Sheridan’s fictional Mrs. Malaprop), a slip of the tongue that produces, late in the utterance planning stage, an incongruous lexical entry. By way of illustration, here is a sequence containing two malapropisms uttered in the presence of the author. Relating topically to a musically talented child, this utterance loses in the course of its production the two salient target items, respectively, “prodigy” and “Symphony”:

Linguistic approaches to humour

(3) He’s a child poltergeist y’know. He’s with the London Sympathy Orchestra.

Fromkin, among others, has speculated that speakers match words with similar phonological specifications by bringing them into a “buffer storage compartment” in the planning stages of an utterance. From this compartment final selections are made, with an error of the “malapropism” type involving the substitution a phonologically similar item (whether semantically compatible or not) in the utterance (Hockett 1977a: 248; Fromkin 1971: 46; MacMahon 2001: 237–240). There is of course a serious side to this brand of unintentional humour. The surface manifestation of a speech disorder may well mask serious deficit at the cognitive, physiological or auditory levels (Rahilly 2003). In this instance the permanent neurological impairment would be phonetic paraphrasia, although it should be added that the originator of (3) suffered from no discernible linguistic disability. Another potential candidate for inclusion in the category of “unintentional” humour is what might be termed the cross-linguistic lapse. This mode of humour originates in an attempted and not altogether successful transfer of an utterance by a speaker or writer into a second language. The L2 version tends to import problems in the choice of lexical items or of idioms, the result of which is a clash in register without necessarily a loss of coherence. Nash, for instance, reports a somewhat infelicitous translation on his Italian coffee percolator urging him to “set on fire and abide the ejaculation” – a sequence which he describes as so far removed from the standard idiom as to constitute an exotic strain of poetry (Nash 1985: 151–152). In English speaking humour communities, cross-linguistic lapses are often gathered through the less than charitable practice of collecting infelicitous examples from hotels and other tourist centres in non-English speaking locations around the world. The following, for instance, is reportedly taken from an Austrian skiers’ hotel: (4) Not to perambulate the corridor in the hours of repose in the boots of ascension. (Simpson 1997: 68)

In its misguidedly ambitious attempt to attain only the most formal register in English, this example becomes saturated with Latinate items of low collocational probability, resulting in a stark mismatch between lexical choice and the constraints of discourse context. The three samples of “unintentional” humour introduced here were so called because they emanated from a position where a speaker does not try to be funny, but is funny. Yet it is possible, in perhaps varying degrees, to use

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Chapter 2

some of the forms above in a consciously humorous way; that is, to deliberately produce Spoonerisms or malapropisms, or to play with lexical aspects of register in a way which resemble cross-linguistic lapses. Nash, for instance, reports that Samuel Goldwyn was perfectly well aware of his own faux pas, and that his propensity to “error” was mostly feigned (1985: 150). This suggests not only that the distinction drawn between intentional and unintentional forms of humour is not as clear cut as it first seemed but that the matching up of a particular form of humour to its possible circumstances of production is not tenable either. Where the distinction between intentional and unintentional humour is especially blurred is in the broad category of the pun, about which more has been written by linguists, stylisticians and critical theorists than about any other mode of humorous discourse. And as the broad principle of punning is relevant to the textual material analysed in later chapters, it is worth spending a little time on this aspect of verbal humour. In its broadest sense – and in a sense generally accepted by most theorists – a pun is a form of word play in which some feature of linguistic structure simultaneously combines two unrelated meanings. Importantly, the unrelated meanings do not necessarily reside in individual polysemous lexical items (though undoubtedly many do) but they may run the full gamut of levels of linguistic organisation. Thus, for convenience, the term pun will be used here in a general way to account for those potentially humorous ambiguous meanings that sit at the interstices between segments of lexis, syntax, phonology and graphology. Allowing that they are built from numerous and possibly overlapping linguistic combinations in lexico-grammatical structure, puns are many and varied in terms of their formal properties. While certain reasonably discrete sub-categories may be discerned, the informal categorisation which follows captures only a few of the pun’s potential permutations. Lexical puns, arguably the most “canonical” of the pun sub-genre, are activated by polysemous lexical items such as homophones and homonyms, and are embodied in quips like Groucho Marx’s: (5) “We only shot two bucks, but that’s all the money we had” (after Sherzer 1978: 341)

Lexical puns also encompass plays on their morphological sub-constituents, as the following example demonstrates. Initiated by the familiar WH-interrogative structure, this one is from the repertoire of my nine year old son (although I suspect some borrowing from Wales 1993): (6) A: What do you call a cat that lives under water?

Linguistic approaches to humour

B: Dunno. A: An octopuss!

The preponderance of the pun in the overall make up of verbal humour and, for that matter, in naturally occurring language is not to be underestimated. Attardo et al. calculate, on the basis of quantified evidence from a corpus of two thousand tokens, that puns in which there is play at the lexical level account for over 90% of all verbal jokes (Attardo et al. 1994: 33). Norrick demonstrates how naturally occurring conversation thrives on puns and word-play, often mixing modes and creating hybrid forms in ways which break down traditionally recognised genres of verbal humour (Norrick 1993: 15). It is worth noting also that the ability to produce or to process a pun is also developmentally constrained, and can only occur once the capacity for the recognition of ambiguity in language has been achieved by young children. Arguably not the first form of humour to be acquired by the young – phonetic game patterns and incongruity-based play tend to precede it (McGhee 1983: 111) – psycholinguistic evidence does suggest that this colourful semantic skill is acquired around the age of six years (Fry 1963: 13; Keith-Speigel 1972; Raskin 1985: 11). Another important feature of the pun is its reflexive capacity, where it acts as an indicator of the linguistic constraints of the particular language system in which it is encoded. On the one hand, a pun may open up a “translingual” connection, by exploiting a random or fortuitous link with an unrelated language. Redfern supplies, as an example of this sort of “false bridge” creation, a highly apocryphal encounter between Eleanor Roosevelt and an oriental ambassador. Discussing democracy, Roosevelt asks “When did you last have an election?”, to which her embarrassed interlocutor replies “Before blekfast” (Redfern 2000: 194). On the other hand, the same constraints of the linguistic system also serve to exercise severe restrictions over the translation (as opposed to the translingualism) of puns. Delabastita reports as a truism the fact that many puns are simply untranslatable, although certain types of wordplay are more resistant to certain kinds of translation than others (Delabastita 1997b). He adds that the specific “inter-semiotic set-up” of the discourse situation in which the wordplay occurs (which includes its social, political and cultural dimensions) presents a further obstacle for the translator (1997b: 8–10; see also Redfern 2000: 201). Resuming our survey of specific categories of puns, the term collapsed idiom might usefully capture a category of linguistic joke which is analogous to the lexical pun. Allowing that idioms are arguably single lexemes derived from multiple-word clusters, considerable punning potential inheres in treat-

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Chapter 2

ing the constituent items of the idiom as autonomous lexical items. Thus, the following example (7) Q: What is worse than when it’s raining cats and dogs? A: Hailing taxis. (Wales 1993: 88)

develops through the contrast between rain as a single lexeme (feeding into hail as a member of the same lexical set) and its correlate within the multipleunit idiom to rain cats and dogs. Collapsing the idiomatic realisation into its constituent components therefore sets up the potential for incongruity with and within the A sequence. On this general theme, Lew argues that because its overall meaning is simply not predictable from the individual meanings of its elements, the idiom offers a rich source of linguistic ambiguity for joke creation (1997: 127). He notes, though, that the potential for idiom “decomposition” is variable in that idioms as fixed expressions exhibit varying degrees of linguistic autonomy, which in turn affects the scope they offer for breakdown. Taking up the same issue, Veisbergs, in a study that catalogues a series of techniques for translating idiom-based wordplay, argues that the process of “deidiomatization” works best when the idiom is “structurally frozen” into a stable word combination with a fully transferred meaning (1997: 156–163). Veisbergs also notes the particular difficulties in translation that attach to this form of wordplay. This is because the translation of a collapsed idiom necessitates the searching out in the target language not only of a parallel idiom, but of an idiom upon which a parallel operation of deidiomatization can be performed. Syntactic puns can be derived from syntactic sequences in which an element of structure may ambiguously straddle two different grammatical classes. The following syntactic structure pun is typical of the customarily lame jokes found inside Christmas crackers: (8) Man in shop: Can I try on that suit in the window? Salesperson: No, you’ll have to use the changing room like everyone else.

At the (perennial) risk of stating the obvious in joke deconstruction, the humour bearing element here is activated at the interface between nominal group and prepositional group boundaries such that the “in the window” prepositional phrase may sit either as an Adjunct in clause structure or as a postmodifier in the nominal group of which “suit” is the headword. There may be a case for differentiating syntactic structure puns from syntactic function puns, of which the latter expounds an ambiguity in the function, rather than class, of clause constituents:

Linguistic approaches to humour

(9) Q: How do you make a Swiss roll? A: Push him down a hill.

In (9), again from the repository of Christmas cracker jokes, the function ambiguity resides in the nominal/verbal opposition in “roll”. However, one would be hard put to draw an absolute or finite distinction between syntactic structure and syntactic function jokes, and as this is not an issue that has theoretical relevance for the humorous texts examined later, the broader term syntactic pun will suffice. I propose the term referent ambiguity for a punning technique which has a lot in common with syntactic puns. Referent ambiguity operates across clause boundaries and is triggered by pronouns which are used as grammatical anaphors. Thus, in (10) The Mississippi is the longest river in America. Can you spell it?

the addressee normally expects to have to spell the name of the river (the referent of the pronominal anaphor) only to be “punchlined” into a literal spelling of the word “it”. Given its putative assumption of coreferentiality across clause boundaries, a protocolled setup for this type of joke is normally necessary, often relying on the contribution of a stage from an interlocutor, as in the following example from the comedy film Airplane!: (11) Doctor:

(said of a stricken passenger) There’s something wrong with him! We need to get him to a hospital! Flight Attendant: What is it? Doctor: It’s a big building with lots of sick people in it, but that’s not important just now!

Phonological sequencing puns draw together two different grammatical patterns within the same (or highly proximal) phonetic string. This is a much favoured technique of old British Music Hall routines, as in: (12) A: My wife has gone on holiday to the West Indies. B: Jamaica? A: No, she went of her own accord.

Consider also the following example which is perhaps the best known one-liner of the comic tradition of the British “Carry On” films. Here a recently betrayed Julius Caesar, cries: (13) Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it infamy!

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Chapter 2

Phonological sequencing puns are planned so that two underlying linguistic realisations are served, as it were, by the same phonetic sequence. Variations in accent constrain the possibilities that the sequence opens up; for instance, the full impact in (13) of the play on [ÁInf6mi™] requires a non-rhotic realisation of the item “for” such as that prevalent in Southern British English. Furthermore, phonological sequencing puns, with their emphasis on low-level phonetic detail, often rely heavily on the skills of the joke teller in order to facilitate the accessing of both readings (Lew 1997: 133–135). The printed form of the joke is therefore often more opaque than its spoken delivery. Nonetheless, printed forms of phonological jokes can work, as the following egregious example from the sports pages of a Scottish tabloid newspaper shows. This headline captures the spirit of a famous footballing victory by lowly provincial team Inverness Caledonian Thistle (“Callies”) over high-flying urban rivals Glasgow Celtic: (14) SUPER CALLIES WERE FANTASTIC, CELTIC WERE ATROCIOUS!

Readers may hear the broad phonetic and rhythmic parallels between (14) and the famous song from the Disney film Mary Poppins. While spelling here can only be approximate, the trochaic metrical units of the Poppins version, with ictus and remiss syllables distinguished, opens up the spoken discourse parallels with (14): “SUPer-CALa-FRAGa-LISTic-IKSpy-Ala-DOCious”. Clearly, (14) is a ludicrous and ostentatiously over-wrought approximation, where the sheer contrivance of phonetic detail is the source from which much of its humour comes. So far, this brief survey of puns and related word play has been informal and partial, and concerned more with outlining broad principles than with providing a comprehensive field guide or exhaustive taxonomy. It has also offered a sample of punning techniques that anticipate the particular types used in the satirical texts that feature in later chapters, and especially in Chapter 5. Fuller accounts of puns, including book-length publications, are easily found in the literature on humour, a representative sample of which would include but would not be restricted to: Heller (1974), Hockett (1977b), Culler (1988), Attardo (1994: 108–173), Delabastita (1997a) and Redfern (2000), and see further the references posted throughout this section. The present account has attempted simply to lay down the ground rules for the principle of wordplay in a framework of humour, and to bring this to conclusion, several remaining loose ends need to be drawn together. First of all, just as there are numerous other points of intersection between grammatical ranks and levels of language organisation, so there are other types of puns situated at the interstices between these linguistic units. Grapholog-

Linguistic approaches to humour

ical puns (“Why do optometrists make efficient lovers?” “Because they do it with the greatest of E’s”; after Lew 1997: 138) are a case in point, realising a category which also includes anagrams and palindromes. Situated at the interface between graphology and lexico-grammar, graphological puns thus find their exponence in written discourse only. By contrast, basic phonological puns (“What do you give a sick pig?” “Oinkment”) inhere in morphophonemic structure rather than in the sorts of grammatical strings which characterise the phonological sequence puns discussed above. These are but two of a phalanx of more narrowly defined pun-types to which many other types can be added. Secondly, the central pun mechanism is a semantic principle which can be encoded into different structural formulae. Thus, pun bearing texts can be “delivered” generically as, inter alia, riddles (Chiaro 1992: 69ff.), wisecracks (Raskin 1985: 29) or narratives (Chiaro 1992: 49; Norrick 1993: passim). Other structural configurations in English include so-called “OK” and “Knock Knock” jokes (Nash 1985: 53–55), jokes triggered by WH-interrogative forms (see example (6) above) or even narrower sub-generic manifestations such as the “light bulb” joke (Attardo & Raskin 1991: 295). Thirdly, although the type of humour covered here is “linguistic” in the narrow sense, it is also possible to plot ambiguities that sit in the spaces between lexico-grammar and more contextually dependent aspects of pragmatic and discourse organisation. The pragmatic pun, for example, is activated by a perceived mismatch between the default speech act status of an utterance and the “literal” meaning of its component lexico-grammatical structure. Thus, when the constraints of politeness require the use of “conventionalised indirectness” in an utterance like “Could you pass the salt?” (Brown & Levinson 1987: 70), a “straight” reading also presents itself, such that the utterance can be interpreted (perhaps more irritatingly than amusingly) as an elicitation and not as a request for action. Consider, in this respect, the following exchange from the American television series Police Squad which works on the same principle: (15) Detective Drebben: (raising a cigarette packet towards a colleague) Cigarette? Colleague: Yes, I know it is.

The humour mechanism here requires the bypassing of the conventional speech act status of the offer in favour of an alternative which is less viable in that interactive context. However, this technique, and other discoursally orientated humour strategies like “modality” puns (Lew 1997: 146), is located more at the interface between linguistics and pragmatics than in the lexico-grammar proper. This tends therefore towards a conception of humour as discourse devi-

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Chapter 2

ation, where the oddity of a particular exchange inheres in its implicit contrast with what would be expected in everyday discourse. Humour as “pragmatic mismatch” has received much attention in the stylistics literature, with particular emphasis given to the fictional dialogue of plays and prose (Burton 1980; Culpeper 1998; Simpson 1998; Okada 2001), and whereas the humour principle here has much in common with the underlying mechanism of the pun, a survey of pragmatic and discourse-analytic approaches to humorous language is best held over until that of the more narrowly linguistic work is completed. To take a longer view of the pun and related forms of wordplay, and to recap, the basic principle that unites the specific examples treated so far (as well as those covered in the fuller studies referenced above) is that linguistic jokes inhere in some feature of semantic ambiguity. By imputation, this ambiguity can be unravelled through a disambiguation procedure that works at the equivalent linguistic level as the mechanism that underpins the pun. Thus, in a lexical pun like the Groucho Marx example (5), the substitution of a lexical synonym for “bucks” (“We shot two deer” or “We shot two dollars”) dismantles the humour mechanism entirely. Similarly, in syntactic pun (8), disambiguation can be achieved simply by a grammatical reordering of clause constituents to incorporate, say, a preposed theme: “That suit in the window, can I try it on?”. Lew (1997: 128) provides a set of comparable disambiguation procedures for collapsed idioms. In effect, the humour of the verbal pun is serendipitous. It emerges from a fortuitous or happenstance assimilation of two frames of reference and is predicated upon a search for a node of congruence between otherwise unrelated lexico-grammatical entities. Disambiguation serves to remove the node of cross-reference across whatever linguistic elements are activated in the pun. However, this is not to suggest that puns are always deliberate; that is, that the activating elements are configured consciously. Consider the following two “lapses”, embodying, respectively, lexical and syntactic puns: (16) There are things that only happen to women. Period. (female poet speaking at literary festival; after Sherzer 1978: 343) (17) Australian Police hold two over bushfires. (Heading from The Daily Telegraph 10/01/2002)

When not encoded in an explicit signalling framework, puns can still emanate from misplaced words or the chance placement of a grammatical category. In terms of the framework of humour positions sketched above, this type of humour event represents position (iii), where the humour is produced uncon-

Linguistic approaches to humour

sciously. Yet this basic position is rather too simplistic because it disguises the manner by which events like unintentional puns are played out, as it were, in a temporal sequence. In two party talk, for instance, the uptake of unintended puns requires in the first instance that either the speaker or the hearer draw explicit attention to them (through metastatements like “No pun intended there!” and such like). The second phase involves a reprocessing of the utterance by whatever party has still not “got the joke” with a view to locating the inadvertent placement. To this extent, the humour generation stage in unintentional puns may develop asynchronously, with one party in talk mapping it onto the utterance before the other. The aspect of intentionality in humour production is an important one for this study and is worth pursuing a little further here. In an ethnographic study which develops the earlier work of Sacks, Sherzer draws a distinction between the respective discourse functions of intentional and unintentional puns (Sherzer 1978; see also Sacks 1973: 135–139). Unintentional puns, he contends, are “doubly anaphoric” in that they operate in several directions simultaneously. As the ambiguous entry in this sort of pun points not to one but to two referents, Sherzer suggests that puns minimally add to the “thickness” of the cohesion of the discourse in which they are located (1978: 340). He develops this point by arguing, along Jakobsonian lines, that what is striking about unintentional puns is that the punning word or phrase selected from a paradigm of possibilities links up with, or relates back to, a previous utterance or topic in discourse. It thus represents a projection of the paradigmatic onto the syntagmatic axis, prompting Sherzer to ask: “are not these examples of unconscious speech play working in the service of the poetry of everyday life?” (1978: 339). That may well be true, but what is of particular interest here is the manner by which Sherzer develops a somewhat different system of classification for intentional puns. Intentional puns (such as those realised in examples (5)–(9) above) are in his view conscious manipulations of the grammar of English. In fact, their purpose is not to create cohesion but to disrupt cohesion; or, in an echo of Goffman, to break “frame” (Sherzer 1978: 341). Where unintentional puns are speech play in the service of discourse, intentional puns are discourse in the service of speech play. Or to put it another way, in the former, speech play is centripetal to discourse; in the latter, speech play is centrifugal to discourse. The idea that a single figure of (humorous) speech may at once function cohesively and disjunctively is an insightful one, and it will be shown later in this book, in Chapters 4 and 5, to have an important bearing on the way satirical texts are created and sustained. That said, the alignment of the cohesivedisjunctive distinction with its corresponding intentional-unintentional di-

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Chapter 2

chotomy is not exactly straightforward, with the difficulty in part coming from the problematic status of intentionality in humour production. Sherzer himself notes some indeterminate areas that would be situated between the basic positions (i)–(iii) outlined above. Puns, for instance, may be both unconscious and unnoticed, although the paradox in this scenario is that analysts presumably won’t know the puns are there because they are, well, unnoticed. Other “unintentional” positions are that the hearer doesn’t notice the pun but the speaker does; or that the speaker doesn’t notice but the hearer does (Sherzer 1978: 336). In either case, as suggested above, temporal sequencing allows one or the other party to monitor the unconscious slip, thereby allowing it to be brought eventually to the attention of both parties. However, further positions are possible even beyond those proposed by Sherzer. Here, for example, is a more problematic example provided by my four year old son. This has been transcribed within standard notation conventions to capture the spirit of the original delivery of this humorous interchange: (18) Danny: Mother: Danny: Parents:

how can an EYEBALL WALK dunno by having some (.) mmm ↑CHAIR LEGS↓ (2.0) is that ↑funny (laughter)

Adapting the WH-interrogative joke bearing framework from his older sibling (see example (6) above), Danny sets up a pattern which both signals intentionality and functions disjunctively to “break frame”. Crucially, however, this tyro joke teller, in view of the psycholinguistic-developmental constraints noted above, has not yet mastered a control of ambiguity – to the effect that there is basically no discernible joke bearing pun element in the text. What is significant about this, though, is that the end product is, to all intents and purposes, a humorous event in the “speaker wants to be funny and is funny” mould. This is in spite of the fact that the joke teller failed to deliver a punchline, so whatever humour there is manifestly not mediated through the intended channel. Clearly, much of the dynamic of (18) is predicated on the attitudinal predisposition of the hearer(s) to the speaker along with the special features of the particular discourse context in which the interaction takes place. This means that the basic humour positions (i)–(iii), while they may serve some generally useful purpose, tend to disguise the localised subtleties in inferencing and predisposition which effect humour processing. And when the humour event in question is a complex piece of satirical discourse, and not a simple family exchange, further modifications of the whole area of humour processing are undoubtedly warranted. Indeed, it will be argued later, in Chapter 6, that

Linguistic approaches to humour

humorous texts functioning at the macro-level, of which satire is a preeminent example, are subject to structured, collective interpretations within a grid of circumscribed pragmatic parameters. It is also suggested, later, that certain types of humorous text can be repackaged (or even remarketed commercially) so as to channel interpretations into particular positions within that grid of structured responses. As far as a general taxonomy of the pun and related tropes is concerned, and of the linguistic approaches to humour surveyed here, much of the substance of this work is centred on the strictly linguistic, core mechanism of semantic ambiguity. There is no doubt that the pun, with its double-edged function as a cohesive-disjunctive device, will have an important bearing on the texture of more substantial humorous texts, where it can function to merge two opposing domains of discourse within the same figure of speech. What is still missing from this survey, however, is an overarching model of humour which encompasses not just puns and wordplay but a range of other possibilities in humour production. It is to one such model that we now turn.

. The Semantic Script Theory of Humour It is worth reestablishing here that the main orientation of this book is to develop a model which explains a special type of humour. Such a model will be one that has been abstracted out of the analysis of satirical texts in order to codify the dominant structural and discoursal properties of satire. The model will also attempt to postulate a set of contextual constraints that operate on the production and reception of satire. In the previous subsection, a range of linguistic studies were reviewed in terms of how they might impact on the development of such a model. Although many useful insights were offered by these varied approaches – insights which will shape and contour subsequent discussions where appropriate – none of the approaches in themselves sought to construct a generalised model of humour. Whereas, for example, the work on puns and related features of lexico-grammar offered a number of useful taxonomies and classifications for certain localised patterns in joke bearing texts, that work was not “predictive” in the sense of specifying an abstract set of discourse postulates for determining the core features of a particular form of verbal humour. There is however one linguistic approach to humour which does seek to establish such an overarching model for the language of humour, whether that humour be jokes, riddles, puns or wisecracks. The inception of this approach was marked by the publication of Raskin’s study of the semantic mechanisms

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Chapter 2

of humour (1985) – now the mainstay of an influential tradition in humorology. The author himself claims that his is “the first ever application of modern linguistic theory to the study of humor” (1985: xiii). This claim is a little tendentious in that Nash’s (1985) study was published in the same year on the other side of the Atlantic. Both authors had clearly been working simultaneously and independently on their material, and without cross-reference; and comparison of the insights revealed by these seminal studies (though not possible here) makes for fascinating reading. What is significant about Raskin’s study, and certain of the subsequent offshoots such as Raskin (1987), is that he establishes a blueprint for the generation of verbal humour within a set of stipulated parameters; parameters which specify why some texts are funny while others are not. His task, in short, is to formulate a set of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the production of humorous texts. Importantly, Raskin seeks to pin down that elusive property of “incongruity” (especially in its perceptual-cognitive manifestation) by grounding it in a devolved linguistic theory, a theory which has come to be referred to as the semantic script theory of humour (hereafter SSTH). In its most general sense, the central hypothesis of the SSTH is elegant in its simplicity. For a text to be a joke, it needs to satisfy two basic conditions. The first is that the text has to be compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts. The second is that the two scripts with which the text is compatible are opposite in a special sense. And it is that special relation of script oppositeness which provides the main ingredient in the generation of a single joke carrying text. The core notion of “script opposition” has had an important influence on subsequent developments within the research tradition it engendered which is why it feeds into the material surveyed in the next section. It also has, to a limited extent, some bearing on the format of the model developed over the course of this book (see §4.1). But before examining more closely the finer detail of this aspect of the SSTH, it is necessary to step back for a moment from Raskin’s model in order to consider the nature and origins of the core terms in his framework. Popular in much contemporary stylistic work, the notion of “script”, and attendant terms such as “frame”, “scenario” and “schema”, were originally derived from work in cognitive psychology and in Artificial Intelligence. Given the extensive research literature now available, it is important to pinpoint the particular aspects of the theory which influenced both Raskin’s study, given its era of publication, and subsequent work within this tradition of humorology. The principal impetus for the script-based model of humour is Schank and Abelson’s influential (1977) study, with, importantly,

Linguistic approaches to humour

supplementary material coming from Raskin’s own work outside humorology (Raskin 1981). The core definition of script, from this perspective, is as a chunk of knowledge which describes “a predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that defines a well-known situation” (Schank & Abelson 1977: 41). A script is therefore a knowledge structure that is brought into play for the processing and understanding of (textual representations of) routine activities. Scripts are expectation-based, preexisting knowledge stores, but they are also subject to modification in the course of an individual subject’s experience and development. One of the principal benefits of a script-based framework as a tool for explaining human text-processing is that it facilitates a conceptual understanding that operates beyond and without recourse to elements of the lexico-grammar of a text. For example, the famous, if now ubiquitous “restaurant script” (Schank & Abelson 1977: 42–49) is a knowledge structure which is activated by an essential precondition – that is, wanting to eat. The script is sustained further as a “giant causal chain” by accompanying conceptual slots such as “Roles”, which would include sub-entries like waiter and customer, or “Props”, with entries like table and menu (Schank & Abelson 1977: 43). Crucially, the conceptualisation of these elements can be achieved by discourse processors even in the absence of any overt syntactic or lexical realisation in the script. In other words, scripts allow for new conceptualisations of objects within them just as if these objects had been previously mentioned, such that “objects within a script may take ‘the’ without explicit introduction because the script itself has already implicitly introduced them” (Schank & Abelson 1977: 41). Of course, the precise nature of conceptualisations varies from one individual to another, and there is no obvious upper limit to the number of conceptualisations that can be invoked for every script. As Brown and Yule note, endless conceptualisation is a problem which exists for virtually every attempt to incorporate world-knowledge in the understanding of discourse (Brown & Yule 1983: 244). This, however, is clearly not the place to conduct a critical review of the theoretical basis of script theory, although useful applications, extensions and suggested modifications to the model can be found in relevant work in cognitive poetics (see Stockwell 2002: 75–89). Any relevant extensions to the script-theory framework, as they impact on the present study, will be introduced where appropriate. To return to Raskin’s model, then. The chunks of knowledge which are activated in a single joke bearing text – the scripts, in other words – are said to be opposed in a “special sense” (1985: 109). This sense effectively expands the concept of oppositeness away from the rather more narrow concept of antonymy in lexical semantics with its tripartite distinction between relational opposi-

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Chapter 2

tion (“teacher” vs. “pupil”), gradable opposition (“hot” vs. “cold”) and complementary opposition (“buy” vs. “sell” ). Although these distinctions are still permitted in Raskin’s model, his emphasis shifts towards a more generalised contrast between “real” and “unreal” situations (1985: 108). This “situation oppositeness” is manifested in the following three principal subtypes (following Raskin passim): a. an actual situation is contrasted with a non-actual situation b. a normal, expected state of affairs is opposed to an abnormal, unexpected state of affairs c. a possible, plausible situation is contrasted to a fully or partially implausible situation (or to a much less plausible situation) Each of the following three jokes embody, respectively, the three types of opposition identified above: (19) The archdeacon has got back from London, and confides to his friend the doctor, “Like Saint Peter, I toiled all night. Let us hope that like Saint Peter I caught nothing”. (Raskin 1985: 25; after Legman 1975: 308) (20) “Who was that gentleman I saw you with last night?” “That was no gentleman. That was a senator”. (Raskin 25; after Esar 1952: 177) (21) Nurse: That’s a pretty bad cold you have sir. What are you taking for it? [Jewish] patient: Make me an offer! (Raskin 25; after Spalding 1976: 225)

Example (19) distinguishes the actual situation in which the “hero” has participated (his debauchery during his trip to London) from a non-actual event (unlike St. Peter, he did not toil honestly). In (20), the opposition (according to Raskin) is activated by the assumption that the normal expectation is for a senator to be the best representative of the public, and in the ethical norms of a certain period, a gentleman. The abnormal state of affairs thrown up by the joke is that senators are not gentlemen. In the third example, billed as an example of Jewish self-disparaging humour, the possible/probable situation is that the patient has an illness; the improbable that he wants to sell this illness. The narrower features of Raskin’s method of textual analysis are interesting in terms of how he teases out the opposing scripts in joke bearing texts. To take a key example of a joke which features across his book: (22) “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.” (Raskin 1985: 100 and passim)

Linguistic approaches to humour

It is a truism of humour research that analysts are under no obligation to stand over the political or moral integrity of cited texts and in this respect we need to overlook for the moment the incorrigibly sexist nature of this joke (although the issue of “appropriateness” as a limiter in humour processing will feature later, in Chapter 6). The main point at issue here is that the text of (22), as a necessary precondition for its humorous effect, is compatible with two overlapping scripts which can be labelled doctor and lover. These scripts are, moreover, opposed in the special sense identified above. What is unusual about Raskin’s own application of the script model and his drawing out of the particular incongruity in (22) is its detailed examination of lexical items, conducted on a word-by-word basis, and even extending to coverage of grammatical morphemes. For the script analysis, Raskin develops a continuous lexical graph which charts the sub-domains corresponding to every lexical entry in the text. This is paralleled by a set of “combinatorial rules” which acts both as a system for allocating these sub-domains to the larger scripts which are compatible with the text and as a system for marking the scripts as opposite (1985: 117–119). Thus, the set of sub-domains activated by the lexical item “doctor” includes, but is not restricted to, the scripts academic and medical. Combinatorial rules then come into play by searching out common domains as text processing continues. For instance, while two “human scripts” were activated for “doctor”, the combinatorial rules, having registered ambiguity in the first instance, will use the appearance of “patient” four items later to “doubly corroborate” the medical script at the expense of academic. Further corroboration for this comes with the item “bronchial”. Similarly, as the joke progresses, the lover script is activated by the item “wife” which is related to “doctor” by the genitive morpheme “’s”. This disambiguates the modifiers “young” and “pretty” into their unmarked scripts, thereby establishing the second, “opposite” script. Elsewhere, the items “whisper” and “reply” pick out compatible scripts in each others’ domains: they share the interlocking node “utter” and in this respect, they activate opposing conceptual domains – hence, consolidating the sense that the scripts are both opposite and overlapping. A crucial element in Raskin’s formulation is the special resource of world information, the activation of which enables newly contained information to supplement previous information if it is compatible with it and to signal a conflict if it is not. Thus, the combinatorial rules, when operating in tandem with world information, produce a set of derivative inferences: namely, that the doctor is not at home and that if the patient comes into the house he will not see the doctor. A further deductive consequence of this series of inferences is that the patient does not need to come into the house – an inference flying

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Chapter 2

in the face of the instruction from the doctor’s wife. At this stage, an important text-processing decision needs to be taken. As the “misunderstanding” is not resolved and receives no further explanation in-text, so the joke processor must (i) reject the default assumption that this is a piece of “bona-fide” communication and then (ii) re-scan the text as a “non-bona-fide” (joke telling) mode of communication. In Raskin’s own words: . . . the combinatorial rules will be instructed first to go back to those words of the second sentence of the text which do not evoke the script or node medical. Those include at least young, and, pretty, wife, whisper, come, right, and in. The combinatorial rules will soon discover the concealed script of sex, evoked much less obviously perhaps but no less persistently than the script medical is evoked by other words, by at least the words pretty and wife. . . Whisper in combination with the probable inference of [the patient and the doctor’s wife are alone] will then match the temporal script lover, or adultery. (Raskin 1985: 126)

From this Raskin concludes that text (22) is a joke with the opposing scripts of medical (doctor) and adultery (lover), that the type of opposition it exemplifies is of the actual/non-actual type and that its domain of reference is sex-related. The point of Raskin’s extensive analysis of what he considers a typical joke format is not only to highlight the script-opposition principle in operation but to endorse the main hypothesis of the semantic script theory of humour. And the fact that the formal analysis of this particular text is able to reveal the principal elements of the hypothesis at work means, in the terms of the model, that the text is recognised and confirmed as a joke. This overview of the methodology of the SSTH forms an important template for the survey of linguistic work on humour that is provided in the next section. That section will also chart some of the modifications and changes in direction that have taken place since the development of Raskin’s model. Regarding the implications of the SSTH for the model under construction, it is worth raising some issues here as a consequence of the overview. The first issue follows neatly in fact from the joke just analysed and concerns the nature of script opposition as a theoretical basis for incongruity. The opposition between doctor and lover identified in example (22), is, in certain other discourse contexts, not so easy to sustain. This is especially true if we bring a “cultural take” to the opposition. There are many spheres of discourse activity where there is, if anything, a complementarity between these two domains. Just about any television soap opera that features professional medics features the love lives of those medics. American-produced and internation-

Linguistic approaches to humour

ally distributed series like ER and Chicago Hope, or in Britain, regular features like Casualty and Holby City, make the blend of the medical with the romantic almost de rigeur. There is no doubt that this pattern is replicated in film, televisual media and in so-called “low-brow” fiction throughout the world. What is more, the technique of parallel editing in the final production stage of the medical soaps often means that romantic episodes are interlaced with contiguous medical episodes, such that the juxtaposition of the one with the other is strident. Significantly, while this narrative technique may be used for dramatic purposes, rarely does it appear to be used for the purposes of humour generation. It is my contention that the humour of example (22), such as it is, originates in the first instance more from an opposition between discursive units than between cognitive units. In this respect, the text of the joke instantiates at the outset what linguists have termed a genre of discourse (see further, §4.2). Situated at a higher level of discourse organisation than a register, genres are text type categories, such as novels, newspaper articles or public speeches, which are readily distinguished by mature speakers of English (Biber & Finegan 1991: 213). While the constraints on generic organisation are obviously looser than those that inform grammatical structure, genre categories are nonetheless relatively homogeneous linguistically, and as Biber and Finegan further point out, corpora genre categories display “a high degree of internal linguistic consistency” (1991: 214). From a systemic-functional perspective, genres are linguistically-achieved activity types that are recognised as appropriate in a given culture (Eggins 1994: 35) and to that extent it should be possible draw out of raw linguistic data generalised models for individual genres. For example, a functional formula for the specific genre of discourse activated in the joke text – a “public service encounter” – can be developed by abstracting out the most core of the structural elements of the text into a schematic structure potential (see Eggins 1994: 30–31; Ventola 1987: 239–240; and see below, §4.2). Part of the schematic structure of this “transactional” genre comprises an initiatory move (realised in (22) by the elicitation “Is the doctor at home?”) which anticipates a follow-up element in the form of the responding move of affirmation. The dispreferred response offered in the joke text (“No”) means that affirmation is of course not provided. Furthermore, the resulting breach in the discourse framework is, crucially, not repaired, even though a range of strategies are available that are designed to reestablish or renegotiate the generic routine of the service encounter. It is the departure from the relatively rigid formula of the public service encounter which sets up the possibility for the clash between, on the one hand, the public field of discourse and, on the other, the

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Chapter 2

private domain of sexual behaviour (or even socially proscribed behaviour like adultery). It is true that the discursive shift from public to private domains is implicit to some degree in the tenets of the SSTH. Raskin also talks of “temporal” scripts (1985: 126) which seem to mirror in certain respects the linear sequencing of preferred slots that characterise a genre of discourse. But the discursive shift suggested here is predicated upon a culturally-driven formula which allows that the doctor-lover opposition is only incompatible in certain discourse contexts. To put it another way, if cued in the appropriate context, the presence of both domains may even be anticipated by text processors. Indeed, the very entertainment value of the medical soaps referred to above is that both domains are there in large doses (without any pun intended). The particular shift in the joke formula in (22) works on the processor’s capacity to recognise a generic initiation. This construal (see below, §4.2) anticipates an organised sequence of stages that set about accomplishing a culturally recognised social goal, a goal which of course is abandoned in the course of the joke bearing text. What is more, the service encounter as a discourse genre is a popular tool for many humorists, not just for the tellers of formulaic jokes. The output of the British “Monty Python” team, for instance, is peppered with surreal “across the counter” sketches built around public service locations (see J. O. Thompson 1982 and D. Morgan 1999 as general reference guides). Among the bizarre scenarios developed are an agency where you can learn to have an argument, a government office where you can apply for a grant to improve a silly walk and a pet shop which sells dead parrots (though only to the most gauche of its clientele). Perhaps the gag par excellence of the Python public service encounter archive is the so-called “cheese shop” sketch. A customer enters a “National Cheese Emporium” with the intention of buying two ounces of Caerphilly cheese. On being told that Caerphilly is out of stock, and after a tortuous search through most of the world’s other known varieties of cheese, the customer discovers that he is in a cheese shop which doesn’t have any cheese to sell. Once the preconditions for a schematic structure are invoked, a culturally determined end-point to the transaction is assumed, the violation of which has consequences for humour generation. This simple breach in one key and strongly presupposed precondition of the discourse framework (that the very existence of a cheese shop is grounded in the sale of cheese) is enough. My point is that “oppositions” are activated in the first instance in discourse units. Moreover, the conceptual domains signalled by these discourse units may very well be compatible combinations in some discourse contexts, but incompatible in others. In the model that develops across this book, primacy is accorded to

Linguistic approaches to humour

discourse (with all that that entails) as the key mechanism for activating incongruity. While the concept of “opposition”, especially in Raskin’s expanded sense, is extremely useful, the assumption that it is only cognitive scripts that enter into this opposition is not. In view of satire’s “interdiscursive” nature, it may prove the case that a pragmatic model, drawn from a variety of individual theories of discourse, is best suited to the exploration of this type of humorous discourse. Indeed, it is telling that Raskin quite pointedly excludes satire from the SSTH, signalling his position thus: “the term ‘satire’ and other generic terms which denote various uses of humor for artistic purposes will be completely ignored” (1985: 28). Interestingly, this disclaimer seems to suggest that satire is being placed at one remove from humour: it is a “use” of humour and an “artistic” use at that. An implication of this is that models for joke analysis and for related forms of word-play are simply ill-equipped to deal with satire. Certainly, any application of the SSTH to satire would warrant a substantial overhaul and expansion of its constituent categories. One such expanded model does however present itself, the review of which forms the remit of the following section.

. The General Theory of Verbal Humour and beyond It is important to stress that the core categories of the SSTH, as presented in previous section, were never designed to constitute an immutable formula for joke analysis; on the contrary, the sense within this branch of humorology of an ongoing tradition of constant revision and refinement is very strong. Since the inception of the SSTH, a number of modifications have been made to its basic concepts and categories resulting in the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) as outlined by Attardo and Raskin (1991), with further revisions in Attardo (1997). This second publication offers a compact and lucid outline of the model, and as it subsumes and revises the earlier publication, it will be the one to which primary reference is made here. The broad contribution of the GTVH has been to stretch the basic concept of the joke bearing text in a linear way in order to capture the different phases of a joke’s development and delivery. While the concept of incongruity through script opposition remains the hub of the joke text, this is bounded by two other phases, resulting in the following three temporally ordered stages in the production of a comic text: – –

setup incongruity (or script opposition)

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Chapter 2

–

resolution

(after Attardo 1997: 396)

The concept of incongruity remains largely semantic in its conceptualisation, but the notion of “script opposition” itself is enlarged to account for additional cognitive-psycholinguistic oppositions. What is especially significant in Attardo’s revisions is that the two scripts of a joke bearing text are ordered such that the first is highly accessible and based on a neutral context whereas the second, opposed script is much less accessible and is strongly context dependent. Once activated, the first script confines the hearer/reader within its parameters until the arrival of the punchline makes this impossible (Attardo 1997: 401). A consequence of this reworked classification, in the light of the reservations expressed Section 2.3, is that there now seems to be some recognition that the scripts which are brought into conflict may be discoursally asymmetrical. In the terms of the GTVH, the neutrality of the first script tends to collide with the specificity (in context) of the second, in a special type of opposition which to some extent surmounts the more rigid or “hard-wired” classification of oppositions that characterised the SSTH. The GTVH also postulates the existence of a setup phase which precedes the incongruity phase chronologically. The setup (corresponding loosely to the notion of “script overlap” in the SSTH) prepares the groundwork for the joke by establishing an accessible, neutral context which is congruent with the experience of the receiver of the text. Although not funny in itself, the setup, so the theory goes, is a necessary preliminary to the incongruity. The stages in the process are as follows: A subject observes a similarity among distinct parts of the experiential continuum, these similarities lead him/her to observe a regularity in the entities of which the stimuli consist, the regularities are abstracted into a rule which is used to make predictions as to the future behavior of (the source of) stimuli, these predictions give rise to expectations on the part of the subject. (Attardo 1997: 411)

To put it as straightforwardly as possible, the setup phase supplies the “order” or “congruity” in the humour stimulus. A general assumption about the setup phase is that those elements that occur first will inevitably become part of the context and will therefore establish a framework of expectations against which the scripts that occur afterwards (and the ensuing opposition) have to be processed. This setup-to-incongruity transition is perhaps most apparent in joke formulae which comprise a triad of scenarios in which the violation occurs on the third scenario. These are jokes of the

Linguistic approaches to humour

“An Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman walked into a pub . . .” variety, of what Attardo calls “the 1-2-3 formula” (1997: 411; and see Sacks’s influential (1974, 1978) studies of the social construction of jokes). This is not to say that the 1-2-3 formula is the only formula in which spontaneously told jokes are encoded. Indeed, the existence of numerous counter-examples to the two-part setup-to-incongruity sequence is acknowledged, and exceptions include humour types such as witticisms, repartees and quips where only the punchline is realised linguistically. It is however true that even in these seemingly anomalous examples, the discourse context itself provides a non-linguistic realisation of the expectations and presuppositions which determine the setup phase. The third phase in the GTVH is the resolution component. Attardo and Raskin suggest that the satisfactory resolution of incongruity requires the deployment of a “local logic mechanism” which is based on a range of individual operations including “paralogism”, false analogy or “figure-ground” reversal (Attardo and Raskin 1991: 303–307). The local logic mechanism functions by conserving in “working memory” the multiple scripts projected by the incongruity for a period of time necessary for the research of a cognitive rule capable of solving the incongruity (Attardo 1997: 412). Or more bluntly, processors need first to discover the incongruity in the joke text and then find a way of resolving it. The resolution is also “helped along” by an enabling mechanism, which is a static linguistic resource facilitating the operation of the logic mechanism. By way of illustration, Attardo talks of simple, playful “juxtapositions” in coordinated noun phrases like “strawberries and zeitgeist” or “asparagus and the immortality of the soul”. Whereas the coordinating conjunction is the enabling element (the part of the text that makes both the existence of the script opposition and the logic mechanism possible), the logic mechanism itself derives from the semantic rule which resolves the obvious incongruity derived from the opposition between the left and right hand sides of the coordination. According to Attardo, the resolution works on the assumption that since the two NPs occur as members of a coordinating construction, it follows that they are equivalent and that therefore it should be acceptable to equate them (1997: 412). By any account, the process of resolution is an absolutely pivotal phase in humour processing and it is not surprising that this crucial stage has received much attention in a wide range of humour studies in the humanities and social sciences. Consequently, and just as there is for the concept of incongruity, a great deal of parallel terminology exists which is roughly analogous to the term “resolution” as specified by the GTVH. For instance, Gruner talks of “winning” as the resolution of an incongruity (Gruner 1997: 40), Forabosco of “cognitive

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Chapter 2

mastery” (Forabosco 1992: 45) and McGhee of “fantasy assimilation” (McGhee 1972: 61–79; and see further references therein). What unites the greater part of this work is the general consensus that the resolution brings a kind of “sense” to an ambiguity, though only, and crucially so, if the humour processor is prepared to do the necessary retrieval work. Also, it is often suggested in the context of the experience of playfulness in jokes, that while the existence of a search for some sort of resolution is incontestable, the two elements that comprise the incongruity are ultimately never fully resolved. Indeed, Attardo talks elsewhere of a sense of incomplete resolution (1994: 143–148) suggesting that the resolution of an incongruity does not per se remove the incongruity to make thought processes “congruous”, but rather that the resolution coexists and accompanies the incongruity. Following Aubouin (1948), Attardo develops the terms “justification” and “acceptation” (sic), arguing that because two incongruous objects are not perceived as funny in themselves, they need to be “accepted” simultaneously in order to be perceived as humorous. Whereas acceptance describes the behaviour of the hearer, justification, according to Aubouin and Attardo, refers to the condition in which the objects can elicit this acceptation (Attardo 1994: 145). The resolution phase appears then to be a somewhat Janus-faced aspect of humour comprehension: it seeks both to resolve an ambiguity and yet to retain a kind of residual impression of that ambiguity. So what, then, are the areas of the GTVH which might usefully inform the development of a model that is specifically designed for satirical humour? One important feature of the GTVH is the way the idea of incongruity has been expanded, which allows a more malleable and expansive view of the principle to be taken. That said, the notion of script opposition is still at its core, which brings with it some attendant problems to do with its potential integration into pragmatic and discoursal domains of inquiry. One problem with the dichotomy (and one that is unlikely to have escaped the attention of stylisticians and cognitive poeticians reading this survey) is that the opposition between scripts (or, at least, the opposition between structured stores of knowledge) is endemic to many forms of discourse which have some stamp of “creativity” upon them. Both Semino and Cook, in their work on literary discourse, use developments from script and schema theory to explore concepts like literariness, poetic effects and cognitive aspects of literary processing (Semino 1997; Cook 1994). Cook, for instance, talks of the primary function of certain discourses, and in particular literary discourse, as effecting a change in the schemata of their readers. Such changes are brought about through “discourse deviation” (defined as a “difference from schematic expectation”), which acts a necessary prerequisite to “schema refreshment”. One consequence of schema refresh-

Linguistic approaches to humour

ment is to bring about “[n]ew connections between existing schemata” (Cook 1994: 190–199). Yet much of what applies to the procedure for the disruption of schemata could be said of the basic script-opposition humour mechanism. Semino, in her work on text worlds in poetry, does in fact note the humorous potential of script-opposition when she remarks that jokes commonly “achieve their effect by leading interpreters to activate a particular script and then forcing them to switch to another, often leading to absurdity” (Semino 1997: 137). Yet crucially, and quite correctly, neither Cook nor Semino argue that humour is a function of the opposition between structured blocks of knowledge per se, just as they do not argue that such opposition is the exclusive preserve of literary communication. The same argument could also be extended to work in foregrounding theory, such as that by van Peer (1986, 1993). Drawing on the work of the Russian formalists, van Peer talks of the typicality of foregrounding as a stylistic device in literary discourse. Foregrounding, in its “deviation” mode, disrupts the linguistic expectations that arise from our experience with language as a rule-governed instrument of communication; with such disruption capable of occurring at any level of linguistic structure including the semantic and the pragmatic (van Peer 1993: 50). Given that foregrounding requires that the linguistic sign attract attention to itself, the effect is one of “heightened psychological attention”. When placed alongside this definition of literary foregrounding, Attardo’s formulation of the principle of incongruity sits very neatly indeed: “Incongruity is a binary relationship, it presupposes the presence of a norm, which is then infringed . . . one has to establish the norm before one can violate it” (1997: 411). The question then arises, what generates humour in one context and enables literary foregrounding in another? Similarly, if we allow as a working definition that a metaphor is the conceptual mapping between two domains, one might add to the previous question: what activates humour in one context and creates a metaphor in another? In fact, in more specialised treatments of metaphor, such as Steen’s proposal for a procedure for metaphor identification (Steen 2002), the process for the recovery of metaphors works by breaking up a text into its constituent propositions and then by checking the typical conceptual domains evoked by the predicates and arguments in that text. Metaphors can thus be detected in the cross-over between the trajectories for two domains of usage (Steen 2002: 26–29). This proposition-based approach to plotting the course of a metaphor’s development bears many similarities to Raskin’s method, noted above, for retrieving a central script opposition from joke bearing texts. It is also worth footnoting here Weiner’s illuminating study of the formal differences between metaphors and riddles. Although in-

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Chapter 2

congruity in the broadest sense characterises both of these tropes, it is different types of incongruity, locatable in what she terms the “differential use of prototypicality”, which make one of them conducive to humour and the other not (Weiner 1996: 111–117; see also Weiner & De Palma 1993). The point is that in all this stylistic and related work nowhere is humour a necessary or even probable consequence of the establishment and resolution of an incongruity. Humour is, rather, an epiphenomenon. All of the stylisticians whose work is cited here take into account additional linguistic and extra-linguistic features of communication, whether that be for the study of metaphor, foregrounding, literariness or text worlds. By the same token, a model of humour that is designed exclusively for satire, but which still retains some notional concept of incongruity, will need to elaborate a full set of dynamic context-sensitive parameters which demarcate the pragmatic potential of a text’s linguistic form. This is an absolute requirement for discourse analysis in general, and it is no less relevant for a model of humorous discourse. As far as the script-informed definition of incongruity goes, it is, curiously, at once too broad and too narrow. It is too broad because the script model tends to disguise a host of other discourse strategies (especially those employed in the setup phase) and tends to dictate that the central “gag” be accessed only in terms of the opposition between two rigid knowledge stores. Although it is quite possible that in the final analysis some sort of script-opposition can always be sifted out of a humorous text, this procedure tends to flatten out the heterogeneity of many genres of humour, especially those which employ distinct or subtle features of discourse in their delivery and presentation. On the other hand, opposition between scripts as a humour mechanism is too narrow a concept, simply because it signifies a binary contrast of semantic features at the expense of other aspects of discourse organisation. It is worth noting that Veatch (1998: 168) in an insightful and substantial article steers the incongruity principle outwards and away from a localised concept of script opposition and towards a more culturally and philosophically informed formula. In his view, incongruity is a violation of “the emotional system of opinions about the proper order of the social and natural world”, though he also notes that this “subjective moral order” tends to destabilise across cultures and across time. Although we are to some extent now back where we started in Chapter 1 (§1.1), with a broad-based, and fairly loose philosophical concept of the humour function, it is still somewhat closer to the sociocultural formulation that will be elaborated in subsequent chapters of this book. Leaving aside for the moment issues surrounding the notion of incongruity, a model of satirical humour, for any insightful application of it to be per-

Linguistic approaches to humour

formed, needs an explicit and systemic mechanism for explaining what would approximate to the setup and resolution phases of the GTVH. The linearity of the GTVH as it stands tends to cut across discursive positions; that is, while the development of the setup and incongruity phases is squarely within the remit of the text producer, responsibility for the resolution phase clearly shifts to the text processor. In a model of satire, where the very status of the object of study is itself only conferred through the act of resolution, such a mechanism becomes absolutely crucial. Moreover, as will be demonstrated later, satire is a multilayered mode of humorous communication, which may or may not comprise a host of embedded joke bearing texts of which puns and general wordplay play a major part. Thus, “getting the point” of a piece of satire is arguably to reach a “macro-resolution” for the text as a whole and not just to reach a series of localised resolutions for individual embedded jokes. Another issue concerns the degree of resolution of a humorous text. Interestingly, Attardo suggests that some forms of humorous discourse actually resist resolution, noting that incongruities are least likely to be resolved definitively in “absurd humour” (1997: 409). Although its perlocutionary status means that a satirical text – unlike an absurdist text – has to be “resolved” to some degree, the overall pattern of resolution is unstable, varied and very much subject to change over time and culture. This jittery “resolvability” of a satirical text derives in part from the obvious fact that its principal target might be a culture-specific episode, experience, person or discursive practice, and may simply be hidden from the text processor. Yet the open-endedness of satirical processing also stems from the possibility that a satirical resolution is negotiable among interpretative communities and in pragmatically constrained ways (see later, Chapter 6 passim). Indeed, the possibility of indeterminacy in humour processing has not been lost on humorologists. As Carrell (1997b) notes, humour resolution does not necessarily inhere in a polar opposition which demands that you either get the joke or you don’t. Rather, humour resolution might be better reconfigured as a three-way relationship along the lines: “yes, this joke is funny”, “no, this joke is not funny”, and “maybe this joke is funny”. The more indeterminate “maybe” position suggests that there are stages in the resolution of a humorous text; a processor either may get the joke but not find it particularly funny, or, alternatively, may be prepared to persist with joke interpretation providing further information is supplied (Carrell 1997b: 182; see further, Chapter 6). Clearly, resolvability is an area that requires full and explicit elaboration. Moreover, the setup phase, which both determines the shape of the text and predetermines the interpretive direction it will take, requires comparably full treatment. It is for this reason that considerable space

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Chapter 2

in later chapters has been allocated to both the setup and resolution phases in satirical humour, or more accurately, to their reflexes in the equivalent linguistic-pragmatic and discoursal categories in the proposed model.

. Review and conclusions The survey and review of the broad terms of the SSTH-GTVH, developed across the previous two sections of this chapter, has been necessarily concentrated so as to draw out those elements of the model that inform and raise issues for the present study. While it is important to stop such a survey from becoming unwieldy and from straying too far from the task in hand, it also needs to be acknowledged that the GTVH, far from being an ossified theory of verbal humour, is a vibrant model to which many extensions and suggested revisions have been made. Some of this additional work has developed as an offshoot to or as an application of the GTVH, although some has developed in opposition to or as a critique of the theory. For instance, and representing the former body of work, Ruch et al. (1993) investigate the empirical validity of the GTVH using the experimental testing techniques of social psychology. This study argues, on the basis of responses from 534 informants to sets of jokes which comprise an “anchor joke” and six variants upon it, that subjects’ perceptions of varying degrees of similarity or difference between categories of jokes is constrained by certain types of knowledge resource, such that most “difference” is detected in the joke variants that contain manipulations of the “language” or “script opposition” resources (Ruch et al. 1993: 132). Representing the latter body of research, Latta (1999) is a notable and strident dissenting voice, rejecting out of hand all incongruity based theories of humour of which the GTVH is, of course, one. Building his own “L-theory” out of a mixture of introspection and of insights from philosophy and psychology, Latta conceptualises humour as a basic three-way process, but not as a three-way process in the terms of the GTVH. On the contrary, Latta’s focus is almost exclusively on the cognitive predisposition of the text-processor, so whether or not there is any incongruity in the humour stimulus is largely irrelevant to his theory. The “L-theory” of humour, for the record, comprises an initial stage of “unrelaxation” (sic) in the bearing of the potential humour processor, a transitional stage involving a cognitive shift, culminating in a final stage of “rapid relaxation” through laughter (Latta 1999: 35–42). Given that it is coded in highly abstract terms, the “L-theory” would be difficult to incorporate in any practical way into the present model of satire.

Linguistic approaches to humour

Other work, which either extends or challenges the central tenets of the SSTH-GTVH, tends to import a communicative-cognitive dimension into the analysis, often resulting in a shift in focus towards a consideration of the relationship of verbal irony to humour processing. Citing just two of many important studies, Giora (1991) and Curcó (1998) explore, respectively, the cognitive aspects of the “surprise” element in a joke’s structure, and the function, from a relevance-theoretic perspective, of the “indirect echo” in humour processing (see further §4.3 and §5.2 below). So that its relevance will be felt more keenly, reference to other important work in the same tradition will be held over until fuller scrutiny of the concept of verbal irony is undertaken in Chapter 4. As far as the present study goes, the principal concern here has been to assess what the main tenets of the SSTH-GTVH, as outlined in Sections 2.3 and 2.4, have to offer for a model of satire. Certain aspects of the theory, such as the unmodified notion of script opposition, will not, for the theoretical reasons evinced over the last two sections, play a major part in the proposed model. Other aspects of the GTVH, such as the concepts of setup and resolution, will feature, though only by being substantially redrawn, extended or redefined wherever appropriate (see §4.1 below). One remarkable point of significance emerges from the survey carried out across this chapter as a whole: humorologists seem almost to have gone out of their way to avoid satire. That so endemic and culturally valorised a mode of humorous discourse should receive so little academic attention is indeed strange. True, there are, within the tradition of humorology, a few localised article-length studies of satire, such as those by Nilsen (1988, 1994). It is also true that in other academic disciplines satire has received some sporadic attention. Pfaff and Gibbs, working largely within the framework of cognitive psychology, examine the ways in which readers draw specific inferences about authorial intent when they read satire (Pfaff & Gibbs 1997; and see further, §6.1 below). Gruner (1988), perhaps more unusually as a study in clinical psychology, looks at subjects’ prior attitude as a contributing factor to the ease or difficulty in understanding the “intended thesis” of a piece of satire. But attention of this sort has been isolated to such an extent that, with the possible exception of Draitser (1994) whose work will feature later (§5.1), no devolved, comprehensive theoretical framework for the study of satirical discourse has yet emerged from the scholarly literature. Many of the issues raised in this chapter will be presupposed in the formation of the satirical model that begins in Chapter 4. Even though that model develops from a “clean slate” insofar as it does not spring directly from an existing model of verbal humour, several of the linguistic devices and strategies of humour introduced in Section 2.2 and thereafter will be shown to play an im-

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Chapter 2

portant role in forming the bedrock of the model. Moreover, many of the basic ideas and linguistic principles highlighted over the course of this chapter will be used to inform the decisions taken about how satire functions discursively, and specifically, how it is arranged through multiple and layered components of discourse organisation. Locating this multilayered organisation of satirical humour in the framework of a number of simultaneous and embedded lexicogrammatical operations will be crucial to the development of the model. There are however further overarching requirements that, while not generally at the forefront in contemporary theories of humorous language, still need to be fully incorporated into the construction of a model of satire. These requirements will stipulate that a model of satire: – – –

–

needs to be sufficiently grounded in an adequate account of discourse context needs to be sensitive to pragmatic strategies within that discourse context needs to register the embedded nature of satirical discourse in such a way as to capture the relationship of elements of lexico-grammar to higher units of discourse organisation needs to develop a system for analysis that is shaped in the first instance by “real” satire as discourse, but which is able to generalise to the broad principles of satire as a discursive practice

Setting out terms of reference in this way serves to pinpoint those areas of the present study where a linguistic-pragmatic dimension is built onto more basic assumptions about verbal humour. Although humorologists and linguists working on humour have, as noted, tended largely to shy away from satire, this does not of itself mean that there exists no academic writing about this form of humourous discourse. There are indeed many articles, treatises and monographs, written by literary critics, which are explicitly focussed studies of satire. Indeed, the assumption that its theory, analysis and history has become the exclusive preserve of the critic, may explain why many humorologists appear almost to have relinquished the study of satire as a viable branch of inquiry. Clearly, the insights offered by literary critical research need to be addressed, and it is to this important and substantial body of work that we will next turn.

Chapter 3

Literary-critical approaches to satirical humour

The tragic (and the dramatic) – it is said – are universal. At a distance of centuries we still grieve at the tribulations of Oedipus and Orestes, and even without sharing the ideology of Homais we are distressed by the tragedy of Emma Bovary. The comic, on the other hand, seems bound to its time, society, cultural anthropology. We understand the drama of the protagonist of Rashomon, but we don’t understand when and why the Japanese laugh. It is an effort to find Aristophanes comic, and it takes more culture to laugh at Rabelais than it does to weep at the death of the paladin Orlando. Umberto Eco

. Introduction In advance of this survey of literary-critical approaches to satirical discourse, I should first “declare my hand”, so to speak. One of the main impulses for this book arose out of my general sense of dissatisfaction with the manner by which the concept of satire has been dealt with in literary criticism. That a stylistician working at the interface between language and literature should complain about the methods employed by literary critics is in itself nothing new. It is also true, in view of the arguments presented in the last chapter, that the lack of attention to satire by academic humorologists has created a marked gap in coverage – a gap which, quite legitimately, the literary critics have sought to try to fill. What is at issue here though is not the critics’ involvement per se in the study of satirical discourse, but more the consequences of that involvement. It will be argued that in spite of its extensive treatment within the domain of literary criticism, the conceptualisation of satire as a form of discourse is still neither imminent nor transparent. If anything, critical attention has led to fracture and disagreement about what constitutes satire, and there seems to be little attempt to reach any intersubjective consensus about how to ground the tech-

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Chapter 3

niques of satire within a model of discourse. While this is not to argue that the critics have nothing to say, or that agreement and consensus are necessarily desirable outcomes of academic inquiry, it does raise significant implications for our understanding of what satire is, what it is for, what makes it work and what is has to do with humour. There will be more on these and other issues later in this chapter. First, it is important to identify in broad terms what general issues about satire have concentrated the critics’ minds over the years. To this effect, the section which follows attempts to tease out from an imposing body of critical research some of the more general areas of interest that feature across literary-critical studies. Thereafter, in Sections 3.3 and 3.4, consideration will be given to how this body of work might usefully inform and supplement the model under development.

. Literary-critical approaches to satirical humour In spite of the difficulties it might pose to the stylistician or discourse analyst, the concept of satire as a specific type of literary-linguistic creativity has, from the twentieth century onwards, received widespread attention within literary criticism. Before the twentieth century, explication of the properties of satirical discourse tended to come from the writers themselves. Paulson notes that the satirists were the principal commentators on their own and others’ work, using prefaces or apologias to defend their writing practices or to sketch a poetics of satire (Paulson 1971b: ix). The current status of critical response to satire is however very different, and there now exists on the topic a substantial and diverse body of work in literary criticism. This diffuseness of critical response is in some measure due to contemporary divisions in the academe between, on the one hand, approaches to textual interpretation which are driven by criticaltheoretical models of inquiry and, on the other, approaches which tend to be more text-centred and author-based. The critical theorists’ accounts tend to place satire against the broader context of literary communication, building argumentation from whatever precise critical-theoretical apparatus frames the approach. Thus, studies like those of Gill (1995) and Nussbaum (1984) draw, respectively, on ideas in postmodernism and feminism for their principal theoretical stimuli. Connery and Combe’s useful collection embraces a range of critical theories among its constituent essays, of which poststructuralism and psychoanalysis feature as two key influences (Connery & Combe 1995). Whatever the particular critical theory employed, such work is centrally concerned with positioning satirical discourse against its sociopolitical context of produc-

Literary-critical approaches to satirical humour

tion, and within a problematised and historicised system of literary communication. The second paradigm of critical response, arguably more “traditional” in its method, approaches satire as the specific instantiation of a literary text. From this perspective, satire is viewed as a distinct form of textual organisation which can be registered against a backdrop of literary, biographical and historical (though not necessarily historicised) particulars. Representative work reflecting this position are Paulson’s collection of influential essays (Paulson 1971a) and a cohort of important single-authored works including Pollard (1970), Carretta (1983), Nokes (1987), Weinbrot (1988), Clark (1991), Griffin (1994) and Dyer (1997). Predictably, there are studies which tend to embody both approaches, such that the dividing line between “critical-theoretical” and “literary-critical” academic writing on satire is not always easy to draw; indeed, many of the studies just referenced tend to shift between both domains of inquiry. Whatever position on the theory-to-criticism continuum is adopted, there exist some broad terms of reference for what constitutes “satire” and for the means of locating it in literary contexts. There is little disagreement across the work cited above about the existence of two “golden age” periods of satirical production, evidenced first in the classical satires of the Graeco-Roman satirists, such as Juvenal, Horace, Persius and Aristophanes, and later in the neoclassicist work of the Anglo-Irish satirists of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth century, such as Alexander Pope, John Dryden and Jonathan Swift. On either side of that second period of literary history, other writers vie for contention, with Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare from the centuries before consistently advocated for inclusion, as well as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens from the century immediately after (see Griffin 1994: 3; Rawson 1994: 267–269). Opinion is however rather more divided on the status of twentieth century satire. Pollard’s introduction to satire, although published in 1970, makes passing reference to but three twentieth century writers: George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Oscar Wilde (Pollard 1970). Whereas this all but brackets off satire chronologically into a pre-20th century slot, Clark and Motto, by contrast, open up the twentieth century to include various and perhaps less obvious candidates like Franz Kafka, Günter Grass, Samuel Beckett, William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez (Clark & Motto 1986: 22–23). And doubtless many other major writers from the 20th and 21st centuries would present themselves for inclusion in what is clearly a very loosely delineated field. Explanations for the perception that satire appears to thrive in one era while being relatively scarce in another are often couched in terms of assump-

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tions about that era’s prevalent social and political conditions. W. H. Auden, among others, has suggested that satire flourishes in times of relative stability and contentment, and in homogeneous societies which abide by a common conception of the moral law (1952: 69). If true, that would indeed stamp the twentieth century, with its two cataclysmic world wars, as an epoch thoroughly unconducive to satirical writing. However, many critics argue that conditions of uncertainty, repression and upheaval are in fact precisely the factors that engender prolific satirical output. Elliott contends that the most inventive satire emerges in times of risk and threat of punishment, and that it thrives when society attempts to censor it (Elliott 1971: 212–213). Paulson goes even further, arguing that the disillusionment experienced after both world wars, and the “existentialist view of life” that that brought about, made the twentieth century nothing less than an “age of satire” (Paulson 1971b: xi). As far as comparison of the broad social conditions of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries is concerned, it is highly unlikely that the differences detected can ever be attributed directly or unequivocally to the level of output of satirical writing. There are two reasons why this is the case. For a start, the more recent writing of the twentieth (and twenty first) centuries may simply be forced to stand the test of time before the status of “canonical satire” is conferred upon it. Or to recast this in more politicised terms, entry to a literary tradition is a highly selective affair where the existing “classics” need to make space for (and are occasionally redefined by) the entry of a new masterpiece, although the newcomer’s entry tends only to endorse the central values of the canon in any case (see Eagleton 1983: 39–40). Another reason, which intersects with the problem of the tradition of the canon, is to do with the difficulty in establishing precisely who is a satirist and who is not. The designated satirists, whose reputations are founded on finite oeuvres, are relatively easy to target. Griffin, for example, signals early on in his monograph that he intends return throughout the book to “the same dozen figures” – the icons of, in his terms, “literary satire from ‘high culture’ ” (1994: 1). But to take this approach is to ignore the great swathe of non-designated satirists whose work nonetheless might be characterised as containing satirical elements. At the risk of sounding frivolous, the situation might be better captured by analogy with the circular conceptualisation used in “fuzzy set theory” (Coates 1983). Whereas the first batch of writers, the “canonical” group, constitutes the inner “core” of the set, the second forms a rather sizable “skirt”. The core is relatively easy to delimit, given the luxury of being able to take the long view on a fixed and chronologically distant body of work. In comparison with the core, the skirt is, by implication, enormous, with more recent writing throwing up a host of “unofficial” candidates for incorporation.

Literary-critical approaches to satirical humour

Looking across the relevant critical literature, it seems that traces of “satirical method” can be (and have been) argued for in just about any major writer of the last hundred years. Indeed, the only established canonical novelist of the twentieth century who seems not to have yet featured as a viable contender – and I may have missed a relevant reference here – is Ernest Hemingway. More seriously, the indeterminacy of the skirt is largely engendered by the theoretical looseness of much that is written on satire (see further below), which makes for great difficulty in charting satirical techniques in contemporary writers in any systematic way. To that extent, it is probably best left to the critics to decide on which authors can be admitted to the core and which are destined to remain at the skirt. The main issue for the present study, and to echo Chapter 1, is simply that satire, as an everyday mode of social discourse, is more endemic and more outside of anything approaching “high culture” than, with certain exceptions like Nokes (1987: 8–10) or Sibley (1995: 67–72), many critics appear prepared to accept. In spite of these inconsistencies in precise categorisation, the critics are nonetheless largely agreed on some broader principles of satire, of which two emerge more consistently and stridently than any others. The first, underscoring the point made above, is that satire is “Literature”; the second, that satire is a “genre” of Literature. Adherence to the satire-is-Literature axiom is strong even when the techniques embodied by satirical discourse are identified as having reflexes in everyday language. Taking an example from early criticism, Hendrickson (1927) acknowledges not only the “wide territory” of the term “satire” but that it also “pertains to the casual utterances of daily life” (46). However, this seeming liberalism quickly dissipates when the term is reined in so as to privilege literary realisations only: “we have almost forgotten that satire is primarily the designation of a form of literature” (1927: 46). Similarly, Worcester agues that as far as the methods of a satirist are concerned, “without style and literary form, his [sic] message would be incomprehensible” (1940: 13). Indeed, throughout the critical literature, forays into the possibilities of everyday manifestations of satirical discourse tend to be short-lived, and are often characterised by a strong sense that “literary satire” is qualitatively superior to any of its crudely sub-literary imitations. As far as the conceptualisation of satire as a literary genre goes, there seems, again, to be general agreement in the critical literature. Nokes talks of satire as “a single dominant genre” in the eighteenth century (1987: 1) while Paulson states categorically that satire is “a real genre, regarded as such by writers, and with particular conventions” (1971b: xv). Nevertheless, in spite of the seeming confidence in this position, a little probing reveals some unease and tension

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among the critics; a sense perhaps that the label “genre” – in the specifically literary-critical sense – is inadequate. In a widely referenced essay focussing on Pope’s satire, Mack sidesteps explicitly the issue of genre and coins the term “Muse”, doing so as a way of coming to terms with what he regards as the slightly oblique relation of “speaker” to author (1951: 83). Mack goes on to suggest that there seems to be a “fictionality” about (good) satire that is not manifest in more definitive genres like Romantic poetry (1951: 84). To Hendrickson, that satirical comedy is a genre goes without saying, although he expresses some unease about the manner by which it seems to appear in other genres like ballads, essays, sermons and even tragedies (1927: 46). Wyndham Lewis’s premise is rather more interesting, posed as a hypothetical question: “you may ask. . . satire can only exist in contrast to something else – it is a shadow, and an ugly shadow at that, of some perfection” (Lewis 1971: 71; original emphasis). The sense of contrast implicit in this formulation at least begins to problematise the status of satire as a literary genre. Although not articulated clearly by Lewis, the remark hints that while satire is situated outside the category of literary genre, it nevertheless has the capacity to consume or imbricate other genres. And the notion that satire has the potential for absorbing more clearly circumscribed genres of discourse is a formulation that begins to approach the position taken in this book. The broad emphasis on satire as a specifically literary mode of communication naturally brings with it the metalanguage of literary criticism. Thus, characterisations of satire are expressed in the stock-in-trade devices of “literary style” such as allegory (Elliott 1971: 212) or formal verse satire (Randolph 1971: 180; Weinbrot 1988: 11–20; Dyer 1997: 18–21). Other stylistic devices include the use of burlesque, with “high burlesque” functioning through the elevation to a “high style” of a trivial subject, and low burlesque by the treating of an elevated subject in a trivial manner (Worcester 1940: 40–83). Yet it is the concept of irony, more than any other device, which tends to be regarded as the central mechanism in the production of satire. In an influential paper that shaped much criticism thereafter, Frye argues: The chief distinction between irony and satire is that satire is militant irony . . . Two things are essential to satire: one is wit or humor, founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd, the other is an object of attack. (Frye 1971 [1953]: 233–234)

More widely referenced perhaps than any other single formula, this pithy definition has at its core a sense that irony is not satire, but that irony can be pressed into service for satirical purposes. In other words, irony has an exis-

Literary-critical approaches to satirical humour

tence outside satire, but a particularly “militant” version of it – one capable of targeting “an object of attack” – is what moulds satire. There is much in Frye’s terse formula that is undoubtedly true. What is remarkable, though, is that in the face of ostensibly widespread endorsement from the critics there has been so little interest in unpacking and probing this definition, along with its subcommentary on humour and wit, through the analysis of satirical texts. Indeed, it is the function of irony as a method in satirical discourse which, above all other techniques, has perhaps been least understood and most misrepresented in literary criticism. This is not to suggest that more formal typologies, which synthesise satire and irony into some broader framework of humour, have not been attempted. Somewhat improbably perhaps, H. W. Fowler, that arch-prescriptivist and “grammarian”, produces a table which positions satire in relation to other techniques of comic discourse (H. W. Fowler 1965: 252–253). After helpfully disabusing us, in a typically hectoring style, of some of “our popular misconceptions” about humour, Fowler at least tries to tabulate satire and other concepts across a grid which tracks their “motivation”, “method” and “intended audience”. Unfortunately, he demurs from providing any “further disquisition” about the schema, which means that no explanation is offered as to why, for example, irony, humour and satire are all situated at exactly the same level of organisation on the table. An altogether more comprehensive taxonomy is that offered by Berger (1997) which is as much a handbook of comedy writing as it is a critical treatise on humour. Using dramatic comedies as illustrations, Berger tries to pinpoint a fixed set of humour generating techniques of comedy writing, of which he identifies forty five (no less!). These techniques are sorted into four categories: language, logic, identity and action. However, as the sorting of types into categories is largely impressionistic, this makes the resulting arrangement seem a little counter-intuitive at times. For example, satire and puns fall into the category of language, along with sarcasm and irony, but parody is situated in the category of identity. The general point about Berger’s and Fowler’s models, and indeed other similar enterprises, is that they are largely atheoretical taxonomies. As far as atheoretical taxonomies go, they are not at all bad: there is much to be said for a framework that seeks to synthesise and reconcile into an overarching schema a number of principles, positions and intersections. The question that remains, however, is an important one; it is the one which demands a coherent theoretical rationale for the particular alignment of these different aspects of comic discourse.

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To close this brief survey, there remain two final areas of interest which arise from the broad conceptualisations of satire developed by the literary critics. The first concerns the assumptions made about the nature of satirical target, what W. H. Auden calls the “comic butt” of satire (1952: 66). Auden sees the satirised entity unequivocally as a person, someone who transgresses the moral law but who is not inherently despotic or evil. The despot, by contrast, lacks the normal faculty of conscience which, according to Auden, makes him (sic) an unsuitable object for satirical attack. The tack Auden takes here is interesting and even in the absence of any illustrative case histories it does throw up for debate the problems attendant on the choice of the potential object of satire. It also accords to an extent with humorologists’ perceptions of the way humour tends to function within totalitarian or highly repressive regimes. Raskin, for instance, notes that there were fewer political jokes generated and retold during Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union than during the period of Khrushchev’s “thaw” (1985: 23). (This matter – the idea of satire as a form of “suppression humour” – will be amplified later during the discussion of satire as a discourse of resistance (see §4.2).) Returning to the critical literature, the target of satirical discourse may also be extended to represent some aspect of human conduct, though that critique of conduct is often more narrowly ascribed to an individual’s behaviour rather than to perceived generalised societal mores. For instance, Clark talks of the sorts of vices, such as pride and pomp, that regularly attract satirists’ attention, although he is keen to emphasise that “the satirist is particularly alert to debunk authors – other writers certainly” (Clark 1991: 35– 37). Thus, a satirical attack on the pride of learned men may be textually realised, so the theory goes, through a lampoon of a particular contemporary writer’s foibles. This may well be an accurate assessment of the general stylistic practice at least of the restricted and narrow group of canonical satirical writers upon which the argument is based. Also, different writers are likely to display different preferences regarding choice of target, such that Pope’s attacks could be said to be orientated more to individuals, while Swift’s to more generalised systems of social conduct (for an illuminating contrast, see Nokes 1987: 99– 121, 179–196). However, the lampooning of other (rival) writers’ styles demands much of noncontemporary readers in terms of the cultural, specialist and encyclopaedic knowledge they need to bring to bear in textual interpretation. And this is a demand which serves not only to sustain the sense of the cellular, enclosed position that satire occupies in canonical literary writing, but to consolidate further the impression that the concepts of Literature and satire are mutually interdependent.

Literary-critical approaches to satirical humour

Moving on to the second issue, in situations where the satirical target is drawn as a transgressor of the moral law, the satirist tends to be cast in terms of occupying a position as moral custodian. The perception of the “satirist as moralist”, where the burden of moral probity shifts by imputation away from the target and onto the producer of the satirical text, runs through much of the critical literature (Pollard 1970: 3). However, as was suggested above in connection with the idea of “genre”, a little probing reveals some underlying tension and disagreement on this issue. Elliott, for instance, sees the satirist as “a true conservative” (Elliott 1971: 213; see also Francus 1994: 52) which tends rather to problematise the “satirist as moralist” interpretation. Others talk of the “radical” nature of satire and the satirist (Dyer 1997; Wood 1994 ), which if true, itself militates against the “conservative” label. Clark talks of the “cynical vision” of the satirist (51), and if this is true, then surely the bearing of the cynic precludes at a sweep that of moralist, conservative or radical. Implicitly rejecting all of these possibilities, Griffin seems to be clearer about the indeterminacy, so to speak, of the satirist’s position: . . . there is little evidence that a satirist is typically motivated by clearly articulated political principles, or even by what might now be called political ideology . . . Indeed, it is likely that satirists’ concerns are more literary than political, that they write satires because they think it will advance their careers by winning audiences or patrons. (Griffin 1994: 149–150)

Although it is true that clearly articulated political principles are extremely difficult to pin down in the ideological “profile” of a satirist, Griffin’s remarks are tacitly relevant only to the satirist of a bygone era, an era of formal patronage and favour. Whether or not they are relevant to the sorts of writing practices that evolved in the modern period remains to be seen. Worcester’s position is at odds even with the set of possibilities outlined so far. Having noted initially (and quite correctly) that an author needs to evolve a criticism of conduct as a preliminary to satire, he takes stock, somewhat less convincingly, of the things that put “a man in a literary frame of mind”, before concluding generously that “[f]eminine readers may find in this observation a possible explanation for the fact that no woman has ever made a mark in satire” (1940: 13). “Feminine readers” of the present book, if able to overcome their seemingly delicate predispositions, will undoubtedly be able to make up their own minds not only about the position of women in satirical writing from Jane Austen onwards, but about changes in the gendered role of the humorist evidenced in the recent rise of the female “comic” (Ross 1998: 102–103). However, it is worth flagging as a follow-on from Worcester’s remarks a more

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serious issue to do with gender representation in satirical writing. It is indeed true that the tradition of canonical satire is overwhelmingly male-dominated, just as it is true that the “butt of satire” is often rival (male) writers. Nevertheless, many satirical targets are female, or to adopt Nussbaum’s more precise formulation, the target of much satire is female as a sex (1984: 115). Nussbaum points to a deeply misogynistic practice in canonical satirical writing where, while males become targets through their individuality, women feature only by dint of their gender. Few if any of the distinctions that are made for men are afforded to women and this results in the female becoming “a metaphor for all that is threatening and offensive to society” (Nussbaum 1984: 19–20). This perspective on neoclassical satire exposes a galloping sexism, where censure is directed towards an entire gender as a means of enforcing sociosexual control and conformity. It also highlights satire’s capacity to develop and then attack targets that transcend individual people. Within the terms of Nussbaum’s study, this unethical aspect of satire serves and sustains its function as an “antifeminist” tradition; within the terms of this study, it provides a foretaste of how satire can function to critique, not just particularised human subjects, but other higher-order discursive practices. The second issue is one which will be developed more fully in the following chapter. The main objective of this section has been to provide a short survey of a number of literary critical works, spanning several decades, that engage directly with the concept of “satire”. Although this survey has tried to be as representative as possible, it cannot of course realistically claim to be comprehensive. Indeed, not only are there many other literary critical studies which tackle satire “head on” as it were, but there are numerous further studies of specific writers which still offer important observations on the process of satirical writing. (For instance, Weinbrot’s (1988) study of Pope and Nokes’ (1985) and Ehrenpreis’ (1962) studies of Swift all contain reflections on the general nature of satirical writing.) The rather limited aim here has been to indicate in general terms where the critics’ main areas of interest lie. The next step, emerging out of this review, will be to probe further these areas of interest so that the theoretical rationale for the present study is thrown into sharper relief. The second half of this chapter will therefore examine those areas of literary critical research which might have some bearing on the development of the proposed model, highlighting the areas of congruence (such as they are) between this study and the literary-critical work. If there is to be a shift in emphasis away from that of the critics, then the justification as to why this is being done needs to be made clear.

Literary-critical approaches to satirical humour

. Problems and issues in literary-critical approaches The main purpose of the previous section was to highlight broad areas of inquiry in critical-approaches to concept of satire, which is why attention focussed primarily on those studies which purported to be general studies of the concept, rather than on the many particularised studies of reputed satirical writers and their work. When both sets of studies are amalgamated, literarycritical output on satire takes on formidable proportions, doubtlessly running into the many millions of words. In view of this, the best that can be hoped for as far as the review of the previous section goes, is that it gives first of all a flavour of the critical coverage from the last hundred years or so and second an indication of the (lack of) agreement there seems to be across the critical work on the core practices and constituents of satirical writing. The purpose of this section, then, is to broach, through successive stages of argumentation, three main aspects of the literary-critical work which have some significance for the theoretical foundations of subsequent chapters of this book. The first stage is to assess the impact that value judgments have for the development of a theory of satire. The second, returning to material aired in the previous section, is to do with the critics’ treatment of the concept of irony. The third stage, arising out of the previous two, is to do with how a “humour community” is drawn (or, frankly, has failed to be drawn) in the critical literature. The various strands of the argument will then be drawn together in the next section which steps back somewhat from particulars by trying to ground in more theoretical terms the disposition of the critics with a view to locating points of divergence between them and the present model. If one practice emerges from the criticism more consistently than perhaps any other it is the tendency to interlace textual analysis with sequences of affective commentary about what constitutes good or bad satire. This, as was noted earlier, is not to deny the usefulness of subjective evaluation in critical interpretation, nor is it to advance a claim for total “objectivity” in critical practice. That argument, within stylistics at least, has been conducted elsewhere and in depth (see, for example, Mackay 1996 and Short et al. 1998). What is principally at issue here is the way the object of study becomes defined and shaped a priori by prescriptive conjecture. For instance, Pollard decrees unequivocally, and early in a book whose intended readership includes beginning students of literature, that “the best satire, that which is surest in tone, is that which is surest in its values” (Pollard 1970: 3). Indeed, throughout most of the critical work surveyed in the last section, opinions on the worth of a particular piece of writing tend to be flagged up in tandem with the reasons put forward

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for the justification of its status as satire. My point is that if the study itself is driven principally by ad hominem judgments, then the object of study will remain always at a remove, obscure and only partially defined. Valorisation as a procedure for selection does little to enhance our understanding of what it is that is being studied. It also provides by default a “safe-haven” from the more thorny problems of delineating the extent or domain of, in this particular case, satirical writing. “Good” satire, so the solecism goes, is Literature in the highest sense. The fact that there may exist in popular culture other plentiful, though less auspicious forms is irrelevant, because by imputation if it isn’t in the canon, then it isn’t really true satire. Again, this is not to claim that value judgments are in some sense illegitimate, but simply to call for a separation of the affective from the analytic as far as is possible in the construction of a theory of satirical discourse. Where the “affective” dimension in critical appraisal collides most markedly with the “analytic” is when the critics’ attention turns to that necessary ingredient of satirical writing, irony. Consider again Frye’s influential essay, touched upon in the previous section, which casts satire as “militant irony” (Frye 1971[1953]). Intriguing as it may be in its economy, this definition certainly merits fuller elaboration; as it stands, it permits inter alia the possibility that satire is the same thing as sarcasm, the latter itself arguably a form of “militant irony”. To be fair, Frye does attempt to reconcile this and other issues in the same article, although without any control over the concept of irony, the solutions on offer tend to be less than lucid: “[i]rony with little satire is the nonheroic residue of tragedy, centring on a theme of puzzled defeat” (1971: 234). Frye is not the only critic whose observations on irony are imprecisely drawn. Worcester begins by defining irony as an “impractical joke” (1940: 77), adding that “When we dislike a writer’s irony we call it sarcasm” (78) before delivering the coup de grâce: “all irony is satirical, though not all satire is ironical” (79). Comparably tortuous syllogistic reasoning abounds in the critical literature, triggered in the main by not paring off adequately the concept of irony from other more contingent judgments about literary value and style. To be blunt, a prescriptive approach to irony is just as stultifying and inhibiting as a prescriptive approach to any aspect of language and discourse. The present study, from the next chapter on, will seek to distance itself from this practice by trying to develop an understanding of the general communicative techniques of irony. In particular, irony will be viewed, not as some kind of crude, one-dimensional communicative strategy, but as a series of interlocking phases which sit in interstices between the discursive positions in satirical writing.

Literary-critical approaches to satirical humour

Without an adequate mechanism for capturing some of its basic discourse strategies, the critic tends to be forced into the position of sole arbitrator over the communicative success or otherwise of a particular satirical text. This means making some difficult decisions about whether or not certain material, say from the eighteenth century, would have “worked” then and whether or not it would “work” now. It also means that irony and other potential humour generating devices have to be assumed to be evident or manifest to, at least, “sensitive” readers of the text. And if it is not to come to a complete standstill, further argumentation can only progress by glossing over yet more highly problematic matters. The first of these lies in the difficulty in defining a humour community for satirical writing. Following Carrell’s typology, a humour community consists in two interrelated types of discourse community: a local discourse community, which is a concrete social entity, definable in demographic terms, characterised by restriction to physical location; and a global discourse community which is defined, not by demographic restriction, but by “likemindedness” and political affiliation, and by its maintenance through widely dispersed discourse practices including publishing and communication technologies (Carrell 1997a: 13–15; and see also Swales’s comparable definition of the “discourse community” (1990: 24)). Audiences are akin to local discourse communities because they are determined in terms of a particular place and time. However, many different audiences who experience the same text come together over time to form a humour community. A humour community then is an abstract, dynamic system which is susceptible to shift and change across time, and which is comprised of multiple, yet similar, audiences. Mapping the concept of the humour community onto satirical writing is interesting though far from straightforward. For a start, the concept of the global discourse community, with its emphasis on communication technology, assumes a relatively modern time reference extending back only as far as the second half on the previous century. Indeed, Carrell’s own application of the concept is primarily to the viewing patterns for American television sitcoms across a period of about forty years. Plotting changes in audience profile for a particular piece of satirical writing across three hundred years is an entirely different matter. What seems reasonable to say is that the original audience constituted a local discourse community insofar as it was, according to the definition, enclosed within the demographic parameters that frame “the place where writers ordinarily work” (Carrell 1997a: 13). Only across the intervening centuries did that humour community, comprised of the many audiences who have since “shared” that text, become progressively more global. Explor-

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Chapter 3

ing just how the humour community between now and then has transformed itself is surely crucial not only to the understanding of the discourse processes at work in a text but to the understanding of the inferencing procedures different audiences use for accessing the “meaning”, as the reception to and uptake of, the text. To be fair, the critics, including those whose work has been criticised earlier, appear to be implicitly aware of the problem of what Carrell calls “the temporality of humour communities”. Worcester, for example, argues that what would have been “delicious to the eighteenth century . . . raises only an occasional smile today” (1940: 51). And he is probably correct in saying that invective dies “when the special occasion that countenanced it passes” or “when the knowledge that supports it is forgotten” (51). Pollard also notes the “dangers in personal satire” insofar as “no matter how much its penetration and point in its own day, in time it may easily lose its point” (1970: 4). But his follow-up to this remark is telling indeed: “even when the industry of scholars has rescued the contemporary relevance of a reference, it may still remain remote” (4). It is indeed generous of scholars to rescue less experienced readers in this way, but the question is begged as to why such industry needs to be undertaken if, as the critics themselves acknowledge, satire is an ephemeral discourse which, in Worcester’s terms, is supported by “knowledge that may be forgotten”. In other words, the cultural frameworks of reference that define the original local discourse community diminish progressively across the successive audiences that comprise the global humour community. Perhaps, and this is a more serious suggestion than it may seem, satirical discourse from bygone eras – that which has long outlived its discoursal “shelf life” – should simply be left to expire gracefully. The problems attendant on the concept of the humour community seem to entrench further the critic in the role as sole legislator over the communicative dynamic of satirical discourse, which in turn throws up more obstacles to critical practice. Rather than try to locate different audience resources within a humour community, the tactic is often to assume that understanding of the totality of the discursive practice of satire lies within the ken of the single critic. That many readers, across historical periods, might not “take up” a satirical reading is an awkward issue, seemingly almost too difficult to countenance. It appears to leave many critics no other course of action than to place these “failing” text processors outside the community of “sensitive readers”. Whereas Pollard refers to the “select and responsive” audience who are capable, along with the critic presumably, of recognising satire’s “peculiar direction of meaning” (1970: 67), Mack draws on the expression “the rhetorically inno-

Literary-critical approaches to satirical humour

cent” (1951: 87) to refer to those who fall outside the inner sanctum of capable readers. That many readers may not have access to the requisite cultural references (then or now) tends to be glossed over with the assertive modality of classic Leavisite criticism – even if the critics themselves are not formal adherents to the particular discursive tenets of Leavis’s 1930s “Scrutiny” movement. For instance, in the course of a commentary on some lines from Pope, Mack remarks that “We know, of course, that the lines were based on Pope’s contemporary, Lord Hervey, whom he passionately disliked . . .” (1951: 92). At a stroke, this formulation exhibits several of the key characteristics of Leavisite discourse (Eaton 1978; Simpson 1991). It draws on inclusive “we” to claim an ersatz interactive common territory, uses the presupposition-carrying modal lexical verb “know” to safeguard potentially controversial embedded information and employs the strong epistemic modal adverbial marker “of course” to attach a condition of assumed “obviousness” to the proposition it governs. Perhaps most importantly, the referent of the “we” is the initiated cognoscenti only, those literally “in the know”; it does not include the rhetorically innocent, of whom the present author must confess in this instance to being one. The practice noted here transfers into other aspects of critical discourse, particularly to judgments about the extent of the canon of satirical writing. The general feeling of unease about where satire stops has already been noted, but this unease takes on a different character when compounded by the sorts of communicative strategies just discussed. When the critic acts as sole mediator for the humour community’s interpretative skills, then there is little need for theoretical deliberation about who exactly gets into the canon and who stays out. The result is frequently the expression of the critic’s own personalised “hall of fame”, often delivered as a blend of regular names along with more novel suggestions for inclusion – the latter serving as the critic’s own personalised imprimatur. Here is an example: . . . the great satirists – Aristophanes, Petronius, the Reynard authors, Chaucer, Rabelais, the creator of Lazirillo, Jonson, Moliere, Swift, Flaubert, Browning, Twain, Musil, Grass, Márquez – have always displayed a remarkable ear for the public’s utterance, its abstruseness and humbug. (Clark 1983: 3)

It may well be that all the authors listed are indeed sensitised to the public’s utterance, but what is at issue here is the unqualified litany of “great” satirical writers, with its mixture of the familiar (Aristophanes, Swift) and the more esoteric (the creator of Lazirillo, Musil). Compare this with Knox’s set of preferences, again with its combination of the “usual suspects” and less predictable candidates:

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Chapter 3

the great names of . . . satirists. Aristophanes in great part. Lucian, Juvenal, Martial, Blessed Thomas More, Cervantes, Rabelais, Butler, La Fontaine, Swift ... (Knox 1971: 56)

In the face of often conflicting litanies like these, one might well spare a thought for beginning students of literature who seek some sort of reassurance about the domain of satirical writing, yet who have no retrievable criteria to go on other than the individual critic’s guarantee of authority. There is also a curious kind of philosophical aporia in proclamations such as these. Without a principled mechanism for assessing or codifying the object of study, the critics have, so to speak, nowhere else to run, other than to assert without warrant the territory covered by their own personalised canon. This is not for a moment to suggest that any of the writers listed are not worth studying in their own terms – to do so would be philistine and anti-intellectual. The difficulty is that it has to be assumed ab initio in critical inquiry that “everyone gets it”; otherwise, an analytic model needs to be constructed which not only facilitates a theory of text processing but which allows for the existence of different subject positions within that framework of inference and interpretation. It is argued throughout this book that satire has a “perlocutionary” status which arises as a pragmatic reflex of the impact of its illocutionary force on a projected humour community. This aspect of satire’s reception-as-discourse is not sufficiently problematised in critical literature, with the result that the critics consistently point you in the direction of where to find satire without getting around to telling you what it actually is. This makes satire seem even more sequestered as a branch of literary study, and the critical attention on it doctrinaire and authoritarian. This book argues that satire is a complexly interdiscursive mode of communication. It is also a mode of communication that, frankly, does not sit easily beside forms of literary discourse such poems, plays or prose, but which nonetheless seems almost to have been totally appropriated into literary study. The critics thus inherited a term which could only marginally be aligned with literary writing, but aligned it had to be, which may explain the consistent attempts to canonise, subsume and genericise this type of discourse. To some extent, satire needs to be wrested away from “Literature” and to be put instead in the context of popular and populist discourses. Some of the ways in which this might be achieved are set out in the following section.

Literary-critical approaches to satirical humour

. Summary and extension This chapter has been principally concerned with assessing the contribution made in literary criticism to the understanding of satirical discourse. In the face of a daunting body of available research, attention was focussed principally on those studies which promised in the first instance a theory, exploration or analysis of “satire” as a general concept. Clearly, then, this has of necessity been a constrained survey, not least because, as was noted above, there are many other critical studies which concentrate on individual, designated satirical writers but which in varying degrees of explicitness offer more broadly conceptualised interpretations of satire. That said, the range of material sourced over the last two sections did tend to suggest that the literary-critical interest has gravitated generally towards text-based (rather than pragmatically based) accounts of meaning and effect. The critical procedure has also been to explore the ties between the author and the work, and to place that work both in its historical context and in the context of other works within a strictly delineated “genre” of literary writing. This emphasis has resulted in a notable absence of any systematic account of the linguistic properties of satire; an account which would ground these properties in a coherent model of humorous discourse. And even in studies where some detailed description of language is promised (e.g., Francus 1994: xii–xvi), the analysis that emerges, if insightful in its own terms, is mostly piecemeal and ad hoc, and certainly situated well outside the broader domains of pragmatics and discourse analysis. Summarised and narrowed down, then, the main issues arising from the foregoing survey are set out as follows: – –

– –

the critics tend to use affective judgments as a way of structuring interpretations of particular satirical works. the critics operate within a set of modalities and discourse strategies which consistently affirm the status of satire in an institutionalised “literary” canon. in spite of its pivotal position in satirical discourse, the concept of irony has not been sufficiently worked through by the critics. whereas the critics have historicised satire as a function of its creation in a particular epoch, they have not theorised satire in terms of the frameworks that govern its reception in a humour community.

To stand in counterpoint to these interpretative procedures, this study attempts to remain within the following parameters:

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Chapter 3

–

–

– –

while not disputing that some satirical texts are more effective than some others, the model proposed here is not built on a priori judgments about the quality of satire. largely avoiding the canon of acknowledged “great” satire, this study approaches satire as a mode of humorous discourse in the contemporary public domain. the notion of irony, and, in particular, the concept of “ironic phases” occupies a central position in the proposed model. without denying the validity of a historicised approach, the model offered here seeks first and foremost to theorise satire in terms of its discoursal properties and in terms of a discourse framework of production and reception.

It is interesting to note that the interpretative practices mapped in the first set of bullet points extend also to work that is bolstered by critical theory; even to work that purports ostensibly to be interested in satire as discourse within a social order or that draws on ideas concerning the social and philosophical organisation of discourse. The work of Michel Foucault, in particular, is often invoked by theorists writing on satire to form the mainstay of a particular line of argument (e.g. Dyer 1997: 11; Payne 1995: 15 and Connery 1995: 167–172), so in that respect it might be worthwhile looking more closely at some of Foucault’s own pronouncements on the area of discourse and social organisation. For a start, Foucault, in a famous paper, explicitly “sets aside” the sociohistorical analysis of the author as an individual and “the systems of valorisation in which he (sic) [i]s included” (1986: 138). He favours an alternative perspective which views the author as a function of discourse, a variable that accompanies certain texts to the exclusion of others. In the light of the reservations expressed across this chapter, it is worth noting how Foucault’s argument unfolds: “literary discourse” was acceptable only if it carried an author’s name; every text of poetry or fiction was obliged to state its author and the date, place and circumstances of its writing. The meaning and value attributed to the text depended on this information. If by accident or design a text was presented anonymously, every effort was made to locate its author. Literary anonymity was of interest only as a puzzle to be solved, as in our day, literary works are totally dominated by the sovereignty of the author. (Foucault 1986: 143)

Foucault goes on to reject as “tiresome repetitions” the questions “Who is the real author” and “What has he revealed of his most profound self in language?”.

Literary-critical approaches to satirical humour

Yet it is these questions, spurned so forcefully by Foucault, which form the very theoretical foundations of a great deal of the literary-critical research covered in this chapter, including, it has to be said, much of the purportedly Foucaultinfluenced critical-theoretical work referenced above. Foucault’s own alternative to this type of critical inquiry is to advocate the pursuit of a typology of discourse which transcends grammatical features in favour of larger categories of discourse organisation (147). To this effect, a set of new questions is posed: “What are the modes of existence of this discourse?” “Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?” “What placements are determined for possible subjects?” “Who can fulfil these diverse placements of the subject?” (Foucault 1986: 148)

As a method of analytic inquiry, it is to Foucault’s set of new questions that the present study addresses itself. Over the next two chapters, questions will be raised about the modes of existence of satirical discourse and its circulation in the public sphere. Later, in Chapters 6 and 7, the concern will be with delineating the potential interpretative positions that various subjects may occupy in a satirical discourse event. Moreover, and to develop the Foucaultian angle a little further, the present study views satire in “transdiscursive” terms. Whereas the rules of its formation may have been established by individual “initiators of discursive practices”, that formation is necessarily detached from its later developments and transformations. That satire may indeed have been “initiated” by the Graeco-Roman writers or by the Augustans is to some extent irrelevant to the present study, simply because these individual “authors” are no longer immanent and have no control over satire’s transhistorical (re)formation as a discursive practice. Foucault’s point is simply that “the initiation of a discursive practice is heterogeneous to its ulterior transformations” (Foucault 1986: 145–146; and see further §4.2 below). At the end of a chapter which has often found fault with the specific critical practices of scholars working on the same type of discourse as that which preoccupies this book, it needs to be made clear that non-formal approaches to humorous discourse (ultimately what characterises much of the critical work) are not devoid of insight or understanding. In fact, Raskin (1985: 1) argues of certain work in humorology that while it may not be founded on a formal theory, it displays “the kind of informal knowledge of, and feel for, humor” which he considers vital to his own study. It would indeed be arrogant and wrongheaded to argue here that because the work covered in this chapter is not built on an adequate theory of discourse, it has no heuristic value. Moreover,

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Chapter 3

some acknowledgement needs to be made of the exceptions to the general critical practices determined in the sets of criteria presented above. For instance, Nussbaum, whose work was mentioned earlier, tends to distance herself from the canon so cherished by many critics by interrogating the gendered social practices exhibited by canonical satirical writing (Nussbaum 1984). Similarly, although his study is firmly grounded in 18th century satire, Nokes recognises satire’s existence outside the canon in his references, inter alia, to the popular satirical movement in 1960s Britain and to the work of Private Eye magazine (Nokes 1987: 30). Hutcheon, although not writing specifically on satire as such, develops a comprehensive critical-theoretical account of irony which has much relevance to the way irony is negotiated in satirical writing (Hutcheon 1994; and see further below, §4.3). And Haslett, writing within a framework of “textual intervention” on the contemporary interpretations of and later revisions to the work of Swift, not only suggests parallels between interpretative debates then and now, but also grounds part of her argument using Habermas’s model of discourse in the public sphere (Haslett 2003; and see further below, §6.2). It is also of course hard to make direct comparisons between critical readings which emanate from introspection and intuition on the one hand and an analytic model which is built from constituent theories in linguistic pragmatics on the other (though that is not to say that intuition has no part to play in the formation of the latter). Furthermore, while the critics tend to focus almost exclusively on material that is in the canon, this book focuses almost exclusively on material that isn’t in the canon, so there is little common ground for reading off one type of interpretation against another. To counteract this in some small measure, part of a later chapter, on satirical method, is reserved for a short analysis, within the terms of the proposed model, of that satirical work sine qua non, Swift’s “Modest Proposal” (see §5.3 below). This is not only to place the analysis, at least implicitly, against the many other critical readings of Swift’s text, but to show that analogues of Swift’s discourse technique may be traced in contemporary satirical discourse. One might also argue that it is unfair to take the critics working in the first half of the twentieth century to task in this way when no fully fledged model of pragmatics or discourse analysis was available for linguists let alone literary critics. This is true to some extent, although the main complaint aired in this chapter is of a perceived failure in those works that confidently project themselves as treatises on satire to problematise the object of study or to align the meaning potential of the text with its potential humour community, a direct corollary of which is that many of the arguments developed feel monochrome and repetitive. This means that the present study is now placing itself under an obligation to do precisely what it accuses the crit-

Literary-critical approaches to satirical humour

ics of failing to do. The next chapter begins the task of assembling an analytic model which stands in direct contrast to the methods reviewed and critiqued across this chapter.

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Chapter 4

Satire as discourse

Sid the Sexist was popular with sexists. Then there were the intellectual types who got the irony. Simon McDonald, editor of British satirical magazine Viz

. Introduction This is now the place to begin to formalise the general discursive characteristics of satire. Developing issues raised across the book so far, this chapter attempts to ground satire in the overall context of comic discourse as presented in Chapter 1, to set it against other patterns and techniques of verbal humour of the sort outlined in Chapter 2, and to try to follow the proposals made in Chapter 3 by problematising satire as a contemporary discursive practice. Whereas the provenance of the model is located in those earlier chapters, its further development will require that a range of theories of discourse and pragmatics be introduced as this chapter progresses. Shortly (§4.2), we shall consider what it means to say that satire manifests a level of organisation which is of a sufficiently higher-order status to constitute a discursive practice. This marks the inception of a “top down” conceptualisation of satire which will be elaborated further over the course of this and the next chapter. Whereas these two chapters are largely given to consideration of the discoursal mechanisms necessary for “doing” satire, later chapters are more concerned with the interpretative dynamic of satire, the procedures text-processors use to “get the point” of a particular piece of satirical discourse. Before moving to the more general typology of satire as discourse, it is necessary to set the present study in the context of an earlier “pilot” version of the model under development, published as Simpson (2000). Whereas some points of overlap remain in the present account, what follows across the remainder of this book is largely a thoroughly overhauled version of that earlier model, and some of the significant theoretical points of departure need to be established here so that the revisions made will stand in sharper relief. The

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Chapter 4

model at “pilot” stage sketches satire’s discoursal properties in the form of four principal components. The four components are: setting, method, uptake and target, drawn together by the rather glib acronym “SMUT”. The first category, setting, is built around Nash’s observation that any “act” of humour requires as its initial, principal reference a genus, which is “a derivation in culture, institutions, attitudes, beliefs” (Nash 1985: 9–10). The notion of setting also follows in part the traditional argument in linguistic pragmatics about how utterance interpretation is shaped by and is heavily dependent on features of interactive context (Austin 1962; Searle 1969). Setting therefore is essentially a nonlinguistic component covering the preparatory preconditions necessary for the construction of satirical discourse. Method, the second of the SMUT model’s four components, marks a linguistic stage proper. This category corresponds, again, to one of Nash’s benchmarks for verbal humour which is that it requires both “a locus in language” and a “characteristic design, presentation, or verbal packaging” (Nash 1985: 9– 10). Following the principles of the GTVH (see §2.4), method consists of two temporally ordered stages with a setup phase (normally) preceding an incongruity phase. The setup, it is argued, lays the groundwork by establishing an accessible, neutral context which is congruent with the experience of the receiver of the text whereas the incongruity phase is built around the broad notion of “script opposition” as presented in Section 2.3 above. The incongruity may itself be activated through a number of overlapping discourse strategies which include: the creation of grotesques or caricatures through exaggeration of features associated with the object of attack; the merging and inversion of scripts and schemata; the transition between positive and negative polarities; the alternation between normal and abnormal scripts; and the opposition of possible and impossible discourse worlds. The third of the SMUT model’s four components is uptake. Like the setting stage, this category is drawn largely from concepts in linguistic pragmatics and is meant, particularly, to echo Austin’s concept of “uptake”. In Austin’s framework, uptake encompasses the understanding of the illocutionary force and content of the utterance by its addressee, and the perlocutionary effects on the addressee brought about by “means of uttering the sentence, such effects being special to the circumstances of the utterance” (Austin 1962: 116). The concept of perlocution in satirical discourse relies heavily on inferencing by the satiree; an inferencing which requires the resolution of the incongruity created in the method stage along with an identification of the component which constitutes the fourth element of the model, the satirical target.

Satire as discourse

The satirical target realises four subtypes, best thought of as interlocking domains or zones rather than discrete units. The first type is episodic, where the target is a particular action or a specific event that has taken place in the public sphere. The second is personal target where the object of attack is, unsurprisingly, a particular individual, though by imputation that individual’s personality is often projected as some stereotypical or archetypical trait of human behaviour. An experiential target is directed towards more stable aspects of the human condition and experience as opposed to specific episodes and events, while textual target spotlights the linguistic code itself as its principal object of attack. In other words, this last form of satire appears to turn discourse inwardly upon itself and to this extent is best considered as meta-discourse. Of course, a single satirical text may realise multiple targets, so discussing a text in terms of its perceived target is largely a question of balance and emphasis; while the principal impetus may, for example, be from one particular subtype, the flexibility of the concept of target is such that this can be expanded outwards to cover the other three. The bulk of the article which contained the SMUT model in its initial formulation was devoted specifically to culturally-situated aspects of verbal humour. To this effect, it focused largely on comic dialogue in the context of an Irish television sitcom, with the emphasis on meta-discourse, that most marginal of forms of satirical target. The SMUT model was presented in outline only, and it was accompanied by a number of disclaimers highlighting its partial and provisional standing as an analytic apparatus. The author also tried to avoid giving the impression that the categories it contains constitute a full set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a definition of verbal and pictorial satire (Simpson 2000: 244). However, in spite of its draft status, there are significant flaws in the SMUT model about which the record needs to be set straight. Most obviously, “SMUT” is simply too broadly sketched to have any substantial explanatory power. Moreover, when placed in the context of the extensive critique conducted over Chapter 2 of this book, further problems emerge in its theoretical construction. The model, as it stands, is over-reliant on the tenets of the GTVH, so much so that the “incongruity” element of satirical method is presented in terms of the concept of “script opposition” only. Specific reservations about both the narrowness of the script opposition approach and the problems attendant on the exclusion of a discourse-based approach were voiced in Sections 2.3 and 2.4 above and so need not be reintroduced here. Similarly, while the concept of a set-up phase is well suited to formulaic jokes in which the incongruity turns on the third stage in delivery (see again, Chapter 2 passim), it is less adaptable to a model of satirical humour where such, almost

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Chapter 4

mathematical, phasing is much less commonly observed. Furthermore, in the light of the research findings that will be presented later, it proves not to be the case, as was argued in Simpson (2000: 246), that the setup lays the groundwork by establishing an “accessible, neutral context”, or even that the set-up is “not funny per se”. Rather, it turns out that the set-up phase, as determined by the criteria in Simpson (2000), has the potential to be very funny indeed, partly because of the particular type of humour “footing” it engenders and partly because of the consequences of its (re)positioning of a speaking source relative to the discourse context. The error in this part of Simpson (2000) may well be a product of what is only a flimsy account of irony in that study, where no real indication was given of where irony would reside in the theoretical model. It will be argued later in this chapter that satire is characterised by multiple forms of irony and that, moreover, ironic phases sit in the spaces between discursive positions in satire. In fact, the general category of “method” is not grounded in any principled way in the earlier study because the specific discourse strategies which expound it are not embraced within an overall element of discourse structure. Uptake, which is arguably the most complex and sophisticated component of satirical discourse, is comparably under-explored, even though – and to draw this brief exercise in self-flagellation to a close – an exhaustive, finalised model was never the remit of Simpson (2000). In the next section and thereafter, the model proposed effectively works from a tabula rasa and no knowledge of the earlier draft will be assumed. While some of the “spirit” of the SMUT enterprise remains, the new model will be built on fresh foundations, as it were, with each of its analytic categories explained and justified entirely in its own terms.

. Satire as a discursive practice In Chapter 2, which offered a general survey of linguistic approaches to verbal humour, attention was focussed on an array of levels of linguistic organisation, extending from the use of lexico-grammatical devices in pun bearing jokes to the potential of discourse genre as an incongruity generating mechanism. In Chapter 3, as a reaction to the critics’ categorisation of satire as a “literary” genre, the idea of satire as a discursive practice in the Foucaultian sense was mooted, and this concept came progressively to the fore as that chapter developed. Implicit to both of those surveys is the assumption that the various categories and units in the organisation of language as discourse are hierarchically ordered. What is needed now is a synthesis of those layers and levels which

Satire as discourse

charts the upward progression from the lexico-grammar to the macro-levels of discourse, thereby enabling the location of satire in the spectrum of discourse organisation to be pinpointed more clearly. One model of language which might appear preeminently suited to this task is the tradition of systemic-functional linguistics inspired by Halliday and his co-researchers, representative samples (only) of which are Halliday (1978, 1994); Benson and Greaves (1985); Threadgold et al. (1986); Martin (1992); Eggins (1994); G. Thompson (1996); Martin et al. (1997). The Hallidayan paradigm has found much favour as a method of inquiry with stylisticians, critical linguists and applied linguists – analysts who are united by their common interest in the functional manifestation of language as a “social semiotic”. In this respect, Halliday’s conceptualisation of the interconnection between system and function in language is crucial. When moulded together, these concepts form a systemic-functional axiom: namely, that the system of language is shaped by the function it serves. Applying the systemic-functional model to linguistic data involves among other things plotting relationships in text organisation between hierarchical scales like rank and delicacy on the one hand, and establishing the connections between the categories (that is, the units, structures and systems) of the lexico-grammar on the other. The lexico-grammar itself is organised into and by three key metafunctions which are expounded at the rank of clause. The experiential metafunction, relayed through the system of transitivity, expresses the meaning of the clause as representation. It registers the way patterns of experience are encoded into text (whether spoken or written) and how a so-called “mental picture of reality” is developed in language (Halliday 1994: 106). The interpersonal metafunction, expressed principally through the systems of mood, modality and polarity, shows how a clause is organised as an interactive event and how the meaning of the clause as exchange is mediated through the dynamic interplay of speech roles. The textual metafunction accommodates the information-building and text-building properties of the clause, organised within the clause by the functional components, following Prague School terminology, of Theme and Rheme, and within and across clause boundaries through the combinations of meaning relations that constitute the system of cohesion. The three metafunctions therefore express three kinds of semantic information and act largely as an organising principle for individual language functions like, for example, Theme (a textual function), Subject (an interpersonal function) and Actor (an experiential function). The metafunctions also mediate between the lexico-grammar and the context of situation, constituting a specific point of entry into the concept of register. The three contextual vari-

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Chapter 4

ables of register are field, tenor and mode and each metafunction informs an associated register variable. Thus, the experiential metafunction determines field of discourse; the interpersonal metafunction tenor of discourse; and the textual metafunction mode of discourse. Register is thus a stable configuration of regularly co-occurring contextual variables. Eggins (1994), whose synthesis of Hallidayan principles is elegant indeed, offers the following schema as a means of capturing the interrelationship between the lexico-grammar, the three metafunctions and the three register variables of field, tenor and mode: mode textual metafunction theme lexicogrammar transitivity

mood, polarity

experiential metafunction field

interpersonal metafunction REGISTER

tenor

Figure 1. From lexico-grammar to register (collated from Eggins 1994: 34, 77 and 79)

Within the systemic-functional paradigm there is a yet higher macro-unit, touched upon briefly in Section 2.3, which is situated above register in the hierarchy of discourse. This unit is genre, the analysis of which marks a shift in the interpretation of context-as-situation towards context-as-culture. The distinction in the systemic-functional literature between register and genre is not always clear-cut; nor indeed is there a single definition of genre which encompasses all scholarly approaches to the topic (and see further below). However, there seems to be a consensus, at least in the functional paradigm, that genre is a form of language which is used to accomplish culturally-determined goals, to “get things done” in Martin’s terms (1985: 250). To be more stringent conceptually, a genre is an abstract realisation of a linguistically-achieved activity type, derived out of configurations of register but transcending register by giving shape to patterns of interaction that are adaptable to many different contexts of situation. Eggins argues, though perhaps less elegantly here, that genre gives “purpose” to interactions of particular types, such that it “lays down the way to go about achieving the aim of [for example] Buying and Selling, which

Satire as discourse

will apply (with some adaptations) regardless of whether we are in a bank, a toy shop or a takeaway food bar” (1994: 32). Similarly, whereas the “university essay” is a genre of discourse in the sense that it realises a culturally-determined linguistic activity, a particular university essay in, say, Sociology instantiates a register because its framework of reference is activated by a specific field of discourse within a given context of situation. Another feature of genre is its capacity for “staging”; that is, its sequential ordering of activity types into recognisable, meaningful stages. The term generic structure potential is used to accommodate the core features of a genre along with the constraints on their sequential ordering. Thus, the university essay as an “expository genre” will (presumably) have as its generic structure potential an opening, a presentation of evidence and a conclusion, among other things, and the realisation of these stages will normally occur in that particular generically constrained order (see Eggins 1994: 34). To raise a more general issue to do with functional approaches to text analysis, it is normally accepted that the interconnection between context and text is such that context predicts text while text construes context (G. Thompson 1996: 9). In other words, a priori assumptions about the nature of the contextual variables of register will predict the use of certain specific linguistic realisations. On the other side of the same coin, the patterns of lexico-grammar read off a particular text construe a certain discourse context. Thus, in Section 2.3, in the commentary around the “Doctor-Lover” example (22), the point was made that the specific linguistic make-up of the text was enough to cue a generic structure potential and, further, to construe a certain kind of discourse context that was essential to the delivery and reception of this joke bearing text. It is important to keep in mind the idea of prediction and construal as functionally interdependent categories in the framework, because they constitute an important discourse resource that enables humour processors to create contexts for interpretation. The question which now needs to be addressed is how the discoursal properties of satire can be accommodated within a functional model of the sort presented here. This is not easy given the notable absence of any serious provision for humorous discourse across the systemic-functional work, and for that matter across the critical discourse analysis work that draws on functional linguistics (see further below). Moreover, the problem is not only about where to locate satire in the terms of a functional framework but about where to locate it in relation to other types of verbal humour in that framework. One possible solution might first of all be to draw on some of the broader representations available in functional linguistics; that is, representations which chart the hi-

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Chapter 4

erarchical progression from the lexico-grammar upwards into the domains of discourse and ideology. The top section of the model offered below attempts to plot this line of progression in a “consists of ” relationship and is in part a synthesis of similar arrangements offered in Martin (1985: 250, 1986: 227) and in Eggins (1994: 113). Restricting discussion to the material above the broken line for the moment, the downward arrows, following the convention used in functional taxonomies, capture realisational relationships between the units, such that the meaning of the higher term is encoded in the expression of the lower: IDEOLOGY GENRE REGISTER LEXICO-GRAMMAR SATIRE

PARODY

PUNS & WORD-PLAY

Figure 2. Satirical discourse within a systemic-functional framework?

Accepting in principle for the moment the broad realisational relationships portrayed in the upper part of Figure 2, the items positioned below the broken line suggest respective locations for the different types of humorous discourse they embody. Towards the right of the figure, puns and word-play “shadow” the lexico-grammar, as it were. The justification for tallying these two was implicit to the survey given in Section 2.2, with its focus on the way ambiguity as a punning mechanism is mediated through the resources offered by the lexicogrammar. Parody, about which more will be said later (see §5.2), functions principally as “a discourse of allusion” to other genres and registers, and is thus positioned on the figure so as to shadow these two units of discourse. Parody also embodies some of the techniques used in satirical writing and is situated, perhaps more tenuously, to act essentially as a bridge between satire and word play. At the higher end of the schema, satire itself is located in a position which shadows ideology. It is argued consistently throughout this study that satire is not a genre of discourse but a discursive practice that does things to and with genres of discourse. As satire therefore has the capacity to subsume and assimilate other discourse genres, it can only be appropriately situated in a position beyond that established for genre. Although neat in general appearance, this arrangement is unfortunately rather superficial and in that respect its heuristic value is limited. For a start,

Satire as discourse

a major theoretical obstacle is created by the positioning of the term “ideology” on the figure. This non-linguistic concept, with its huge jurisdiction, is bolted onto the top end of a schema which clearly up to that point had been accommodating components of linguistic organisation only. Although it is true that all discourse is ultimately framed in ideological practices, it seems a little trivial to register the point in a way which makes ideology appear as a kind of bucket category for containing anything bigger than a genre of discourse. It also means that “ideology” is the only term available for alignment with satire, and while satire is certainly “ideological” in the broadest sense, so is all discourse, so the point is simply anodyne. Another obstacle in the categorisation is that the upwards progression of discourse units is precisely that; its vertical arrangement disallows lateral, horizontal interconnections between the units. This is especially marked in the case of genre where, as noted above, there is some tension in the functional work about the precise range of this concept. Whereas the term encompasses macro-structures such as literary narratives and news broadcasts, it is also extended in the relevant literature to other forms of discourse which, if not exactly more trivial, are either looser in design, as in the case of “expositions”, or more narrow in focus, as in the case of “appointment making” (see Martin 1985: 250). True, all of these forms satisfy the standard definition of genre as a type of culturally-sanctioned linguistically-achieved activity, but some genres seem to have the capacity to expand “sideways” more than others. Lemke, in a study which is critical of the standard definition but which still works within the terms genre and register, remarks that the notion of register (and by imputation genre) is “usefully protean”, but is perhaps best thought of in terms of its “intersemiotic” quality (Lemke 1985: 276). To demonstrate this he develops a curious hypothetical scenario which involves two unrelated couples, one in New York and the other in Toronto, who at the same time argue (in their generally similar kitchens) about whether the husband’s mother should be invited for the long holiday weekend. Given the similarity across both texts of the variables of field, tenor and mode, Lemke contends that these two texts form an “intertextual” pair in that the meanings made through the relationship of the individual texts are above and beyond the meanings made in each of them (1985: 279). He posits the existence of a possible “third” text which expresses a “common thematic system”, such that the three texts together form an “intertextual set”. One of the significant things about this proposal is that even though the two original texts do not refer directly to each other, they are mediated intertextually because they belong, in Lemke’s terms, to the same regular activity pattern. They thereby express a cultural semiotic of social action which allows language

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Chapter 4

use to bridge across widely separated and structurally unrelated occasions of discourse (1985: 284). A further issue raised by Figure 2 and discussion thereof relates more narrowly to the terms of the systemic-functional concept of genre. Whereas the functional definition assigns primacy to genre’s linguistic reflexes, this is by no means a straightforward or even commonly shared point of reference for genre analysis as a whole. Indeed, standing in sometimes direct contrast to the functional “Sydney School” approach is a range of other approaches to genre, including the influential “North American School” (Freedman 1994: 191–193; Freedman & Medway 1994: 9). The emphasis in the latter body of work tends to be placed less on regularities in patterns of discourse and more on the regularities in the human spheres of activity through which genres emerge. Moreover, the North American School sets greater store by the broader social and cultural understanding of genre as language in use, seeing genre as a category of discourse based in typicalities of “rhetorical action” and as acquiring meaning from the social context in which that rhetorical action arises (C. Miller 1994: 37). While this is clearly not the place to conduct a detailed critical review of genre theory in modern discourse studies, it is worth registering here the significance of those alternative models whose methods run counter to the systemic-functional practice of retrieving generic elements through indices of linguistic structure. That said, the discursive practice that is satire, as defined progressively across the reminder of this book, stills resists classification as a genre of discourse irrespective of whatever theoretical model is employed. It is worth noting, for instance, that two of the key criteria commonly used by the North American school are that genres should “share some set of communicative purposes [which] are recognised by the expert members of the parent discourse community” (Swales 1990: 58; my emphasis). The criteria both of recognition and of common communicative purpose tend not to “fit” satire in the way that they do for readily identifiable genres of discourse, and this problematic issue will be explored throughout in Chapter 6. Other issues concerning the ways in which different models of genre might enrich the proposed satirical framework are covered in a more appropriate place, in Section 8.2, where a range of potential extensions to the present study are considered. To try to draw together a number of the strands developed so far in this section, it will be useful to consider a very short satirical text in the light of some of the discourse categories introduced thus far. Later in this chapter, a more detailed analysis of a second piece of satirical writing will be undertaken in order to illustrate and fine tune some subsequent terms and concepts, but this short (complete) text will serve, amongst other things, as a simple illustration

Satire as discourse

of the problems inherent in the formulation suggested by Figure 2. The context to Text B is an episode involving the former heavyweight boxing champion, Mike Tyson, where the boxer, notorious for his behaviour outside and inside the ring, has attacked his scheduled opponent at the pre-fight weigh in. The text “picks up” on the ensuing debate around the decision by the relevant American state’s athletic commission not to grant a licence to Tyson: Text B

(From Private Eye; 1047: February 2002; p. 20)

That printed news media constitutes a genre of discourse both in the functional model and in the other approaches just outlined, is, as it should be, unequivocal. But to what extent can this piece of writing be called “a newspaper article”? It certainly has all the orthographical, grammatical and stylistic trappings of a short news item in a tabloid newspaper. For instance, the grammatical construction of the headline is familiar, expounding a moodless unit stripped of Subject and Finite markers. The opening text elaborates upon the heading within the parameters of a paragraph-long single sentence, again a much favoured technique in print media. Orthographically, both font-type and font-size narrow after the “drawing in” stage, with further stylistic funnelling through the removal of bold face after the opening text. In the absence of a personally attributed by-line, the text concludes by dutifully “acknowledging” as its source the well-known news agency. Other hallmarks of tabloid “typicality” come in the methods used for speech presentation. The headline suggests a “hypothetical” mode of Direct Speech (DS) presentation, in that there is no anterior utterance to which the words in quotation marks are necessarily being faithful. This is a journalistic strategy which, according to Semino et al., enables journalists to summarise in relatively few words potentially long and complex speech acts or events (Semino et al. 1999: 314–315). By contrast, when the space for text opens up, non-hypothetical DS forms appear – one of which employs

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Chapter 4

the post-posed reporting clause commonly found in journalism – and in a proportion which concurs generally with Short et al.’s findings on the distribution of this device in tabloid discourse (Short et al. 1999: 48). To all intents and purposes then, this is an unassuming piece of journalism that might well find its way onto the back pages of any modern English language newspaper. Text B is not, of course, a piece of journalism. Whereas it employs the generic structure potential of canonical newspaper discourse, it does so, as humorologists might say, in a “non-bona-fide” way. It is, for want of a better term, a “spoof ”; a piece of echoic discourse whose formation is framed by the template of another genre of discourse. Furthermore, the genre Text B echoes is mediated through a metatext, which is to say that it neither invokes another actual text implicitly by allusion nor explicitly through overt citation. In any case, whether or not it happens to mirror a particular text in its linguistic makeup is not really the issue, although evidence to prove this one way or another could be gathered, if one felt predisposed to do so, from the various “straight” versions of the story that appeared around the same time. The point at issue is more that the template which inspires text B acts as a mediated intertext, very much like the “third” text referred to in Lemke’s model above. Whereas this third text may arise out of “real discourses”, its essence is more abstract, working as an intersemiotic thematic system to bridge unrelated discourses but without referring directly to any particular one. Bex makes a similar point in connection with parodic texts when he says that “they do not take any particular anterior text as their model. Rather, they take characteristic ways of ‘saying’ that are associated with particular social functions” (Bex 1996: 237). Simple in design as this “spoof ” text is, it nonetheless reinforces an earlier comment about the capacity for satirical writing to assimilate the templates of other genres and registers of language. By implication, that means that satire is of a different order of discourse than either genre or register, although many other forms of discourse would present themselves as exceptions as well. Bakhtin, whose ideas seem to be relevant to most discourse phenomena in some way or other, reserves a number of terms for various sorts of “multi-voiced” discourse. The concept of “polyphony”, now ubiquitous in stylistics and critical linguistics, is an example, although a more productive alignment with satirical discourse is allowed by his distinction between primary and secondary speech genres (Bakhtin 1986). According to Bakhtin, secondary (or complex) speech genres arise in the artistic, scientific, sociopolitical discourses of “more complex and comparatively highly developed and organised cultural communication”. He adds that during the process of their formation, secondary speech genres “absorb and digest various primary (sim-

Satire as discourse

ple) genres that have taken form in unmediated speech communion” (Bakhtin 1986: 62). From this perspective, there may indeed be a case for arguing that satire is in essence a secondary genre, something which, in the terms of Figure 2, is situated at the position in the hierarchy allocated to “genre” but for which allowance is made for its capacity to spread horizontally to consume other neighbouring primary speech genres. The problem with Bakhtin’s distinction, however, is that it is informed principally by literary discourse, with novels and plays singled out as particularly good exemplars of secondary speech genres. In many respects, this takes us right back to the problems encountered in the previous chapter, where it was argued that the direct parallel the critics tend to draw between satire and “Literature” is not theoretically justifiable. It is true that “Literature”, like satire, has the capacity to assimilate other registers to produce discourse that is composite or “multi-voiced”, but so for that matter do other linguistic activities such as journalism and advertising discourse, and that certainly doesn’t make per se any of these language practices satirical. In the course of a study which informs usefully the present discussion, Steen reserves the term “class of discourse” to refer to forms of discourse such as literature, advertising and academic writing. Central to his prototypical categorisation framework is the assumption that these superordinate forms enter into a hierarchically-ordered relationship with other classes of discourse such as genres and subgenres. Genres are basic level concepts that have the richest representation for subjects insofar as they are most readily distinguished from competing concepts at the same level (Steen 1999: 114). By contrast, the superordinate and subordinate classes are conceptually more difficult to distinguish, and are rather more abstract or “fuzzy” in status. Translated to literary discourse, for example, Steen’s typology postulates that basic level genres for literature are the novel, the play or the poem, while subgenres for, say, the novel, include the romance, the Western and the detective story. Similar prototypical categorisation frameworks can developed for many other classes of discourse such as advertising, academic writing, news media and so on. What is of particular significance to the present, unfolding model is that satire seems neither to approximate a class of discourse in the terms so-defined nor to be readily located in the same broad typology of discourse. In fact, it is a defining characteristic of satire that it be able to assimilate various classes of discourse, basic level genres and subgenres especially, and that, moreover, it be able to set these embedded genres in opposition with one another. A useful way of conceptualising satire’s discursive position is to see it as situated in the spaces between classes of discourse, stalking, as it were, the margins of discourse. As the re-

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Chapter 4

mainder of this and following chapter seek to prove, part of the oppositional dynamic of satire comes from this capacity to incorporate and then subvert genres from different classes of discourse. The precise nature of this oppositional dynamic will be fully addressed shortly, but it is worth signalling informally how it might be said to function in Text B. What makes Text B satiric, or rather, invites a potentially satirical reading, is the interplay between the text as an intersemiotic “spoof ”, on the one hand, and the particular kind of discursive twist that occurs late on in the text on the other. As noted earlier, there is much of Text B that makes it seem a perfectly straightforward echo of the discourse genre of printed news media. Yet the substance of the final paragraph realises a contra-expectation, a kind of stark reversal in discourse orientation, which cuts right across the fabric of the text that precedes it. It is this text-internal discursive twist, built here on what psychologists refer to as “garden-path reasoning”, which destabilises everything preceding it in order to establish a satirical target. The “story” is not, after all, an attack on Tyson’s behaviour as anticipated throughout the text, but a critique of the avarice and restricted practices of the media moguls and their cronies who control television “pay per view” rights for prestigious sporting occasions. The destabilisation of the text in this way is crucial because it serves to cue what might be termed a satirical “footing” (see further below). Of course, if Text B were to appear in an explicitly designated satirical magazine (which it does in this case), then readers receive a prior cue to look for, in Searle’s (1975: 320) term, the “non-serious” status of the text as news media. Without that cue, however, the satiric reading is less immanent, simply because text processing involves the retrospective conferral of the status of “spoof ” only after the encounter with the twist late in the text – an encounter that engenders a change in footing. These informal observations on Text B will find their way into a more systematic account of the mechanisms of satire as the model develops progressively throughout the remainder of the book. The bulk of this section thus far has been concerned with assessing satire’s possible categorisation as a genre of discourse principally within a systemicfunctional framework. It was argued that in spite of a seemingly straightforward initial alignment to the functional hierarchy, certain theoretical loopholes barred satire from occupying the slot occupied by other genres of discourse. There is however much in the functional model that explains the resources of satirical discourse, and the short illustration offered by Text B has hopefully begun to highlight the methods by which satire draws in its “raw materials” from other units of discourse. The problems encountered in matching it up to the systemic model, though, explain why satire, as has been advocated consis-

Satire as discourse

tently in this study, is best conceptualised as a discursive practice in the Foucaultian sense. This is to categorise satire as a discourse of a “higher-order” than either genre or register, which, if it had to be mapped onto Figure 2, would be placed, somewhat unsatisfactorily, between genre and ideology. Such placement, although conflating two very distinct traditions of research in discourse analysis, would at least capture its essence as a unit of discourse whose elements of structure are expounded not only by genres and registers, but also by other non-diatypic linguistic varieties such as social and regional dialects – an area of inquiry, by the way, conspicuously absent in much systemic-functional work. Figure 2 would not however capture satire’s lateral or horizontal organisation, where it exhibits a capacity to consume, in the almost predatory way noted above, other units of discourse that are themselves situated on the same level on the hierarchy. This issue, which centres on satire’s capacity for lateral “interdiscursivity”, will be one of the main issues raised later in this chapter during the analysis and discussion of satirical Text C. The move to approach satire as a discursive practice along Foucaultian lines has of course been anticipated in earlier parts of this book, with the principal terms of reference for this interpretation emerging towards the end of the last chapter in response to the work of literary critics. It was especially important there to recast satire in such a way as to dissociate it from a number of critical assumptions, the most problematic of which being that satire is a literary genre similar in status to, say, Romantic poetry or the Gothic novel. This chapter has largely been preoccupied with delineating further satire’s discoursal properties, primarily through reference to existing theoretical frameworks in linguistics and discourse analysis. One of the most important features of this categorisation is that it seeks to get around the rather crude formulation of “satire as ideology”, a formulation which is itself a consequence of treating ideology, as Figure 2 (erroneously) does, as a kind of final staging post in a hierarchy of discourse. Significantly, Foucault himself usefully dissociates ideology from the concept of a discursive practice when he argues that the notion of ideology is difficult to make use of because it always stands in virtual opposition to something else. In his view, ideology tends to refer to “something of the order of a subject” and it stands in “a secondary position relative to something which functions as its infrastructure, as its . . . determinant” (Foucault 1984: 60). Although not within the remit of the present discussion, this last observation makes for an interesting cross-reference to the functional model, with the latter’s problematic split between the linguistic and the non-linguistic on the one hand and its projection of ideology as the topmost unit in a hierarchy of discourse on the other.

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Chapter 4

Other implications follow from invoking the concept of a discursive practice as a way of capturing the communicative dynamic of satire. With its existence being interwoven with relationships of knowledge and power, the concept has acquired a certain currency in critical discourse analysis (see, for example, van Leeuwen 1996; Candlin 2000; Fairclough 1989, 1995, 1996, and especially 1992; and see also Stockwell 2001: 517 for a helpful overview of terms). From the critical discourse analytic (CDA) perspective, patterns of discourse are seen not as symbolising neutrally a “natural” order of things, but rather as a naturalised order locatable in prevailing relations of power and predicated upon the particular power relations that are immanent in each discourse event. Crucially, and in view of the reservations aired in the previous chapter, the object of analysis is not so much individual human subjects engaged in discourse but rather, the relations between the subject positions that are taken up in discourse. In the terms of Foucault’s sets of questions (see above, §3.4), the emphasis is on what placements can be determined for possible subjects and who can fulfil these diverse placements of the subject. In a model that privileges subject positions over individual subjects, the boundaries between subject positions naturally come more and more to the fore. Fairclough argues that boundaries can become so naturalised as to be “lived as complementary”, but under different social circumstances, the same boundaries can become “a focus of contestation and struggle, and the subject positions and the discursive practices associated with them might be experienced as contradictory” (Fairclough 1992: 69). Fairclough also points out that whereas a discursive practice is a particular form of and sometimes wholly constitutive of a social practice, it is also manifested in linguistic form, in the form of texts (1992: 71). At the upper end of the spectrum of discourse organisation, discursive practices are themselves organised into an overall collectivity of discourse practices produced by a society or one of its institutions. To refer to this larger configuration of discursive practices, Fairclough, again following Foucault, reserves the term order of discourse (Fairclough 1996: 71). Now, while concepts such as “order of discourse”, “subject position” and other terms covering the macro-levels of discourse organisation feature prominently in frameworks of critical discourse analysis, there is no study which I know of which attempts, within those frameworks, to identify humour, let alone satirical humour, as a form of social praxis. In view of satire’s aggressive function, this omission is all the more striking, especially when many of the individual studies in CDA seek to uncover and challenge the repressive discourse practices of powerful interested groups, or to challenge the hegemonic authority of political institutions and organisations. Without any allowance for

Satire as discourse

the social glue that humorous discourse offers, there emerges a sense in CDA that there is no “way out” other than simply to recognise and understand that discursive practices are naturalised and not of a natural order. It may be that for the analysts themselves humour is not sufficiently elevated in consciousness to be perceived as manifest in discursive practices; it is certainly not seen as important enough to function as a tool of resistance to certain orders of discourse, or as a cohesive mechanism for galvanising disenfranchised groups. Yet the literature in humorology (as distinct from CDA) abounds in references to humour’s function as a mode of resistance, or at least as a “coping mechanism” in difficult social circumstances. Hillenbrand’s study of underground humour in Nazi Germany gathers and annotates collections of jokes from various periods during the rise and fall of Hitler’s regime (Hillenbrand 1995). While it is not suggested that a few jokes would have brought down the Third Reich or halted the spread of Fascism across Europe in the 1930s, the jokes at least serve to sustain the cohesion of the groups of people who produce and ratify these humorous texts. On a similar theme, Henman (2001) looks at the use of humour among repatriated American prisoners of war from the conflict in Vietnam, arguing that, for the veterans, humour acts as a well-defined system of social support, playing an important communicative role in the strengthening of resilience and resolve as coping mechanisms (Henman 2001: 83; and see further the comments on Raskin 1985 in §3.2 above). The simple truth is that there seems to be no recognition anywhere in the more theoretical critical discourse analysis literature of the capacity of ordinary (non-academic) people to use humour to resist ideologically insidious discourse, nor is there any recognition of the social function of humour as a social-solidary mechanism that helps to sustain communities in the face of repression by dominant institutions and individuals. This makes the model that follows shortly, which attempts to blend many of the categories and principles elaborated over this chapter with a conceptualisation of humorous discourse, dangerously uncharted territory. The schema below, Figure 3, offers a conceptual model for the organisation of satirical discourse. Many of the concepts and terms outlined above are implicit in this schema’s design, as are the observations made about satire that arose out of the analysis of Text B. The figure also represents a more structured way of firming up some of the more informal commentary presented across the book thus far. Figure 3 displays essentially a group of subject positions framed within orders of discourse, the totality of which constitutes the discursive practice of satire. It is crucial that the peculiarly triadic structure here is not interpreted, in spite of the inclusion of terms like “satirist”, as a grouping of individuated

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Chapter 4

C: SATIRISED (TARGET)

A: SATIRIST

Orders of discourse in social, cultural and political organisation

B: SATIREE (ADDRESSEE)

Figure 3. Triadic structure of satire as a discursive practice

authors, texts and “messages”. On the contrary, it represents a more abstract set of “subject placements” in the Foucaultian sense touched upon above; placements which are framed within boundaries that are malleable and unstable, and which are connected to one another by bonds that are in conflict and open to interrogation in satirical discourse. The impetus that prompts satire is a tension between positions A and C, such that any particular satirical discourse event is activated by disapprobation from A about a perceived facet of the disposition of C. Importantly, this need not necessarily translate into disapproval of some aspect of a particular human subject’s behaviour, although that is undeniably common in satire. It is possible that the perceived flaw extends to other aspects of discourse, even, as we shall see shortly, to another discursive practice, which means that position C, the target of satire, cannot be considered co-terminous with an individual person. Following Nash’s observation (cited above in §4.1), the genus for satire, as for humour production generally, is a derivation in culture, institutions, attitudes and beliefs. This very general notion can be rendered down here to embrace the discourse resources shared by a humour community, whether that community be local or global (see above, §3.3), and these resources include the concepts of register and genre, along with varieties of idiolect and dialect, which constitute the linguistic raw material for the production of a satirical text. In fact, as the analyses of individual satirical texts in Chapter 5 will testify, the resources for satire extend even further down the hierarchy of levels of language organisation expressed in Figure 2 above, in that puns and verbal play, encoded at the level of lexico-grammar, play a major part in sustaining satirical discourse.

Satire as discourse

It is important also to underscore the idea that the bonds between the subject positions in satirical discourse can be renegotiated and redefined. The relationship is such that “successful” satire, in keeping with the general principle of humour delivery and reception, tends to “shorten” the connection between positions A and B, thereby bringing these discursive positions closer together. This seems uncontroversial given that the social solidary consequence of a successful humour event is that it consolidates the bond between speaker and addressee, or writer and reader. (And see in this regard Mulkay 1988: 205–209 for an account of the relationship between “political grouping” and responses to humour.) A successful satirical discourse event, given its aggressive function, also distances both parties from the target of humour, thereby lengthening the bonds between position C and the other two positions. However, the interactive consequences of unsuccessful or “failed” satire are more problematic, and there is a case to made, the evidence for which will be offered later in Chapter 6, for suggesting that in these circumstances the bond between positions A and B actually lengthens while that connecting positions B and C simultaneously shortens. Another feature of the possible configurations of the placements on the triad, and something that was noted in passing earlier, concerns what Goffman calls footing. Goffman argues that significant shifts in the alignment of speakers and hearers can occur over the course of an interaction and that these shifts – or changes in footing – are language linked because they are activated by styleshift or by code-switching (1979: 4–5). Satirical discourse is saturated with style shifts of various sorts and changes in footing are rife, although consideration of the specific impact of this on position B is best held over to later discussion of the inferencing strategies used in satirical uptake (see Chapter 6). The part of Goffman’s general thesis about footing which is more germane here is his concept of “ratified” and “non-ratified” participation in discourse. Within an overall “participation framework”, there is, according to Goffman, a normative expectation on the part of the speaker that certain other parties occupy a ratified social slot in the talk. Other parties, who do not have this “official status” as the legitimated recipients of the talk, but who might nonetheless follow the talk closely, are non-ratified (Goffman 1979: 7–9). Goffman concludes that “a ratified participant may not be listening, and someone listening may not be a ratified participant” (8). Taking Figure 3 as a participation framework, and allowing Position A to function as the “speaker”, then position B manifestly and uncontentiously occupies the ratified social slot and position C (normally) the non-ratified. Furthermore, position C is arguably an ex-colluded party in Goffman’s sense

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Chapter 4

(1979: 9–10) in that it tends to be bypassed by the verbal strategies concealed in the collusive “crossplay” between positions A and B. However, it is axiomatic to Goffman’s thesis that these participation frameworks are subject to transformation. For example, the non-ratified participant may “listen in” or “eavesdrop” on the talk, while the ratified participant, the “official recipient” of the discourse, may simply not be listening. The implication of such changes in framework for the communicative participants in satire is telling. For one thing, the ratified interlocutor (position B) may not be listening, such that the satirical intent fails and the message “falls on deaf ears”, as it were. For another, there are cases where the satirical target (position C) “listens in” on the satire, and when the process of auditing is done in this way by a non-ratified participant the consequences can be far-reaching (see further Chapter 7). There are even, as both Chapters 6 and 7 will later reveal, further, non-canonical scenarios for satirical placement where both positions B and C coalesce, or even where positions A and C merge. It has been proposed, through Figure 3 and its related commentary, that satire is in essence a triadic discursive event, with three principal subject positions, two of which are ratified within the discursive context. What now needs to be firmed up is the concept of the satirical “text” itself, its make-up in discourse terms and its method of transmission in a discourse event. To this effect, this section will conclude by identifying and defining two keys elements in the design of a satirical text at its most generalised level of discourse organisation. This theme will be picked up again later in the chapter during the analysis of satirical Text C, where these two exponents will be distinguished in the text along with a range of other aspects of discourse which will have been brought to the fore in the next section. The construction of satirical text involves the combination of and opposition between two elements: a prime and a dialectic. These elements are best thought of as two opposing discourse slots in the organisation of the text, slots which may be “expounded” by a set of circumscribed discourse techniques. It was suggested informally during the analysis of Text B above that a potentially satirical reading is invited by the interplay between two features in that particular text’s overall profile: its intersemiotic quality as an echo of the discourse genre of printed news media, and the discursive twist or contra-expectation it exhibits within its text-internal organisation. The first of these features is what supports the prime; the second the dialectic. To make clear the provenance of both terms, the concept of the prime is adapted from Emmott (1997). Although writing specifically on narrative comprehension and not on humorous discourse, Emmott’s term nonetheless usefully accounts for the process by

Satire as discourse

which one particular contextual frame becomes the main focus of attention for the reader. The prime, cast in cognitive terms as essentially a type of textual monitoring, is therefore the context which is “currently the reader’s main context” (Emmott 1997: 123–124). The prime instantiated in a specifically satirical text functions by echoing some sort of “other” discourse event, whether that be another text, genre, dialect or register, or even another discursive practice. By contrast, the dialectic is a text-internal (as opposed to intertextual) element which is normally positioned after the prime, although its appearance may sometimes be isochronous. The term dialectic is used in the Popperian sense to refer to an antithesis, or an opposing idea or movement, which stands in contrast to something else. Popper notes in passing the Greek etymology of the term (H7 ∆iαλ7κτ7, meaning “the argumentative usage of language”) and also assesses the concept’s treatment and transformation by philosophers before him such as Kant, Hegel and Marx (Popper 1963). However, it is his emphasis on the oppositional nature of the dialectic within a “dialectic triad” which makes it particularly serviceable here. Popper argues that there is first “some idea or theory or movement which may be called a ‘thesis”’ which then produces an opposing idea or movement, realised through opposition, negation or contradiction, called an antithesis (Popper 1963: 313–314). He further contends that because we determine not to accept the contradiction between thesis and antithesis, we seek to resolve the conflict by reaching a synthesis, which marks the third stage of the dialectic triad (317). Admittedly general as Popper’s conceptualisation of “dialectic” is – he himself says it would perhaps be best not to use the term at all! – the idea that there exists a struggle between an idea and its antithesis is a particularly useful way of capturing the relationship between the notions of prime and dialectic as presented here. Moreover, Popper argues that this struggle creates a “force”, the consequences of which are that a resolution is reached, a resolution that embodies some new idea which cannot be reduced to an earlier stage in argumentation. In his own words: the only ‘force’ which propels the dialectic development is, therefore, our determination not to accept, or to put up with, the contradiction between the thesis and the antithesis. It is not a mysterious force inside these two ideas, not a mysterious tension between them, which promotes development – it is purely our decision, our resolution not to admit contradictions, which induces us to look out for a new point of view. (Popper 1963: 317, my emphasis)

This idea of dialectic development has many analogues with the way satirical processing works. Thinking here of the predisposition embodied by Position B on Figure 3, it is to some extent the text processor’s decision “not to put up

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Chapter 4

with” a text-internal contradiction – the dialectic in other words – that activates a search for what Popper calls “a new point of view”. Further discussion of this important notion of synthesis as a principal of satirical “uptake” will be resumed later, in Chapter 6, when attention shifts to the inferencing strategies and processing mechanisms used by the satiree in a satirical discourse event. For now, the task will be to assimilate into the concepts of dialectic and prime some conceptualisation of an important pragmatic device which was heavily foreshadowed in the last chapter. That device is irony, an essential ingredient of satirical discourse, whose linguistic properties form the remit of the next section.

. Satire as irony within irony Irony is the space between what is meant and what is asserted, so a thumbnail definition might run. Pithy as such a definition is, it will not advance in any systematic way our understanding of how irony plays a central role in the creation and uptake of satirical discourse. Yet, locating a fully-fledged model of irony in the scholarly literature is far from straightforward. There has simply been so much written on irony – Hutcheon (1994: 1) counts one thousand four hundred and forty five entries on “irony” in the MLA Bibliography alone – that finding a suitable or even obvious starting point is challenging. One approach, such as that taken by Hutcheon herself, is to treat irony in a relatively global sense, focussing on its social and political ramifications rather than on its precise mechanics of delivery and reception. At the other end of the spectrum, irony may be approached within a framework of reference that arises specifically out of developments in discourse analysis and linguistic pragmatics. Given that the categories of the present model are informed precisely by such models of discourse, it is to the narrower aspect of irony that attention will be focussed in the first instance. After that, a more “global” perspective will be advanced as this section progresses (and see further, §5.2). Sperber and Wilson (1981) have proposed a unified linguistic pragmatic model which, they suggest, is designed to cover all types of irony. They challenge traditional semantic accounts which view irony as “figurative meaning” because those accounts fail to provide a mechanism for deriving the figurative meaning of a sentence or even to explain why figurative utterances exist at all. They also argue that pragmatic approaches, such as that of Grice (1975), are similarly “defective” because they work solely from the assumption that “what a speaker of an ironical utterance wants to get across is the opposite of what

Satire as discourse

he (sic) has literally said” (1981: 296). Sperber and Wilson then move on to develop their own model, first by formulating a list of (hypothetical) ironical utterances exchanged between two people caught in a downpour. Here are two examples from that list: (23) What lovely weather. (24) It seems to be raining.

(from Sperber & Wilson 1981: 300)

They argue, quite legitimately in my view, that both utterances are ironic in some sense. In the circumstances described, it is inconceivable that the speaker of example (23) meant to get across the literal meaning of the utterance; rather, it is the case that the speaker believes the opposite of what is asserted. It is clear, they argue, that the choice between literal and ironic interpretation must be based on information like contextual knowledge and other background assumptions that are external to the utterance. The second example, however, poses a problem for the traditional belief in semantics and pragmatics that irony is saying the opposite of what you believe. The content of (24) is certainly not the opposite of what is meant, it is just less than what the speaker thinks. Whereas (23) was odd because the speaker did not believe in what they were saying, (24) is odd because its truth is so patently obvious. Sperber and Wilson move away from these sorts of examples for a short period while they build a model of irony as “echoic mention”, a model built on the logical distinction between “use” and “mention”. Thus, in an “ironic” exchange like: (25) A: I’m tired. B: You’re tired! And what do you think I am? (after Sperber & Wilson 1981: 306)

the proposition used in the first part of the exchange is explicitly mentioned in the response in the second. The “mention” version indicates that the previous utterance has been heard and understood, and expresses the hearer’s immediate reaction to it. That means, amongst other things, that the illocutionary status of the “mentioned” proposition is not the same as when the proposition is used, so to speak, in a “bona-fide” way. The use-mention distinction, if somewhat arcanely put, is such that “use of an expression involves reference to what the expression refers to; mention of an expression involves reference to the expression itself ” (Sperber & Wilson 1981: 303). The purpose behind mention is that the speaker may echo the remark to suggest that “he finds it untrue, inappropriate or irrelevant” (307). It is interesting that Sperber and

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Chapter 4

Wilson keep returning to these three conditions of truth, appropriateness and relevance (e.g., 308) suggesting that there are universally constrained sets of interpretive procedures for irony processing, a point that will be expanded much more fully in Chapter 6. There is much that Sperber and Wilson say about the use-mention distinction that is insightful for a model of satire. They emphasise consistently that irony as echoic mention crucially involves, in the relationship of the speaker to the mentioned proposition, the evocation of an “attitude” or “image”. They even bring parody into their schema arguing that both irony and parody are types of echoic mention, with irony involving the mention of propositions, parody the mention of linguistic expressions (311). There is however one significant theoretical obstacle to the wholesale deployment of their model in this study of satirical irony. This is to do with their insistence that all ironic language usage is reducible to the echoic formula, such that all three of the examples (23)–(25) express fundamentally the same type of irony. It is my contention, for reasons that follow here and across subsequent chapters, that the types of irony embodied by examples (23)–(24) and (25) are simply not of the same order. For a start, the method by which Sperber and Wilson bring the earlier “weather” examples back into their echoic definition is unconvincing. Apart from some illustrations taken from literary texts, these and other “ordinary language” examples in their paper are all invented. While acceptable as a way of making a general point, this practice makes it possible to contrive all sorts of hypothetical interactive contexts to narrow or expand the meaning potential of the examples on display. It is worth looking at how Sperber and Wilson set up a seemingly ever more narrow context for (23), effectively reining it into their “echoic mention” definition: Suppose that, as we were deciding to set off on our walk, someone told us that the weather was going to be lovely. It is quite clear that ([23]) is an ironical echo of this remark . . . (1981: 300)

Or consider their hypothetical context for utterance (24): Suppose someone had originally made this remark just as the rain was starting. By repeating it in the middle of a downpour, the speaker of ([24]) shows how laughable it was, in retrospect, to be in any doubt about whether it was really raining. (1981: 300)

To be blunt, nothing was said about these contextual strictures when the examples were first mooted, yet without them, the general sense of irony in (23) and (24) was still intact. That suggests that the narrowed context is required to

Satire as discourse

give them a specially echoic quality. The question is begged: would these examples really be echoic if Sperber and Wilson hadn’t later appended these highly speculative hypothetical contexts? My sense here is that this is theoretically akin to trying to force a square peg into a round hole, and that there are, in fact, qualitatively distinct forms of irony. True, Sperber and Wilson recognise that two possible types of irony have been proposed in the relevant scholarship, “standard” irony and “echoic” irony, but they reject the distinction in favour of a single “echoic mention” formula. They also allow that there is a continuum within the echoic formula, with poles of “pure use” and “pure mention” and a host of more indeterminate cases in between. However, the question remains as to why, when no anterior discourse is available, a prior utterance has to be invented to make the sentence under scrutiny echoic. Moreover, even when no prior utterance can be constructed, Sperber and Wilson insist that there is still some “vague echoing” – for example, a prior expectation of good weather, rather than an utterance about it, would be enough to make (23) echoic of the earlier “high hopes” the speaker would have entertained. The problem with this is that if infinite extensions to contextual conditions are allowed in this way, then just about everything in discourse can be cast as echoic of some other utterance. This seriously weakens the explanatory power of a model which is designed for a very particular type of discourse processing. Now to assimilate, focus and direct the theoretical implications of the foregoing discussion. It is a central thesis of this book that there exist in satirical discourse up to three principal ironic phases, of which two are captured in the distinction just drawn between “echoic” and, serving as an interim term, “standard” irony. The first phase occurs in, and in effect activates, the prime element of a satirical text. The irony which this phase embodies is echoic in the sense proposed by Sperber and Wilson and indeed by subsequent commentators on this aspect of their work (see §5.2 below). It is this echoic dimension in textual formation that imbues satirical discourse with its “spoof ” or parodic quality, that quality of intertextual mediation which was highlighted during the earlier analysis of Text B. Indeed, this aspect of ironic phasing dovetails with Sperber and Wilson’s own comments, noted above, on the relationship between parody and echoic utterances. What is crucial to the operation of the ironic phase of the satirical prime, however, is that it involves a repositioning or realignment in discourse of the utterer or speaking source, such that there is some masking of the genuine originator of the text from the ersatz discursive position adopted by the text. As a stylistic parallel, the use of Free Indirect Discourse in narrative fiction is often classified in terms of this brand of irony. Marnette (2001)

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Chapter 4

talks, for instance, of the echoic dimension involved in FID, observing that the idea of ironic (re)positioning is not sufficiently foregrounded in the Sperber and Wilson model. She concludes that “what makes an utterance ironic is not that it mentions an absurd point of view but, rather, that it subtly blends that point of view within the utterance of the speaker (i.e., the locutor) without him being equated with its origin (i.e., its enunciator)” (Marnette 2001: 246). Goffman, whose ideas about footing have already featured in this chapter, also emphasises the significance of positioning in discourse. He develops the term “animator” to refer to a participant who activates someone else’s discourse, a participant who basically conveys words that are not his/her own (Goffman 1979: 21). Whereas the presence of a prime element and its associated echoic phase would serve to identify many types of discourse as parodic or as containing a parodic element (and see later, §5.2), the delineation of satire as a discursive practice requires rather more elaboration in terms of its modelling within a pragmatics of irony. Satire, for example, exhibits a second ironic phase, a phase that would equate in very broad terms with the “standard irony” displayed by examples (23) and (24) above. This is the type of irony that engenders a discursive “twist”, whether that be through implicature – a deliberate departure from Grice’s maxims – or through some broader incongruity-generating strategy. It is also, as has been noted before, the type of ironic transformation in discourse that humorologists in the SSTH-GTVH tradition have referred to as script opposition. And as this is the form of irony that brings about the “collision of ideas” in the Popperian sense, it is proposed that such irony occurs in, and in effect activates, the dialectic element of a satirical text. What is beginning to emerge now is an impression of satirical discourse as comprising (at least) two qualitatively different ironic phases; phases which act in tandem with one another but which nonetheless carry out very different discourse functions. Whereas the irony-in-prime variant engenders the “spoof ” element in satire, the irony-in-dialectic variant engenders, as it were, the “twist in the spoof ” element. The techniques by which the second mode delivers the twist are many and varied, and a full account of the specific discourse devices which sustain it will unfold in the next chapter. However, the term first mooted to capture this second mode, “standard irony”, is of itself rather weak, in that it does little to register the transformative potential of this particular device in satire. Replacing it with the term “incongruity-generating irony” might add, if clumsily, greater theoretical exactitude, but as incongruity could be said to be induced in certain respects by the echoic phase as well, then this taxonomy is a little misleading. The key issue is that the essence of the distinction

Satire as discourse

between the two ironic phases, even though both may generate incongruity, lies in the requirement that different types of text processing strategies be brought to bear for each phase. The notion that variable knowledge resources are used in text comprehension is not controversial. For example, Emmott’s study of the resources used in narrative comprehension, touched on above, identifies four principal types of mental representation used by readers: general knowledge, knowledge of typical text structures, text-specific knowledge of a particular fictional world and knowledge of the style of a particular text (Emmott 1997: passim, 2003: 145–146; see also Stockwell 2000: 146, 2002: 156– 163). While Emmott’s main focus is on text-specific mental representations, and on narratives which do not necessarily display any humorous element, her distinction between types of knowledge representation is a useful one for the present task. In the specific case of satire, there may be grounds for postulating that the knowledge representations called upon for text processing vary, with phase one irony, the echoic mode, played off against general knowledge mental representations and phase two, the principal incongruity generating element, played off against knowledge of typical text structures. Emmott is understandably cautious regarding the demarcation between general knowledge and textspecific knowledge, insofar as “the creation and tracking of ‘text-specific’ representations may itself utilise general knowledge” (Emmott 1997: 36). However, and allowing that there may be some overlap between the two phases, it is perhaps best to adapt and import Popper’s notion of “collision” into the second phase, because that phase consists in an opposition or fracture in the anterior discourse framework that has been constituted by the prime. For these reasons, then, it is proposed that the term oppositional irony be reserved for the second phase of irony which supports the dialectic element in satirical discourse. The term is intended to serve as a mnemonic to distinguish it conceptually from the echoic phase, and also to be sufficiently broad to encompass a host of rhetorical devices. And in its echo of the Popperian sense of a collision or opposition of ideas, it also foregrounds this type of irony in a framework of mental representations, where it resides in breaches or schisms in processors’ knowledge of typical text structures. To draw this section to a close, it is worth summarising a number of observations made about both the structural elements of satire and the ironic phases that trigger them in the overall context of satirical discourse. The prime element is a stage which is characterised by irony in its echoic mode, which construes a particular discourse domain and establishes or invokes a mediated intertext; crucially, this involves a repositioning in discourse of the originator of the text via the mediated discourse. The prime is also accessed by text pro-

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Chapter 4

cessors largely through world knowledge. The dialectic element of structure, on the other hand, is a stage which is characterised by irony in its oppositional mode, created as a discursive manipulation within the text through a range of potential operations. The dialectic, which encompasses the concept of incongruity in the broad humorological sense, functions as a contra-expectation in discourse and tends more to be accessed by recourse to knowledge about typical text structures. Both prime and dialectic elements are mutually interdependent, and in a way which is intrinsic to the operation of a satirical discourse event. Indeed, the detection of a dialectic element is an often essential precursor, especially in the absence of any formal cue, to confirming the status of the prime. And to raise an important issue that will be resumed later, it is also the case that the amount of conceptual space between prime and dialectic – that is to say, the degree of transformation, distortion or opposition – is an important determining factor in the process of uptake of a satirical text. This formulation of the distinction between prime and dialectic flags up a number of contingent issues that will be addressed progressively throughout the remainder of this and forthcoming chapters. The binary conceptualisation of irony which is used to underpin the distinction is, as it stands, still rather crude, and will need to be refined further by drawing in and incorporating into the model a number of parallel research developments from the relevant areas of linguistic pragmatics (see §5.2). Furthermore, there are as yet not enough illustrative examples on show of the basic categories proposed, an imbalance that will be addressed soon in the next section and more fully again in Chapter 5. Finally, it has been suggested passim that there are in fact three ironic phases in satirical discourse of which only two, of course, have been the focus of attention here. A case will be made later, in Chapter 6, for the existence of a third ironic phase in this particular type of humour. This rather more tendentious third phase will be characterised as an “irony of conferral” and is triggered in the text processing stage by a collision between sets of universal validity claims. Although this is manifestly not the place develop this aspect of the model in any detail, it is worth noting in brief that this type of pragmatic uptake involves participant B in the satirical triad not redeeming a claim of sincerity in the text, even if such a claim has been offered by the participant situated at position A on the triad. Whereas a defining characteristic of “canonical” satire is that it raises a specific claim of insincerity, there are other “satire-like” situations where the offer of a “good faith” sincerity condition can be refused, leading to what is later termed a “B-movie” footing. However, these and other related matters are best left to the appropriate place in Chapter 6.

Satire as discourse

. Satire, irony, discourse: Applying the model of analysis I propose to develop this section principally through an analysis of a short satirical text, Text C, and in doing so hope to accomplish several interconnected aims. First, and most obviously, the analysis should serve as an illustration “in action” of the categories developed across this chapter, while additionally bringing into play some of the issues raised in both Chapters 2 and 3. Second, Text C is an altogether more sophisticated text than Text B, the example upon which several of the theoretical constructs developed in Section 4.2 were hinged, and that earlier text in itself is neither substantial or representative enough to sustain the categories of a full-blown analytic model. Third, in spite of its seemingly restricted topicality, Text C raises some broader crosscultural issues the exploration of which do not require the detailed unpacking of localised references in the text. Finally, Text C problematises some of the categories of the proposed model, and while those categories have hardly had time to become “bedded down”, there is no reason to sidestep their application to data which in certain respects is more indeterminate and consequently more challenging. Text C is complete in every detail, right down to, importantly, its graphological layout. What readers need to know by way of contextualisation for this text is one key item of information. This piece of satirical writing appeared shortly after a time of catastrophic floods on the Indian subcontinent during the late summer of 1999, leading to the loss of thousands of lives in both Bangladesh and India.

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Text C

(From Private Eye; 987: October 1999; p. 36)

It is indeed a peculiarity of satirical discourse that it can at once sustain a text which is part “referential”, part “fictional”, and yet has the capacity to broach subject matter that is fully divorced from any direct lexico-grammatical realisation in the text itself. The suggestion that Text C has a certain referential value is based on those linguistic elements which “pick out” directly retrievable referents in certain aspects of Indian culture. For instance, hockey occupies pride of place alongside cricket in Indian sporting culture, “Bollywood” remains the vogue term for the ever popular Indian film industry, and the government, though no longer “new”, is still arguably a “coalition” insofar as the dominant Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), at the time of writing, leads a federal coalition which depends on the support of a collection of parties from Southern India. Yet a “bona-fide” news report, which this text is certainly not, would also map specific events to these referents, events that unfold around real people, and in real places and times. That these events are often reported neither accurately or fairly in genuine news reporting is not the issue; what is at issue is that they are still anchored in a tangible sociocultural system of actions and episodes. In

Satire as discourse

comparison with authentic news gathering, Text C has a flagrantly fictional element to it in the sense that none of the stories it ostensibly reports about “real” people and things are true. There is simply no newspaper called the Delhi Telegraph (although there is, for the record, a Calcutta-based publication called The Telegraph, about which more shortly). From this illusory foundation it follows that the lead “story” about national politics, and the two under “news in brief ” on, respectively, sport and light entertainment, are utterly invented. And if indeed a hockey squad were named or a Bollywood star were to divorce in that particular week it would be entirely coincidental and, for that matter, irrelevant to the dynamic of this text. Especially importantly, it is not the case that there was, in that period, a train crash in London which killed forty people. Text C does then tend to steer a curious path through referentiality and fictionality, and its “referfictionality”, to coin an excruciating lexical blend, functions in a particular and circumscribed way. As will be argued later, its hybridity in this respect attaches a kind of “insincerity” to its manner of delivery, a type of delivery that may indeed set it apart from other types of fictional writing (see further, §6.2). Through a sustained pattern of discoursal opposition, Text C tends to destabilise and collapse under the weight of its own seemingly irreconcilable textual foundations. It resists reading, forcing a potential satiree constantly to search in text processing terms for a synthesis that lies outside of the specific lexico-grammatical fabric of the text itself. Paradoxically, in the light of the comments just made on its referfictionality (if readers have by now managed to forgive the neologism), Text C’s impetus (that is, the discourse context which constitutes its source material) is very much situated in attestable practices of the British print and broadcast media. And while this text is arguably not “about” an individual item of news per se, it certainly concerns itself with matters attendant on the process of news gathering and on the method of delivery of news stories by the British media. Remarkably, these matters are never explicitly communicated insofar as the text does not, and does not need to, “say” anything about them. Now to couch this broad formulation of the dynamic of Text C in the narrower terms of the ideas and frameworks developed across this chapter. In Section 4.2, a participation framework was proposed for satirical discourse which realised a triad of subject placements (see Figure 3 above). It was further suggested that the impetus which prompts a piece of satire is a tension between subject positions A and C, such that a satirical target is developed out of disapprobation by position A about some aspect of position C. Whereas placement C is ex-colluded in the participation framework, collusion is invited between A and B through the transmission of a satirical text, such that C is ostracised

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further within the framework while the discursive bond that links A and B is strengthened. The genus for the particular humour event under scrutiny here derives in the main from attitudes and beliefs about British cultural and social institutions, such that the raw material of the text is engendered by the discourse resources of that humour community. The satiree, realised as subject position B, is moreover a readership situated in the British sociocultural system and not in that of India, in spite of the explicit allusions, noted above, to culturally valorised institutions in that community. Taking the analysis a step further, let us for the moment allow that position C, the satirical target, constitutes a certain thesis. This thesis is the assumption that aspects of the process of selection of news stories by British newspapers are insidious; insidious in that they constitute a practice which is not reflective of the “natural” order of things but instead represents of a “naturalised” way of doing things. The text itself is in part mediated, following through the Popperian line of reasoning, as an antithesis. It establishes an oppositional discourse which portrays how some hypothetical, putative equivalent in the Indian print media might conduct a parallel news gathering exercise. Following the text’s transmission across to position B on the triad, the irreconcilability of many aspects of these textual “collisions” leave no other course of interpretive action than to search for a synthesis, for a “new way of seeing” in Popper’s terms. The new way of seeing is created by opening up a new vantage point such that the satiree can “look in” on what the British newspapers, or at least one British newspaper in particular, have been doing all along. The nature of the particular insidious discursive practice exposed by the text will be explored shortly, but first the text itself needs to be unpacked a little more fully for this interpretation to be justified. Probing Text C in terms of its constituent elements of structure is, it has to be admitted, not as straightforward as the procedure involved in the earlier analysis of Text B. It seems to be the case that C is comparatively more resistant both to reading and interpretation, although that is good reason in itself for testing, through analysis, the components of the model under development. Although attention was drawn earlier to the patterns of reference to Indian cultural activities, the raw linguistic resources which are used in the formation of this text derive principally from a key representative of Britain’s “fourth estate”. The form of the masthead employed in C, with its quasi-Gothic font, echoes explicitly The Daily Telegraph – that stalwart of the (so-called) quality broadsheet tradition of journalism. As this is the contextual frame which is the main focus of attention for the reader, it makes up C’s satirical prime, triggering a specific echo of this publication and constituting, to adopt Fairclough’s term

Satire as discourse 

(1992: 117–118), a “manifest intertext”. Let us accept then, at least for the moment, this contention that the genus for this text is British, not Indian, and that the echoic element of the prime it instantiates is very much orientated towards the discourse of a particular British institution. That said, there is at the very inception of this text a discursive twist or contra-expectation which is injected straightaway into its text-internal organisation. This constitutes the dialectic element, the mode of oppositional irony, which is established by the insertion of “Delhi” for “Daily” in the made-up masthead. There will be more on the precise mechanics of this operation shortly, but there is, on the grounds that it occurs simultaneously with the prime, a case for saying that the dialectic here is isochronous. That one element of structure should necessarily follow the other in a temporal sequence was never claimed of the model outlined above, although, as the examples in the next chapter show, many indeed do. The significance in this example of the isochronous instantiation of the dialectic is that it collides with the prime before that element even has a change to settle down into a consistent pattern. It is also the case that the dialectic is staggered in that both elements run side by side, and are spread throughout the text rather than occurring in two discrete blocks (again, see as a comparison the analysis of Swift’s “Proposal” in §5.3). Finally, the dialectic is arguably covert, at least initially, in that its salience is “graded” (Giora & Fein 1999) and in such a way as to acquire full salience only late in the text. That the dialectic is relatively covert is because the graphological form that embodies the prestigious marque of The Daily Telegraph is so ingrained in cultural iconography that it over-rides, as it were, its own lexical entry. Moreover, the font size of the spoof masthead is noticeably small in relation to the headline below it, and is thus somewhat out of proportion with that of the source text which inspires it. Evidence for this process of semiotic “over-ride” is admittedly not easy to come by, but it is worth adducing some informal external support. I showed Text C to around twenty friends, colleagues and students (all either British or Irish nationals) and when asked to comment on how they “read” the text, while all claimed that they “got the point” of the satire, not one admitted to picking out the “Delhi” entry on a first reading. That only happened on rereading, and that rereading was itself triggered by the third of the “news in brief ” items, the fake report of the London train crash. Although some puzzlement was expressed about the “relevance” of the earlier items, the main processing “jolt”, and some following discomfort, was delivered by the seemingly throwaway content of that third item. The extent to which that reorientation in textprocessing would occur for satirees everywhere else in the world, for whom

 Chapter 4

the cultural iconography is not so immanent, is an important and intriguing question, and readers from a range of humour communities will have registered their own responses to Text C as this analysis has unfolded. No doubt, the type of structuring in response noted informally could insightfully be investigated using more rigorous experimental techniques. Pfaff and Gibbs (1997; and see further §6.2) develop a useful template for eliciting informant-based responses to humour, and although beyond the remit of the present project, the development of such experimentation would be well within the compass of a quantificational stylistician. To return to the text, the particular linguistic operation that instantiates the dialectic both covertly and isochronously is none other than that basic humorous device surveyed in Chapter 2, the pun. It has been argued consistently that not only can satire function through a layering of linguistic structures but that the seeming “lower-order” linguistic devices can be pressed into service to sustain the textural dynamic of satirical discourse. Text C is no exception. In its fake masthead, the interface between graphology to phonology is exploited through the serendipitous coalescence that is offered by the resources of punning. Specifically, a phonological sequencing pun milks the happenstance consonance of “Delhi” (as [d7li™]) and “Daily” (as [ÁdeIli™]), garnering further support from the similarity of those two items at the graphological level. As was discussed at some length in Section 2.2, the pun, following Sherzer, has both a cohesive and a disjunctive function. As a selection from the paradigmatic axis out of perhaps many available items, it adds to the “thickness” of cohesion between the two frames of reference it signifies. However, it also has a disjunctive dimension in its capacity to point simultaneously in different semantic directions; its capacity, in other words, to “break frame”. Given this paradoxical cohesive-disjunctive quality, puns can, unsurprisingly, play an important role in establishing a dialectical relationship in satirical discourse. They function as stylistic hooks by fastening together unrelated discourse domains, not just different individual texts, but different registers, genres and other higher-order spheres of discourse. Before tackling the crucial issue of its satirical target, it is worth summarising the constituent elements of structure of Text C as identified in the foregoing breakdown. It has been argued that the discoursal construction of C as an event of satirical humour is expounded both by a prime element, the phase of irony mediated intersemiotically through its echo of The Daily Telegraph, and a dialectic element, the phase of oppositional irony which overlays the prime with the referential markers of the Indian sociocultural system. It has been argued also that whereas the interpretation of the prime tends to be more dependent

Satire as discourse 

on the general knowledge resources of the British humour community to which the text is orientated, the dialectic element is brought into play by text-internal knowledge in that the “Delhi-Indian” strand to a certain extent collides with knowledge of the typical structure of the echoed intertext. The result is that a schism occurs simultaneously between frames of knowledge and frames of style. It is the presence of both prime and dialectic, with their varied modes of irony engendering a style shift and incongruence, which concomitantly resists a “straight” reading and activates a satirical footing. Crucially, it is the oppositional nature of the dialectic relationship which is paramount in the text’s discoursal construction. The prime and dialectic are not only mutually interdependent but, as was suggested earlier, the perception of a dialectic element is often the key to identifying the presence of a prime. Indeed, the informal observations made above suggested that only on encountering the “London train crash” sequence were subjects sufficiently “jolted” into a rereading and consequent reevaluation of the status of the text as satire. Arguably, a counter-argument to this line of interpretation presents itself, which effectively inverts the classification proposed above for prime and dialectic. In other words, the prime might be seen as developing in the first instance through a spoof of an Indian newspaper. Candidates for such treatment might include Calcutta’s The Telegraph, mentioned earlier, as well as The Tribune and The Hindu whose mastheads employ fonts identical to the British broadsheet. The problem with this line of reasoning however would be over the status of the oppositional strand and the manner by which this strand would be related to the prime in text processing. Would, for example, this echo in graphology be to reflect a transposition to the discourse domain of another Indian newspaper or to that of the British newspaper? If the former, then very little conceptual space would be opened up between the Indian original and its spoof partner, and it is hard to see what satirical mileage would possibly be gained by this. If the latter possibility obtained, that is if the Indian prime were imbricated with an oppositional strand reflecting a British element, then apart from the “polysemous” masthead, no further dialectic element is sustained in the text, and again this would make little satirical “sense”. In any case, and as will be argued shortly, the synthesis that is central to the uptake of this text is to do with a specifically British, and not necessarily Indian, way of doing things, and the balance of prime and dialectic, in the particular manner claimed, is pivotal to its projected context of interpretation. So much, then, for the nuts and bolts of the discursive organisation of Text C. While it has been useful to test and refine the categories of the proposed analytic model in this way, there remains an important issue to do with how the

 Chapter 4

echoic text becomes transposed, through its collision with a dialectic element, to a new context of interpretation; a context which establishes, ratifies and ultimately critiques the third participant on the triad of discourse positions, the satirical target. What, in short, is the satirical “point” of Text C? To tackle this question I propose to step away for a moment from the specific organisation of Text C and to draw on a particular piece of research in media studies, the findings of which have an important bearing on the way C’s satirical target is mediated in discourse. In an influential article exploring the process of news selection, Galtung and Ruge (1973) develop a series of interrelated hypotheses to explain the mechanisms that influence the ways certain “events” are converted into news items. Their article, which has had an impact on both media analysis (e.g., Gans 1979: 39–69; Philo 1983) and on critical linguistic analysis (e.g., Fowler 1991: 12–24; Caldas-Coulthard 1992: 37–39), is built on the assumption that what we choose to consider as a news “event” is strongly culturally determined. Working from an extended (and sometime strained) analogy that sees the total set of world events as akin to the cacophony of sound produced by scanning a short wave radio receiver, they propose eight principal sub-hypotheses that seek to explain the way news is “heard”. Since we cannot register everything, they argue, we have to select, and there are constraints on what will attract our attention. For instance, the “frequency” of a radio signal is translated, admittedly rather liberally, to the notion that an event needs a certain time-span for it to unfold and acquire meaning. A murder takes little time, they point out, and is thus an event which can take place between the publication of two successive issues of a daily newspaper. In contrast with stories that can be meaningfully told from one day to the next, the building of a dam, for instance, goes relatively unnoticed because of its extended time-span, normally only becoming a news “event” on its inauguration. Working the radio analogy further, Galtung and Ruge suggest that the more “meaningful” a signal the more likely it is to be recorded as worth listening to, which triggers a further hypothesis that sees “meaningful” as interpretable within the cultural framework of the listener or reader. This introduces a measure of ethnocentric “cultural proximity” in that the event-scanner will pay more attention to the culturally similar while the culturally distant will tend to be passed by. Another ramification of this sub-hypothesis is that what is selected as news conforms to a “mental pre-image” of predictions and wants; that is, a set of images consonant with what news processors expect to find in print and broadcast media. Indeed, the strength of this “hypothesis of consonance” prompts Galtung and Ruge to suggest that much of what constitutes “news” is better thought of as “olds”.

Satire as discourse 

It is the last of their eight principles which is especially germane in the present context insofar as it relates to the “composition” of news units as entertainment. It is worth citing their own formulation of the principle: . . . imagine the news editor of a broadcasting station has received only news from abroad and only of a certain type. Some minutes before he is on the air he gets some insignificant domestic news and some foreign news of a different kind. The hypothesis is that the threshold value for these news items will be much lower than would otherwise have been the case, because of a desire to present a ‘balanced’ whole. Correspondingly, if there are already many foreign news items the threshold value for a new item will be increased. (Galtung & Ruge 1973: 65)

What is important about this model is that its eight constituent categories should, in theory and ceteris paribus, vary only slightly in media practices across different cultures. However, things are not equal, a point not lost on Galtung and Ruge as they build into the framework a series of culturally bound strictures influencing the transition from events to news within particular cultures (1973: 69). Most significant is the constraint that news communication is elite-centred in that the more a particular event concerns either an elite nation or an elite individual, the more likely it is to become a news item. Galtung and Ruge’s criteria for elite nations, clear from their repeated references to the countries of the “northwestern corner of the world”, is developed into a fourway paradigm capturing patterns of news structure across different global political systems; a paradigm which, in short, casts implicitly the process of news gathering as a discursive practice. Two of these patterns, Pattern 1 and Pattern 4, merit particular comment. Whereas the selection of news in the geopolitical “North” (Pattern 1) is straightforwardly elite-centred in that it tends to report events associated with culturally proximate elite nations and people, the pattern for a newly independent or developing nation (Pattern 4) is, according to Galtung and Ruge, somewhat more complex. When reporting culturally proximate events, the developing nation balances news about non-elite nationhood with news about elite individuals within that nation; when reporting culturally more remote events, especially those to do with dominant nations or former colonial powers, all news stories are motivated by the “elite” criterion, whether to do with nations or with individual people. This suggests a conflict between, on the one hand, non-elite, local and national issues and, on the other, issues at the elite, geographically remote, international level. When mapped onto the earlier breakdown of the discourse organisation of Text C, the relevance of the news selection model, and in particular the contrast

 Chapter 4

between different news gathering patterns, should hopefully be established. It was postulated that Text C works from a certain stimulus, which has its derivation in the systems, attitudes and beliefs of a specifically British humour community. That stimulus, only sketched above, is in effect the process of news gathering by the print and broadcast media of elite nations. In short, the satirical target of Text C embodies the discursive practice constituted by Pattern 1, with that pattern’s privileging of actions concerning elite-centred nations and individuals over events concerning “non-elite” peoples, and its tendency to upgrade trivia about elite individuals at the expense of the suffering of non-elite peoples. In the terms of the triad for satirical discourse, it is disapprobation by the satirist (subject position A) about this aspect of the British sociocultural system (subject position C) which prompts both the design and transmission of this particular piece of satirical writing towards its projected humour community (subject position B). Whereas this stimulus finds its way into the echoic dimension of Text C, it is not of itself sufficient to engender the antithesis which activates the necessary dialectic element in satire. That sense of oppositional irony, it was argued, is achieved through the superimposition of the “Indian” strand, which in the present terms of the Galtung and Ruge model, serves to turn the elite/non-elite distinction thoroughly on its head. Although Pattern 4 might be anticipated in the framework of media practices in a relatively poor or undeveloped nation, what is in fact offered in the “Indian” strand is a version of Pattern 1. First, there is the fixation on culturally proximate issues concerning national politics, which is served up in the headline and its accompanying page references. Thereafter, the trio of “news in brief ” items leads with two reports of events surrounding individual elites, promising stories about the national hockey squad and a Bollywood star. It is only after these that the third item is delivered, with its (spurious) report of many deaths in the British capital, and even then it is purportedly shunted off to a distant page 94, well away from those concerning the individual elites. This third “story” also violates the “frequency” selectional criterion in that in spite of its short time-span, it is still not considered of enough merit to displace stories of longer duration such as the Bollywood divorce immediately above it. It is this seemingly sundry item of news about a calamity in the fourth largest economy in the world, portraying the British people in starkly non-elitist terms, which delivers the interpretative jolt necessary to reappraise the status of the entire text as satire. Up to that point, if the informants’ reading experiences noted above are representative, the oddity perceived in the stories is more of a sense of cultural remoteness colliding with an expectation of cultural proximity. After all, the informants

Satire as discourse 

admitted to mistakenly taking their principal cue from the spoof “Telegraph” masthead. Yet the reorientation delivered towards the end of C – seemingly not transparent on a cursory reading – highlights “in practice” the very asymmetry that distinguishes news Patterns 1 and 4, an asymmetry which has become naturalised covertly into everyday discursive practices. What the discourse organisation of C does, and this is precisely the point of satirical discourse, is powerfully to turn this practice on its head, engendering through its antithesis a way of seeing anew. The suggestion that Text C is powerful is based partly on the sharpness of its observation, and partly on the subtly oblique and novel manner by which it develops two ironic phases to deliver a “message”. Its message suggests in effect that this is what it would be like if all news gathering followed the same pattern. Whereas it is one thing to point out that the British media have little interest in non-elite nations, it is another to invite a text processing strategy the synthesis of which is a recognition that this is actually what an Indian newspaper would look like if it also did things, as it were, the “elitist” way. Daniel Sanjeev Roberts reports (personal communication) that the two discourse contexts are indeed far from symmetrical, and that Indian papers tend actually to upgrade stories in which British participants are involved. Thus, a rail crash (or catastrophic floods) in Britain is likely, other things being equal, to receive the same if not more attention by Indian journalists than equivalent events in their own country. This suggests, in line with Galtung and Ruge’s predictions for Pattern 4, that the elite-nations factor overrides that based on cultural proximity. It is also interesting that although the source material for C is ostensibly topical news about floods in India, the use of which requires calculations about potential satirees’ knowledge of current affairs, the knowledge that there was no train crash in London is just as important to the working through of the prime-to-dialectic relationship. That said, the cognitive backdrop of C is not as restricted as it might have been if its target were developed out of the actions of, say, a particular politician or media personality. Although manifestly a text of contemporary political satire, the crux of C’s satirical target is a perceived iniquity in the way patterns of news selection have stabilised across time and across different cultures. The extended analysis of Text C has been offered in the main as a test for the central components of the satirical model assembled across this chapter. It also raises some more general issues about satirical discourse, one of which is that it gives the lie to the commonly-held critical assumption, noted in §3.2 and §3.3 above, that satire is mainly writing which voices criticism of the stylistic foibles of other writers. As far as Text C goes, nothing could be further from

 Chapter 4

the truth. Nor can the argument be sustained that satirical discourse is a product of individual writers and readers, between whom is passed a discrete critical “message” about some third party. The foregoing discussion is intended to demonstrate that satire is in essence a configuration, not necessarily of distinct individuals, but of subject placements and humour communities within orders of discourse. Another point of the analysis developed here is to underscore an observation made in Section 4.2 above. This is to do with satire’s potential to organise itself laterally, to subsume and assimilate other units of discourse. Given that its target is another discursive practice, Text C illustrates well this capacity for lateral expansivity in that it subsumes, by way of critique, a unit from a homologous level in the hierarchy of discourse. And finally, what satire does is to invite the satiree to concur by reaching a synthesis that offers, in Popperian terms, a “new way of seeing”. It does not hector in the manner of, for example, a political speech or a journalistic polemic, but rather invites a more complex pattern of inference through its own rhetorical structure. In the particular case of Text C, for instance, satirical “uptake” does not amount to the same thing as being “told” that the British press treat people unfairly, although the particular notion of uptake still needs more thorough investigation (see Chapter 6 below). Leading from this last point, the rhetoric of political satire demonstrates that there are ways of foregrounding and of challenging insidious and naturalised discursive practices, and that moreover, ordinary people have the ability to discern and critique these discursive practices in a way that does not require the assistance of specialist academic discourse analysts.

. Summary and conclusions This lengthy chapter has provided an outline of the core tenets, categories and principles of an analytic model for the study of satirical discourse. Rejecting early on some of the results of a pilot study by the same author, the focus of attention was switched to systemic-functional models of genre and register with a view to assessing how this work might usefully be factored into an account of satire. Some criticisms were levelled at that approach, especially towards its conceptualisation of hierarchically staged units in discourse organisation, the theoretical implications of which led to the proposal that satire might be better cast as a discursive practice in Foucault’s sense. More narrowly, satire was construed as a participation framework comprising a triad of discursive positions involving a satirist, a satiree and a target. The chapter also offered a theoretical blueprint of the textual foundations of satire, proposing the terms prime

Satire as discourse 

and dialectic as two interdependent elements of discourse structure. Mapped onto that distinction, and acting in the service of these two elements of structure, were two qualitatively different modes of irony, categorised as echoic irony and oppositional irony. And finally, so that these various analytic categories could be justified and to some extent problematised, an extensive and detailed examination was conducted of a satirical text from Private Eye magazine. Subsequent chapters of the book seek to build on these foundations in various ways. The next chapter concentrates largely on method, with a view to spotlighting a range of techniques in satirical composition other than those identified in the two texts analysed in this chapter. Later chapters tend, as it were, to move around the triad of discursive positions, so that in Chapter 6 the main focus is on the discourse perspective of the satiree, while in Chapter 7 the impetus is provided by that of the satirised entity, the target. But first, to a more directed survey of the techniques of satirical composition.

Chapter 5

Ways of doing satire

I will compose a satire on Master Bartley Timlin, schoolmaster and bacon curer. But it will be too easy, won’t it? Hugh, in Brian Friel’s Translations

. Introduction This chapter develops the theoretical outcomes of chapter four through a series of illustrations of the ways in which satirical texts are created in discourse. It applies to authentic textual examples the categories of the theoretical model advanced in the book, with the principal emphasis here on the methods and techniques of satirical composition. In highlighting a range of the linguistic devices that make up part of the satirist’s discoursal toolkit, this chapter is therefore about the operations people need to perform on discourse if they want to create a satirical text, about ways of doing satire. It was suggested in Chapter 2, towards the end of a comprehensive survey of linguistic approaches to humour, that relative to the amount of attention given to other forms of verbal play satire has received almost no sustained treatment within the tradition of language-based humour research. Instead, the general drift in linguistic humorology, it was noted, tended more towards “core” aspects of the semantic and pragmatic organisation of verbal jokes. In Chapter 3, the opposite tendency was observed; that is, in spite of widespread attention to satire, there was little literary-critical work that sought to ground satire within any encompassing theoretical model of verbal humour. Though many other reservations were expressed in that chapter, one of its most significant criticisms was of the critics’ framing of satire as “high literature”, something at a remove from ordinary social interaction. This type of classification, it was argued, tended to block both the reception and the interpretation of satire as an everyday humour praxis. Both of those earlier chapters concluded that satire remains a relatively neglected area of study and that the attention it has received as humorous discourse has been scant.



Chapter 5

There are of course exceptions, some of which were acknowledged across both chapters. Especially noteworthy, in view of the remit of the present chapter, is Draitser’s study of the techniques of satire (Draitser 1994). The focus of his monograph is exclusively on the life and work of the nineteenth century Russian satirist, Mixail Efgrafovic Saltykov, who wrote under the penname “N. Scedrin”. Draitser argues that because of the ideological strictures of the former Soviet communist system, Saltykov-Scedrin, often regarded as “the Russian Swift”, has been unjustly neglected and has not been accorded the acclaim he deserves in the wider scholarly community. In terms of overall approach, Draitser’s emphasis is strongly literary-critical, as his unequivocal definition of satire makes clear: “Satire is a genre of literature whose goal is not only to point out a social vice but to make it clear that this vice is intolerable” (1994: xxi). Serious reservations have already been expressed in this book, passim and ad nauseam, about the treating of satire as a genre of literature and about the limiting effects that such a categorisation has for our understanding of how satire works. Another issue, following directly from this point, is to do with the reliance on an individual writer of (literary) narrative as the sole exponent for a generalised classification of satirical method. Draitser is adamant that his study of Saltykov-Scedrin’s techniques “may be considered a study of typical devices that many satirists employ. Most often one finds that many of Saltykov’s devices are generic . . .” (1994: 44). If these devices are indeed generic, they are probably generic to the methods used by writers (like Saltykov) in the creation of fictional satirical characters in extended literary narratives. That in itself does not mean that the techniques highlighted are not interesting or the insights offered irrelevant. Indeed, the present study attempts to build a generalised model of satire through a textual base that is derived largely from British popular satire, so the potential for the “generic” application of its categories also remains to be proven. A productive feature of Draitser’s approach, which sets it apart from certain other critical studies, is that it places the satirical techniques it uncovers in the broader context of humorology. For instance, incongruity theories of humour are at the fore, as are socio-behavioural models of the comic (1994: 33ff.), and this solidifies substantially the account of the particular methods of satire identified in Saltykov-Scedrin’s work. Draitser also makes an interesting distinction between metaphoric and non-metaphoric types of satirical characterisation, with the former type depicting humans as fauna, flora or inanimate objects and the latter using “infantilization” and “stupefication” (ogluplenie) as ways of attacking satirical targets (Draitser 1994: 47–100). Although grounded in

Ways of doing satire

very different criteria to those of Draitser, Section 5.3 of this chapter draws on models of discourse to sustain a similar distinction in types of satirical method. By way of final comment, it is worth acknowledging the relatively full attention accorded in Draitser’s study to the language of satire. Although derived exclusively from the Saltykov-Scedrin “corpus”, a range of features of lexis and grammar are identified as pivotal to the working of satire, of which puns and related aspects of verbal play are especially prominent. This underscores a central theme of this book, developed from Chapter 2 onwards, that satire is a multilayered, multi-modal form of discourse in which is embedded numerous devices and mechanisms that are situated at the level of lexico-grammar. Although more a survey of aspects of “literary technique” with general implications for satire, and less an integrated analytic framework whose categories interlock, Draitser’s study nonetheless has much to say about the stylistic profile of satirical narrative. And while this chapter is very different in terms of the research paradigm which underpins it, its preoccupation is similar insofar as it seeks to try to draw out of a body of data some of the key compositional techniques of satirical discourse. But before addressing these compositional techniques directly, there remains to tidy up a number of theoretical “loose ends” from the previous chapter. For a start, a little more will need to be said on the proposed binary model of irony, simply because the research base upon which it was built is too narrow. Furthermore, the relationship of satire to parody, which was touched upon in places across the previous chapter (see Figure 2 and subsequent discussion) needs to be more fully drawn. Although it would be implausible to attempt a full blown theory of parody anywhere in this book, some of its basic connections with satire need to be established, as indeed do other forms of humorous discourse, such as sarcasm, which sustain some sort of echoic dimension in their ironic conformation. To this effect, the section which follows will seek to resolve these and other outstanding theoretical issues before attention is turned directly, in Section 5.3, to some of the methods of satirical composition.

. Theoretical preliminaries: Satire, parody and irony Over the course of the previous chapter, the basic tenets of a model of satirical humour were advanced, some components of which were grounded in the discursive manifestation of two qualitatively distinct modes of irony. Those modes, which sustained the transmission of prime and dialectic elements in satire, were classified, respectively, as echoic and oppositional irony. Although





Chapter 5

the criteria advanced for the echoic mode followed loosely the rationale suggested by Sperber and Wilson (1981), the attempt by those authors to render down into one formula all forms of irony was explicitly rejected. It needs to be acknowledged, though, that whereas this critique was necessary to underscore and delineate the theoretical position adopted in the proposed model, this is not to claim in any way that it marks the only scholarly engagement with that aspect of the Sperber and Wilson model. There have, in fact, been a number of studies which have actively sought to align the concept of echoic irony with the construction and delivery of verbal humour. Notable among these is a series of overlapping publications by Curcó (1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1998) which offer parallel attempts to locate a pragmatics of humorous discourse within the broad parameters of Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1995). Arising from this work are some issues that are pertinent to the present study. Given the coverage of Chapter 2 of this book, Curcó offers an interesting reappraisal of some of the data and terms of reference developed in Raskin (1985), thus offering a relevance theory “take” on the semantic foundations of the SSTH (Curcó 1995: 28–39; see §2.3 above). Another issue concerns the way relevance theory (hereafter RT) is proposed as a method for separating the humorous from the nonhumorous in discourse. This is no small undertaking, especially as the concept of “echoic mention”, in the sense described in Section 4.3, is intended as a mainstay of the distinction. To pinpoint the RT formula more clearly, Curcó contends that verbal humour consists in the speaker leading the hearer to “entertain mental representations that are attributable to someone other than the speaker at the time of the current utterance, while simultaneously expressing towards such representations an attitude of self-distancing”. She adds that “[t]his particular use of mental representations is what in relevance-theoretic terms is called echoic use [sic]” (Curcó 1996a: 89). Thus, the key pragmatic strategy that underpins humour involves a specific type of “dissociative” comment, attributable to someone other than the speaker, which is recognised by the hearer as echoic mention (see further Curcó 1996b: 63, 1998: 306). However, in spite of its seemingly compact theoretical profile, an RT-based pragmatics of humour, in my opinion, provides neither a serviceable model for satirical discourse nor sufficient evidence for the existence of a unitary mode of (echoic) irony. Moreover, the extent to which RT offers a genuine theoretical advance over the semantic footing of the SSTH/GTVH tradition of humorology remains questionable. Consider, for instance, Curcó’s own formulation of the basic humour process: “a hearer may be led to expect relevance in a given direction and suddenly discover some other unpredicted way in which the ut-

Ways of doing satire

terance achieves it” (1995: 31). There seems to be little in this formula that marks any significant departure from the core principles of script opposition nor indeed from the broader psychological modelling of the “garden path reasoning” element in verbal humour. This is perhaps no surprise given that the general efficacy of RT for dealing with real language in use has been seriously questioned by linguists. In a sustained critique of the framework, Toolan points out that RT’s key and most problematic postulate is the notion of a “shared cognitive environment” (1996: 184), adding that another limiting factor to its application to real data is the embeddedness of Sperber and Wilson’s examples in “culturally stereotyped situations” (192). Whereas the model, according to Toolan, works best in scenarios in which the addressee knows in advance what will be relevant to him or her, it is much less effective in dealing with situations where the addressee is confronted with thoroughly new information, information whose relevance was not foreseen and indeed whose relevance is doubted or ill understood (Toolan 1996: 189; and see further below). Looking back at the observations made in the previous chapter, both on the satirical texts analysed and on the discursive triad and its subject placements, it is the latter scenario, with its “doubtful” or “ill understood” relevance, that is surely a much more accurate index of the interactive context of satirical discourse. Curcó’s work is not the only research which seeks to underpin a model of humour with the concept of “echoic mention”. In a study of a type of verbal humour which, like satire, manifests an actively aggressive element, Gibbs offers a psycholinguistic explanation of the mechanisms people use to understand and remember sarcasm (Gibbs 1986). Using data collected from three readingtime experiments, Gibbs argues that people do not, as many pragmatic theories postulate, need to process first the literal meaning of an utterance like “You’re a fine friend” (meaning “You’re not a fine friend”) before deriving a nonliteral, “sarcastic” interpretation. Built as it is on rigorously quantified experimentation, Gibbs’s evidence for this part of the thesis is indeed compelling. What is at issue here, though, is the primacy assigned in the evidence to the concept of echoic mention as an indicator of sarcasm. Like Curcó, Gibbs rejects the Gricean model of irony, which would predict that an utterance like “You’re a fine friend”, by saying something that is manifestly untrue in context, would flout the maxim of quality (Grice 1975). He prefers instead to model sarcasm as a specifically echoic strategy. Asking us to consider a hypothetical situation where Al says to Bob “You’re a big help” when Bob has not assisted Al in doing some task, Gibbs argues that the sarcasm in this exchange





Chapter 5

comes from the fact that Al has echoed some previously mentioned statement or belief, or perhaps some unspoken agreement between Al and Bob. That is, Bob might have earlier offered to help Al or it might be Bob’s job to do so. When Al says “You’re a big help” he is in a sense quoting this previous statement or verbalising a mutually shared belief that Bob is supposed to help Al as part of his job. (Gibbs 1986: 4)

This formulation of the echoic principle in irony takes us right back to the problems that were aired in Section 4.3, with Gibbs’s heavily modalised explanation here reminiscent of Sperber and Wilson’s “reconciliation” into instances of echoic mention the ironic examples (23) and (24). The problem is simply that we can never know what exactly it is that Al is echoing, which means that if the echoic argument is to be sustained, then some anterior discourse event has to be invented, come hell or high water, to justify the echoic function. Once invented, that imagined echoed utterance then becomes quietly actualised and reified into the explanation as a “previous statement” or a “mutually shared belief ”. The foregoing observations are not intended to deny that a great deal of irony is predicated upon echoic mention; after all, the fabric of the proposed model for satire is woven partly with an explicitly echoic strand. Rather, what is contentious is a theoretical position which assumes that all irony, including sarcasm, must be an echo of some other discourse. To follow the sarcasm-asechoic-mention issue a little further, here is a short illustration of the general point being made. The following two exchanges are taken from an episode of the popular Irish television sitcom Father Ted (see Dixon & Falvey 1999: 46–65 for full contextualisation). Here the eponymous central character is diffidently trying to initiate a conversation with three other co-participants, of whom one, Bishop Brennan, is his superior. Unfortunately, Ted directs his remarks towards Father Jessop, the bishop’s aide and a priest with a reputation for being “the most sarcastic priest in Ireland”: (26) Fr. Ted: Hello Father Jessop, helping Bishop Brennan then? Fr. Jessop: No, I’m up in space doing important work for NASA! (27) Fr. Ted: Nasty day, did you come by the new road? Fr. Jessop: No, we came round by Southern Yemen!

Father Ted’s utterances are the very essence of phatic communion, that interactive gambit which embodies the routine vacuities that regulate the margins of conversation. The obviousness (in context) of his questions to Jessop constitute what Laver terms “neutral tokens”, because their reference is to uncon-

Ways of doing satire

troversial information that is retrievable from the context of interaction (Laver 1975: 224). Alternatively, they express what Labov and Fanshel call “O-events” because the propositions they contain are known to everyone present in the interaction (1977: 100). Whatever the precise framework of analysis, Ted’s attempt at pleasant small talk is rebuffed with some vigour by his interlocutor who, true to his reputation, deals out some heavy sarcasm. However, it seems unfeasible to classify such ironic language solely in terms of the identification of some perceived echoic mention. For a start, there are strong sociolinguistic parameters which cue the delivery and uptake of this sort of sarcasm. Jessop’s utterances draw attention to the obviousness of the propositions in Ted’s questions, foregrounding their “O-event” status as information known to everyone present. This implies that sarcasm, or at least this variety of sarcasm, requires that the target of the humorous interchange be co-present in interaction, something which is not necessary in other types of aggressive humour of which satire is a clear example. Jessop’s sarcastic rebuttals are also accompanied by marked prosodic and other paralinguistic features – he “sneers” continually throughout this episode – which underscores Attardo’s observation that two of the most effective indices of ironic intent are phonological mechanisms and kinesic markers (Attardo 2000c: 55). Of course, neither Ted nor Jessop are, strictly speaking, “real” people. Nevertheless, the linguistic routines they employ and the processing strategies used by the audience to understand them are very real indeed, and to that extent Jessop’s sarcasm is perhaps as visceral as it would have been if uttered outside the context of the television sitcom. While sociolinguistic aspects of the context of situation are clearly important to its interpretation, what psycholinguistic evidence is there for the echoic aspect of Jessop’s sarcasm in examples (26) and (27)? In other words, what “previously mentioned statement” is being quoted or what “mutually shared belief ” is being echoed? These are questions to which I must confess to having no answers. The idea that these two (albeit fictional) interlocutors have reached some prior understanding in discourse is difficult to accept; indeed, it is nothing short of outlandish to suggest that Jessop (or any real speaker for that matter) is echoing in these sarcastic utterances some mutual awareness about the American space programme or about the geography of Southern Yemen. If something as tangential as the propositions in (26) and (27) count as echoic mention, then a case could be made for classifying everything in language as echoic, whether ironic or not. True, the general import of Jessop’s rebuffs may constitute, if not exactly an echo, then a violation of some assumed a priori agreement about the dynamic,

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Chapter 5

social solidary function of phatic communion. Yet from this perspective, (26) and (27) simply create a breach in the underlying expectations about discourse structure (Tannen 1979), something which, through a shift in style, creates a “break in frame” (Goffman 1979; and see §4.2 above). It may well be that, as far as its general profile as a pragmatic strategy is concerned, sarcasm exhibits qualitatively different varieties. Whereas Gibbs and Sperber and Wilson are interested mainly in direct oppositions between use and mention, where “a fine friend” in an echoed variant means “not a fine friend”, Jessop’s sarcasm seems more to inhere in its tangential scope of reference and its marked lack of topicality rather than in any kind of binary opposition. However, whatever the particular discourse model employed to explain the sort of pragmatic mismatch that is sarcasm, it will certainly require fuller explication than that offered by the metalanguage of the echoic mention model. In spite of the foregoing reservations about the reputed universality of the use-mention distinction, there is one form of discourse for which the notion of echoic mention does appear to have some considerable explanatory power. That form of discourse is parody. Since the introduction of Figure 2 in Chapter 4 and in much discussion thereafter, the concept of parody has in certain respects tended to sit in the shadows of the model of satire, so the theoretical connections between these two modes needs to be established more clearly here. That said, this is not the place to attempt a comprehensive account of the discourse of parody: such an endeavour would require a book-length treatment, as the existence of a trio of monographs dealing exclusively with parody will testify (Hutcheon 1985; Rose 1993; Dentith 2000). Thus, the short commentary that follows is designed primarily to highlight the principal points of intersection between parody and satire only insofar as they impact on the specific aims and remit of the present study. It is worth recalling from the previous chapter Sperber and Wilson’s observation that whereas both irony and parody are types of echoic mention, irony involves the mention of propositions, and parody the mention of “linguistic expressions” (1981: 311). In a study which draws directly on this formulation to develop an echoic account of parody, Carstyn modifies in the first instance the concept of “linguistic expressions” on the grounds that parody may mention a number of aspects of an original work as its principal point of departure (Carstyn 1981: 32–33). Whereas the echo of specific linguistic expressions suggests a one-to-one mapping between use and mention, parody, it is argued, tends to mention “certain memorable phrases, certain grammatical constructions, certain principles of versification and certain propositions” (1981: 33; see also Carstyn & Noh 1995: 4). This does seem a reasonable position to take. It ac-

Ways of doing satire

cords with Bex’s observation, noted in Section 4.2 above, that parody does not necessarily take any particular anterior text as its model; rather, it takes characteristic ways of “saying” as its impetus (Bex 1996: 237). It also tallies with Nash’s comment on parody’s status as a “discourse of allusion”. Nash demonstrates, using his own humorous examples, that broad grammatical patterns can function as parodic stimuli without necessarily exhibiting any lexical equivalence with an anterior text, a mode for which he reserves the term pseudoparody (Nash 1985: 100; see also Stockwell 2002: 35–39). However, the key issue which needs to be tackled is where precisely, in the light of these criteria, do parody and satire differ? While this is a serious research question and one which can only be partially addressed here, there do appear to be three main areas where the differences between parody and satire can be located. The first is to do with the presence of a dialectic component, obligatory in satire but not in parody. The second is to do with the sorts of text-processing strategies demanded for the interpretation and understanding of each type of discourse. And the third is to do with the nature of the universal pragmatic claims that are projected by each mode. Considering each area in turn, it has been argued throughout the previous chapter that satirical discourse inheres in at least two modes of irony: the echoic and the oppositional. In the literature on parody, whether in designated applications of the Sperber and Wilson model (see above) or in more general non-linguistic accounts of the techniques of parody (Rose 1993: 79; Dentith 2000: 9), the emphasis is consistently placed on parody’s capacity to echo some other discourse. To all intents and purposes, then, this looks like the key disambiguating criterion: while satire embraces double-edged ironic phasing involving an in-text collision, parody displays the echoic form of ironic phasing only. However, no sooner does a seemingly catchall distinction like this present itself than straightaway ambiguities and counter-examples emerge from the scholarly literature. Reference is regularly made, for instance, to parody’s aggressive function, to its capacity to undermine (Culler 1975: 152) or even destroy (Dentith 2000: 36) the original text. This certainly blurs the distinction, suggesting that parody too contains a phase of oppositional irony which subverts the anterior discourse event it echoes. In one respect, the formula for clarifying this blurred boundary is straightforward: any parodic text that displays, in addition to its requisite echoic dimension, a phase of in-text oppositional irony simply shifts into satire. There does in fact appear to be some implicit recognition of this postulate in the work on parody. For example, while discussing a line in T. S. Eliot which echoes and to some extent subverts an earlier line from Edmund

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Spenser, Carstyn tellingly refers to this ploy as Eliot’s “satirical thrust”, even though no overt commentary on satire had been offered in this article up to that point (Carstyn 1981: 32). There is moreover a particularly strident form of verbal humour which, by definition, suggests itself as potential common ground between parody and satire. Touched upon in Chapter 3, the stylistic technique of “high burlesque” functions by elevating to a grandiose or inflated style some trivial or inconsequential subject matter. Nash offers his own comical high burlesque of the poetic style of D. H. Lawrence in the poem “Bert Gets the Bug”, which recapitulates Lawrence’s “experience” of squashing an insect in the school playground: “. . . Oh and instantly I took to him [the bug]/I did, I liked him, I fell in love with him, I could have kissed/him as an Indian kisses his squaw . . .” (Nash 1985: 85–86). The point about high burlesque is that although the linguistic code itself comes to the fore, the collision between subject matter and style of delivery is of itself sufficient to shade into satirical attack. Indeed, Nash himself even refers to this type of comic pattern as “satirical parody” (85). And in a similar vein, Dane (1980), Draitser (1994) and Simpson (2000) all touch upon comparable linguistic phenomena in their analyses of verbal humour. Dane allows that parody does in fact have an “object of attack”, but whereas in satire the target and referent “is a system of content . . . that of parody is a system of expression” (Dane 1980: 145 ). Draitser also considers situations where parody and satire tend to shade into one another, arguing that “if the stylistic model is the satirical target, the text is parody” (Draitser 1994: 125– 128). And finally, Simpson talks of textual satire in which the principal object of attack is the linguistic code itself. It is suggested that this form of satire, which straddles most closely the interface between parody and satire, appears to turn discourse inwardly upon itself and to this extent is best considered as meta-discourse (Simpson 2000: 251). Considered collectively, the observations of Dane, Draitser and Simpson, loosely drawn as they are, do suggest that the origins of parody’s potentially hostile function requires fuller and much more systematic exploration within discourse analysis. One reason why the distinction between parody and satire seems constantly to be blurred in the research literature may be to do with a confusion between those parodic texts which exhibit a genuine dialectic element and those which simply carry embedded jokes. Consider in this regard a brief illustration. Excerpt (28) is taken from a written (as opposed to filmed) parody by Woody Allen. In “A Twenties Memory”, set in the Europe of the 1920s, a fictional persona imagines a series of encounters with the distinguished literati of that period. This sequence covers his meeting with Ernest Hemingway:

Ways of doing satire

(28) We had great fun in Spain that year and we travelled and wrote and Hemingway took me tuna fishing and I caught four cans and we laughed . . . (from Allen 1975: 93)

Short as this fragment is, the spoof of Ernest Hemingway’s prose style is certainly well-taken: witness the familiar paratactic ordering of narrative clause units, with the additive conjunction used solely and to the exclusion of any available adversative or causal entries. Indeed, along with the temporal deictic marker “that year”, the passage bears a particular stylistic resemblance to the opening paragraph of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929). To that extent, then, the echo of that writer’s style establishes (28) as a clear parody. However, there is within this excerpt a joke text based around the idea of “tuna”, the analysis of which tends to lend itself to the script opposition approach reviewed in Chapter 2 (see §2.3 and §2.4 above). In (28), the opposing scripts embrace, on the one hand, the concept of tuna as the wild quarry of the big game angler, and on the other, tuna as the prepared comestible available from the supermarket shelf. A case might be made then, within the terms of the SSTH, for classifying the joke as a “situation opposition”, on the grounds that a normal, expected state of affairs (in the context) is opposed to an abnormal, unexpected state of affairs. This, however, is really a side issue. What is of central relevance is that (28) is a parody which contains a joke but not a parody which shades into satire. The embedded joke bearing element is not of the same order as the text-internal dialectic required of satire. It does not subvert the discourse framework through oppositional irony in the manner of genuine satire, where internal disruption occurs normally after the echoic phase has been established. Just as an impressionist or stand-up comedian may deliver jokes in the style of a well-known politician or media personality, parody which carries joke bearing texts is not necessarily constitutive of an attack on the particular individual whose discourse is echoed. Thus, it may be the case that much of the perceived aggressive dimension in parody stems from responses to parodies which carry jokes, jokes which are mistakenly analysed as ridiculing or attacking the entity echoed in the parodic framework. As a corollary of the foregoing remarks, and to raise the second of the three areas flagged up earlier, one issue that would seem to strike at the heart of the distinction between satire and parody concerns the different text processing mechanisms presupposed by each mode of discourse. Now, the contention that parody exhibits an echoic phase of irony, but not a dialectic phase, may have given the impression that parody functions as a kind of “ur-satire”; that is, as a logically prior version of satire, or as something that represents a kind

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of discoursal staging post along the way to satire. This is a false impression. For one thing, there are constant reminders throughout the literature on parodic humour of the difficulties this mode of discourse places on the reader and of the type of knowledge required for its understanding. Nash notes that readers are commonly not aware of what is being parodied, even though they can still be aware of “parodic intention” (1985: 89). Carstyn talks of the difficulty in identifying the “real world” source of the echoic element in parody, suggesting that while such identification is basic to its understanding it is generally not necessarily so for other types of ironic discourse (1981: 33). Certainly, there is no evidence that parody, when compared to satire, is any less “complex” in terms of the conceptual and inferencing skills it demands. It is rather more likely that a key difference between the two resides in the specific configuration of text processing resources commanded by each mode. It was argued in the previous chapter, following Emmott (1997), that variable knowledge resources are used in text comprehension. Four principal types of mental representation were identified: general knowledge, knowledge of typical text structures, textspecific knowledge of a particular fictional world and knowledge of the style of a particular text (Emmott 1997: 36). In the case of satire, there seemed reasonable grounds, given that mode of discourse’s doubly ironic structure, for postulating that the processing strategies called upon tend to play off general knowledge mental representations against knowledge of typical text structures. In the light of the observations just made, the processing strategies called upon for parody, by contrast, would seem to invoke general knowledge representations and knowledge of the style of a particular text. That is to say, whereas the formula for satirical text processing is “general knowledge + knowledge of typical text structures”, that for parody is “general knowledge + stylistic knowledge”, assuming of course that the concept of stylistic knowledge can be sufficiently widened as to cover genre, register, dialect and idiolect. Moreover, where the balance of knowledge stores for satire consists in a relationship of opposition, that for parody may assume a relationship of complementarity (and see further below). Clearly, this is an area for sustained cognitive-poetic research which would extend well beyond the speculative suggestions made here. Nonetheless, there do seem good grounds, especially in view of the research context outlined above, for proposing that part of the distinction between these two closely related types of verbal humour lies in the respective text processing strategies which each demands. Linked closely to the previous two is a third area which has theoretical relevance to the interface between parody and satire. To explore this area in detail would however risk preempting and substantially offsetting the prag-

Ways of doing satire 

matic model that is developed fully in Chapter 6, so the commentary here will of necessity be brief. A well-known proverb in English runs: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”. Consistent emphasis has been placed so far on the echoic, allusive dimension of parody, on its function as imitation. It has also been argued that parody, unlike satire, need not necessarily display an aggressive element. Placing these two aspects of parody against the proverb tends to draw attention to another word in its formulation: “sincerest”. It is my contention that parody can be “sincere”, but satire can never be. While satire, as a direct consequence of its formal design and organisation, violates a “validity claim” of sincerity (see Chapter 6 passim), parody’s differing discourse profile enables that claim of sincerity to remain intact. In respect of the complementarity of its requisite text-processing resources, parody can be a homage to the writer (or discourse) parodied, whereas satire cannot do this because of its particular dialectic structure and the oppositional relationship of its associated triad of subject placements. It is worth noting a propos example (28), that Woody Allen, in response to an interviewer’s question about both his film and prose parodies, speaks of his “great fondness” for the writers in question. When asked would he consider doing a parody of his film-director mentor, Ingmar Bergman, he answers in the affirmative but adds that it “would be done out of affection” (Allen 1995: 72). A well-taken echo of anterior discourse can be both stimulating and thought-provoking, and parody in its own terms can offer humour without hostility. To follow the sentiment of the proverb, it may indeed be that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In drawing this discussion to a close, it is worth reiterating that the point of this section has been to bring together a number of theoretical loose ends such that the categories which comprise the proposed model of satire may stand in sharper focus. Especially important has been the consolidating of the research base which produced concepts like parody and irony, concepts which featured in the previous chapter but which were not handled there with any degree of precision. With its echoic phase of ironic development, and with all the accompanying interpretative “baggage” that accrues from such a shift in discourse alignment, parody is undeniably the closest form of verbal humour to satire, in terms of its overall texture, design and delivery. Pinpointing, as the previous discussion has done, the points of theoretical contact between satire and other modes of discourse like parody has hopefully brought more to the fore what is in the fabric of satire, what it is that sets it apart both from other forms of verbal humour and from other discursive practices. This section has also been concerned with strengthening the theoretical context for a model of irony. In the face of a daunting research base, what is

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proposed here is still a relatively superficial sketch of verbal irony. However, the place of irony in satirical discourse needs to be demarcated as unequivocally as possible, which is why an argument was built against a unitary model of irony that encompasses all realisations in discourse as echoic mention. While echoic mention is undoubtedly an important ingredient in comic discourse, over-reliance on this mechanism as an analytic category tends to stultify or even mask the subtlety of many forms of verbal humour. True, the bipolar model of irony outlined in this and the previous chapter is admittedly a basic one, and even though a third category will be added in Chapter 6, it may then still not be comprehensive enough. Nevertheless, a model comprising multiple forms of irony seems better suited, if the analyses of Texts B and C above are anything to go by, to capturing the discourse profile of satire than a model comprising just one, overarching category. Toolan, whose observations in this area have already been noted above, expresses similar reservations about the echoic formula in both Sperber and Wilson’s 1981 model and in a later variant of that model (Sperber & Wilson 1989). Although Toolan’s own concern is with the development of an integrational model of language and not with the discourse of humour, he attaches strongly sociolinguistic parameters to irony, arguing that it is “guided by assessments by interlocutors as to what activity type is in progress and of local determinations of what the present intentions of the interactants are” (Toolan 1996: 208). Toolan also notes that a key element of “echoic irony” is “the assumed disjunction or noncongruence between an original or established situation of use and the present one” (210). This emphasis on the “situated” nature of irony, bringing in the current status of participants and circumstances, makes for an interesting parallel with the suggested interpretation of sarcasm in examples (26) and (27) above. In sum, Toolan’s reservations about a wholly “echoic” explanation of irony are similar to those expressed in this section: if the concept is to be sustained then it can only be done in so heavily attenuated a sense that it extends to echoes of various culturally-bound frames and scripts (1996: 214). Further support for the need for a more sophisticated and sociallygrounded model of irony, which can be tallied more directly with humorous discourse, is offered by Attardo in the form of a series of interconnected articles written largely outside the tradition of the GTVH (Attardo 2000a, 2000b, 2000c). Like Toolan, Attardo resists the one-dimensional echoic model of irony, arguing that it not only makes for a potentially infinite regression of “echoes” but that innumerable difficulties are presented in trying to identify what it is that is being echoed, an issue that was raised in fact in the commentary around examples (26) and (27) above. Attardo prefers to view irony in terms of its

Ways of doing satire

rhetorical and social effects (2000c: 64), suggesting that an utterance is ironic principally in the way that it maintains relevance while implicitly or explicitly violating the conditions for contextual appropriateness (2000a: 817). Irony is, in other words, contextually relevant yet contextually inappropriate at the same time. Although this is not the place to flesh out in any detail Attardo’s extensive definition, what appears to be happening as this section has progressed, is that two extra-textual parameters attaching to ironic usage have come progressively to the fore. These are appropriateness and, as noted above, sincerity. This points in useful ways to the issues that will be addressed in the next chapter, where the conditions of both sincerity and appropriateness are tied into an interpretive matrix for satire. For the moment, the discussion needs to move away from these theoretical issues in order to allow some consideration of the more material aspects of satire’s design and textual composition.

. Metonymic and metaphoric satirical method Let us begin this section with some informal parallels. The popular British broadcaster, John Peel, runs a weekly “family album” in a television listings magazine in which he comments on various aspects of media and broadcasting. In one instalment, Peel reviews that week’s episode of the so-called “cult” teenage drama series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in the course of the review he remarks that “Buffy the Vampire Slayer [is] a programme so unashamedly silly that it places itself way beyond the reach of either ridicule or parody . . .” (Peel 1999: 21). When one considers the plot-line for that week’s episode, Peel may indeed have a point. At the start of the episode in question, Buffy’s biology teacher transforms herself into a gigantic praying mantis and then sets about feasting on the remaining staff in the school. Further ever more ludicrous events follow in that episode, but it is the particular manner by which Peel makes his point which is the thought-provoking issue here. It suggests that certain aspects of discourse organisation make particular text types difficult to ridicule or to parody, the implication of which is that not everything in discourse is amenable to the sort of transformation that ultimately frames a satirical text. Indeed, it is as if Buffy comes with a kind of built-in, prefabricated exaggeration that acts as a limiter on its potential for the sort of discursive manipulation needed to establish oppositional irony. To introduce another informal parallel. Many years ago, I took part in a school chemistry experiment the point of which I have to confess was thoroughly lost on me at the time, although its relevance, if oblique, has occurred

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to me in the context of the present study. The experiment sought to test gaseous pressure using a large, sealed glass bell jar in which was housed a strong, rubberised balloon-like contraption. When the balloon was inflated via an external pump it led to an increase in the pressure of the air trapped between it and the inside of the glass jar. The more the balloon inflated, the greater the pressure inside the vessel, while conversely, deflation of the balloon led to a reduction in pressure. If readers can forgive some of its more tortuous ramifications, the implications of the analogy are thus. Imagine that the bell jar represents an order of discourse and the balloon a potential satirical target within that discourse context. Altering the overall shape of the balloon/target brings about a marked change in the space around it; that is, in the space between it and the boundaries of that order of discourse. The crucial point is that the liminal, malleable space around the satirical target is altered because of the operations performed upon it within that enclosed universe of discourse. In terms of the methods employed in its construction, the effects of satirical discourse are often to do with altering the texture or pressure of the liminal space around its target, whether through inflation of the target as saturation, or through deflation as attenuation (see further below). While readers interested in pursuing further the Buffy genre might wish to consult Mary Hammond (forthcoming), the relevance here of John Peel’s remark as far as it impacts on a conceptualisation of satire is that Buffy comes to us, as it were, pre-saturated. The balloon has been substantially inflated such that it leaves little discursive room for manoeuvre, and this I believe is why Peel revealingly remarks that it is impossible to ridicule or to parody. Strictly speaking, this may not be true insofar as there are other discursive techniques available: one might for instance try to transfer the “order of discourse” by shifting, so to speak, to another bell jar. But to try to stay within that same bell jar with an already inflated balloon does indeed leave little liminal space for a parodist or satirist to work. What the implications of these two rather curious and seemingly oblique parallels have to offer is that they encode in effect a basic mechanism of satirical method, a method that is metonymic in principle. Stylisticians and cognitive poeticians have consistently drawn attention to systems of conceptual transfer in both literary and in everyday discourse, underscoring especially the importance of both metonymic and metaphorical processes. Metaphor, which will act as a framing principle later in this section, involves the mapping between conceptually distinct domains, comprising a source domain for features of the metaphorical construction and a target domain onto which these features are projected. Thus, what connects metaphorical expressions like “He blew his lid” or “She’s just letting off steam” is that they both evoke the underlying concep-

Ways of doing satire 

tual metaphor anger is a heated fluid in a container, wherein our understanding of anger, the target domain, is conceptualised as heated fluid in a container, the source domain (Gibbs 1994: 7; see also Stockwell 2002: Chapter 8; Goatly 1997: 108–119 and passim). By contrast, the concept of metonymy, which will feature as the informing principle for the earlier part of this section, is commonly accepted as a operation which involves a transposition within the same conceptual domain. Steen elaborates thus: Metonymy involves the nonliteral use of a concept which stays within the limits of its own conceptual domain, and which does not have to involve abstraction in the way most metaphor does, depending as metonymy does on part-whole, product-producer relationships, and so on. By contrast, metaphor involves the nonliteral mapping of correspondences between two conceptual domains. (Steen 2002: 25)

Many metonymies have become conventionalised, especially in synecdoche where the part stands for the whole (as in “hired hand”) or in those constructions where a place, such as Hollywood or Buckingham Palace, stands for the institution with which it is commonly associated. Other metonymies are more contextually dependent for their interpretation, as in, say, “The lead guitar has gone AWOL” where a more contingent “stands-for” relationship pertains between the musician and the particular instrument played. Gibbs (1994: 321–322) notes that the difference between metaphor and metonymy is not always easy to draw, but he proposes a useful rule of thumb to help disambiguate the two tropes. Whereas a metaphor assumes a certain distance between the concepts it embodies, between its topic and vehicle, a metonymy upgrades certain salient characteristics from a single domain to represent that domain as a whole. Applying an “is like” test serves therefore to draw out the space between a topic and a vehicle in metaphor, although the test collapses when applied to metonymy. Thus, and developing some of the examples above, the notion that anger “is like” a pressurised liquid will confirm its status as a metaphor, whereas the metonymy “hired hand” cannot support the parallel “A worker is like a hand”. The same restriction blocks the conversion of the other metonymies, such as “A musician is like a lead guitar” or “A monarchy is like Buckingham Palace”. This brief sketch of the metaphor-metonymy distinction is in no way intended to signal the onset of a comprehensive survey of research in what has become a huge area of interest in stylistics and cognitive poetics. The theoretical importance of this outline is simply that it provides a basic organising principle for different types of satire, and to that extent, the tropes of metaphor

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and metonymy are best thought of as two interrelated schemes which underpin some of the techniques of satirical composition. In fact, throughout his influential study of the poetic structure of the human mind, Gibbs emphasises that both metaphor and metonymy should be seen, not as distortions of literal mental thought, but as basic schemes by which people conceptualise their experience and their external world (Gibbs 1994: passim). He also argues that figurative language generally, which significantly also includes irony, is found throughout ordinary speech and writing and in everyday discourse situations. Figurative language, he argues, is ubiquitous and does not require of its use and understanding any special intellectual talent or any special rhetorical situation (Gibbs 1994: 21). Where all this informs a model of satire is in its insistence that ordinary language users have the ability to think in ways that go beyond the literal and that so-called “nonliteral” communication is part and parcel of everyday communication. The basic principles of metonymy and metaphor, along with irony, can act as useful framing devices for satirical discourse and, moreover, these figurative devices can serve to organise and classify palpable techniques of textual organisation within an overarching schema of discourse. To be more specific, certain techniques used in the formation of a dialectic component in satirical discourse can be classified as metonymic because the oppositional irony they yield comes from operations performed within same conceptual domain. By contrast, other techniques fall into the metaphoric category as they involve cross-domain mapping and merging. To set this distinction in the terms of the analogy developed earlier, whereas the first type, the intradiscursive principle of metonymy, represents operations that take place within the same bell jar, the second, the interdiscursive principle of metaphor, represents operations that involve, as it were, different bell jars. As anticipated during the earlier discussion of Buffy and following, the term saturation is reserved for a particular method of satirical composition that is metonymic in character and which involves a process of inflation within a particular conceptual domain. More informally put, saturation works through a kind of “more of the same” transformation in discourse. A simple, yet curiously apposite working illustration of the technique is offered, at the time of writing, by media coverage of the soccer World Cup of the summer of 2002. José Antonio Camacho, manager of the Spanish national side, sported an elegant light blue shirt throughout the period of his team’s involvement in the tournament. The shirt is relevant insofar as Camacho exhibited – how shall one put it – a noticeable propensity towards perspiration, brought about no doubt by the balmy Oriental conditions. Now, this aspect of the redoubtable

Ways of doing satire 

former international’s personal hygiene did not escape the attention of Spanish television’s “Muñecos de Canal Plus”, a satirical programme which is built around an assortment of uncomely latex mannequins – a format, incidentally, inspired by Britain’s “Spitting Image” series and France’s longstanding “Le Canard Enchaîné”. During the Spanish side’s progress (such as it was) in the competition, the Muñecos took the familiar image of moist patches on the light blue shirt rather further by consistently presenting Camacho’s puppet with a veritable fountain of liquid spewing out from the region of its armpits. A disquietingly over-literal illustration of the concept “saturation” it has to be said, but the Muñecos’ method nonetheless shows how a familiar “part for whole” metonymic relationship is first imported into the satirical context as a prime, only to then to be subverted through a phase of oppositional irony which exaggerates the established perception of the elements that comprise that prime. Clearly, saturation, in the sense proposed here, envelops the technique of caricature, that much favoured satirical device of the political cartoonist (Wright 1865; Klingender 1944; Bindman et al. 2001). However, rather than seeming to reinvent the wheel by renaming a perfectly acceptable term in current usage, the parallel drawn here between saturation and caricature is intended to rein the latter term into a more global set of satirical strategies such that it can be plotted against cognate methods of composition. Caricature, as a form of metonymic saturation, involves the distortion of some aspect of human appearance, normally physiognomy, such that this exaggerated body part assumes a prominence sufficient to symbolise the whole being. Writing as a professional political cartoonist, Garland makes the interesting observation that there is a transience to the sort of distortion that cartoonists can wreak on their subject material (Garland 1988). What was once exaggeration tends to become neutralised over time so that subsequent cartoons need to refresh or reinvigorate the metonymy by taking the distortion a little further in each subsequent instalment. For example, most caricatures of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher played, according to Garland, on her bouffant hair and pointy nose. This gradually shaded into ever more grotesque representations until the nose and hair themselves became the visual embodiment of the politician. As Garland notes acerbically, the fact that Thatcher’s hair became less “fluffed out” as her career progressed was neither here nor there, because the politician was still “perfectly recognisable in [her] transmogrified form” (1988: 77). Garland also notes by way of conclusion that consistent distortion of the representation of people like politicians, even if done “without intention

 Chapter 5

to wound”, still serves in some measure to reduce the dignity and hence the authority of these powerful individuals (1988: 76–77). Saturation, as a device that extends or inflates an entity within the same domain of reference, obviously applies as much to verbal satirical method as it does to visual caricature. Later in this section, some further comments will be made on the relationship between this and other techniques in the metonymic system. This concept also makes up an important strand of the case-study in satire that forms the remit of Chapter 7, and in order that this material is not preempted here, fuller analysis of the concept of saturation in satirical discourse will therefore be held over for the meantime. In order to capture a mode of discourse organisation that is essentially the opposite of saturation, I suggest the term attenuation, best considered as a contraction of the more targeted, if clumsier, concept of “attenuated focalisation”. To return briefly to the balloon-and-bell-jar analogy, attenuation is that procedure which functions as a deflating strategy within a particular order of discourse, and it is expounded in language within circumscribable lexicogrammatical parameters. As an illustrative starting point, it is worth looking at an insightful short commentary from Fowler which, although not located per se in a model of satire, nonetheless sheds much light on this particular aspect of satirical method (Fowler 1986: 42–44). Fowler’s main interest in fact is in developing a linguistic framework to account for the concept of defamiliarisation, following the lines suggested by Russian formalists like Shklovsky and Tomashevsky, and to this effect he seeks to draw out stylistic devices that have the potential to bring about “the unsettling of the relationship between a sign and its concept” (42). To illustrate one of a range of such devices, for which he proposes the term undercoding, Fowler examines a passage from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a fragment of which is reproduced below. In this episode, Gulliver for the first time catches sight of the Yahoos: At last I beheld several Animals in a field, and one or two of the same Kind sitting in Trees. Their Shape was very singular, and deformed, which a little discomposed me, so that I lay down behind a Thicket to observe them better . . . Their Heads and Breasts were covered with a thick Hair, some frizzled and others lank; they had Beards like Goats, and a long Ridge of Hair down their Backs . . . The Hair of both Sexes was of several Colours, brown, red, black and yellow. Upon the whole, I never beheld in all my Travels so disagreeable an Animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an Antipathy. (Swift 1985 [1726]: 269–270)

Ways of doing satire

The Yahoos, portrayed so disagreeably here, are in fact human beings who are kept as beasts of burden by the Houyhnhnms. Fowler notes of the passage that use of the label “human being”, or indeed any equivalent term, is markedly avoided so as to engender a “pointedly naive perspective”. This estranged narratorial focalisation works in effect “by withholding the usual term for something that is being described, by pretending that the thing is not coded” (1986: 42). In other words, undercoding acts as a technique of defamiliarisation because it questions the “naturalness” of the coded concept, by removing what Fowler calls the “forgiving distortions of commonsense” (44). The “withholding” of certain lexical items is significant as far as the broader ramifications of satirical technique are concerned. It represents a strategy of salient deflation, of attenuated focalisation, whose lexico-grammatical realisation is often marked by extensive underlexicalisation. Throughout the Swift passage, superordinate terms are preferred over their (perhaps anticipated) hyponyms: “Animals”, for instance, is a superordinate entry whose compass extends beyond a hyponym like “humans” (and other similar superordinates from the longer passage from which the excerpt above is taken include “Female”, “Male” and “Beast”). Undercoding is supported by additional devices such as the use of general nouns like “their Shape” and “the same Kind” which function as items of generalised semantic reference with low lexical power (Simpson 1993: 112). General nouns are themselves underpinned by other nominal elements such as “Heads”, “Breasts” and “Hair” which function metonymically to break up the sense of wholeness of described objects by collapsing them into their constituent parts. (Draitser also talks in a similar vein of the “physiologization” of a character as a common technique of satiric denigration (1994: 64).) Although there are, as is suggested throughout this chapter, many ways of “making strange” in satire, here a funnelled or telescoped focalisation serves as the principal collision-in-text that establishes oppositional irony. What is more, there is again evidence to suggest that the dialectic component in satirical discourse may involve some fracture between general knowledge resources and knowledge of typical text structures (see §4.2 and passim). This particular case of attenuation, for instance, seems to inhere in a mismatch between encyclopaedic knowledge of, say, the concept of humanity as (strictly speaking) generically accommodated within the higher-order genus of animal kingdom, and expectations about typical narrative description where human characters are conventionally differentiated in textual terms from animals or beasts. Consider now the following example, of attenuation, which is taken from a piece of satire written over two and half centuries after Swift’s Gulliver. This

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“story” is played off against the press outcry that followed the behaviour of one of the British Royals, Prince Harry, during his time at the prestigious Eton public school. The teenage Prince’s exploits, which included smoking cannabis and spending time in public houses, received what was arguably an inordinate amount of coverage in the British media, a point not lost on the producers of this satirical text. Text D

(From Private Eye; 1046; January 2002; p. 18 [passage continues])

Dealing first of all with its textual arrangement, passage D, in view of the immediately foregoing discussion, reads like an exercise in sustained lexical underspecificity. That is to say, into seemingly every key slot is inserted a lexical item from a node in the semantic scale that is situated above that which would be selected as neutral in the context. The point about lexical specificity, as Cruse notes in two important studies, is that deviations from neutral co-occurence patterns carry important strategically-loaded signals (Cruse 1977, 1986). In other words, there are strong pragmatic constraints on which hyponyms and which superordinates can be chosen in which contexts, such that departures from “contextually neutral” terms in certain utterances are marked as potential implicature-carrying devices (Cruse 1977: 154–163). For example, while the owner of one domestic pet might say “I think I’ll take the dog for a walk”, this “inherently neutral” selection would be inappropriate when spoken by the owner of two dogs. That second context would warrant a shift to something lexically more specific, like “I think I’ll take the Alsatian for a walk”. The point is that lexical specificity is not confined to a decontextualised semantic schema, but is rather a sliding scale of pragmatic options which has some real portent in

Ways of doing satire

discourse. Marked options from this sliding scale, involving over- and underspecification, can exploit strategically particular aspects of pragmatic meaning. So, if our one-dog-owner exclaims “Take that animal away!”, the less specific superordinate term implicates distance from or disdain of the referent, while in an utterance like “Siobhan let me drive her new Ferrari” the choice of a hyponym of “car” suggests greater affinity with the referent because it plays up the included, esteemed feature, so to speak, of “Ferrari-ness”. A yet more curious scenario is the use of underspecificity to suggest in-group knowledge or expertise. Thus, a jeweller might say “We have some lovely stones in stock at present” even though the populace at large might use hyponyms such as “diamonds” or “emeralds” as contextually neutral terms. Mapped onto Text D, and aligned with the broader concept of attenuation as a satirical device, the concept of lexical (under)specificity has an important pragmatic function in terms of the sorts of inferences it tenders. At every possible turn, direct reference to Prince Harry (using, as I have done, the conventional title and first name pattern) is pointedly waived in favour of a set of superordinate terms conveying either age group only (“TEENAGER”), age group and gender (“teenage boy”) or specific age and gender (“A 16-year-old boy”). His “friends” are similarly underlexicalised with neither age nor gender specified. Attenuation through this type of underspecificity means that this is as “close” as we get in focalisation to the central participant, simply because such marked lexical underspecificity is of sufficiently generalised reference not to preclude the possibility that this could be any boy from millions of potential referents. And that possibility is in essence what opens up the pathway to the satirical target. This is not to say though that attenuation is the only stylistic device on show in Text D. The strapline, situated above the “headline”, exhibits a delightful internal fracture in its composition, where the echoic “WORLD EXCLUSIVE”, spoofing the attention-grabbing formula much favoured of tabloid journalism, is undercut almost immediately with the contradictory “to all papers” sequence which establishes the oppositional dialectic phase in composition. In spite of this internally embedded sub-joke, analogous perhaps to the “jab-line” of Attardo’s taxonomy (2001: 152–155), the principal foundation for the main echoic-dialectic opposition is, on the one hand, the intersemiotic spoof of a news item concerning the exploits of a British Royal, and, on the other, the prominent strand of oppositional irony delivered by the pattern of underlexicalisation noted above. To this extent, textual structure collides with general knowledge assumptions about the degree of lexical specificity anticipated in generalised media naming practices.

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Fowler points out that different styles of naming in English are systematically associated with different social values, and that variations in the combination of titles, first names and last names can unmask different political leanings across print and broadcast media (Fowler 1991: 99). Considering what happens in Text D, it seems that yet again here is a piece of satire whose target is news values and news gathering practices. The stimulus for that target arises out of disapprobation of the widespread media attention given to this story, attention which is perceived as obsessively disproportionate. In a certain sense, the original news item is a “non story” – a sense which Text D obviously works hard to convey – because the behaviour that ostensibly so outrages the press is replicated by perhaps thousands of other British teenagers every day of the week. But the exaggerated significance attached to the events illustrates again the workings of an elite-centred hypocritical media (see §4.4) whose practice is to upgrade in priority the arguably trivial and humdrum activities one individual juvenile, albeit a highly elite juvenile. What Text D does, through the device of attenuation, is to serve up the very nondescriptness and anonymity that should have been accorded the initial news item. A final point about Text D’s design is that in its confrontation of asymmetrical news gathering practices, its method of dealing with perceived media excess is not to try to exaggerate the target through saturation, but to “de-excess” certain aspects of the anterior discourse that constitute the stimulus. A course of action that, in other words, is grounded in the technique of attenuation. The decision over whether to “saturate” or to “attenuate” in the composition of a satirical text is an important one. Later, in Chapter 7, fuller attention will be given to this issue when the discussion centres on the specific case of a satirical text that “failed”. This case involves a “spoof ” diary, the design of which, in terms of the satirical method employed, had serious consequences for various participants within the triad of subject placements in satirical discourse. One of the implications of this later discussion is that while there are circumstances were saturation in satirical discourse is possible, it may not always be judicious if the satirical target is, as it were, pre-saturated. In that case, when the balloon within the bell jar is already partly inflated, a better course of action in compositional terms is to deflate it. Another method would be to “negate” it by trying to pretend in effect that the balloon is not there at all. The general significance of this concept of negation, as another weapon in the armoury of metonymic satirical discourse, is spelled out below. Whereas the conceptualisation of saturation and attenuation has been as different positions along the same metonymic continuum, the conceptualisation of negation (at least in satirical discourse) is to see it as situated at one

Ways of doing satire

of the extremes of that continuum. When put in the context of negation in the lexico-grammar, such a categorisation is not controversial. Halliday, for instance, while distinguishing grammatical realisations of modality and polarity, suggests that modality refers to “the area of meaning that lies between yes and no – the intermediate ground between positive and negative polarity” (1994: 356). In other words, epistemic modal structures of belief and knowledge can be arranged along a continuum that is bounded at either extreme by polarity, and this concept of the epistemic continuum is what prompts the classification of negation as a type of metonymic method in the proposed satirical model. Halliday’s own commentary around the cline of polarity tends to focus on the lexico-grammatical realisation of negation and on how the negative operator used for asserting and denying propositions is realised as a distinct morpheme in English (1994: 88–91). Tracking exponents of negation in the lexico-grammar aside, the implications of injecting this little particle into a text that has been planned as satirical can be far-reaching indeed. Leaving for the moment the theoretical implications of negation in discourse, consider the following excerpt, Text E, from Private Eye magazine. Other than to note that it relates to a particular controversy concerning an international sporting event, no additional contextualisation would seem necessary here: Text E

(From Private Eye 1011; September 2000; p. 22 [passage continues])

Dealing first of all with the anatomy of the text, there is much in the linguistic make-up of E that follows patterns identified in the material examined in Chapter 4. Indeed, this text is built on discoursal foundations that are very similar to those that support Text B (see §4.2), so to that extent there is little need here for a detailed breakdown of its infrastructure. Suffice it to say,

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within the terms of the satirical model, the prime element is instantiated as an echoic frame which draws intersemiotically on many of the “real discourses” that constituted the press response to apparently widespread drugs taking at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. This echoic phase, functioning as a thematic system which bridges these anterior discourses, is then fractured via a text-internal manipulation which constitutes the dialectic phase in satirical development. The dialectic component, non-isochronous with the prime, is embodied by oppositional irony, the principal impetus for which is the inclusion of the negative particle in the sequence “a leading athlete . . . was found not to be taking drugs”. The collision brought about by that negative particle – there is perhaps no clearer exemplar of the notion of “antithesis” in satire – activates a wholesale conceptual inversion which is sustained for the remainder of the text. Interestingly, so exact is this inversion that it allows a simple substitution rule through which the phrase “drug taking” can be inserted, cloze-test style, into a number of grammatical slots. (Consider sequences such as: “I stupidly thought I could win by __________” or “I now accept that ________ was not the way to win”.) Such a manoeuvre would nullify the oppositional strand, thereby pushing Text E more into line with the various “straight” anterior texts which constitutes its prime. It also illustrates how the negative event (the shock “non-drugs-taking” incident) functions as the ground of the text, while its counterpart in positive polarity is shifted, even if momentarily, to the background. Givón’s comment on negation as a type of pun is telling: in negation, he argues, “the non-event becomes – temporarily, locally – more salient, thus more informative” (Givón 1993: 190). In terms of the construction of its satirical target, then, the perception that drug taking is endemic in athletics (disapprobation from position A about position C on the triad of subject placements) is mediated through a spoof news report about a non-event wherein the polarity of its conceptual spheres is turned upside down. The synthesis invited of the satiree arguably requires the working through of this antithesis by readjusting its polarity back into some sort of positive framework. It is worth adding by way of an endnote that the pun is again pressed into service as a stylistic hook in the construction of satirical discourse. The fake byline, purporting that the story has been written by one “Anna Bolic-Steroid”, is a phonological sequencing pun which plays on a happenstance assimilation of the phonetic string in “Anna” with its realisation as the first two syllables in the name of the performance-enhancing drug. Again, the cohesive and disjunctive functions combine, on the one hand consolidating the two spheres of reference while on the other functioning to “break frame” in the manner described earlier in Sections 2.2 and 4.4.

Ways of doing satire 

There is of course much more to negation than has been drawn upon for the rather rudimentary analysis of Text E. The general issue of negation in language is undeniably a complex and thorny one, and is a problem which over the years has vexed, variously, linguists, philosophers and psychologists. This is patently not the place to attempt to review this enormous body of research, although a useful survey of the relevant literature on and key concepts in negation can be found in Hidalgo Downing (2000: 23–79). Another useful aspect of Hidalgo Downing’s study, worth noting here, is the manner by which the broad concept of negation in discourse is applied specifically to Joseph Heller’s comic novel Catch-22, a work with a much commented-on biting and angry satirical thrust (see further Nagel 1974; Fletcher 1987: 59–78). It will therefore be useful to make some further comment on both Hidalgo Downing’s approach and on the wider principle of negation as far as it impacts on satirical discourse. It is generally accepted within developmental psycholinguistics that the negative is acquired later than the affirmative in the language acquisition process, and that because it tends to foreground nonexistent states and events it is the marked term in the polarity system. A curious aspect of negation is that it has no counterpart in nature, so while an utterance like “When did you lock the door?” affirms some palpable activity, the utterance “When didn’t you lock the door?” is anomalous to the extent that it foregrounds a nonexistent process. Hidalgo Downing points out that whereas experience tends to be coded positively, the negative is used for expectations that are not fulfilled. Developing the work of both Langacker and Givón, she further notes that the interpretation of a negative tends to require a corresponding affirmative proposition because it makes salient internal reference to the situation whose existence it denies (2000: 70). When this notion is translated to verbal humour, Joseph Heller does indeed emerge as the practitioner sine qua non of a form of verbal play that makes extensive use of polarity reversal. Of the many famous episodes from Catch-22 predicated entirely on some category of negation, consider the following which recounts Major Major’s father’s expertise in, er, not growing alfalfa beans: His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. (Heller 1986 [1955]: 94)

Hidalgo Downing, in her commentary on passages like this in the novel, tends to reject traditional logical and semantic approaches to negation in favour of a

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discourse-centred approach developed particularly out of the work of Schank on memory organisation packets and Werth on text world theory (Schank 1982; Werth 1999). On this particular example, for instance, she notes that a sequence of negative clauses creates a negative discourse subworld that describes a nonfactual state of affairs. Thus, the prototypes and expectations associated with the memory organisation packet “earn a living” are not fulfilled, while in text world terms, “the negative propositions project a negative subworld that creates a nonfactual domain by means of denying the applicability of a standardly accepted frame of world knowledge” (Hidalgo Downing 2000: 165). As a footnote to the passage just quoted, it is worth pointing out that Heller’s satirical method is just as serviceable today as it was fifty years ago. Although written well before the advent of the European Economic Community, the notgrowing-any-alfalfa-beans scenario provides a ready made stylistic formula with which to attack the excesses of that body, with its economic subsidies and grotesque over-production, now so ingrained in public consciousness that the phrases “butter mountain” and “wine lake” have entered into, in their various linguistic reflexes, the common parlance of European citizenry. A further, if seemingly tangential, illustration of the implications and consequences of using negation in real discourse can be found in two of Coulthard’s studies in forensic discourse analysis (Coulthard 1992, 2000). Although not about negation per se, and most certainly not about the discourse of humour, these studies are nonetheless relevant in a curious sense. Coulthard examines certain linguistic features in the statement of Derek Bentley, the last man to be hanged in Britain. Executed in 1953, although his conviction was quashed, absurdly belatedly, in 1998, Bentley produced, prior to his trial, a statement of the incidents which led ultimately to his conviction, a statement which by law was to have been a verbatim record of all and only the words used by the defendant himself. When subjected to methods of modern discourse analysis by Coulthard, one recurrent and surprising stylistic pattern in Bentley’s statement is the use of negatives, embodied in structures like “Chris had not said anything . . .”, “I did not see . . .” and “I did not have a gun . . .” (Coulthard 1992: 251–252). Coulthard argues convincingly that there is no preceding justification in the text for these negatives, which come thick and fast in the statement, just as there is no apparent reason for the defendant to make impromptu denials of any of these occurrences. The presence of such marked negation leads Coulthard to conclude that much of Bentley’s “statement”, which was to have been completely unsolicited, had been prompted by questions from the police, as indeed the defendant himself claimed. On those grounds, the text violated the law and should have been rendered inadmissible.

Ways of doing satire 

Coulthard’s data is a germane, if somewhat alarming, depiction of the potential consequences of negation in a real discourse context and in this respect it stands as a useful counterbalance to the sort of research on negation in theoretical linguistics which is often dogged by invented examples and contrived data. When transposed across to the discoursal construction of satire, it also illustrates well how the negative, while constituting a marked form, still seems to be stalked, as it were, by the shadow of a positive polarity. Writing in a different research context, Hutcheon, noting the way negation functions as a irony marker the film Wayne’s World (“Great party . . . not!”), talks of this device as expressing a world that is “unsaid” (Hutcheon 1994: 8). This again consolidates the impression that the negative acts in a text as a kind of response to a, perhaps absent, affirmative; as something that drives a text processor beyond the antithesis encoded in the negative to search for a synthesis. It is through the technique of negation that the satirical “mirror” is able to show the same conceptual domain, but only in reverse, and as a kind of negated doppel-gänger in discourse. Leaving metonymic methods aside for the moment, this section will conclude with an overview of the exponents in discourse of the metaphoric principle of satirical composition. This marks a shift in attention away from techniques that are intradiscursive in character and towards techniques which, in that they embody some degree of cross-domain conceptual mapping, are “interdiscursive” in their overall bearing. However, two points are in order in advance of this overview. First, it needs to be reemphasised that the concept of “metaphor”, as with “metonymy”, is used here as an analogue. Without being imported directly into the analysis of text, metaphor offers a framing device – a kind of “meta-metaphor” – which helps organise a particular set of strategies of satirical discourse. A second issue concerns the theoretical distinction between metonymy and metaphor. In spite of their usefulness as a structuring tool, the two terms, as various commentators have hinted, might be better configured as points along a continuum rather than as discrete variables. Walsh for instance argues for a model of “metonymic distance” and even suggests that the distinction is collapsible (Walsh 2003: 234; see also Stockwell 2000: 211). The impact of this categorial indeterminacy resonates especially in research work on satire which explores the concept of the grotesque. A stock technique in satirical distortion, the term grotesque has its origins (literally) in the “art of the grotto”, in the bizarre wall paintings found in the remnants of Nero’s first century palace, the Domus Aurea. These “grotto-esque” paintings combined vegetation, animals and human body parts in elaborate and fantastical designs (Russo 1994: 3 and passim; see also Clark & Motto 1986: 6). This

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type of cross-domain metaphoric mapping would seem naturally to set itself apart from a device like caricature which, as observed earlier, exhibits distortion within a single conceptual domain. Indeed, the distinction does appear to accord with Draitser’s formula which postulates that “non-metaphoric” caricature involves “disproportion in a character’s external appearance” while the grotesque functions as a “denigrating device [which] compares a human being to an animal or to a thing” (Draitser 1994: 135). However, there are many instances across the research literature where the distinction is collapsed in such a way as to subsume caricature within the grotesque, or vice versa. Wright’s classic nineteenth-century study sees one technique as embodying the other: “[t]he monstrous is closely allied to the grotesque, and both come within the province of caricature, when we take the term in its widest sense” (Wright 1865: 8). Indeed, Draitser’s own formula appears to collapse when he subsequently calls for the classification of “the grotesque as extreme exaggeration, as caricature” (Draitser 1994: 139). Clearly, these two important techniques in satirical composition, the use of caricature and the creation of the grotesque, are not easy to distinguish from one another and that indeterminacy arises in part from the non-discrete relationship between the higher-order concepts, metaphor and metonymy, which frame them. Against this mildly cautionary note, there are satirical texts which nonetheless gravitate markedly towards the metaphoric pole of the compositional spectrum. In fact, the first text to have been introduced in this book, Text A, illustrates well the basic principle of this aspect of satirical method. Text A is a spoof “Product Recall” notice, the main impetus for which, it may be recalled from Section 1.1, is the perceived poor performance in power of the British Labour party. For ease of reference, and given its brevity, it is worth reintroducing Text A here:

Ways of doing satire

Text A

(From Private Eye; 969; February 1999; p. 22)

It has been a working assumption of this entire project that satire is not a genre of discourse but is instead a discursive practice that does things to and with genres of discourse. From this perspective, satire has itself the capacity to subsume and recontextualise other classes of discourse, other registers and genres from the broad system of language. Text A offers prima facie evidence for this type of assimilating mechanism insofar as it uses one discourse framework as a kind of post onto which another set of meaning potentials is fused. The “Product Recall” notice, a register-genre of discourse in terms of the relevant criteria (see §4.2 above), serves as the vehicle for the interdiscursive transition between the two domains, the upshot of which is an invitation to view a political party as an object of consumption, as a so-called “consumer durable”. This crossdomain mapping is indeed marked, exhibiting a structure that even lends itself to the formula standardly used to signal metaphor; namely, a political party is a consumer product. However, in view of the strictures just placed on the applicability of the metaphoric-metonymic distinction, it is not suggested that a similar formula could be derived from every such instance of this type of satirical method. Turning to its more localised constituents, Text A invokes both of the requisite stylistic ingredients for satirical composition, a prime and a dialectic. The

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prime element is activated through the intersemiotic mediation of a particular register of discourse, in this case the familiar “Product Recall” notice that features regularly in various print media. The notice, in its “straight” version, is intended to recall to the manufacturer those white goods and motor vehicles that have, subsequent to their public launch, been discovered to be prone to faults, mechanical failure or problems of safety. In its stylistic anatomy, the spoof notice format is observed faithfully to the last degree. A square block marks off a distinct graphological boundary, while the superscript trade mark logo (“TM”) picks out clearly the patented brand at issue. The “branded product” theme is sustained further through repeated definite referring expressions (“the New Labour”) which cast the faulty product as a unitary material entity. Other significant features of lexico-grammar include the use of nominalisation (“Recall”), moodless units (used in both headings) and passives (“Placed on the market . . .”; “Customers are advised . . .” and so on) which serve collectively to consolidate the formal, transactional register of written discourse which is being echoed ironically in Text A. Additional indices embodying the experiential and interpersonal metafunctions (again, see §4.2 above) of the particular register in question include depersonalisation, which is effected both by the passive constructions already noted and by nominal agents (“The manufacturers”) in the main body of the notice. Working against the prime, and establishing the oppositional mode of irony in the text, is the dialectic component which injects into the “product recall” strand something obviously at odds with the echoed discourse framework. The faulty “product”, it turns out, is not a material commodity like a washing machine or a car, but the British “New” Labour Party. Once the political-partyas-consumer-product merger is established, the way is opened up for other more localised techniques of satirical embellishment. Puns, predictably, bridge as stylistic hooks the two interdiscursive frameworks of reference. The lexical items “recall” and “return”, in addition to their sense in everyday usage, have particular resonance in the political context: politicians and political parties are returned to Parliament, while Parliament may itself be recalled. Similarly, the faulty product might “bend” or “buckle”, suggesting tensile weakness in a perhaps metallic object; yet the political party might also bend or buckle in the sense of vacillation or wavering brought about by media and public pressure. Following this particular sequence in the text is a further internal collision. The shift to the colloquial idiom “fall to bits . . .” signals a switch in register by dropping the tenor of discourse to below the level of stylistic neutrality. Yet even further oppositional elements follow. Negation, interestingly, emerges as a device of “contraexpectation” (see §5.4 below) in the text: no claims for

Ways of doing satire 

compensation will be considered while the New Labour cannot be returned, either to power or to the manufacturer. Here the subversive element in satire’s design is taken to the extreme insofar as the very point of the product recall notice is to, well, recall. The New LabourTM is it seems neither returnable nor recallable, a product which falls well short of the requirements demanded of it when placed on the political market. Overall, the kind of merger in discourse that is exhibited by Text A is a mode of metaphoric satirical composition. It involves cross-domain mapping that is encoded in the pulling together of two systems in different orders of discourse. And just as with the metaphoric trope that informs it, the conjunction of two domains of reference invites a fresh perspective, which, in the specific situation of satirical discourse, translates into a “new way of seeing” a projected object of attack. Given that the metaphoric organising principle is primarily interdiscursive rather than intradiscursive in general orientation (although see my earlier point about the categorial indeterminacy of this distinction), the natural range of possibilities for compositional experimentation within this mode is potentially endless. There may even be grounds for developing a further set of subclassifications of the principle which takes account of various qualitatively different textual reflexes of cross-domain mapping and which accommodates the various methods available for blending, merging and combining dissonant frameworks of discourse. Although further refinement of this sort is beyond the scope of this already full chapter, it is worth considering one final example of a piece of satire which, in its method of design, shades towards the metaphoric end of the compositional continuum. Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” (1729) lays good claim to being the most famous piece of satire ever written. The full title of Swift’s text is “A Modest Proposal for preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland from being a Burthen to their Parents or Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick”, and this is important because, as Bex notes, it immediately contextualises the work against the proliferation of early eighteenth century pamphlets which offered economic solutions to what was then perceived as the “Irish problem” (Bex 1996: 227). In fact, the first seven paragraphs of the Proposal review various schemes and recommendations, including some championed by Swift himself in the years before, to alleviate poverty and starvation and generally to improve “the present deplorable state of the kingdom”. It is only after about nine hundred words of text that its mild-mannered speaker eventually details his “proposal”:

 Chapter 5

Text F I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection. I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout. (from: Swift 1986 [1729]: 2175–2176)

This is not the place to advance a critique of the implications for the study of literature of this piece of satire; suffice it to say, a vast amount of academic attention has been already been devoted to the subject (see Chapter 3 above) and no doubt many more critical interpretations of this particular text remain to be written. What is worth investigating in the present context is the extent to which the proposed model of satire can be applied to the Swift text. The categories of that analytic model have been tested and modified using a cluster of examples of contemporary political satire, all of which were written well over two and half centuries after the “Modest Proposal”. There is some irony then in that, of all the illustrations used in this book, it is an eighteenth century text which seems most neatly and readily to conform with the terms of the model. Compared say to the equivalent structures in Text C (see §4.4 above), both prime and dialectic elements are easily identified in the Proposal, while the collision in-text between these two components is conspicuous indeed. The first seven paragraphs of the text establish the prime, by echoing the discourse of the political tract which was a commonplace in early eighteenth century Britain and Ireland. Working off general knowledge resources, the prime establishes a strong interpretative bedrock for its projected humour community. Furthermore, the suggestion in these early paragraphs that a proposed solution to the condition of poverty is in the offing is framed within the “common expressions and insinuating tone” much favoured by the contemporaneous pamphleteers (Bex 1996: 227); to that extent, the prime echoes the conventions of a genre of discourse rather than the idiolect of an individual text. The dialectic element, when eventually delivered, is activated by the startling sequence in Text F where the persona proposes to alleviate the burden of overpopulation in Ireland by eating that country’s children. Whereas this shift is both brutal and stark, somewhat of a quantum leap in its transition from a seemingly moral framework into a framework of abnormality and obscenity, it is accomplished in so unassuming a manner that its full import hardly seems to register. Unlike the stylistic profile drawn earlier for Text C,

Ways of doing satire 

the dialectic element here is neither staggered nor isochronous; the collision works instead as an abrupt shift that depends for much of its impact on the long setup phase in the prime. True, there is an earlier reference (prior to the extract) to children as a “saleable commodity”, which might be interpreted as a signal of the onset of the dialectic element, but as Bradford notes, this comment is well within the figurative language of hard economics where labour is capital (Bradford 1997: 131). The discursive space between the prime and dialectic phases is indeed wide here, and a case could be made on these grounds for suggesting that the satire shifts towards “invective” in its general import. Dane, for example, suggests that satire can be conceptualised as a cline at one end of which sits “invective, polemic, vitriol” and at the other sits “gentle satire” (Dane 1980: 152). Although Dane’s framework is markedly different from the one employed here and no criteria are offered for the recognition of its categories, it may well be that his perception of a continuum between vitriolic and more attenuated satire arises as an intuitive reaction to the degree of perceived discursive space between prime and dialectic elements (and see also Chapter 7 below). These observations are not to suggest that in its overall structural design Text F is stylistically more “simple” than any of the other examples of satire covered thus far in this book. Readers may make up their own minds about the degree of sophistication or otherwise in Swift’s text, but there is one peculiar feature in its compositional makeup that bears further scrutiny here. In the Proposal, the dialectic element seems to be imbricated, by which I mean that it is stacked or layered across and between different levels of language organisation. In other words, the pattern of cross-domain mapping resonates from its organisation at the metafunctional level (see Figure 1 in §4.2) right up to the opposition it engenders between, what might be called, “cultural cognitive models” (P. Morgan 2001: 77; and see below). Although delivered with somewhat of a jolt in the light of its anterior co-text, Text F’s central “collision of ideas”, to echo Popper’s wording, is sustained by tensions between a range of hierarchically ordered levels in the language system. For example, what is projected through the experiential function, the novel “idea” of eating children, is offset by what is projected through the interpersonal metafunction, with the “modesty” of the proposer encoded in a elaborate network of politeness markers (more on which below). Another collision occurs in the register variable of field of discourse. Reflecting early eighteenth-century British interest in French cuisine, the passage is massively over-lexicalised with sets of terms from that culinary register, with what Nokes refers to rather more directly as “posh terms from the new French cookery” (Nokes 1987: 183). With its pretend appeal to

 Chapter 5

the moneyed middle-classes, the “fricassee” and the “ragout” are just two of the many culinary delights which will tempt the palate. It seems, indeed, that a great deal of the oppositional irony in the Proposal lies not so much in its suggestion that we should eat children, but in the prurient gastronomic delight it takes in suggesting how we should eat children. Both superimposed onto and to some extent underpinned by the metafunctions and variables of register is the startling reversal that inheres in a collision between, as suggested above, cultural cognitive models (CCMs). Morgan defines a cultural cognitive model as a mental representation which is not specific to an individual or to personal experience, but which is shared, culturally, within a “thought community” (P. Morgan 2001: 77–78). This is an interesting idea which in certain respects parallels the concept of the “humour community” used in a number of places in this book. Morgan notes, from data relating to the way the behaviour of politicians is understood by the media, that certain “linguistic triggers” activate clashes in the meanings of fundamental CCMs, and that these clashes are often played out in debates about what is acceptable in public as opposed to private spheres. Translated to the Swift text, the compositional form of the Proposal arguably serves as the linguistic trigger that leads ultimately to a dispute about the meaning of a cultural cognitive model. That is to say, the experiential-interpersonal clash identified above has its reflex in a collision between the perceived “public” enormity of the idea proposed and the “private” modesty and humility of its proposer. If these general observations about the presence of an imbricated dialectic and a problematised CCM can be accepted in principle, there remains an important issue to address in connection with Swift’s text. Why, in the face of such a raw and stark conceptual reorientation in meaning, do so many readers still not derive a satirical interpretation from the “Modest Proposal”? George, for one, reports that his teaching of this text regularly elicits “straight” interpretations, embodied in “the typical naïve response ‘This Swift guy is sick!”’ (George 1989: 38). Nokes points out that although his student readers usually identify the pamphlet as ironic, the Proposal still has the capacity to deceive the reader with its “earnest well-intentioned tone” (Nokes 1987: 74). This he suggests is largely because Swift has gone to “considerable trouble to build up a coherent character for his modest proposer”, adding that the proposer “is not completely obtuse to the hideous implications of his proposal, and there is a nervous cough in his voice when he hopes it ‘will not be liable to the least objection”’ (74). Even if only intuitively arrived at, the notion of the “earnest well-intentioned tone” is insightful, suggesting that the interpersonal markers deployed throughout the proposal shore up the impression of the utterly rea-

Ways of doing satire 

sonable and, well, modest predisposition of the proposer. It is important to recognise that the Proposal is an offer, albeit a fake one, and that offers constitute what Brown and Levinson in their influential model of politeness call Face Threatening Acts (FTAs). Even though an offer predicts some positive future act of the speaker towards the hearer, it still puts pressure on the hearer to accept or reject it, and possibly to incur a debt (Brown & Levinson 1987: 66). An offer of goods, services or even information is therefore a potential threat to face, specifically to negative face, because it encroaches upon the addressee’s desire to be free from coercion or imposition. Some form of mitigation in the speech act, through the pragmatic indices of the interpersonal metafunction, is therefore normally warranted. And it is this mitigation which engenders the mildness of tone which so marks the stylistic profile of the proposer’s “voice”. Without even attempting any comprehensiveness in description, here are some of the numerous politeness strategies, from across the Proposal as a whole, that are used to redress negative face. The proposer constantly hedges the illocutionary force of his offer through epistemic modals and other strategies such as epistemic lexical verbs. This, for example, is a sequence where the second of these devices follows hard on the heels of the first: “it would, I think with humble submission, be a loss . . .”. This particular sequence also invokes another key negative politeness strategy: deference (Brown & Levinson 1978: 178). Here and passim the proposer signals a deferential bearing through a substrategy which involves humbling his own capacities and abilities. The proposer also indicates pessimism about the likely outcomes of the FTA: he can only “hope” (passim) that his suggestion will not be objected to. He invokes various forms of apology, one of which consists in the giving of overwhelming reasons for doing the FTA (e.g., “I must confess the times require . . .”). The proposer goes on record as incurring a debt (“I freely own . . .”) and he claims common ground with the hearer (“it is very well known that they are everyday dying”). In the sequence “I think it is agreed by all parties . . .” both the hedging and claiming common ground strategies are employed. Furthermore, he impersonalises the speaker and hearer while carrying out the FTA. Thus, in “I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration”, the proposal is not directed in the second person to his interlocutor but instead to a nonspecific addressee in the third person. And finally, working alongside impersonalisation is the strategy of point of view distancing (Brown & Levinson 1987: 204). Text F contains just one of many uses of this tactic in the Proposal as a whole where its appeal to the wisdom of the “American of my acquaintance” functions to dissociate the speaker from the epistemic source of the face threatening act.

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In a certain sense, the Proposal is somewhat of an object lesson in negative politeness phenomena, where seemingly every strategy that could be used is used. The upshot of this is that the proposer is indeed, as Nokes’s comments suggest, a “coherent character” insofar as he is politely assiduous in respect of every single suggestion made. Far from being obtuse to the implications of his proposal, the speaker acts as a reasonable “competent adult member”, to adopt Brown and Levinson’s term, by making full use of the pragmatic and communicative resources of his speech community. Given the formidable array of politeness strategies on display, it is perhaps no surprise then that there is scope for a “straight” reading of the Proposal, even in spite of its embodiment of a profound rupture in the cultural and cognitive domains of acceptability and decency. I have suggested elsewhere that Swift’s Proposal, with its focus on starvation, poverty and suffering, is a example of satire which develops an experiential object of attack (Simpson 2000: 251). As opposed to, say, episodic satire whose target is specific incidents and events in the public sphere, experiential satire targets more stable aspects of the human condition and experience. However, that earlier publication fails to articulate clearly that all categories of satirical target can ultimately be expanded upwards to encompass the discursive practices of elite groups, dominant institutions or powerful individuals (see, for example, §4.4 above). Moreover, as noted at the beginning of the previous chapter, a single satirical text may realise multiple targets. Thus, in addition to its polemic on the socioeconomic origins of poverty, the Proposal also attacks those pamphleteers of the time whose motives were less than charitable; pamphleteers who, as Bex notes, had used the ostensible functions of the genre “to conceal, at least in some writers, naked self-interest” (Bex 1996: 227). The most important issue however is that the concept of the satirical target, as delineated throughout this book, is best conceptualised as one subject position in a network of subject positions for satirical discourse. Furthermore, the bonds between these positions (see Figure 3) allow renegotiation and redefinition. This principle is especially important in the case of the satirist, position A, on the triad of discourse. It has been argued from Chapter 3 onwards that it is unproductive to try to read off a consistent or immutable ideological stance for any one position on the triad. To this effect, I have tried to resist discussing the “ideology” of this or that satirist, or, in the case of Swift, attempting to reconcile the satirical thrust of the Proposal with Swift’s own perhaps radical or progressive “position” on the tract’s object of attack. A broader look at Swift’s oeuvre makes for a very good illustration of this point. Eight years after the Proposal was written, Swift published a “Proposal

Ways of doing satire 

for giving Badges to the Beggars of Dublin” (Swift 1737; see Nokes 1985: 400). This later pamphlet involved a scheme to identify all “genuine” beggars of Dublin with badges which should be worn “well sewn upon one of their shoulders, always visible, on pain of being whipped”. If not as stark as the “Modest Proposal”, the “Badges” Proposal is certainly disconcerting, especially in the context of contemporary knowledge of the Nazi excesses of World War Two. What is particularly disquieting about the “Badges” proposal, however, is that it looks to all intents and purposes as if Swift basically meant what he said. Critical sources attest to the “serious” intent of the proposal, with Nokes referring to Swift’s pamphlet as “a chilly and unforgiving note on which to end his political career” (Nokes 1985: 400; see also Ehrenpreis 1962; Griffin 1994). It is interesting that Swift signs his own name to the later proposal, which suggests that any claim to the possibility of an echoic element in its composition is being rescinded. The proposer also refers to “the privileges of the Dublin beggar” in a manner which Nokes says is intended with “no irony at all” (Nokes 1987: 184), although how this reading is reached is not explained. The real heart of the matter is that there is simply no discernible dialectic element, no secondary phase of oppositional irony in the “Badges” proposal. Without that in-text collision working off a prime element, a satirical footing cannot be activated, so any standing the text might have as satire simply collapses like a house of cards. What exactly Swift did “mean” by the “Badges” proposal has been the subject of much debate, with deteriorating mental health – he was declared insane a few years later – one possible cause of his seeming loss of irony. However, the significant issue as far as the present study is concerned is that the “Modest Proposal” and the “Badges” Proposal exhibit very different compositional structures and that it is the ironic phasing of the former only which invites a satirical reading. In contrast, the absence of such ironic phasing in the “Badges” proposal means that that text’s claim to “sincerity” remains largely intact. Quite how this notion of sincerity is tied up with the concept of irony in satirical discourse is one of the main concerns of the next chapter.

. Conclusions This chapter has been concerned with investigating the techniques of satirical composition and has sought to isolate some of the resources used by satirists as they go about “doing” satire. However, the coverage here has been in essence no more than a snapshot of the range of possible conformations of satirical discourse. Indeed, a full-blown account of satirical method is unlikely to be fram-

 Chapter 5

able within the confines of a single chapter, and any attempt to do so would be misleading and partial. It is important to reemphasise then that this chapter has been more an examination of some basic techniques than a comprehensive survey of all aspects of satirical design. A perennial problem in dealing with satire lies in trying to capture the way this form of discourse sets itself apart, on the one hand, from nonhumorous discourse, and, on the other, from other forms of humour like jokes and witticisms. One recurrent feature in satirical design, possibly separating it from these other modes of discourse, is the sort of conceptual twist which was informally referred to, in certain of the foregoing textual analyses, as “contraexpectation”. Although relatively underdeveloped in those analyses, the concept may serve, with fuller investigation, to narrow further the particular properties of satirical texts. One of a range of frameworks that might productively be brought to bear on the notion of “contraexpectation” is Giora’s model of the “informativeness requirement” in discourse. Working from experimental evidence, Giora (1988) argues first of all for the existence of a continuum of informativeness in the way concepts are formed in (nonhumorous) expository texts. A message, she proposes, is informative relative to the number of uncertainties it reduces or eliminates, such that textual coherence can be plotted as a progression from the least to the most informative message (Giora 1988: 551). Text construction is thus regulated, commencing with references to less informative, prototypical exemplars and moving towards more informative, more dissimilar borderline exemplars. In a subsequent publication, the same author applies her graded informativeness requirement model to jokes (Giora 1991). Unlike that found in expository texts, the progression of concept formation in jokes violates the graded informativeness requirement by forcing a reader/listener to cancel an unmarked interpretation and replace it with a marked interpretation. Aligning this point with incongruity theories of humour, Giora argues that the informativeness of jokes, compared to expository discourse, is often assigned a “surprise value” which arises from the final appearance of the least probable message in a set relative to a given question, that message being marked because of its distance from the message preceding it (Giora 1991: 467–471). Now, what is interesting is that this formula, which distinguishes the organisation of the nonhumorous expository text from the joke text, says very little per se about how information is organised in satirical discourse. That in itself makes for a productive point of comparison, and may also indirectly shed some light on the concept of contraexpectation in satire. Consider for instance two of the texts analysed above under the umbrella term of metonymic method:

Ways of doing satire

Text E with its marked negation and Text D with its “underlexicalised” attenuated focalisation. Both texts fly thoroughly in the face of any text composition model which is organised along the lines of an informativeness requirement. This is precisely because satire’s very compositional structure, with a dialectic component colliding with a prime, is designed to arrest, distort and fracture the progress of textual construction. While this makes satire an altogether different system of communication when compared to expository discourse, it does not necessarily follow that satire measures up to the informativeness criteria for joke texts. For instance, Giora’s model postulates that “the joke does not progress gradually from the least to the most informative/marked text constituent. Rather the passage from the least to the most informative message is abrupt” (Giora 1991: 471; original emphasis). Although this can be no more than flagged up as a possible line of future research, my own interpretation of how satire might be sustained in an informativeness requirement model is that it exhibits marked underinformativeness. Whereas standard expository texts are considered informative, but not markedly informative as they evolve gradually from the least to the most informative message, joke texts are markedly informative because their final informative messages are too distant, in terms of number of similar features, from the messages preceding them. Satire is markedly under-informative on two grounds: first, because it does not progress from the least informative to the most informative message (indeed it often pointedly inverts this sequence) and second, because it does not necessarily involve a final message, abrupt or otherwise, that is necessarily distant from any of the messages preceding. Such a line of inquiry, where the ad hoc term “contraexpectation” might be more rigorously reworked as a category of marked under-informativeness, is one of many that would be worth pursuing with regard to the composition of satire. The next, immediate concern, however, is to begin to think about what impact these compositional techniques have on the addressee in satirical discourse processing; to think in other words about how the satiree reaches “satirical uptake”. Indeed, the sustained emphasis on the text production side in both this and the previous chapter has tended to create somewhat of an imbalance in the way the satirical model has been developed thus far. This imbalance will be addressed, and it is hoped, resolved satisfactorily in the next chapter.

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Chapter 6

Satirical uptake

. . . what I wonder at is yer sayin’ the humorous things sae aisey like. Some says ye mak them up aforehand, but I ken that’s not true. “No only is’t no true,” said Tammas, “but it couldna be true. Them at says sic things . . . hasna nae idea o’ what humour is. It’s a thing ’at spoots oot o’ its ain accord. Some of the maist humorous things I’ve ever said cam oot, as a body may say, by themsels.” J. M. Barrie A Window in Thrums

. Introduction This chapter signals an important shift in focus, away from the methods used for creating satirical texts and towards the inferencing strategies used by interpreters to “get the point” of a piece of satirical writing. It highlights the active, and to some extent, collaborative process whereby a potential satiree works through the ironic phases embodied in both the prime and dialectic components of satirical discourse, resulting in the injection into the discursive event of a third ironic phase, an “irony of conferral”. The overarching theoretical construct which frames this chapter is, to borrow the term from Austin’s influential work in speech act theory, the linguistic-pragmatic notion of uptake. Developing the Austinian conceptualisation further, the chapter also explores the status of satire as a perlocutionary act. In Austin’s own terms, uptake encompasses the understanding of the illocutionary force and content of the utterance by its addressee, and “the perlocutionary effects on the addressee brought about by means of uttering the sentence, such effects being special to the circumstances of the utterance” (Austin 1962: 116). In respect of this definition, it will be argued that satire has no ontological existence but, rather, that the status of “satire” is something that is conferred upon a text and this conferral is as much a consequence of the way the text is processed and interpreted as it is of the way it is produced and disseminated. The concept of perlocution in satirical discourse, it will be argued, relies heavily on structured patterns of inferenc-

 Chapter 6

ing by the satiree; patterns of inferencing which require ab initio the resolution of the certain elements in textual organisation which then push the satiree towards a phase of text processing where a satirical interpretation may (or may not) be accepted. This chapter, in sum, examines how and where the addressee is situated in the interactive event that is satirical discourse. Couched more generally in the tradition of linguistic humorology, this chapter also seeks to redress what Latta refers to as the “stimulus-side bias” in humour studies (Latta 1999: 9). Going as far as to call it a “prejudice”, Latta challenges the assumption in many theories of verbal humour that the key to understanding lies entirely on the stimulus (textual construction) side. He prefers instead to account for patterns on the “response-side” of the basic humour process, although he surely strays wide of the mark in saying that the stimuli for humour can take “any of a virtually unlimited number of forms and can occur in any of a virtually unlimited number of combinations” (Latta 1999: 44). By way of contrast, it is worth recalling that Draitser’s study of satirical method (1994), cited at the start of the previous chapter, is concentrated steadfastly upon the stimulus side insofar as it categorises the methods employed by the (one) satirist, without factoring into the categorisation any account of the text-processing strategies that might be employed by a putative humour community. The position adopted in the present study attempts to steer a course between the two positions: it allows that a text’s particular design is very much a location and genus for humour, although it also accepts that what makes this or that piece of language humorous is very much grounded in the structure of response to that textual design. Set in the context of previous chapters, this is where the position of the satiree, subject placement B on the discursive triad of Figure 3, is brought to the fore. It will be emphasised that this key discursive position is both heterogeneous in terms its constituency and active (as opposed to passive) in terms of its general interactive predisposition. That said, this is not the only study which attempts to develop a reasonably rigorous and retrievable system of analysis for assessing, in linguisticpragmatic terms, the organisation of text-processing strategies in satirical discourse. In an important article deserving of specific comment here, Pfaff and Gibbs (1997) conduct four interconnected informant-based experiments where they elicit the responses of 93 undergraduate students to satirical writing. The text upon which the experiments are based is James Garner’s collection Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, among whose spoof fairy tales is featured the “Three Codependent Goats Gruff ”. In the original story, three wily goats try to elude a troll that prevents them from crossing a bridge, although in the politically correct (PC) version each goat refuses to be eaten without consulting its

Satirical uptake

family members. Pfaff and Gibbs’s study operates from two basic assumptions about satirical discourse. One is that understanding the point of satire requires an assessment of what an author intends to communicate by his or her words, making “the recovery of authorial intent” central to people’s interpretation of satire (1997: 45). The other assumption concerns the “object of satire” by which Pfaff and Gibbs mean the target which is constituted by the author’s satirical intent (1997: 52). In the Garner stories, for instance, the “object” is political correctness, and the informant-driven part of their investigation is to try to establish how many participants successfully identify this object. As far as the experimental procedure itself is concerned, a “pre-post” design is employed wherein students are asked, in the first instance, for their general perceptions of the stories, from which their answers are sorted into seven categories of response (such as whether it was thought that the author was attacking political correctness, whether the author used PC words satirically, whether the author was writing in a genuine PC manner and so on). Next, Pfaff and Gibbs tell the informants that the Garner texts were satirical and were using humour to poke fun at political correctness, after which they ask the students to repeat the experiment, thereby eliciting a further set of responses with which comparison with the original set can be made. A striking feature of Pfaff and Gibbs’s results is the sheer diversity of the informants’ responses. Initial perceptions of the “intent” of the stories were not only wide-ranging, but many answers fell into more than one of the seven categories drawn up by the co-authors of the study. What is especially interesting is how many informants resisted the satirical meaning even after the explicit cue from the investigators, while others who had “uncovered” the satirical intent were still unsure as to how far the author (Garner) wanted to take his critique of political correctness. Pfaff and Gibbs argue that while informants may not recover the thesis “expressly intended” by the author, they still try “to construct a coherent picture of the author and what he might have intended” (1997: 55). Overall, only 21 of the 93 responses seemed to show an unquestionable understanding that the author had satirical intentions and that the object of the satire was political correctness. Indeed, many informants thought that the writer was actually endorsing political correctness, thereby aligning the author with the very opinions targeted in the satire. Pfaff and Gibbs develop this issue thus: the satirist risks the recovery of some unintended object by choosing a genre in which his or her intentions are not explicitly revealed, but are only alluded to through an implicit connection between the real world and the world of the text. Some readers simply infer that the author is actually endorsing the object that he means to critique. (Pfaff & Gibbs 1997: 60)

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 Chapter 6

There is much that is of interest in Pfaff and Gibbs’s experiment, especially in the way it highlights just how unstable and fractured are the protocolled responses to satire elicited from what appears to be a reasonably homogeneous group of informants. Where the present study diverges principally from their particular empirical-quantitative line of investigation is in its attempt to build, and then apply to texts, a broad theoretical model of satirical discourse. In that respect, there are significant points of disagreement about the nature of satire between the position adopted here and that in the Pfaff and Gibbs experiment. For a start, those authors embark on their testing procedures having determined a priori what the “object” of the particular piece of satire is, even though later results show that a minority of informants actually concur with their reading. As the remarks quoted above should reveal, much is made in this article of the “recovery of the author’s intention” and of how certain readers tend to “miss the point entirely”, a position which tends to cast the processing of satirical texts rather in the light of a search for a unitary and immanent meaning that has been “put there” by an author. Although acknowledgement is made of the risk involved in writing satire – as the inset quote above does indeed allow – informants’ responses which disclosed that a non-satirical reading had been reached were still framed in the terms of a “mistaken belief ” about the meaning of the text (1997: 53). It seems hard to justify the notion of a “mistaken belief ” in an empirical study of text-processing, especially in one where 67% of informants reached the conclusion that the author was endorsing (and not critiquing) political correctness. Put another way, if only 21 out of 93 informants see the satirical “object” of the Garner story, then that simply means that here is a text whose target is not readily identified and whose satirical status is thus only marginal for that particular humour community. This does not invalidate the premise that a writer who sets out consciously to produce a work of satire hopes to enable certain interpretative pathways at the expense of other “straight”, non-satirical ones. The issue is rather that satirical discourse is not amenable to the sort of binarism which is calibrated through an opposition between “right” and “wrong” interpretations. Moreover, writers simply cannot exercise that degree of control over the interpretation of a text, especially, and if the observations made across previous chapters are correct, that text is constituted by two juxtaposed modes of irony and is framed within a discourse complex comprised of three, possibly conflictual, subject positions. Of course, this is not to suggest for a moment that Pfaff and Gibbs are under some obligation to build a theoretical model of satire; a model, like the one under development here, which seeks to explain discourse processing through sets of globalised inferencing strategies and which is “macrosocial” (Steen 1999: 110) in its broad

Satirical uptake

design. Their study, by contrast, inheres in a micro-model of discourse which is rather more interested in the empirical investigation of individual language users intentions, than in the development of a macro-model of satire (and see later, §8.2). Another significant aspect of Pfaff and Gibbs’s experiment, which impacts upon certain issues raised later in this chapter is to do with the overall profile and predisposition of the informant group, the undergraduate students from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Pfaff and Gibbs observe, although the implication of this is not given the prominence that it might, that their student groups were not only “quite radical” but that they hailed from an institution “noted for its liberal atmosphere” (1997: 67). Given that this group would be likely to support political correctness, the “blatant exaggeration” in the Garner tales would, to them, not be that obvious and this may explain why so many thought the author was endorsing PC values rather than criticising them. Even when told that the stories were satirical, students seemed reluctant to relinquish their initial comments. Much of this serves to underscore my earlier point that the status as satire of the Garner text is problematic in the context of that particular humour community. However, it also suggests that in the triad of subject placements in satirical discourse, the student group that constitutes the satiree, position B on the triad, is positioned close to the very target of the satire itself, position C. In this sense, positions B and C on the triad are in some degree proximal, which may explain why it is harder to wedge them apart; that is, for the piece of satire to lengthen the bond between positions B and C in the manner suggested in Chapter 4. Although Pfaff and Gibbs talk passim of the constitution of the informant group as “ordinary readers”, there is probably no such thing as an ordinary reader of satire, and the liberal, radical undergraduates of UCSC may not be the best exemplars of subject placement B in this particular configuration of discourse. In an insightful peripheral comment developing the work of Gruner, Pfaff and Gibbs note that people who supported Richard Nixon tended to enjoy satirical humour which targeted the president’s rival, presidential candidate George McGovern, rather more than that which targeted Nixon (1997: 48). Again, there is a sense that the closer the discoursally constructed subject positions B and C become, the greater the limiting effect on the successful identification of the target of the satire in question. This important issue will be returned to later, in the third section of this chapter. Finally, a strand which runs through Pfaff and Gibbs’s study concerns the justification offered by certain of the informants as to why they found the Garner work non-satirical. When a satirical interpretation was dispreferred, it was normally on the grounds that the text was taken as a “sincere expression of

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[the satirists] view” (1997: 60). What emerges from the Pfaff and Gibbs study is the sense that the “mistaken” readings were attributable to the inference by the informant that the text was a sincere expression of Garner’s feelings, while the “correct” identification of the “object” was reached through the assumption that the writing source was being insincere. As this chapter later seeks to demonstrate, the concept of “sincerity” is an absolutely pivotal construct in the satirical text-processing mechanism, and to that extent, much of what Pfaff and Gibbs say about the issue of sincerity is undoubtedly accurate. Indeed, the present model is underpinned by the assumption that the discoursal make-up of a satirical text in tandem with the interactive predisposition of addressee serves to problematise its claim of sincerity. Ultimately, that claim has to be assumed by the satiree to be relinquished in order for a satirical interpretation to be reached. Nonetheless, that process of itself does not make a text satirical. For instance, it may well be that the students who participated in the Pfaff and Gibbs experiment were prepared to ratify the “insincerity” of Garner’s text but nonetheless thought it inappropriate, especially given that they, as has been suggested, occupied a position close in the triad to position C. As the remainder of this chapter hopes to prove, satirical uptake requires that a subject be placed onto a satirical footing, and that that placement arises out of a degree of calculated and situated interactive risk on the part of the satirist. That placement also requires that issues not only of sincerity but of truth and appropriateness be factored concomitantly into the interaction. What is required now is a more comprehensive pragmatic model which defines and accounts systematically for these parameters in discourse processing, and it is to one such model that we now turn.

. A model for satirical uptake: Habermas and “universal pragmatics” This chapter opened with a brief reference to speech act theory, touching upon the ideas of the influential philosopher of natural language, J. L. Austin. This section introduces work on “universal pragmatics” by the Frankfurt-School sociopolitical philosopher, Jürgen Habermas. Although Habermas has, almost pointedly, little to say directly on any aspect of verbal humour, the broader design of his model will be used to try to frame the global inferencing strategies used by people when they interpret satire. The conjunction of Austin and Habermas may seem an unlikely one, but a key theoretical connection that sits at the interface between the two is found in the work of John Searle. Although Searle’s extensions to Austin’s model have admittedly not always been greeted

Satirical uptake 

with ringing endorsement, his development and expansion both of the concept of illocutionary force and of the preconditions that attach to illocutionary acts should not be overlooked (see, for instance, Searle 1969, 1971, 1975, 1976). For instance, in his famous treatment of the illocutionary act of promising, Searle highlights the preparatory, sincerity and essential conditions that attach to the successful performance of this particular type of speech act (Searle 1971: 47– 53). The notion of the sincerity condition, in particular, forms an important bridge between Austin’s concepts and the type of model that will be elaborated shortly. This however is not the place to attempt a detailed critique of Searle’s work in natural language philosophy, although an excellent overview of his general contribution to pragmatics, with criticisms and suggested extensions, can be found in Levinson (1983: 238ff.). Suffice it to say, any subsequent points of intersection between Searle and Habermas will be noted where relevant in the analysis that follows. The task of a programme in universal pragmatics is, according to Habermas, to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible understanding; to account, in other words, for the general presuppositions of communicative action (1979: 1). The goal of coming to an understanding in interaction is achieved by the bringing about of an agreement, and that agreement terminates in the “intersubjective mutuality of reciprocal understanding, shared knowledge, mutual trust, and accord with one another” (1979: 3). Habermas goes on to argue that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech action, raise universal validity claims and then assume that these claims can be vindicated. Thus, an idealised speaker (in an albeit highly normative speech situation) must in the first instance utter something that is comprehensible in the given language. Aside from comprehensibility, there are, according to Habermas, three other principal validity claims – truth, truthfulness and rightness – which are required to be ratified for communicative agreement to be attained. Before examining in more detail the nature of the validity claims, it is worth sketching the broader theoretical paradigm in which the claims are embraced. Habermas’s model is intended to function as a model of social action which is dependent on subjects’ participation within a kind of pragmatic “infrastructure” and to that extent, this framework is markedly more global in its conceptualisation that those of either Austin or Searle. Habermas argues that access to a symbolically structured domain calls for procedures of interpretation that are conceptually distinct from those developed in the natural sciences. McCarthy, translator and principal commentator on Habermas, suggests that these proce-

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dures are designed to grasp the “meaning” that is constitutive of social reality. McCarthy elaborates thus: Social action [according to Habermas] depends on the agent’s “definition of the situation”, and this is not solely a matter for subjective motivations. The meanings to which social action is orientated are primarily intersubjective meanings constitutive of the sociocultural matrix in which individuals find themselves and act: inherited values and world views, institutionalised roles and social norms, and so on. Any methodology that systematically neglects the interpretative schemata through which social action is itself mediated, that pursues the tasks of concept and theory formation in abstraction from the prior categorical formation of social reality, is doomed to failure. (McCarthy 1979: xi)

The first of the validity claims which underpin the “sociocultural matrix” referred to by McCarthy is instigated by language usage, and as has been noted, the only validity claim that language itself raises, at least within the tenets of this framework, is comprehensibility. Rather idiosyncratically, Habermas distinguishes “linguistic rule competence”, which is the stricture that governs comprehensibility, from “communicative rule competence”, which is the benchmark for the remaining three validity claims (1979: 26). To that extent, the validity claim of comprehensibility is in some measure bracketed off from the other claims: this domain is principally linguistic in character and takes no account of what Habermas terms “speech function”. The remaining three validity claims, however, are very much tied up with speech function in that their mutual recognition by participants in discourse is the principal impetus for communicative understanding. Put another way, speakers and hearers have to raise, and recognise as justified, each of the claims in order to accomplish successful communication. The first of them is the claim of truth. Habermas conceives of this claim as the intersection between language and the world of external nature; how an utterance, in other words, situates a sentence in relation to external reality. With the phrase “external nature”, Habermas has something very specific in mind. External nature encompasses what is supposed to be an existing state of affairs, the world of objects about which one can make true or false statements. This is the environment that the speaker objectifies in the third person attitude of an observer, the world towards which one adopts an “objectivating attitude”. This explains Habermas’ consistent use of scare quotes in describing “the” world of external nature. This world, in his terms, means the “objectivated segment of reality that the adult subject is able (even if only mediately) to perceive and manipulate” (1979: 67–68).

Satirical uptake

The second of the claims is “truthfulness”, which is distinguished from “truth” and is used interchangeably with the term “sincerity”. Unlike the claim of truth, sincerity arises from the subjectivity of the speaker or hearer and is disclosed (or concealed) in “a first person attitude”. Habermas classes as “internal nature” all wishes, feelings and intentions to which an “I” has privileged access and through which that “I” can express their own experiences before a public. This sincerity claim centres on “a particular inner world (of the speaker) as the totality of his intentional experience” (1979: 67). Sincerity (truthfulness) is thus the internal reality that a speaker would like to disclose in the public sphere as his intentions, such that the speaker’s own world of internal experiences can be expressed either sincerely (truthfully) or insincerely (untruthfully). The last of the claims, appropriateness, embodies the normative reality for what is intersubjectively recognised as a legitimate interpersonal relationship. Governing this claim, according to Habermas, is a conformative attitude to the institutional systems of culture and society. Set against both “the” world of external nature and “my” world of internal nature, the validity claim of appropriateness centres on “our” social life-world of shared values and norms, of roles and rules. Appropriateness (or “rightness”) governs whether the speech act can fit (or fail to fit) the totality of “all normatively regulated interpersonal relations that count as legitimate in a given society” (1979: 67). Within the framework of appropriateness, utterances are themselves either right (that is legitimate, justifiable) or wrong (illegitimate, unjustifiable). In Figure 4 there is a diagrammatic summary of the principal tenets and categories of the framework of universal pragmatics. A chief characteristic of Habermas’s model is its sustained emphasis on the global mechanisms by which claims to truth, sincerity, and appropriateness position utterances in relation to non-linguistic orders of reality. As a programme in universal pragmatics, it develops a series of generic rules for aligning discourse events with a coordinate system comprising “the” external world, one’s “own” internal world and “our” shared world of society. A fully-fledged universal pragmatics thus seeks to offer a unifying framework for a theory of discourse and social action. How the Habermasian model might actually be applied to linguistic data will be addressed shortly, towards the end of this section, but there are a few loose ends which need to be tidied up before that. First of all, the model sketched here has been extrapolated out of a densely written article of some seventy pages in length. The anatomy of the original article is also challenging because the material which frames the model of universal pragmatics is delivered to some extent at the margins, while its lengthy middle sections contain treatments of, inter alia, empiricist philosophy and transcen-

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 Chapter 6 Habermas’s Model of Universal Pragmatics Validity claim Truth

Sincerity (“truthfulness”)

Domain of reality

Mode of communication “the” world of ex- cognitive/objectivating ternal nature attitude

General speech function representation of facts – so that the speaker can share their knowledge with the hearer

“my” world of in- expressive/expressive ternal nature attitude

disclosure of the speaker’s subjectivity – so that the hearer can trust the speaker

Appropriateness (“rightness”)

“our” world of soci- interactive/conformati- establishment of legitiety ve attitude mate interpersonal relations – so that the hearer can be in accord with the speaker in shared value orientations Comprehensibility language

Figure 4. After Habermas (1979: 28–29, 68)

dental hermeneutics, along with an extensive survey of Searle’s work on illocutionary force. Moreover, the article ends rather abruptly, in fact on the diagram upon which Figure 4 is based, and in that respect offers no follow-up illustration or signal as to how the model might insightfully be brought to bear on attested data. Thus, my own sketch of Habermas has been, of necessity, both brief and partial, and readers are referred elsewhere for fuller critiques of the main ideas in his paper (see McCarthy 1978; White 1995; Ashenden & Owen 1999: 1–7; Basu 1999; Cummings 2002). More importantly, there are parts of Habermas’s explanation which tend to give the impression that the source of the validity claims can be located in different subject positions in discourse. Although the “intersubjective” status of the claims is consistently underscored, as is the dependence of communicative agreement on both speaker and hearer participation, there are places in the study where the source for the claims seems to be attributed to one or other (but not both) members of a dyadic exchange. For example, in the outline of the sincerity claim developed above, the quote from Habermas includes a parenthetical sequence which suggests that it is the speaker, and not the hearer, who has primary responsibility for attaching this claim to the utterance. A

Satirical uptake 

more accurate portrayal of the situation, it seems to me, is that the validity claims are to some degree negotiable, that they straddle participant boundaries, but that communicative agreement ultimately depends on their ratification by both subject positions in discourse. In respect of this issue, McCarthy remarks that “speech necessarily (even if often only implicitly) involves the raising, recognising and redeeming of validity claims” (1979: xix, my emphasis). In a productive, if inadvertently reached mnemonic, McCarthy casts the general interactive situation as a configuration of three “Rs”. Whereas the speaker raises the claim, the onus is on the hearer to recognise it, while the claim is ultimately redeemed through a process which suggests consensual ratification by both parties. That means that for every validity claim there are three interactive permutations – raising, recognising and redeeming – and this more finely drawn distinction will have an important bearing in the later stages of this chapter. The last of the theoretical “loose ends”, related to the previous one, concerns the typical procedures involved in ratifying validity claims. Habermas notes that if one were to embrace as a normal state of linguistic communication all four claims (including the claim of comprehensibility for language usage), there would be no real need for a dynamic perspective on how agreement is sought in the communicative process (Habermas 1979: 3 and passim). A more likely situation is that typical communicative states are in what he calls “the gray areas in between”, with utterances throwing up all manner of combinations of incomprehensibility, insincerity, untruthfulness or inappropriateness. In everyday life, according to Habermas, we start from a background consensus of interpretations that are taken for granted among participants, but this consensus can be shaken, and presuppositions about certain claims can be suspended. It does therefore seem that Habermas is prepared to allow that the real world of discourse is much more messy and unstable than the highly normative world encoded in the model of universal pragmatics. And even though the validity claims seem superficially rigid, they still accommodate negotiation, violation or reappraisal in the context of a discourse event. Discourse is not the reflex of a world of rational and ratified harmony, and interactants are capable of redefining or reshaping the interactive situations in which they find themselves. Again, as we shall see shortly, this capability is central to the development and uptake of satirical humour. As signalled earlier, this section will close with a short assessment of how the universal pragmatics framework might usefully be employed in the analysis of real textual data, and to this effect, it cites specifically an article which offers a cogent and telling application of the Habermasian model. Montgomery (1999) is a study in discourse analysis which examines the public and media represen-

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tations of Diana, Princess of Wales. Manifestly not about humorous discourse, Montgomery’s article focuses on the discursive representation of Princess Diana through the mediatised public reactions to her death in 1997. He examines, in the first instance, the linguistic properties of the tributes paid to Diana by Prime Minister Tony Blair, by the Queen and by Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, and, in the second, the manner by which these tributes are assessed by the media and by the public. Drawing on the same conceptual framework which has informed this section, Montgomery highlights the different means by which speech in the public sphere (as in the tributes offered to Diana) projects itself as valid in context in determinate ways: it can be seen as true, sincere or appropriate. Montgomery argues, furthermore, that the judgments delivered through print and broadcast media on the three public speeches tend to foreground only one of the validity claims at any one time. Of the three Habermasian validity claims, it is sincerity that in the main becomes the touchstone against which the behaviour of the tribute-paying public figures is measured. However, he notes as a significant exception that in some of the mediatised reception of the Queen’s tribute, the shift is towards the validity claim of appropriateness, and not sincerity. This shift is encoded in remarks by the press about the general “correctness” of her oration and demeanour, and even extends to a bizarre comment that her speech is that of “a real professional” (1999: 27). Montgomery is understandably circumspect in his conclusions about this divergence, but the well-publicised, often troubled relationship between the Queen and Diana may have problematised the use of the sincerity claim as a framing device for the reception of the former’s tribute to the latter. That is to say, public and media responses would have found it more difficult to “play up” this aspect of discourse, thus explaining perhaps why the ratification of another of the claims was sought. Montgomery also suggests that sincerity is a feature of the private, not public, sphere, of intimate rather than public discourse. Why the Queen’s oration diverges from those of the other tribute payers may therefore reside in the difference between an older modality of the self in public, where appropriateness amounts to decorum and takes precedence over sincerity, and a newer modality of the self where the claims of sincerity are paramount (1999: 27–28). Methodologically, what is particularly insightful about Montgomery’s study, as far as it connects to the central task of this chapter, is that it focuses not only on the texts that constitute the tributes to Diana, but on the media and public responses to those texts. In other words, Montgomery employs the validity claims, exploring the manner by which they are recognised and re-

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deemed, as a framing device for the study of pragmatic “uptake”. That emphasis will be maintained in the following section when the Habermasian model is used as the principal analytic apparatus for a range of textual data. Whereas the Montgomery study illustrates how this model can be applied to mediatised discourse, what remains to be seen is how the same model might usefully be brought to bear on humorous discourse.

. Validity claims and satirical uptake Across many of the preceding chapters and in several individual analyses of satirical texts, mention has been made of satire’s capacity to problematise its own status as “sincere” discourse. Indeed, one of its chief characteristics, arguably setting it apart from parody (see §5.2 above), is that the text-internal injection of oppositional irony collides with an echoic prime and that this fracture in turn alerts and then places the satiree on a “satirical footing”. That satirical footing is effectively brought about by the destabilisation of the validity claim of sincerity, although the other two validity claims need also to be reconfigured in specific ways (more on which shortly). Indeed, it has been argued consistently up to now that a unique feature of satirical discourse is the presence of both prime and dialectic elements, and that it is the interplay between the two elements (and not the function of one or other element in isolation) which jeopardises and ultimately rescinds the text’s claim to sincerity. To recast this perhaps more clearly as a negatively framed axiom, the first of the three Rs involved in the process of satirical uptake involves raising a claim of insincerity. In terms of the general speech functions captured by Figure 4, this translates into a disclosure such that the addressee is invited not to trust the hearer. The impact of raising “insincerity” in this way resonates across the remaining interpretative positions, affecting the processes both of recognising and of redeeming the claim. Yet it also resonates laterally in the sense that it impacts on other validity claims. In “canonical” satire, if we can accept for the moment this hypothetical category, the identification by the satiree of two ironic spaces encoded in prime and dialectic, and the assumption that the guarantee of sincerity has been suspended, leads to further inferences about the status of the claims of both truth and appropriateness. Whereas the text’s claim to “facts” can be assumed to be jettisoned (although see further below), the claim to “rightness” assumes primacy to an extent that its non-ratification can act as a block to satirical reading or even lead post hoc to a satirical “defooting”. In the Habermasian model, the mode of communication which expresses ap-

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propriateness consists in a “conformative” attitude, not to the subjectivity of the speaking source as it would be for sincerity, but to “our” world of social and interpersonal relationships. Without the establishment of these legitimate interpersonal relations, so the theory goes, the hearer is not in accord with the speaker in shared value orientations. Before fleshing out these theoretical observations through the analysis of text, it needs to be reaffirmed that the validity claims used in satirical uptake, as they presumably are for all types of text-processing, are strongly interconnected such that the manipulation or destabilisation of one has a rippling effect on the ratification of the others. It is also important to reemphasise that in satire these pragmatic framing devices are closely bound up with textual design and their interpretative status is dependent to a large degree on methods of discourse organisation. Nevertheless, it is part of the calculated risk that is satire that the canonical discourse processing gambit sketched above can stall, falter or simply collapse. For instance, it is possible to recognise a sincerity claim even if it has not been raised; in other words, to map a claim of sincerity onto a satirical text which has raised (or has sought to raise) a claim of insincerity. In this respect, the intended satiree, in assuming that a sincerity condition pertains, reaches a non-satirical reading and, well, simply misses the point. In that case, and to adopt the speech act term for the obverse of uptake, the text has “misfired”. Satirical texts which exhibit only a marginal degree of opposition between their prime and dialectic phases are obviously particularly prone to misfire, although, as the commentary on “straight” interpretations of the “Modest Proposal” in Section 5.3 shows, this outcome may be reached even in the face of a sizable shift between prime and dialectic. In contrast to those occasions where a satire misfires, it is perfectly feasible for a text-processor to withhold the recognition of a sincerity claim even if it has, to all intents and purposes, been implied in “good faith” by the producer of the text. A “straight” text may for instance be perceived to have so much (unintentional) distortion from what is normally acceptable that it creates a situation where irony is conferred, so to speak, without warrant. Such a situation, where a good-faith sincerity condition is not redeemed, engenders what will be termed a “B-movie footing” (see further below). In a certain respect, it is slightly misleading to talk here of the “satirist” in the same terms as those used to delineate canonical satire; perhaps more than in any other form of humorous discourse, the subject position of the (unintentional) humorist is entirely a function of the ironic predisposition adopted in the text-processing strategies of the addressee.

Satirical uptake 

What then of the impact of satire’s claim to insincerity on the remaining two validity claims? It was suggested above that the destabilisation of the sincerity claim resonates laterally and to that extent satirical discourse, if anything, inheres in a fracture within and between its validity claims. That fracture, as noted, requires in the first instance that a claim of insincerity be raised by the satirist and recognised by the satiree. This claim however needs not only to be supplemented by the redemption of the claim of appropriateness, but at the same time the satirical utterance needs to be processed within the terms of a suspended claim of truth. The pragmatic interface between the claims of sincerity and appropriateness, as far as it concerns satire, will be examined shortly. This interface in turn impacts on the validity claim of truth, and although this area will receive thorough treatment in the following chapter (§7.3), some brief points of clarification are necessary here. To suggest that satirical discourse operates within a suspended framework of truth is to argue that it does not uphold the representation of facts as they connect to “the” world of external nature. Yet to say that satire is simply “fictional”, and of the same order as the fictionality of prose writing or filmic texts, is a somewhat unsubtle characterisation. As was noted in Chapter 4, satire embodies more a kind of “referfictionality”. That clumsy term attempted to capture satire’s capacity to straddle the poles of truth and falsity: whereas it picks out referents in “the” world of external nature, the semantic propositions and narrative actions attached to those referents may be utterly fictional. Where the truth claim in satirical uptake is especially significant is when it acts as a reflex of insincerity; that is, when the satiree has recognised that the claim to sincerity has been rescinded by the satirist. That recognition in itself takes us back to satirical method, to the interplay between prime and dialectic elements which function to splinter the discourse framework and to activate the types of text-processing strategies outlined here. All of these assumptions about the validity claim of truth, and especially about its intersection with the other claims, will be defended and illustrated fully in the next chapter. For the moment, the task will be to explore in more depth some of the issues raised by the foregoing theoretical discussion. As billed, the validity claim of appropriateness, about which relatively little has been said so far, will be an important focus, particularly in respect of how that claim interacts with the claim to (in)sincerity. For this purpose I propose to examine a final short text from Private Eye magazine, which is represented below as Text G. The choice of this text is fitting in a number of respects. Up to now, various texts from that satirical magazine have been used as illustrations of the basic tenets of the proposed model. In that respect, they have served –

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it is hoped – as usefully unremarkable, self-contained and free-standing examples of various aspects of satirical technique and design. They have also been offered without much contextualisation other than of some of the indicators of topicality needed to make sense of their satirical target. However, the following example is anything but unremarkable, self-contained or free-standing; rather, it offers an opportunity to explore the problematic and sometime serious ramifications of satirical discourse in the public sphere. It is also a useful coincidence that Text G connects in an unusually direct way to Montgomery’s application of Habermas to discourse in the public domain, detailed above. The text in question is one of the spoof front pages of Private Eye magazine, taken from issue number 932 of Friday the 5th of September 1997. There is, it should be said, nothing unusual per se about the appearance of a humorous cover on this publication. Appearing on the front of most of these fortnightly publications, under the Private Eye masthead, are multimodal texts which normally mix verbal material with visual images. For example, a photograph of a celebrity or politician will be captioned with a seemingly “straight” headline which mirrors a significant item of news from the relevant two week “news gathering” period. This prime element is usually undercut elsewhere in the text, often through spuriously attributed comments or remarks that establish the phase of oppositional irony within the text. To that extent, Text G follows the blueprint to the letter, but its principal significance lies in its subject matter. The topical news item which it seeks to capture, and ultimately satirise, is the press coverage that followed in the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princes of Wales. It is not possible, both for technical reasons and because of the sensitivity of the material involved, to reproduce this controversial cover in facsimile format. However, from the description used to constitute the substance of Text G, it is hoped that readers can develop a reasonably clear picture of the anatomy and content of this particular piece of satire. Text G All of the text, including its visual and verbal elements, are enclosed in a one centimetre thick black surround. A large purple heading, in a 72 point seriffed font and taking up one sixth of the entire text, declares: “MEDIA TO BLAME”. Below this heading, and forming the background to the rest of the page, is a familiar photograph, shown in many newspapers at that time, of thousands of mourners gathered outside Buckingham Palace on the day of Princess Diana’s funeral.

Satirical uptake 

Over this photographic backdrop are placed three speech bubbles, made to seem as if they emanate, disembodied, from the throng. The speech bubbles, which are ordered progressively from the mid-left of the picture through to the bottom-right, are suggestive of a dialogue between three “mourners”. The three utterances in the bubbles emerge in the following sequence: “The papers are a disgrace” “Yes, I couldn’t get one anywhere” “Borrow mine. It’s got a picture of the car”.

Before considering the significance of this cover-page in terms both of its uptake and of the controversy that ensued from its publication, it is worth noting briefly the discursive features which frame it as a piece of satire. The prime element plays off an anterior discourse event which was then very much grounded in public consciousness, with both the headline and the accompanying photographic image forming the mediated intertext that constitutes the echoic phase of satirical textual design. The dialectic component is marked by the onset of the speech bubbles, clearly setting up a collision with the prime, but the coup de grâce is delivered by the contra-expectation manifested in both the second and third bubbles. Even though represented polymodally, with a pictorial element supplementing the verbal prime of the heading, it is still possible to “read” both satirical elements off the text. Moreover, in terms of its “visual grammar”, Text G arranges the three imagined utterances, represented by the speech bubbles, into a narrative syntagm; that is, in an overt taxonomy which chains the bubbles into a narrative of unfolding actions and events, rather than into a more stable conceptual representation (Kress & van Leeuwen 1996: 79–81; see also Shappeck 2002). One cannot possibly forecast how readers of the present book will react to this controversial text, but, for the record, the Eye’s expressly designated satirical target, as the magazine itself reluctantly felt compelled to point out later, was the behaviour of the media and many members of the public in the aftermath of Diana’s death. The Eye also felt that some “blame” should be apportioned to the media, given that her death resulted from a car crash following a pursuit by paparazzi photographers. To locate this position more clearly in the text under scrutiny, what triggers the principal satirical device in G is the collision between the various inferences that can be derived from the remarks in the speech bubbles. From the first bubble, which shores up the prime element, an anonymous member of the public appears to be complaining about over-intrusive and excessive press coverage (“The papers are a disgrace”). Set

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against that initial inference are the assumptions made in the remaining two bubbles, namely that what is disgraceful for the speaker of the second bubble is the scarcity of newspaper coverage, to which the speaker of the third obligingly offers their own copy, complete with morbid pictures of the wreckage of the car in which the princess was travelling. So here, again, is a piece of satirical discourse that targets news values and the gathering and consumption of news, and much of what was said during the earlier extensive analysis of Text C (§4.4) is germane to Text G also. The Eye’s ire is directed towards media practices and towards the public’s ghoulish fascination with this story – behaviour which represents collectively position C on the triad of subject placements and which attracts disapprobation from subject position A. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the satirical skits produced in the middle section of the same issue from which Text G is taken criticise consistently the perceived profiteering of the media, witnessed by its indecorous haste in putting on sale commemorative supplements and associated merchandise to do with Diana. Within days of the accident, any amount of tasteless memorabilia, including scented candles and mugs of remembrance, was available on “special offer” to the regular readers of an assortment of British newspapers. It is indeed an irony that the only publication not to have posted a large increase in sales at this time was Private Eye itself, which, to put it rather more starkly, makes it the only British newspaper not to have made money out of Diana’s death. There is a further, and more particular, reason as to why sales of Private Eye actually fell during the period around Diana’s death, exploration of which begins to shed light on how a framework of structured expectations, such as that embodied by the Habermasian model, might be brought to bear in (the analysis of) satirical uptake. So contentious was the cover-page of Text G – its notoriety spread like wildfire within a few days of its publication – that many newsagents and booksellers simply removed the magazine from public sale. In many cases, the managers of retail outlets appointed themselves arbiters of decency and good taste, the upshot of which was that thousands of copies of the “offending” issue remained unsold. The following letter, written to the Eye by a senior manager of a stationery and newsagents chain, gives a flavour of how high feelings were running at this time: Let it be known at your office that I have instigated the withdrawal of your latest issue of Private Eye (932) from the following chains: W. H. Smith, John Menzies [and many others]. “Jokes” of this nature, and at this time of national grieving especially, will NOT be tolerated! The laugh’s on you this time arsehole!! Have a nice day! (printed in Private Eye 933; 19/9/1997)

Satirical uptake

Pompous and abusive by turns, this self-styled censor has decided that humour in the context of “national grieving” is inappropriate. And because of his senior corporate status, he is thus able to intervene directly in the transmission and dissemination of humour in the public sphere. It is argued here that much of the controversy surrounding the “Diana” front page can be accommodated within the Habermasian model and that, in fact, the discord it produced can be located in a protracted schism between universal validity claims. Unusually for an exploration of satire in the public domain, this episode produced tangible evidence of public reactions to this problematic text, evidence which, somewhat ironically, was retrievable from a subsequent issue of the Private Eye magazine. Anxious to vindicate their own position with respect to the place of humour in the context of “national grieving”, the Eye published a series of letters written to them by people who either found the cover offensive or who supported it. According to the Eye, those who were “pro-the-front-page” (categorised as the “Pros”) outnumbered those who were “against-the-front-page” (the “Antis”) by ten to one. Whether or not this calculation is accurate is not at issue, and in any case one must take into consideration the magazine’s desire through this exercise to justify its own style of humour. What is of interest is that the altercation seems consistently to elicit two types of reaction to the controversial front page. Whereas both sides are impassioned, the manner by which this passion is encoded into arguments about the discourse of humour makes for a rich point for comparison. Here is a selection of letters representing both points of view, all of which were published across the two issues immediately following the one containing the “Diana” cover: The “Antis”: (i) Unlike yourselves, I have not found the death of Diana at all humorous . . . good for you if the majority of EYE readers are in favour of taking the piss out of someone’s death . . . (ii) I find your attitude to Diana smallminded and disappointing . . . (iii) I am at a total loss for words to express my outrage at the tasteless nature . . . (iv) I had no great admiration for Princess Diana, I wished her neither well not ill. But by God I wish you ill . . . (v) . . . her death should not be treated facetiously . . . (vi) I think a more fitting response to the circumstances would have been to keep your gob shut . . .

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The “Pros”: (i) Issue 932 proved to be an effective barrier against the sheer hypocrisy and unrivalled cant of the fourth estate . . . (ii) You have chosen the brave route of satirising the overwhelming media hypocrisy, without . . . resorting to bad taste or disrespect. (iii) The letter from X [the letter by the senior manager, quoted above] . . . proves that the ghouls satirised on the cover of EYE 932 can’t take the joke when it’s on them . . . (iv) I thought your cover “Media to Blame” perhaps the most appropriate and certainly one of the funniest ever.

The two sets of letters are intriguing in respect of how they tend to gravitate towards different aspects of the discursive construction of the controversy surrounding the “Diana” cover. The broadest conceptualisation of this divergence would be to say that they embody a collision between the validity claims of sincerity and appropriateness. Key lexical items from both sets reinforce this division. Throughout the discourse of the Antis, the violation of the claim of appropriateness is invoked as a major point of criticism: the cover is “tasteless”, “facetious” and it is not “fitting”. By contrast, the Pros consider it “appropriate”, “effective” and the “brave route” to choose – anything but a show of “disrespect” or “bad taste”. What is interesting also is that some of the Antis appear not to have recognised the claim to insincerity that attaches to a satirical utterance: the writer of (i), and to some extent that of (ii), seems to believe that it is the princess’s death which is somehow constitutive of the satirical target, and not, as is clear from most of the other letters, the media reaction to the death of Diana. This misrecognition is certainly picked up on by the Pros, as it is elsewhere in Private Eye’s response to public outcry about the controversial cover. For instance, Pro (iii) actually engages directly with the discourse of one of the objectors, aligning the writer of the earlier letter squarely with the cover’s satirical target. Pros (i) and (ii) are also keen to affirm, lest there should be any doubt, the status and precise nature of the satirical target. This also was the more global perspective adopted by the Eye towards those who objected to the front page. Seemingly puzzled at how anyone could miss the point, the magazine cast the Antis as obtuse individuals who were simply unreceptive to satire. Yet to say that the Antis didn’t “get it” is a little misleading. My own formulation would be that they chose not to get it because the impact of the perceived violation of the validity claim of appropriateness formed a barrier to the processing of the text as humorous discourse. It is worth noting that many of

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the Antis were regular Eye readers, whose letters of complaint often included a formal cancellation of their subscriptions to the journal. One wonders then how these readers had been previously reading and interpreting the magazine, given that publication’s consistent avowal of its expressly satirical purpose. It is probably more the case that assumptions about appropriateness overruled the redemption, by the intended satiree, of the claim to insincerity activated by the in-text juxtaposition of prime and dialectic elements. As such, the debate which ensued was provoked by a schism between the interpretive mechanisms employed by the various potential satirees who comprise the projected humour community. In its own terms, the narrower detail of these letters is also revealing. For instance, the writer of letter (iii) in the Pro camp, as noted, aligns the chain store manager with the text’s satirical target, before provocatively suggesting that the manager’s proximity acts as a block on his capacity to accomplish satirical uptake. This echoes an issue raised during the earlier account of Pfaff and Gibbs’s study, namely, that the more closely situated someone is to the target of satire, the less likely or able they are to identify that target. Given the brevity of Pro (iii)’s remarks, it is at best disputable as to whether this point can be argued with any rigour here (although see further below), but it is surely very unusual to see articulated in the public domain a debate of this sort between different subject positions in satire. Another of the noteworthy localised features of the letters is the general tenor of Anti (iv). This letter again tends to cloud the status of the satirical target, suggesting that a perception of its inappropriateness has blocked the recognition by the satiree of the status of the text as insincere. But the nature of the vitriol directed towards the Eye is interesting in terms of the way it relates to the subject positions of satirical discourse. Attached as an important rider to the triad of satirical placements represented by Figure 3 (in §4.2 above) is the presumption that the bonds that connect the three positions are themselves open to renegotiation and redefinition. Successful satire, in keeping with the social solidary pact that governs many types of humour, serves to consolidate the bond between humour producer and humour processor, that is, between subject positions A and B on the triad. However, it was also postulated in Section 4.2 that “failed” satire tends to wedge A and B apart, and as the bond between them lengthens, so that which connects B and C simultaneously shortens. There can be no doubt in this regard about how the letter writer, as the exponent of position B in this discourse event, perceives the exponent of position A: the onslaught on the Eye, in the utterance “By God I wish you ill”, is starkly unambiguous.

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Finally, and as the inverse of the position just noted, it is worth registering the conjunction of “appropriate” and “funniest ever” in Pro (iv)’s remarks. This marks an almost diametrical opposition to the general Anti position which is that the cover was neither appropriate nor funny. In the face of sometimes vicious attacks from the Antis, it does seem that the Pro lobbyists feel it incumbent upon them to underwrite the communicative “success” of the controversial cover. Their reactions tend to centre for instance on the perceived consolidation of the relationship between satirist and satiree. They are also concerned to ratify explicitly both the insincerity and appropriateness claims as well as delineating clearly the precise nature of the satirical target. Ultimately, the responses strove to piece together enough of the requisite preconditions for satirical uptake as to justify the humorous status of the text in question. But was the “Diana” cover really that funny, even on its original run? My own opinion, for what it is worth, is that G is a rather lame text whose satirical target is not especially stridently drawn, and which, against the normal level of creativity displayed in the magazine’s front covers, is laboured by comparison. Convention seems to dictate that a humorous angle be found in all circumstances, because that presumably is what satirical magazines are supposed to do. To an extent, the Pro lobby probably overplays the humorous impact of the cover. But just because that particular group of text processors underwrites its claim to appropriateness does not of itself make Text G the “funniest cover ever”. What the evidence presented above and following is intended to demonstrate is that universal validity claims play a significant role in humour processing. As far as satirical uptake goes, the interplay between the claims is all: it is one thing to recognise and redeem the claim of insincerity but another entirely to endorse the claim of appropriateness. Satirical uptake, as the foregoing discussion should underscore, inheres in a structured framework of interpretive positions; so much so that it would be trite to describe a misfired satire simply in terms of the intended satiree “not getting the point”. Uptake is thus grounded in decisions about whether or not to participate in the pragmatic framework of humour and about whether to allow in or to block the variables which influence and shape humour processing strategies. Some theoretical parallels might be drawn between this observation and some of the issues broached, much earlier, in Chapter 2. Towards the end of that chapter’s review of linguistic approaches to verbal humour, reference was made to the role of joke processing strategies in humour resolution. It was suggested, following the line taken by Carrell (1997b), that humour resolution might be configured, not as a polar opposition, but as a three-way relation-

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ship comprising “yes”, “no” and “maybe” responses. This would legitimately enable a degree of indeterminacy to be sustained in the relative positioning of the addressee to the humour event. However, what is less convincing is Carrell’s suggestion that a subject who has adopted the “maybe” position after the joke’s “initial pass through his or her humor competence” is prepared to persist with joke interpretation providing that further information is supplied (1997b: 182–183). This is surely too self-conscious and mechanical a process to be an accurate characterisation of the way humour processors respond to the often spontaneous by-play that constitutes much verbal humour. It also implies the existence of a kind of recycling loop through which, possibly several times, the joke might be passed. My own impression is that the longer you need to make up your mind about a joke, the more unlikely it is to be funny. If extended to satirical discourse, the “maybe” option would suggest the presence of some sort of cognitive buffer zone through which the satiree can feed the text, seemingly any number of times, before reaching uptake, and such a suggestion is surely hard to defend. The direct translation to satirical humour of the “yes-no-maybe” triplet of responsive positions remains then unconvincing, but much of what Carrell says about the broader principles of joke processing as a dynamic construct is germane to satire. She notes for instance that the reception of “red-flagged” humour, such as taboo material of which Text G is a clear example, is strongly dependent not only on context of situation but on the “emotionally, psychologically, and/or even physically charged entanglements” of the humour processor (1997: 183). Although it is unlikely that the “Diana cover” could ever be redesignated funny by an individual humour processor once the initial “pass” has been made, its reception and uptake in another set of contextual and predispositional circumstances is another matter. What constitutes the “sore spot” of today, according to Carrell, may well, over time and distance, become the subject of tomorrow’s jokes. The remainder of this section will advance a series of examples which highlight further the interconnections between satirical uptake, universal validity claims and the general dynamic of satirical discourse. It is especially important, in the light of the immediately preceding discussion, to develop in more detail the idea of satirical “footing” and to show how footing is a function of the operation of validity claims in a context of discourse. To reiterate, it has been argued that the three Rs associated with the validity claims exercise a strong constraint on satirical uptake. Furthermore, for satirical humour to work requires ultimately that irony be conferred on the discourse event by the satiree: in other words, that in addition to the two principal phases of irony offered in-

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text, satire has to be endorsed through a third and overarching claim to irony which depends a great deal on the overall predisposition of the satiree in the participation framework. In that sense, satirical uptake ultimately involves a decision by the satiree – and how consciously that decision is reached remains to be seen – about whether or not to play the “humour game”. In earlier discussion much was made of the alignment of humour with, on the one hand, a ratified validity claim of appropriateness, and, on the other, a mutually redeemed claim of insincerity. It was also argued that a breakdown in one area engenders a collapse elsewhere in the system, and that this destabilising effect ripples across the other claims. Although it is the totality of satire’s design, transmission and uptake that makes it, so to speak, satire, it seems that aspects of the pragmatic validity claim model can be expanded, beyond satire, to other forms of humorous discourse. The Habermasian claims are, after all, intended to be “universal”. Ross offers a pertinent illustration of how such expansion might be undertaken. She recounts an episode from a theatre in England involving a poetry reading by Merseybeat poet Roger McGough, renowned for his entertaining and humorous live performances. With each new poem getting progressively funnier and more absurd than the last, here, in Ross’s words, is what happens next in McGough’s performance: As the laughter subsided from one [poem], he announced the next: “This one’s about a young woman who got raped by a jogger.” Laughter broke out in sections of the audience. “Is there something funny about that?” There was a ripple of uncertain laughter – was his deadpan expression part of the joke? He was so offended by the laughter that he was no longer the comedy poet but a headteacher lecturing a hall of kids on their appalling behaviour. The audience sat silently through his serious poem, but were too nervous to laugh much when he reverted to his usual comic style. (Ross 1998: 72)

Ross’s anecdote is admittedly informal, as is her commentary on the implications of the exchange, but it does serve to foreground the interactive consequences of a breakdown in agreement about the status of validity claims. Whereas a mutually redeemed claim to insincerity appears to have been the principal underpinning of a previously successful humour event, McGough’s change of tack to a “red-flagged” domain of discourse is accompanied by the raising of a claim of sincerity. His rationale appears to have been that the signalling of a tabooed domain is in itself sufficient to bring about a humour “defooting”. However, this attempt to “break frame” fails spectacularly: in the terms of the three Rs, while McGough “raises” sincerity, most of his audience “recognise” a continued claim to insincerity. That collision impacts further

Satirical uptake 

around the claim of appropriateness. To have been insincere would have still upheld the appropriateness of laughter, even laughter at a tabooed subject, but to be sincere makes at a stroke the audience’s laughter inappropriate. As noted of Goffman’s proposals in Chapter 4, significant shifts in the alignment of speakers and hearers can occur over the course of an interaction and these changes in footing are activated by style-shift or by code-switching (Goffman 1979: 4–5). The problem for McGough in discoursal terms is the omission of an explicit device, such as a shift in style or code, that serves to break frame, and so engender a new footing. The audience are not to blame here: McGough’s attempt at humour defooting is abrupt and inexplicit and so wedges them between two inferencing possibilities. This fracture it seems is never fully resolved for the remainder of the performance. To stray for just a brief moment from issues directly concerning satirical discourse, it is worth footnoting the McGough episode with an incident that offers an almost diametrically opposed set of interpretative outcomes. Several years ago, Ronnie Corbett, a popular British comedian well known for his (seemingly) improvised humorous narratives, was interviewed by an equally famous chat show host on prime-time television. Given its designation as a light entertainment feature, the comedian launched into a series of funny stories, of which the following extract, transcribed from videotape, is an example: Corbett: I have a friend called (.) Morris (light laughter from audience) (2.0) I called round to collect him for a game of golf (light laughter from audience) (2.0) His wife said HE’S DEAD↓ (heavier laughter from audience) (3.0) No he ISN’T↑ (.) yes he IS↓ (2.0) she said (.) he went down the garden to get a cabbage for lunch (1.0) and just dropped dead (light laughter from audience) What did you do↑ (2.0) I had to open a tin of peas↓ (heavier, more prolonged laughter from audience) (Ronnie Corbett, interviewed on Wogan; BBC 1; 8/12/1986)

Without spending too long on the various issues this excerpt might usefully raise, here is an almost canonical joke bearing text, which, within the terms of the GTVH (see §2.4), comes complete with a set-up phase and an incongruitytriggered punchline. The pauses at various stages of delivery also suggest that the joke teller is a skilled orator with a keen sense of timing (and see also

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Grundy 1995: 144 on other pragmatic features of this comedian’s technique). Crucial to the reception of this humorous text, however, is Corbett’s capacity throughout the story to sustain a manifest validity claim of insincerity. The story never slips from the “nonserious”, non-bona-fide mode of joke telling even though it covers similarly “red-flagged” territory to that of McGough. Significantly, the audience ratify the insincerity claim to such a degree that they actually begin to laugh during the setup phase – long before Corbett gets to his punchline. This suggests, with respect to the observations made on the GTVH, that when validity claims are redeemed “harmonically” across speaker and addressee, it is the overall event of humour that is funny, and not necessarily the central incongruity of an individual joke. The cue to insincerity is, in other words, so strong that it actually overrides the formal structure of the joke bearing text. Moreover, the taboo material here, contrary to that in the McGough exchange, is so strongly attached to the claim of insincerity that the appropriateness claim is never called into question. Moving back to satire, and to conclude this section, it is worth drawing together some further, and more general observations on the significance of the validity claim model to humour processing. One important area concerns the degree to which the validity claims are activated or invoked consciously by a satiree in the humour event. Now, I must admit that my own position, in advance of researching this issue, would have been that the humour response was simply too much a spontaneous reflex, too “biological” in origin, to be constrained by so formalised a set of extra-textual parameters. However, against the backdrop of humour research surveyed in Chapter 2 and elsewhere, and against the analyses of textual data from Chapter 4 up to the present, there do seem good grounds for arguing that a matrix of validity claims acts as a genuine catalyst for (or limiter on) satirical uptake. We do, in other words, process satirical discourse through recourse to a special configuration of nonlinguistic mechanisms, whether that be through the Habermasian three-tiered model offered here, or through some other interpretative configuration for the processing of ironic discourse (Attardo 2001c: 56–57). These constraints – the special alignment of the claims of sincerity, appropriateness and truth – are particularly prominent in the context of the reception of film humour, especially of satire in film. Producers and distributors normally market films within a very narrowly circumscribed set of generic labels, such as the western, the musical or the gangster film, or occasionally through sub-generic classifications like the romantic comedy or the slapstick comedy. Neale argues that this practice has arisen through Hollywood studios’ treatment of film production largely in terms of a model of mass production, with

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familiar stories containing familiar characters and situations replicated on an almost industrial scale (Neale 2000: 9). Mainstream film genres are finite in number, and promotional material for new releases will deliberately place the film in a “tag-line” which signals its particular generic slot. This type of genericisation (cf. that covered in §4.2) appears designed to encourage and establish certain interpretative predispositions in the cinema-going public. Neale, again, observes how significant are the sorts of labels or descriptions circulated in advance by distributors, reviewers and perhaps even film makers themselves (2000: 27). Consider an example from early film comedy. Chaplin’s film Shoulder Arms went on general release in 1918 and was accompanied by an aggressive and to some extent then relatively novel style of promotional campaign (Mike Hammond forthcoming). The trade journal Kinematograph Weekly, for example, carried an advertisement for the film which ran thus: A right down howling success. The second million dollar Chaplin is even better than we said. Shoulder Arms! (sic) has come at the right time. People can laugh at it without any guilty feeling now. (21/11/1918, p. 33; quoted in Mike Hammond forthcoming: 470)

Remarkably, there is in this text an express instruction to the effect that humour is now acceptable in the post-war epoch; that laughter is once again appropriate. In order to offset a possibly unfavourable evaluation by film goers, it explicitly invokes the validity claim of appropriateness (“the right time”) as a way of inviting, even soliciting, a certain interactive orientation towards the film. Consider a much more recent example of the same principle at work. British television’s hugely popular satirical news quiz Have I Got News for You?, with an estimated nine million viewers, started in 1990 and has had regular series, each comprising twelve weekly episodes, in every year since. One of the permanent team members, comedian Paul Merton, was asked how the programme would have reacted, if at all, to the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, given that the series was not due for scheduling in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Merton replied: The news will constantly change. We were lucky to return six weeks after the events in New York because by that time the audience wanted to laugh about Bin Laden. Laughter is a good antidote to war. (Radio Times magazine, 22/12/01; 28, and web)

Again, this suggests the bringing into play of the validity claim of appropriateness as a constraint on the creation and uptake of satirical humour. It also

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underscores a point made earlier in this section about how the status of “redflagged” material in humorous discourse can change over time. And further to both of these points, it highlights the dilemma for the contemporary political satirist in trying “evenhandedly” to satirise at least some aspect of major news events while trying not to fall foul of the validity claim of appropriateness. This dilemma, the clash between being consistent in satirical attack while observing a degree of appropriateness, was certainly experienced by Private Eye with its notorious “Diana” cover, the ramifications of which have of course already been dealt with at length in this chapter. Developing further the particular discourse situation of film humour, it was suggested above that genre in cinema is something which is consciously framed in film marketing through a finite and fixed set of categories, categories which it would seem seek strongly to privilege certain directions in textprocessing. Of course, a film genericised as a comedy may simply not be funny, just as a designated horror movie may not be scary. Nevertheless, the “it’s-OKto-laugh” clause which attaches to explicitly genericised film comedy does seem to be more of a stimulus to a “humour footing” than it might at first appear. A particular case in point, though one which can really only be sketched here, is to do with the critical and public response to the Australian film Muriel’s Wedding. Directed on a very low budget by P. J. Hogan (Hogan 1994, web), Muriel’s Wedding tells a grim narrative by any stretch of the imagination. The eponymous heroine, an overweight and lonely young woman who is bullied by her peers and rejected by her dysfunctional family, steals a large sum of money in order to run away from home. She befriends another lonely young woman, although, after an improbably short space of time, the friend is permanently crippled by a mysterious illness. Muriel, who really only wants to be loved, eventually enters into a cynical marriage with a South African athlete whose only requirement from the arrangement is the acquisition of a “green card” for immigration purposes. On the face of it, this is hardly the sort of rollicking story line that would have cinema-goers laughing into their popcorn. The broadcaster and film critic Mark Kermode reports his own reactions to a screening of the film before it went on general release in the United Kingdom; that is, before it had received a formally genericised tag-line (Kermode 2001). His impressions from the prerelease experience were that this was a bleak story, suffused with hopelessness, in which there was little hope of redemption for its central characters. He was in no way prepared then for the utter repositioning in discourse that accompanied the film’s mainstream release in Britain. Complete with gaudy pink promotional posters, and a tag-line that stamped the film sub-generically as

Satirical uptake

a “comedy romance”, Muriel’s Wedding was, astonishingly, to become the great “box office bonanza in Australian comedy” (Travers 2002, web). Kermode reports that the directed campaign to play up the film’s “feel good factor” (such as it was) was hailed as something of a marketing success in the boardroom of distributor Miramax. What is more remarkable again is that the post-release critics’ reviews consistently buy into the film’s upbeat humour and into the comic talents of its leads, with only the occasional nod towards its brooding dark side (Smith 2001, web). From this, Kermode draws the conclusion that he and the other critics were effectively “watching different films”. And in terms of the varied configuration of validity claims that influenced text-processing, to some extent they were. The (re)positioned genericisation acts as a channel, as a cue, to interpretation. Invoking the claim of appropriateness, the “it’s OK to laugh” tag-line, does seem to be designed, as it was with the Chaplin material, to invite processors to sidestep the red-flagged dimension in a humorous text. This is not to suggest for a moment that we should ignore textual design, and all the associated linguistic elements that make up a humorous text’s composition; it is rather to suggest that we allow into the totality of the discursive practice those elements that constitute the “response-side” in discourse processing. Whereas the foregoing comments have explored the appropriateness claim as it is encoded in the uptake of (film) humour, it is worth adding some comments here on the way the claim of sincerity interacts in this process, thereby shifting the focus from the question “Is it OK to laugh at this text?” towards the question “Is this text meant to be serious?”. It is indeed a truism to say that irony is not always taken up in interaction. The bulk of this chapter has been concerned with exploring this aspect of satirical discourse, and how any claim to sincerity needs to be revoked jointly by both subject positions A and B in the humour exchange. That means that a satiree, in particular, needs both to recognise and concur with a framework of insincerity, and in that respect, for satire to work, irony to some extent needs to be “conferred” upon a text. However, it also the case, as anticipated earlier in this chapter, that irony may be conferred upon a text even when at source the validity claim to sincerity is not revoked. Even when a good faith offer of sincerity is provided, subject position B may still rescind it, to produce a discursive outcome which, if not quite satire, is certainly “satire-like” in its general bearing. Further evidence for this can, again, be adduced through reference to film texts. The year 1958 saw the general release of Ed Wood’s sci-fi horror, Plan 9 from Outer Space (Ed Wood 1958), a “straight” B-movie which flopped abysmally on its first cinema outing. Critics repeatedly drew attention to, among other things, its ill-conceived plot, its outrageous ham acting, its

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ludicrous “special effects” and its appallingly poor production standards. The well-publicised penchant of its director to cross-dressing did little to enhance public reception of the film either (Taylor 2001, web). Since 1958, the film has passed into immortality by becoming, officially, the worst film ever made. It has for instance consistently been voted the winner of the annual “Golden Turkey Awards”, having now acquired an unprecedented full complement of five turkeys (It’s a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movie, web). However, Plan 9 from Outer Space has also become one of the most popular and widely watched films ever made, even though it is now “consumed” as comedy in spite of its outward pretensions to serious science fiction. What has happened across the intervening years is that a degree of deviation and distortion has been perceived in the film’s textual composition which tends to distance it from reasonable standards of contemporary movie-making. Those compositional features appear to have injected a kind of oppositional strand into the textual fabric of the film, even though a dialectic element, as defined here, was clearly never conceived of in the text’s initial formation. The validity claim to sincerity, which accompanied the original, has long been rescinded by the text’s humour community. Like canonical satire, irony is conferred upon the text, although in this case Ed Wood’s creation was never intended as self-mockery or self-parody. As prefaced earlier in this section, the humorous placement engendered through this type of interpretative situation, in which irony is conferred upon an otherwise “straight” text, might be informally termed, and as a homage to Wood, a “B-movie footing”. Working on different, though related, aspects of irony comprehension, Attardo introduces the concept of mode adoption to capture a specific kind of pragmatic uptake that involves, first, the recognition of the illocutionary force of an utterance and, then, the performance of subsequent speech acts which follow the same type of illocutionary path (Attardo 2001c: 61). When that principle is plotted against the Ed Wood scenario, the obverse seems to apply. That is to say, the concept of the B-movie footing might be characterised as a type of mode rejection in that even though the illocutionary force of the text is recognised, there is non-compliance and resistance from the addressee to the mode invited. However, the whole area of unintended irony, of which the B-movie footing is just one instance, is still relatively under-researched. Indeed, Gibbs et al. argue that existing taxonomies of ironic situations need to be amended to include cases in which a speaker’s utterance, unbeknownst to him or her, creates an ironic situation (Gibbs et al. 1995: 199). They also suggest that the humour produced by intended and unintended irony may differ because there is a “greater conflict between expectation and reality in unintended irony” (200).

Satirical uptake 

Although the precise implications of this claim are not spelled out in any way, the concept of unintentional irony certainly merits fuller investigation within a pragmatics of humour. A final example of film humour will serve as a useful counterpoint to the notion of the B-move footing presented above. Rob Reiner’s satirical film This is Spinal Tap (Reiner 1984, web) traces the exploits of a luckless yet utterly vain heavy metal band as they embark on a come-back tour in the USA. With fortunes clearly flagging, the eponymous quartet of fictional British rockers are tracked, documentary-style, as they move from one dismal performance to another, with these episodes interlaced by question and answer sequences with the “documentary maker”. The rockers emerge as precious, self-obsessed and arrogant. One especially famous scene, for instance, involves a Q and A session with Nigel, the group’s lead guitarist. In addition to possessing (uniquely) an amplifier than can go right up to number eleven, Nigel so fetishises his “axe” that he will not allow the documentarist even to look at, let alone touch, his prized guitar. The role of documentary maker, “Marti DiBergi”, is played by director Reiner in a fairly transparent echo of Martin Scorsese’s role in The Last Waltz (1978). That earlier film, a documentary following the final performance of Bob Dylan’s erstwhile backing group The Band, is the explicit intersemiotic frame which marks the prime element of structure in Reiner’s satire. However, this is indeed an astute piece of satirical humour whose in-text oppositions and collisions are almost imperceptible, a feature of composition that (implicitly) did not escape the attention of the film critics. Jones for example describes This is Spinal Tap as a “completely on-target satire of the rock’n’roll industry” that was “so precise that, on its original release, many didn’t realise it was a huge joke!” (Jones 2001: 57). The point is indeed germane given that the film premiered in the USA in front of the great and the good of the then contemporary rock scene. That audience – perhaps predictably? – hardly managed to raise a smile throughout the entire screening. While the vision of serried ranks of pofaced rock musicians must have been something to behold, it raises two broader issues in connection with satirical discourse. The first, and one which has been voiced from Chapter 4 onwards, is that when the discursive space between the prime and dialectic elements is relatively narrow, then the more “gentle” or subtle is the satire (and see further Chapter 7). From this perspective, then, This is Spinal Tap is undeniably a subtle satire. The second issue concerns the positioning of the satirical target, subject placement C, in the humour event. The specific case of the film’s premier is interesting in this respect because the satiree and the satirised happen to be one and the same entity: members of

 Chapter 6

the rock music industry. In other words, positions B and C coalesce within the triad of subject placements. Moreover, the fact that satirical uptake appears not to have been achieved in this instance, largely because the text’s claim to “insincerity” is not recognised and ratified by the intended satiree, tends to underscore the observations made across this chapter about the repercussions of the close proximity in discourse between subject positions B and C in the triad of satire (and again, see further Chapter 7). Following from the preceding discussion about the connection between sincerity and satirical uptake, here is a matrix summarising how that claim is negotiated across three possible discourse outcomes: in a satire that works, in an attempt at satire that doesn’t work, and in an attempt at “straight” discourse which engenders nonetheless a “satire-like” uptake. The matrix captures subject positions A, the satirist, and B, the satiree, in terms of the inferencing mechanisms which fall under the compass of the three Rs: Discourse type “Canonical” satire: Misfired satire: “B-movie footing”:

Position A insincerity raised insincerity raised sincerity raised

Position B insincerity recognised sincerity recognised insincerity recognised

In the canonical satirical discourse context, the claim to sincerity is rescinded at the point of delivery and is ratified harmonically across both subject positions. Whereas sincerity is also rescinded by A in a misfired satire, a claim of sincerity may still be mapped onto it by subject position B. Alternatively, the satire may misfire through B’s rescinding of the validity claim of appropriateness. In fact, in the reception to the controversial “Diana cover” (Text G above), there appeared to be a split among the discourse community for whom the satire failed. While certain of the “Anti” lobby mapped a claim of sincerity onto the text, others rescinded its claim to appropriateness in spite of having recognised its claim to insincerity. In the case of This is Spinal Tap, it is the delicacy of textual composition that appears to be the cause of misfire for so many members of the humour community, although, as Jones’s remarks above seem to imply, knowledge of that degree of misfire makes the film even more enjoyable to those who access its satirical potential. And finally, the B-movie footing, which is best construed as a particular type of unintentional humour, arises initially from the rejection of a sincerity claim raised in “good faith” at the point of delivery which then is supplanted in the text-processing phase by a claim of insincerity. Only the first and third scenarios, therefore, require that some form of irony be ratified or conferred in the overall humour event.

Satirical uptake

. Summary This chapter has attempted to model the types of inferencing strategies that are used to achieve satirical “uptake” and to this effect attention has been focussed mainly on the discursive position of the satiree within the participation framework for satire. A three-tiered pragmatic framework, the core tenets of which have their (unlikely) origins in Habermas’s work on universal validity claims, is proposed as a useful mechanism for dealing with the qualitatively different, yet interconnected, parameters that shape the humour response to satirical discourse. Whether those three categories have the explanatory potential to handle other forms of humorous discourse is still a moot point, although some of the observations made on various aspects of film composition suggest that they may have some applicability beyond satirical humour. That wider application will, however, need to be investigated in some future study. In addition to the two principal ironic phases in its composition, defined and illustrated in earlier chapters, satire requires additionally that irony be ratified by the satiree, primarily through the recognition and then redemption of a claim to insincerity. This more generalised “irony of conferral” may however, under certain contextual conditions, be mapped onto a text even in the absence of the two earlier phases, a position in discourse registered informally by the term “Bmovie footing”. A more general aim of this chapter has been to examine the palpable consequences of real satire in terms of what social actors bring to texts and how they react to those texts. To this effect, considerable attention was given to the consequences, both pragmatic and social, of the publication of a highly controversial front cover in Private Eye magazine. The next chapter of the book seeks to build on this model in various ways. For a start, it switches the focus of attention towards the discourse perspective of the remaining position on the triad of subject placements, the satirical target. It also picks up on the one validity claim to have received little attention in this chapter, that of truth, while it also develops in more detail the concept of “saturation”, a term left relatively under-analysed in Chapter 5. Most importantly, the next chapter offers a case study which maps the inception, chronological development and eventual outcome of a single satirical humour event, an event that did not, as it turned out, quite follow the path anticipated by the satirist.

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Chapter 7

When satire goes wrong

I’m always joking. It’s a defence mechanism. Miles, from Woody Allen’s Sleeper Nothing could be more threatening to the long tradition of satiric commentary than a course of action on the part of politicians for emotional distress. Satire is particularly relevant to political debate because it tears down facades, deflates stuffed shirts, and unmasks hypocrisy. By cutting through the constraints imposed by pomp and ceremony, it is a form of irreverence as welcome as fresh air. From a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, 1986.

. Introduction This chapter seeks to accomplish a number of interrelated aims. It attempts in the first instance to bring to the fore the notion of the satirical target, embodied by position C on the triad of subject placements for satirical discourse. Up to now, attention has been focussed largely on the other two positions on that triad, the satirist and the satiree, while most of the related analysis of text has explored the realisation of satire largely through the transmission and reception of discourse between these positions. This chapter, by contrast, places special emphasis on the discoursal construction of the satirical target, and on how that entity interacts with and is mediated through the triad of positions which comprise the discursive practice that is satirical humour. Axiomatic to this project has been the underlying assumption that satire is real discourse, grounded in time and space, and disseminated by social agents. Far removed from the rarefied, ossified texts that characterise many of its “classical” exponents, satire is conceptualised in the present model as a form of dynamic social action which has palpable social and interactive consequences. Moreover, foregoing analyses of individual satirical texts, such as those undertaken in Chapters 4 and 5, may have suggested that satirical discourse operates through the

 Chapter 7

assembly of a neat and tidy package of linguistic features which, when correctly aligned, automatically brings about the requisite pragmatic uptake. While the analysis of the deeply problematic Text G in the previous chapter may have gone some way to allaying this impression, this chapter is very much preoccupied with the less determinate and often messy pragmatic consequences of interaction between the subject placements in satire. The principal “discourse event” which comes under scrutiny in the present chapter is the specific case of a satirical text which, communicatively, goes badly wrong. In that sense, the attempt at satire “misfires”, but the impact of this misfire is far-reaching not only in discursive terms but in terms of the serious legal repercussions it occasions. Drawing on the theoretical constructs advanced over previous chapters, this chapter investigates the progress and outcome of the particular piece of litigation instantiated by this piece of failed satire. The litigation in question was brought by a well-known British public figure against the owners of London’s daily newspaper, the Evening Standard. Following very shortly is a detailed examination of the discursive history of the case, along with a profile of the litigants involved. Thereafter, the progress and outcome of the case are analysed, again as a discursive event and by using all the relevant components of the model of satire. The model is also used to develop a short, and it is hoped, illuminating contrast between this and another legal case which took place in 1987 on the opposite side of the Atlantic, a case which is now popularly referred to as “The People versus Larry Flynt”. It is suggested that an interpretive model of the sort proposed offers an unusual and insightful perspective into how the concept of satire is filtered through and framed in the context of legal discourse. In keeping with the thrust of the book as whole, this chapter synthesises frameworks in both pragmatics and discourse analysis and continues to underscore the socially and culturally centred nature of satire. However, the preoccupation here with the legal consequences of satire makes this chapter as much a study in forensic discourse analysis as an exercise in applied stylistics.

. Developing a case study: Alan Clark vs. the Evening Standard This and the following section comprise two halves of an extended case study exploring an episode that was played out in Britain, over several years, until its conclusion in January 1998. As noted above, the case study offers an opportunity for applying various of the established categories of the proposed model. It also provides an insight into how a satirical target is constructed and how that

When satire goes wrong 

target is mediated through a particular piece of satirical writing. What the following study seeks to demonstrate is the extent to which the target can interact and participate within the discourse framework of satire. A notable feature of this case, for instance, is that the satirical target ultimately “bit back”. This section establishes the context and key players in the case study, and the following section its significant stylistic and forensic consequences. In the autumn of 1999, a number of British newspapers ran obituaries devoted to a “colourful” writer and politician. A former Defence Minister in Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, Alan Clark (1928–1999) had been Member of Parliament for the Kensington and Chelsea constituency of London since 1997. In addition to a high-profile political career, Clark was a military historian of some standing, whose first book The Donkeys (1961) was reputed to have been the inspiration for Joan Littlewood’s satirical film Oh What a Lovely War. However, Clark’s enduring fame is probably as a writer of frank and opinionated political diaries, which recorded, in often outrageous detail, the machinations and inner workings of the British government (Clark 1993). The unstinting detail with which the corridors of power were described, stretching for nearly a decade from the early 1980s, made many of his contemporaries and colleagues in government very uncomfortable indeed. The obituaries were, in the circumstances, understandably generous in their tributes. Clark was portrayed as “a connoisseur of gentlemanly vices” in one, while another affectionately spotlighted his exploits as a (self-confessed) “old-fashioned philanderer and serial adulterer”. In spite of his well-documented political outspokenness, unashamedly reactionary in its tone, Clark was presented as the embodiment of “charm, dash and colour” and as someone who was “his own man”, a laudable personal attribute to be sure. The downplaying by the media of the “controversial” side to Clark was perhaps somewhat disingenuous given that many of the same papers had in the past been only too happy to recount the wilder of the MP’s exploits. Glanced over in The Times obituary was the bizarre story of his marriage, and how, for instance, his mistress famously accompanied him and his sixteen year old bride on honeymoon (The Times 8/9/99; p. 19). Also touched upon was his remark, made in public, that a female rival for his Tory party nomination was “the obligatory skirt”. Then there was the incident involving the South African high court judge who, during a British election campaign, flew from South Africa expressly to join forces with a Labour opposition candidate in London: the reason was that Clark had conducted a 24 year affair with the judge’s wife during which he had also seduced both of his daughters into the bargain (a trio of conquests referred to as “the coven” in the MP’s Diaries (1993: 9)). As

 Chapter 7

an index of his political views, The Times notes that one of the MP’s dogs was named Eva Braun, while the hall of his Saltwood Castle, inherited from his father Kenneth (later Lord) Clark, was reputed to be hung with SS banners (The Times 8/9/99; p. 19). When asked live on British television why, given the troubled situation in East Timor, his own department was overseeing arms sales to the Indonesian government, he riposted: “Who the bloody hell’s ever heard of East Timor?”. It may have been with a heavy-handed irony that The Times carried in the same issue as their obituary to Clark a report of the murder of fifty East Timorese civilians (The Times 8/9/99; p. 23). One might wonder how so notorious and egregious a personality managed to sustain a career in politics which saw off three prime ministers and which survived a period in British politics where “family values” and “back-to-basics” policies were enshrined in the ideological ballast that kept afloat the ruling Conservative party. Indeed, The Times obituary begs the question as to how “in a moralistic age” Clark got away with his outrageous public and private behaviour. It is worth relating the paper’s answer to the question it asks itself: The answer can only be the patronage of Margaret Thatcher and his own panache. His technique was complete frankness (he never attempted to hide or deny his many sexual affairs) and considerable charm. Since he wrote about many of his escapades in his diary, there was little capital that puritanical editors could make from them. Thunder they might from their newspaper pulpits, but a fascinated public paid them no heed. In an age when the scalps of promiscuous politicians hung from the belts of the tabloid press, Clark was treated almost with admiration. (The Times 8/9/1999; p. 19)

There is much of interest in The Times’s explanation, not least because it echoes, though obviously not consciously, some of the issues raised by Montgomery’s study of public and media discourse in the aftermath of the death of Diana (see §6.2 above). Implicit to the newspaper’s account seems to be the assumption that the public reception of Clark’s personality and behaviour is grounded in a conflict between the universal validity claims of sincerity and appropriateness. Throughout the mediatised reaction to Clark, emphasis is repeatedly on his frankness, his truthfulness and his unwillingness to conceal or deny his actions. Set against that is the marked inappropriateness of his conduct and, in the interpersonal dynamic of the Habermas model, the manifest “non-conformative attitude” which it signals. For example, in an editorial tribute to the politician in the same issue of The Times (p. 26), the “candid” style of writing in his diaries is described as “indiscreet”, at once reconciling candour to the claim to truthfulness and indiscretion to the claim of appropriateness. Sin-

When satire goes wrong

cerity, where the speech function is such that “the hearer can trust the speaker”, collides with appropriateness, the function of which is to enable the hearer to accord with the speaker in “shared value orientations” (see Figure 4 above). However, the sheer inappropriateness of Clark’s opinions and actions would of itself still have caused much public outcry were it not for another important contextual factor. This factor, touched upon again in The Times’ comments, is about the comparison of Clark’s behaviour with that of other politicians belonging to the same right-wing Conservative regime. The arrogance, humbug and hypocrisy of a number of high ranking Tories was captured at the time in a series of well-documented scandals. Clearly, these politicians were inhabiting a world far removed from the espoused “family values” and “back-to-basics” ethos that stamped the official Conservative party line. This much published “sleaze factor”, evident in The Times’ reference to the “the scalps of promiscuous politicians”, played no small part in the demise, in 1997, of this arrogant and decadent administration. Remarkably, two highprofile members of that government, Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer, are at the time of writing still serving prison sentences, one for perjury and the other for lying and attempting to pervert the course of justice. Lying and related strategies of deception, which feign sincerity while violating the claim of truth, is not something that could readily be associated with Alan Clark: his actions may have been inappropriate but they were at least sincere. And sincerity was certainly at a premium for a political party plagued by stories about its members’ promiscuity, dishonesty and rank hypocrisy. Such, then, is the admittedly partial sketch of an individual whose ideas and opinions were ultimately to become the target of a particular piece of a satirical discourse. But what of Clark’s writing, especially that in the notorious Diaries? The brief excerpt which follows is a fragment of one entry, although typical in style and delivery of the Diaries as a whole. Of interest to the present author in its topical relation to his country of origin, this entry records what was clearly a dispiriting day spent in Northern Ireland: Northern Ireland is unbelievably nasty. Grey, damp, cold. Big puddles just lying; blackthorn hedges; low standard of life. I saw one pretty girl, in a crowd that had been evacuated from a building on account of a “200lb bomb scare”. They were all standing, patient but dejected, on the pavement. White police tape everywhere. On her own, she was jumping about excitedly, very nice legs. But the general atmosphere is bleak; overlaid with the oppression of terror; deep and perpetual feuds, suspicion and callousness. I am confirmed in my opinion that it is hopeless here. All we can do is arm the Orangemen – to the teeth – and get out. This would give also the not slight

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advantage that, at a stroke, Infantry “overstretch” is eliminated. Alan Clark, Diaries (1993: 395); entry for January 1991

Shocking, opinionated and voyeuristic by turns, this short extract is very much in the spirit of the Diaries as whole. The proposal mooted in the final paragraph is certainly likely to offend many sections of Northern Ireland’s divided community, and it is perhaps best that no further commentary on this portion of the text is offered here. The remainder of the entry is high in the “evaluative modalities” of first-person subjectivity, replete with predicative adjectives (“nasty”, “bleak” and “hopeless”) and adverbials of manner functioning either as adjuncts (“excitedly”) or as intensifying modifiers (“unbelievably”). The note-like scribblings and annotations of the diarist are captured in moodless units couched as orthographic sentences, as in noun phrase to adverbial combinations (“White police tape everywhere.”) or in asyndetically coordinated units (“Grey, damp, cold.”). A notable feature is the use of italicisation to accord special emphasis to an intensifier (“very”) which seems to be a stylistic technique replicated across the Diaries in descriptions of women whom the author finds attractive. Indeed, it speaks volumes that the aside which houses this intensifier is offered in spite of the obviously traumatic events unfolding in the description. Reading between the lines is not difficult to do here: the pretty girl’s “jumping about” may have been induced through shock or because a close friend or colleague may still have been inside the building being evacuated. But at least she has nice legs, which, of course, makes everything all right – at least as far as the diarist is concerned. For an intending satirist the scene is now set. A satirical target presents itself in the form of a high-profile personality with frank and outspoken views; someone prone to indiscreet and often offensive public pronouncements. What is more, the Diaries offer a ready-made corpus of written material, widely available and easily identifiable through the bold stylistic imprimatur of its author, giving ample and clearly delineated scope for satirical invention. An extra incentive for London’s Evening Standard newspaper, as the body who eventually took up position A on the triad of discourse positions, was that their satirical target’s responsibilities as parliamentary representative for Kensington and Chelsea made him a particularly prominent figure in that city. And with a target so well-known to the paper’s million or so readers, the potential for satirical exploitation seems, at first glance, very hard to resist. In April 1997, there duly appeared in the Evening Standard a “spoof ” diary. The diary, which thereafter became a regular feature in the paper for nearly a year, was headed by the caption “Alan Clark’s Secret Political Diary” be-

When satire goes wrong 

side which was placed a photograph of the MP himself. Below the heading and photo was a brief “standfirst” (introductory commentary), allegedly summarising what Clark had been doing during the week or so leading up to the diary entry. The substance of the standfirst obviously varied from copy to copy, but it always included a sentence in the following format: “PETER BRADSHAW imagines how the MP might record these events in his diary”. The precise anatomy of the spoof diary entry, as detailed here, proved crucial in the light of what was to follow. Readers of this book may perhaps have already formed some ideas about how such a figure might be satirised in print, about what methods to use and about what sort of dialectic component would be needed to offset the echoic irony established in the prime element. Or perhaps not. Before thinking any further about what might be a productive mode of textual composition, however, let us consider first of all how the Evening Standard set about satirising Clark in the fake diary. To that effect, it will be worthwhile setting alongside one another two texts, one a bona-fide entry from Clark’s own diaries and the other a spoof from the pages of the London Evening Standard. In spite of the stylistic template extracted out of the sample given above, readers may well find themselves hard put to distinguish the two: Text H There was a local big cheese, who’d come down from Bristol, to drive us about. Angela Croft, the press officer is attractive. Smart summer suit, pretty legs. Jenny is Victorian, no, sanatorium pale, in her silk frock. I ought to be full of testosterone as I stride along the platform with these two cerebral cuties clip-tripping beside me. Quite the opposite. They’ve got me in a tungsten steel jock-strap. Within, there is nothing better than a champagne cork. Text I I have sifted the evidence; yet I cannot arrive at a judgment as to who I find the more fascinating. Sinead Martin, our assistant solicitor, or the lovely and quite brilliant Emma Himsworth, junior to my counsel – the portly Geoffrey Hobbs QC, whose unpromising appearance serves to set off Emma’s beauty with more piquancy, like something from Chaucer. Sinead is quite strict, which I like, with flowing dark hair and a charming lilt to her voice.

There is indeed little stylistically that separates Texts H and I. Both are rich in the evaluative modalities, encoded in predicative adjectives and adverbials of manner, which so mark the Clark idiom. Then there are the, seemingly de

 Chapter 7

rigeur, salacious asides appended to the descriptions of women, although men patently fare less well in this area. The stylistic similarity even extends right down to the italicisation, in “sanatorium” and “strict” respectively, for those points of special emphasis in the depiction of women whom the author finds especially attractive. That there is nothing to choose between these texts, nor indeed between any of the published spoof and real diary entries, was to have an important bearing on the shape of events thereafter. For the record, and I even need to search through my documentation to remind myself which is which, Text I is entirely the invention of columnist Peter Bradshaw of the London Evening Standard (18/12/1997), while Text H is, so to speak, the real Alan Clark (1991: 25). To be sure, the mimicry is sharp and keenly observed, and the fine detail of the spoof reveals, right down its graphological form, a discerning sense of stylistic nuance. Astute as the spoof may be, there are other aspects of its satirical design which were clearly problematic, because towards the end of 1997, Alan Clark, Member of Parliament and well-known public figure, brought a legal action against the London Evening Standard because of the spoof diary. The substance of that action, and its ramifications for the study of satirical discourse, forms the remit of the next section.

. Analysis, overview and commentary Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the litigation brought by Clark against Associated Newspapers, the parent company who defended the action on behalf of the Evening Standard, is that it flew thoroughly in the face of the legal pathway customarily taken by an individual who has been slighted by a humorous publication. In English civil law, the offence of libel dates back as far as the reign of King Alfred the Great in the ninth century. Libel is a tort, “an actionable civil wrong”, reserved for the pursuit in law of defamatory statements which, in Baron Parke’s formulation of 1840, exposes someone to “hatred, ridicule or contempt” (Crone 1989: 9). Lord Atkin further amended the legal definition in 1936, adding the test: “would the words tend to lower the plaintiff in the estimation of right-thinking members of society generally?” (Barendt et al. 1997: 25). Clearly, libel is the natural path of legal redress for parties who feel that they have been wounded by the aggressive intent of satire. This is no surprise; after all, the very discourse model advanced in this book postulates that the initial impetus for satire is disapprobation by the satirist about the satirical target, which is then manifested in a textual composition directed towards

When satire goes wrong 

the subject position of the satiree. So satire, of course, has the potential, indeed the intention, to lower the estimation of its target in the opinion of those whom legal sources often refer to as “reasonable people”. Given that is also very much the point of satire that “ridicule” and “contempt” be directed to subject position C, the degree of risk for the intending satirist is considerable. The publisher of Private Eye magazine, Pressdram, certainly knows to its cost, literally, the litigious hazards of scatological material. Between 1990 and 1994, this company was involved in over half of all the periodical libel cases set down for trial at London’s Royal Courts of Justice (Barendt et al. 1997: 40–41). As has been noted, Clark’s legal team eschewed redress through the tort of libel and took a different tack. They pursued instead the common law offence of “passing off ”, a mediaeval law enshrined in modern day English jurisprudence under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988 (Halsbury’s Laws of England, web: 2001). The specific clause in the Act, invoked in the litigation, is Section 463, “false attribution of a work”, which says that a person has the right in the specified circumstances “not to have a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work falsely attributed to him (sic) as author”. Effectively the inverse of plagiarism, this law takes “attribution” to mean a statement expressed or implied as to who is the author, so the plaintiff must show that the work in question actually contains, to follow the precise legal direction, “a false attribution of authorship, not merely what was or might have been understood by some as a false attribution”. Clark’s legal team maintained that the articles were indeed published in such a form that a substantial number of readers attributed the article to the authorship of the plaintiff (All England Law Reports [AELR]: 959, web). The case therefore centred on whether the Evening Standard genuinely attributed authorship to Clark and whether the plaintiff was thus entitled both to an injunction restraining the defendant from publishing any further diaries and to “relief sought in the commission of the statutory tort”, which, to dispense for a moment with the legal jargon, simply means compensation. The question however is why, when the name of the real author was always posted in small capitals on the “diary”, Clark’s team should assume that the pursuit of false attribution, as opposed to libel, would stand a good chance of success. Moreover, to argue that readers would mistakenly believe that the words were those of the plaintiff would be to concur implicitly with the often unpleasant views expressed in the spoof, an outcome which would surely be undesirable. Quite how this intriguing case unfolded will be related shortly. For the moment, it is worth offering some observations on how the discursive event that was the trial can be aligned with the discursive practice that is satire.

 Chapter 7

At the risk of sounding immodest, it is my contention that the satirical model proposed across this book can usefully be brought to bear on the general direction which this trial took; on its instigation, on the nature of its execution and on its legal and discursive ramifications. Applying it to the legal process also serves as an opportunity to review the model’s key features, developed across the previous three chapters, as well as helping to unpack certain aspects of the discursive construction of the case itself. To revisit some of the core terms of the model proposed in Chapter 4, the construction of satire involves the combination of and opposition between two elements, the prime and the dialectic. The prime instantiated in a satirical text functions by echoing some sort of “other” discourse event, extending from another discursive practice right down to the specific idiolect of a particular individual. The dialectic, by contrast, is a text-internal mechanism which produces, in the Popperian sense, an “opposing idea or movement”, such that the struggle between prime and dialectic pushes the satiree towards a resolution, towards a “new point of view”. Whereas the prime element is activated by an echoic form of irony, the dialectic is embodied in oppositional irony, and crucially, it is the collision between these two modes of irony that, according to the model, forms the theoretical bedrock of satire. Translated and applied to the Evening Standard diaries, the model throws up for consideration some intriguing features of textual construction. The domain of discourse which Bradshaw’s text ostentatiously construes, and through which it intercedes intersemiotically, is obviously Alan Clark’s own Diaries. To that extent, the prime element of structure, such that it repositions the originator of the text relative to the anterior discourse, establishes the first phase of irony, the echoic phase. Yet while the prime element is conspicuous, and presumably sufficient to confer the status of “spoof ” on the text, the dialectic element, which functions to create the “twist” on the prime, is, frankly, nowhere to be seen. For the satirical text to work effectively, the model argues, both prime and dialectic need to be present. Moreover, the accessing and retrieval of the former element is often dependent on the recognition of the latter. What compounds the omission noted of the Evening Standard text is the way it fails to exploit convincingly the part-referential, part-fictional status that satire enjoys; its “referfictionality” in other words. Satire of the sort embodied by Text C (the “Delhi Telegraph” example, §4.4 above) problematises the division between fact and fiction, referring to authentic people and places on the one hand while attaching to them invented propositions, events and actions on the other. In the absence of a discernible mode of oppositional irony, the problem for the Evening Standard text is that the people and places portrayed seem to

When satire goes wrong 

have no such fictional attachments, such that the events described begin to feel uncomfortably authentic. For example, many of the “spoof ” entries record, as do the real diaries, the specific location where events of that day were supposed to have taken place. Two of Clark’s homes, Albany and Saltwood, feature as the most frequently cited locations in the real diaries. That of itself is not surprising, but consider this in the context of the following openings to two separate entries: Albany Fool, Clark, fool, fool! Saltwood Fool, Clark. Fool, fool, fool.

As it turns out, the first fragment is from the Evening Standard (9/4/97; p. 6), the second from Clark’s own Diaries (1993: 28). But for some very minor variations, the sequences of self-admonition are lexically identical, right down to the intrusion of the vocative “Clark”. Furthermore, the locations signalled are also “true”, which tends to make both texts, at least as far they go here, utterly believable. Believability is generally not an index of successful satire, and satirists normally work hard to rescind any guarantee of the authenticity of what is reported (more of which below). Given the symbiotic relationship between the two elements, the dialectic is often required, in the absence of any formal cue, for the recognition of the prime. By not creating sufficient ironic space through the instantiation of a dialectic element, so “proximal” a spoof thereby tends discoursally to sail a little too close to the wind. The potential satiree is offered no in-text oppositional marker, so text-processing strategies draw on general knowledge, which may or may not combine with stylistic knowledge, to stamp the text as a close parody. Perceptive and well-taken as a parody it may be, but as a piece of satire it falls well short of the mark in terms of the parameters specified in the model for textual construction. It is important to remember that the expressed intent of the spoof diary – the trial notes constantly underscore the defence team’s insistence on this – was that the diary was supposed to satirise Clark. One can see why: to have proven its satirical intent would be to have confirmed its claim to insincerity, a move which would have had a profound impact on the outcome of the trial (and see further below). This point begs another question. What exactly led the Evening Standard author to construct so “proximal” a text? To answer this question, we need to look a little closer at the way method intersects with the discoursal construction of target in the participation framework for satire. In Chapter 5 it was argued

 Chapter 7

that certain discourse techniques used in the formation of a dialectic component in satire can be classified as metonymic, because the operations they perform fall within the same conceptual domain (§5.3 passim). The term saturation was used to refer to the technique of exaggeration, which in the terms of the balloon-and-bell-jar analogy, functions as an inflating strategy within a particular order of discourse. Whereas saturation is essentially “more of the same”, its opposite, attenuation, is “less of the same”. Detailed analysis of saturation back in Chapter 5 was withheld because the concept can be usefully illustrated in the present context by applying it to the way the satirical target is drawn (or not drawn) by the spoof diary. My own contention is that Alan Clark is, to say the least, a challenging target for satire. What is more, the direction taken by the Evening Standard was a dangerous one because they chose a figure who came, as it were, “presaturated”. Throughout this book, reference has been made to the unsuitability for satirical attack of certain types of subject position in the triad of discourse. In this instance, the paper chose to satirise a man whose outspoken views and controversial behaviour had to some extent placed him “beyond the pale” as far as his public representation in discourse is concerned. Saturation is a relative concept, of course, but the sociopolitical context that was drawn earlier around this figure should demonstrate how Clark’s discourse, especially through his written pronouncements, was viewed and received in the public domain. This is not to suggest that other satirical methods were unavailable or in some way precluded from use, but the significant error for the Evening Standard was that their satirical gambit, such as it was, was to attempt to saturate further an already heavily saturated target. In terms of the somewhat surreal conceptualisation that is the balloon-and-bell-jar analogy, they simply tried to inflate what in effect was a well-inflated balloon, trying to “out-Clark” Clark. And because it was already under pressure, the liminal space that sits, so to speak, between the balloon and the outer wall of the jar, provided the intending satirist with very little room for stylistic creativity. This notion of a “pre-inflated balloon” is perhaps not quite as daft as it first seems. There are, as Chapter 5 has sought to illustrate, a variety of circumscribable techniques available, other than saturation, that can serve in the creation of a dialectic component in satire. Given that, by imputation, there was ample opportunity to “deflate” the target within the confines of the belljar, the technique referred earlier to as attenuated focalisation would surely have been a viable option for the Evening Standard. For instance, Clark’s long suffering wife, Jane, would have been an excellent choice of focaliser; a spoof diary written from her perspective would have offered a sufficiently remote long lens

When satire goes wrong 

through which to view Clark. With the putative anterior discourse of the echoic phase shifted towards her and away from her husband, and the dialectic phase sustained through attenuation, this tactic would engender a whole series of more complex subject positions. The more complex the subject positions, the more opportunity for irony and obfuscation, which in turns creates more space between the views and opinions of the “diarist” and the views or opinions of the satirist. More than anything, it was the lack of ironic space in their diary that was to cause so much trouble for the Standard. It is worth noting that the strategy of attenuation was precisely that used by Private Eye magazine during the so-called “Thatcher years” in Britain. Not quite a diary, the format of the Eye’s spoof was that of an imagined letter written to a fictitious personal friend. It was absolutely integral to its impact (and humour) that the letter, which covered political events of note in the relevant fortnightly period, was ascribed not to Margaret Thatcher but to her husband Dennis. Popular to an extent that they became known as the “Bill letters”, these texts cleverly offered an assumed insider’s take on the alleged political activities of Thatcher without the risk of seeming to attribute anything directly to her. Moreover, although the spoof letter appeared to have been signed off by a real individual, “Dennis”, the assumed friend to whom it was directed, the eponymous Bill, was an invention. Thus, the referential-fictional interface is straddled in a way typified by much satire, but to which, significantly, the Evening Standard is an exception. It is worth footnoting this general point with a mention of how subsequent British Prime Ministers have fared in recent years in terms of their satirical treatment in Private Eye magazine. Conservative Prime Minister John Major was accorded a regular instalment entitled “The Secret Diary of John Major, Aged 473/4 ”. Drawing on an interdiscursive frame, this fake diary invokes as its prime a manifest intertext, hanging discursive events associated with Major on Sue Townsend’s then hugely popular comic novel The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 133/4 . Again, metaphorical rather than metonymic in method, is the strategy used to capture in satirical discourse the ideas, activities and policies of Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair. In the Eye, the world of Blairite politics is transposed to a quiet English country parish, with, of course, Blair himself cast in the role of vicar. In an intergeneric echo of an unassuming and indeed bland parish newsletter, the regular feature “St. Albion Parish News” projects the discourse world of “New Labour” into the very “old” world of the English country village. The point is that these satirical texts, irrespective of whether their dialectic component is formed by metonymic or by metaphoric methods, are fully-formed in respect of both their composition and design.

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As observed earlier, the upshot of the particular stylistic direction taken by the Evening Standard was that they seemed to leave themselves little discursive space in which to induce that necessary degree of distortion or opposition for satirical writing. Part of the problem, again noted earlier, was down to the nature of their chosen target. Indeed, the written summary of the trial (AELR 959) makes some very revealing observations in this regard. Presented as the background “facts” to the case, Clark is described as someone whose “trademarks” appear to be “a larger than life character unconstrained by normal standards and conventions of behaviour and a total lack of discretion”. Some time ago, in Section 3.2, reference was made to what W. H. Auden calls the “comic butt” of satire (Auden 1952: 66). Auden’s view was that a satirical target should be someone who transgresses the “moral law”, although he adds that anyone who lacks the normal faculty of conscience makes him (sic) an unsuitable object for satirical attack. In spite of the Evening Standard’s insistence that Clark was a suitable candidate for their spoof diary, it does indeed appear that this is someone who lacks “the normal faculty of conscience”, someone who, as even the case notes acknowledge, is “unconstrained by normal standards”. As a reflex of this point, it is instructive to look at what the Evening Standard, from their own perspective as revealed in the written summary of the trial, sought to accomplish by representing Clark in the way they did. Here are some very telling remarks, culled from a lengthy witness statement offered in defence of the spoof diary by Mr. Berry, associate editor of paper: The format of the [fake diary] had to attract the attention of the reader and have the hallmarks of a genuine diary but simultaneously convey the clear message that there was something odd about it; that it was not quite what it seemed. The use of the word “Secret” in the title was a clear signal that the piece was not what it might initially seem . . . if the diary was “Secret” how come it was appearing in a newspaper? This was the first major signal that the piece was not what it seemed . . . The use of the word “Secret” in the title, the prominent reference to Peter Bradshaw’s name and the word “imagines” in the standfirst, and indeed the obviously exaggerated comic text are all signals to the reader that the columns are spoofs. We always believed that Peter Bradshaw’s pieces should include something which the reader knew had actually happened. News reporters from the Evening Standard were keeping an eye on what Mr. Clark was doing and . . . feeding information back to Mr. Bradshaw so that Mr. Bradshaw’s pieces could include standards of reality on which to hang his fantasies. Naturally, the joke would not work unless Mr. Bradshaw exaggerated reality and distort[ed] real facts. I believe Mr. Bradshaw succeeded admirably and that his pieces have worked well. The issue is whether their pre-

When satire goes wrong 

sentation is such as to cause people wrongly to believe that they were written by the plaintiff. (AELR 959: 5)

This vitally important and to some extent programmatic statement offers an intriguing perspective, from outside of the academe, into what supposedly constitutes good satire. Contained within it is a delightfully pithy definition of what I have been trying to capture in the term “referfictionality”: notice how Berry calls for a balance between what is imagined and what readers already “know”, such that the writer of the fake diary can “include standards of reality on which to hang his fantasies”. Also implicit in this account is some sense of the necessary opposition between prime and dialectic elements in satire. The format of the diary, according to Berry, had to have “the hallmarks of a genuine diary”, needing in other words to activate a prime, but it also had to simultaneously convey the clear message that there was something odd about it, needing in other words to develop a dialectic element. Moreover, if this account is to believed, there is an earnest attempt on the part of the newspaper to inject into the text’s construction a genuine dialectic component. For instance, the explicit reference to secrecy in the diary’s title, when read against the context of its obviously public dissemination, was apparently designed consciously to create a contraexpectation between the two frames of reference projected. Taken along with the disclaimers in the standfirst highlighted in Berry’s statement, it seems that to some extent the newspaper did try to establish and develop a genuine mode of oppositional irony in the diary. However, this needs to be set against the evidence adduced earlier through the comparison of Texts H and I. The sheer stylistic proximity of these texts does militate against the Standard’s position that the spoof had “exaggerated” reality and “distorted” the facts; to that extent, Berry’s comment regarding its standing as an “obviously exaggerated comic text” is well wide of the mark. Moreover, there is an uncomfortable tension in the final, contradictory sentences of Berry’s statement; whereas he believes the diary’s author to have “succeeded admirably”, and that the pieces “have worked well”, he concedes that their presentation may be such as to cause people “wrongly to believe that they were written by the plaintiff ”. Not to put too fine a point on it, if the diaries had been so successful, then the problem of believability would never have become an issue. What is emerging out of the observations made so far is the sense of a collision between universal validity claims and a breach between the three Rs – the acts of raising, recognising and redeeming – which configure the interaction and interpretation of the claims. Satirical uptake is reached through, among other things, the recognition by the satiree of a text’s claim to insincerity. Satir-

 Chapter 7

ical misfire, by contrast, is often located in position B’s ratification of a claim to sincerity even in the face of an attempt by position A to rescind that claim. For the fake diary to have functioned “successfully”, as the Evening Standard seemed to believe it did, would have required the suspension of the claim of truth, the redemption of the claim of appropriateness and the redemption of a claim to insincerity. As the direction taken by the legal process reveals, this was simply not how it happened. For a start, the precise terms of reference of the trial were that the Court was required to exercise its own judgment, assisted by the evidence given, as to whether a substantial body of readers had been or were likely to be misled more than momentarily into believing that the plaintiff was the author of the articles. Yet the “proximity” of its composition to the anterior discourse, detailed extensively above, meant that the text’s claim to insincerity was not easy to access. Furthermore, the difficulty that “the reasonable reader” would have in recognising the claim to insincerity impacts heavily on the direction of other text-processing strategies. With an assumed claim to “truthfulness” (sincerity), it follows that what was said in the Evening Standard diary was also raising a claim to “truth”. In Habermasian terms (see Figure 4 above), subject position B interprets the text as a representation of “the” world of external nature; as something “true” to the facts such that “the speaker is sharing his knowledge with the hearer”. The crux of the matter was that the diaries were so “true” to what Clark believed that reasonable readers were likely to be misled. Transposed across to the domain of forensic discourse, this was, on the one hand, the very issue which the defendants tried to nullify, and, on the other, precisely the point from which the litigants took their cue. The tack taken by the defence team, first of all, was to attempt to slur the character of Clark through a lengthy and aggressive cross-examination. Accusing the litigant of having been involved in unsavoury personal scandals was, it seemed, used as a ploy to goad Clark into protecting his “good name”. This was perhaps a more clever a gambit than it might have at first appeared. If Clark rejected verbally the allegations made about his outrageous opinions and lifestyle, then he would have been dissociating himself from his portrayal in those same terms in the spoof diary. It follows that the spoof would then by imputation have been a distortion of Clark’s opinions and lifestyle. And if it were a distortion, thereby satisfying (in our terms) the criterion for the formation of a dialectic element, it would have rescinded any claim to sincerity that might have been conferred upon the text. Although an interesting direction to take, the cross-examination failed spectacularly for two main reasons. For a start, Clark’s behaviour was already

When satire goes wrong 

notorious, which simply left the defence with very little to get its teeth into. In fact, the very court circular itself describes the original diaries as revealing the plaintiff ’s “decidedly right wing views”, his “extensive sexual exploits” and his “highly unconventional behaviour, thought processes and private life” (AELR 959: 4). In this context, the search for any scandalous admissions from the litigant simply appeared futile. The second reason arises from the first. Seemingly pointless as an attempted exposé (though an exposé was not what the defence were seeking), the interrogation of Clark offered no immediately obvious legal rationale. The judge intervened, calling the grilling a “totally uncalled-for personal attack” that exceeded “the proper limits of cross-examination” (AELR 959: 11). The cross-examination was cut short while senior counsel for the defence received a formal rebuke from the judge over his tactics. In his written summing up, the judge mentions as some “consolation” the fact that the plaintiff, seemingly happy to concur which much of what was directed towards him, “stood his ground and survived the onslaught unfazed and unbowed” (AELR 959: 11). The particular direction taken by counsel for the plaintiff offers in itself a revealing insight into how the validity claim of truth is embodied in the legal process. In spite of the disclaimers offered by the Evening Standard, and in spite of the reference to the “real” author in the standfirst, this did not deter Clark’s team from seeking to prove that “the notional reasonable reader” would still attribute authorship to the plaintiff. The task for the plaintiff was therefore two-fold: confirmation was required that the ideas in the spoof were basically indistinguishable from those of the real diaries and proof was required of how reasonable readers could actually be misled into believing Clark to be the author of the fake diary. Unbelievably, it was accepted without demur that Clark’s own close friends in the Conservative party would legitimately constitute this community of “notional reasonable readers”. One after another, Tory MPs, including one husband and wife pairing with parliamentary seats in the greater London area, gave evidence to the effect that they had been hoodwinked by the diaries into believing Clark to be the author. The general tenor of their evidence suggested that the “repellent” views of the spoof could only be attributed to one man, their close friend Alan Clark. In the broader terms of the participation framework for satire, this is indeed a curious scenario. As Chapter 4 argued passim, the satirical target, position C, is normally an ex-colluded party in the triad of subject placements in satirical discourse. Yet here is a satirical target which not only intervenes directly in that participation framework but actually arbitrates over the constituency of its subject placements! What Clark’s team was allowed to do, within this specifically forensic context, was effectively

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to design a position on the triad based on a predetermined interpretation of the interactive predisposition of the intended satiree. It is truly remarkable that not one of the many London Labour MPs were called to give evidence, and odder again, judging by the case history, that no-one thought to point out this breathtaking asymmetry to the court. What this incident says about the procedures of English civil law is a matter best avoided for now. That said, there was one notable exception to the stream of personal friends that made up the cohort of so-called reasonable readers. Reported with great indignation by the Evening Standard, in their only dispatch on the trial’s progress, is the story of the evidence given by a Mrs. P. of South Kensington. One of the MP’s constituents, her testimony was to prove telling, because it suggested that she had been misled “more than momentarily” into believing Clark to be the true author. However, it is the particular wording of her oral evidence that is remarkable: Reading Alan Clark’s Secret Political Diary for Tuesday 23rd September confirms my position that Alan Clark is a very nasty piece of work. However did he become my representative in Parliament? I didn’t realise it was not written by him until some time afterwards. (Evening Standard 14/12/97; p. 3)

This surely ranks among the more bizarre episodes in the history of English jurisprudence. A witness is called to testify on behalf of a particular individual, yet to support properly that individual her testimony takes the form of a character assassination. Astonishingly, counsel for the plaintiff actually invited this witness to confirm just how repellent a character their client was, thereby consolidating the impression that the ideas and opinions in the spoof diaries were so repugnant as to be only attributable to one individual, the “nasty piece of work” who was the then MP for Kensington and Chelsea. Clark stood firm throughout this, not for a moment seeking to disassociate himself from any of the opinions expressed in the fake diary or, for that matter, from the evidence of his doughty constituent. The diaries were to all intents and purposes the very embodiment in discourse of the MP’s beliefs, attitudes and opinions. The “truth”, so to speak, was out. On January 22nd 1998, the judge, Mr. Justice Lightman, ruled in favour of the litigant arguing that the Evening Standard was guilty of the common law offence of “passing off ” and of false attribution of authorship under Section 84 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. The judge added that “the identification of the plaintiff as the author was not sufficiently neutralised” to prevent a substantial number of readers being deceived. Costs for the trial were set at £250, 000. To date, the “relief sought in commission of the statutory

When satire goes wrong 

tort”, the compensation awarded to the plaintiff in other words, has never been disclosed, but it has been rumoured to have amounted to half a million pounds. There is an important footnote to this analysis. On the day of the judge’s ruling, a version of the spoof diary appeared in the Evening Standard, which, in a thoroughly postmodern twist, “imagined” how Clark would greet his victory in court over the newspaper. “The moment of triumph has an almost ineffable sweetness . . .” began the body copy. However, all was not quite what it seemed. Something had happened both to the caption and to the photograph of the MP. The photograph now appeared with a black rectangle blanking out the MP’s eyes. The familiar heading “Alan Clark’s Secret Political Diary” had been altered to “NOT Alan Clark’s Secret Political Diary”, with the new word inserted in handwriting as if to strike through with a pen the original printed heading. This new format, it transpired, was agreed upon by both sets of lawyers (AELR 959). What this means is that the members of two opposing legal teams actually sat down together to discuss what should constitute an appropriate method of satirical distortion. They settled on negation, a metonymic device that has already received extensive treatment within these pages. In Chapter 5, reference was made to the simplicity of negation as an irony marker, and to its capacity to alter substantially the whole tenor of a text by shifting its universe of discourse to “a world that is unsaid”. Clearly, the lawyers on both sides considered negation an appropriate device with which to deliver the all-important dialectic component, the absence of which had so seriously impoverished the original spoof. Although the specific path which led to the lawyers’ agreement will never be made public, a curious image presents itself of a debate in which the forensic domain meets and is synthesised implicitly with the domain of modern stylistics. The more serious implication of this is that if that crucial dialectic component had been injected into the text on its first outing, the Evening Standard would in all probability have saved themselves an awful lot of time and money.

. Extension and summary As signalled earlier in this chapter, a useful point of comparison can be drawn between the foregoing analysis of the Clark versus Associated Newspapers case and the analysis of a particular case which ran between 1986 and 1988 in the United States of America. The American case became widely known as the “The People versus Larry Flynt”, largely through its portrayal in Milos Forman’s “biopic” starring Woody Harrelson in the less than savoury role of the epony-

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mous (anti)hero (see Forman 1996, web). With respect to its legal reference, the title of that film is a spectacular misnomer. A more accurate designation would have been “The Diversity Action brought to the US District Court for the Western District of Virginia by the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Appellant, versus Larry C. Flynt, Hustler Magazine INC, Appellee”, although, to acknowledge Hollywood’s sense of creative licence here, accuracy of this sort would be unlikely to prove a big draw for the cinema-going public. To be even more pedantic, the case, strictly speaking, involved two trials, the Virginia hearing and Flynt’s subsequent petition to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. What this brief overview is intended to accomplish is to draw attention to any significant issues in the Flynt litigation as they might impact on the proposed discourse model, and to highlight some relevant points of intersection between the discursive construction of this case and that which formed the focus of attention in the bulk of this chapter. Flynt, proprietor and editor of the pornographic Hustler magazine, was sued by Jerry Falwell, a well-known American cleric and social commentator, over the publication of an allegedly defamatory and libelous satirical advertisement in that magazine. Here is the context to the case, as represented in this extract from the official legal documentation for American Federal and State Caselaw: A magazine of nationwide circulation, parodying a series of liquor advertisements in which celebrities speak about their “first time”, published an advertisement parody – labelled on the bottom in small print, as an “ad parody – not to be taken seriously” – in which a nationally known minister and commentator on politics and public affairs was presented as recalling, in a supposed interview, that his “first time” was during a drunken incestuous rendezvous with his mother in an outhouse. (Federal and State Caselaw (FSC) 1988: 86-1278, web)

On its publication, the offending issue of Hustler swiftly brought an action from Falwell against Flynt and the magazine. Falwell claimed that the publication of the advertisement entitled him to damages on three counts: for libel, for invasion of privacy, and for intentional infliction of emotional distress. What is interesting is that the substance of Falwell’s manifold complaint seems to involve a set of linked stages, where the success of one action impacts on the next. Libel, as was noted above, is malicious defamation carried out with the purpose of injuring someone’s reputation, and in this regard US and English law cover broadly similar ground. The case notes for the Flynt trials argue clearly that participants in public life are not powerless in the face of at-

When satire goes wrong 

tacks against their reputations and that they “may bring an action in libel to protest against the false infliction of reputational harm” (FSC 1986: 85-1480, web). However, Falwell builds into the libel action a second writ; namely, that he, Falwell, had been “emotionally distressed” by the advertisement. The third action, the invasion-of-privacy claim, fared less well, with the trial judge at the first hearing directing the Court to find for Flynt on the grounds that individuals like Falwell, who actively sought publicity, could not reasonably ask to be kept out of the public spotlight. The first issue, then, is the libel writ. What is truly odd about Falwell’s action is that the satirical advertisement – the terms “parody” and “satire” to all intents and purposes are used interchangeably throughout the legal documentation – actually urges readers not to take the text seriously. In other words, the ad’s subheading, “ad parody – not to be taken seriously”, is an explicitly verbalised disclaimer which implores readers to avoid any attribution to Hustler magazine of a validity claim of sincerity. It was noted during the discussion of the Clark case that difficulties in locating elements of oppositional irony in the spoof acted as a barrier to the suspension of its claim to sincerity. No such difficulties, it would seem, bedevil the Flynt text, a text so utterly devoid of any pretence to in-text oppositional irony that it even uses meta-discourse as a proviso to signal its illocutionary status. Again, as observed in the Clark case, the claim of sincerity, as embodied in discourse, intermeshes with the claim to truth: recognition of the manifestly insincere nature of the Flynt text would thus act as a precursor to the rejection of any claim to truth. In fact, the Habermasian formulation of the truth claim, which maps the relationship of the utterance to “the” world of external nature, is close to the criteria applied passim in the legal documentation; that is, that the jury’s task was to assess whether the Flynt text “could reasonably be understood as describing actual facts and events”. Again, one senses that some appeal is being made to the “reasonable reader”, to some notional embodiment of position B on the triad of discourse placements in satire. Unlike the Alan Clark case, however, the Flynt trial was conducted in the presence of a jury, which at least meant that the constituency of position B was broader than the one formed by the close personal friends of the plaintiff/appellant. In Forman’s cinematographic portrayal of the Virginia hearing, the particular manner by which the claims of truth and sincerity were played out in court made for pure theatre. Alongside the formal documentation of the proceedings, the accuracy of the details in the film cannot of course be vouchsafed. However, it is still worth recounting the relevant scene here. Edward Norton, playing Flynt’s real-life lawyer, Alan Isaacman, presents a series of arguments that connect up the conditions of truth and sincerity with

 Chapter 7

a degree of syllogistic reasoning that would put even Joseph Heller to shame. Isaacman’s “summing up” to the jury begins on the assumption that every sensible citizen believes Falwell to be a reputable and upstanding man, a custodian of morals with an unblemished reputation. Therefore, the incestuous actions portrayed of him in the Hustler advertisement – as any reasonable American would of course know – couldn’t possibly be true. Indeed, if anyone did believe the portrayal, they would be a fool, not only because of their mistaken belief that Falwell could be capable of such behaviour, but because of their inability to read and understand even the most simple of disclaimers. Falwell naturally had to concur with the widespread popular recognition of his public standing, because not to have done so would have committed him to the possibility that he was capable of performing the actions portrayed in the ad. And as no sensible person would ever believe that of Falwell, the ad could not therefore be taken seriously. Whether or not Forman’s film dialogue reflects accurately the flavour and direction of Isaacman’s summing up is impossible to say, but the real-life jury did find for Flynt on the libel charge. In the jury’s opinion, the text “could not reasonably be understood as describing actual facts or events” (FSC 1988: 86-1278), so it did seem after all that the reasonable reader, as the representative of position B on the satirical triad, was able to exercise some jurisdiction over the precise discursive status of that particular humorous text. There remains one final issue surrounding the Flynt case, one which leads to a more general overview of the societal and cultural significance of satire. It may be recalled that Falwell had one remaining action in his lawsuit. This action, much harder to defend against, was the alleged “emotional distress” he suffered as a consequence of the Hustler text. At the original Virginia hearing, the jury found for Falwell, in spite of that same jury’s acceptance that the text was literally “unbelievable”. That ruling led to an appeal by Flynt which came before the US Supreme Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in December 1987. The Supreme Court upheld Flynt’s appeal. It maintained that under the “Free Speech guaranties (sic) of the Federal Constitution’s First Amendment” public figures and public officials may not recover for the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress by reason of a publication caricaturing them. The Supreme Court accepted the original jury’s findings that the text in question could not reasonably be understood as describing actual “facts” about the minister, and given that for the purposes of First Amendment law Falwell could be said to constitute a “public figure”, then there was no other legal course of action but to find for Hustler magazine. Clearly, the judges came to this ruling with some reluctance. Circuit Judge Wilkinson, for example, records that

When satire goes wrong 

Flynt’s pornographic magazine was “a singularly unappealing beneficiary of First Amendment values” and that the action as a whole only “serves to remind us of the costs a democracy must pay for its most precious privilege of open political debate” (FSC 1988: 86-1278). The importance of the Appeal Court’s ruling cannot however be overstated. Perhaps the most significant of its many consequences is its attempt to “protect” the arena of free political debate where persons can speak their mind on public officials without fear of liability in tort. Satire, in the legal ruling, is viewed as a preeminent form of political debate, and although Flynt’s text is described “a tasteless, silly, and scurrilous bit of nonsense”, the Supreme Court judges point to the dangers in the legal precedent that would have been set by finding for Falwell in the case. To have found for any individual who simply complains that their feelings have been hurt by satire would, in the judges’ words, only serve to “stifle the finer forms of the genre” (FSC 1988: 86-1278, 487). In short, the ex-colluded participant in satire, the target, cannot legally suppress a piece of satirical discourse simply on the grounds that they disapprove of their portrayal in it. Indeed, the judges’ formulation of this principle is a resounding endorsement of the very rationale of satirical discourse: . . . one simply cannot subject a parody of a political figure to a cause of action for emotional distress. The reason for this is obvious. Political satire and parody aim to distress. This genre of commentary depends upon distortion and discomfiture for its effect. The best political humor may be in bad taste. (FSC 1988: 86-1278, 487)

Thus, the satirical target’s ability to intervene, redefine or even to dismantle the triad of discourse positions through legal redress is seriously circumscribed here. Whereas this dictum arises specifically out of not being able to square an “offending text” with America’s First Amendment, the evidence from British jurisprudence suggests that a similar principle applies. Conspicuously, the first point in Mr. Justice Lightman’s ruling on the Clark case was a disclaimer to the effect that his judgment against the Evening Standard should act as “no bar” to the further publication of satire or parody (AELR 971). What also seems to unite both legal systems is the assumption, argued throughout this chapter as a defining criterion of “true” satire, that the humorous text should provide a sufficient degree of “distortion”. Another is that the text should be constructed in such a way as to remove any “facts”, an obstacle which all too clearly was not overcome in the discoursal make-up of the Clark spoof. The text in question must also be insincere, for then it cannot be seen as a malicious and in-

 Chapter 7

tentional attempt to wound. Judgments of sincerity, however, depend on who constitutes, or is allowed to constitute, the position of the satiree in the participation framework. Whereas the notional “reasonable” reader is often assumed, the Clark case revealed that when the satirical target is a particularly powerful individual they can legislate over the make up of this important position in the discourse triad. Perhaps the most remarkable outcome of this marriage between the forensic and the stylistic is that the legal system has clearly underwritten the legitimacy of satire. The law has resisted opening the floodgates to public figures who wish to appeal about their humorous portrayal in satire. Instead, both of the cases examined in this chapter accord formal recognition, enshrined in civil law and in the higher echelons of legal institutions, to the place satire has in society. Satire is an institutionally sanctioned discursive practice that has material consequences for real social actors. And nowhere are those consequences more acute than when, in some aspect of its design or delivery, satire goes wrong.

Chapter 8

Analysing satire as discourse Overview, development, extension

Unlike conventional laughter, which is inspired by bad puns and human misery, our therapeutic laughter is thought-free, and is based on ancient techniques. There are more than a dozen techniques to learn on the course, and these include: – Pillsbury Dough boy laughter, where there is mutual poking of stomachs. – Austin Powers laughter, where people imitate the snicker of Dr. Evil, with their pinkie placed alongside their mouth. And if you fall ill during the course, all fees will be refunded. (From an advertisement for a course in therapeutic laughter, San Francisco)

. Overview The proposals that have been made across this book are, of course, not the only way to go about designing a stylistic framework for the analysis of satire. Behind every of the individual models in linguistics and pragmatics that have found their way into what is ultimately a composite analytic framework, there is a phalanx of comparable and perhaps equally suitable discourse models that might also have found their way into the framework. To that extent, what is offered in this study must inevitably stand as partial, provisional, and only one of a number of possible theoretical configurations. Moreover, of the “figurehead” scholars like Foucault, Popper and Habermas whose work has informed the broader elements of the framework’s design, there remains one theorist whose work, if not exactly absent, has at least been downplayed in this book. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin, especially Bakhtin (1981), continues to occupy the foreground of much contemporary stylistic-related work and there is little sign of any downward trend in the level of application of his ideas (Hall 2002: 357). On the face of it, there are many concepts in the Bakhtin storehouse – “dialogism”, “polyphony”, “heteroglossia”, “speech zones”, “voice zones” and such

 Chapter 8

like – which might have usefully been pressed into service here. Moreover, Dentith’s model of parody (Dentith 2000; and see also Howes 1986) is shaped in part by Bakhtin, and no doubt an extension of this could have been developed for a study of satire, an extension which would certainly be fuller than the short application of Bakhtin’s ideas provided in Chapter 4. However, it is precisely because Bakhtin’s work marks such well-trodden ground in discourse-stylistics that his influence over the present study has been to some extent mitigated. Whereas the concepts just noted may indeed play a significant role in satire, their more general application within stylistics demonstrates that they play a significant role in many other types of discourse as well. That surely militates against their explanatory potential for the present framework. Further to this, another area which is largely sidestepped across the book is the concept of ideology, although in this instance fuller justification was offered as to why this term was resisted (see Chapter 4 above). The concept of ideology has certainly been overused in stylistics to the extent that it now seems common practice – and the present author has been especially guilty of this – to tally up just about every feature of lexico-grammar in a text with some perceived significance in ideological structure. Upgrading everything in language to a higher ideological matrix simply masks the finer intricacies of individuated discourse functions and processes, while tying up satire with ideology is simply a tautology. As argued throughout the study, it makes little sense to talk of the ideology of a piece of satire or of the ideology of an individual satirist. The subject positions that realise both the satirist and the satiree are somewhat of a movable feast in discourse terms, framed as an interactive triad within orders of discourse, so trying to square a particular text with the ideology of this or that satirist is a less than productive use of the analyst’s time. Yes, satire is ideological, but then so, as the orthodoxy has it, are all forms of discourse. What, then, of those theorists whose ideas have found their way into the model? Foucault’s work on discourse, first aired towards the end of Chapter 3, proved useful for locating satire as a discursive practice within orders of discourse, and for drawing up the triad of subject positions for satire. It also helped sidestep the problematic, though seemingly prevailing, notion of a single author-satirist who is able to preside over and influence the “meaning” of a satirical text. Popper, whose work came to the fore in Chapter 4, provides a useful framework for explicating the concept of a dialectic element of structure in satirical discourse. Further, his conceptualisation of the dialectic triangle, with its three-step process from thesis, through antithesis, towards synthesis, mirrored productively the search in satirical text processing for a “new point of view”. Finally, Habermas’s framework of universal pragmatics was proposed

Analysing satire as discourse 

not only as a way of capturing the mechanism by which satirical uptake is reached by the satiree, but as a way of accounting for the pragmatic factors that contribute to satirical misfire. Habermas’s model was especially useful in pinpointing the particular constellation of validity claims that are brought into play as a structuring framework in the processing of satirical discourse. While the alignment of the ideas of these three philosophers looks straightforward, the conjunction is not quite as congenial or harmonious as it first seems. The relationship of Foucault to Habermas, for a start, has become a highly contentious one, and as a recent collection of essays suggests (Ashenden & Owen 1999: passim), the theoretical discrepancies embodied between the work of the two are far-reaching enough for many scholars to opt for one at the expense of the other. When Popper is factored into the triangle, the relationship becomes even more fractured, not least because Popper is highly critical of the entire Habermasian endeavour. For example, in his treatise The Myth of the Framework (1994), Popper accuses Habermas of fostering “a cult of incomprehensibility” (71) and of simply “talking trivialities in high-sounding language” (72). Things go from bad to worse when Popper elaborates: . . . I find it so difficult to discuss any serious problem with Professor Habermas. I am sure he is perfectly sincere. But I think that he does not know how to put things simply, clearly, modestly, rather than impressively. Most of what he says seems to me trivial. The rest seems mistaken. (Popper 1994: 73–74)

And as if the situation could not deteriorate any further, Habermas himself has rejected the concept of humorous discourse, seeing it simply as distorted communication which interferes with the drive to consensual intelligibility embodied by the ideal speech situation. In his highly normative model, ideal interaction should be free from the distortions of inappropriate language which tamper with form and which thereby potentially pervert the outcome of dialogue (Habermas 1990: 58, 106). This position is captured superbly by Basu in his description of Habermas’s ideas as the very “apogee of interlocutory humorlessness” (Basu 1999: 380). So to summarise then. Foucault and Habermas are politically and philosophically incompatible, Popper finds Habermas incomprehensible, trivial and wrong, while Habermas has no time for humour. Not exactly a harmonious coalition of theoretical positions to be sure, but this in no way should act as a bar on its potential application to humorous discourse. For one thing, it has been a consistent approach of this study not to “buy into” any particular model of analysis to the exclusion of all others because to have done so would have obscured part of the broader landscape of satirical discourse. The quasi-religious

 Chapter 8

observance of the principles of one scholar is especially restrictive when the analysis of polymodal and multivalent discourses, like satire, is concerned. It also seems appropriate in a way that the schisms that form the bedrock of satire should be captured by an analytic apparatus whose internal components have themselves a dialectic relationship to one another. In any case, there is at least a palpable theoretical link between both Foucault and Habermas in the form of the work of John Searle. Searle is the only scholar who is referred to by both Foucault and Habermas in the course of the respective articles cited in the earlier chapters (i.e., Foucault 1986 and Habermas 1979). As for Habermas’s attitude towards humour, well, there is something pleasantly mischievous about applying to humour a model designed by a scholar who actively thinks humour a waste of time. And if that application has proved to be of some heuristic benefit in broadening our general understanding of humour, then so much the better.

. Extension A further issue raised by the previous section concerns, not so much the theoretical compatibility (or otherwise) of the individual scholars whose ideas have influenced this study, but the theoretical parallels between particular concepts and categories in linguistics, pragmatics and humorology which have been built into the model of satire. A wide variety of approaches in discourse analysis have been pressed into service over the course of this book, although the intersections between these approaches have admittedly neither been developed as fully as they might nor been synthesised into a over-arching typology of discourse. For instance, a question might be asked as to how the core tenets of the SSTH-GTVH (Chapter 2) can be reconciled with the models of irony developed in later chapters. Such reconciliation might result in a more effective composite model which would have the explanatory power to deal with a broader range of forms of verbal humour. Although there is to the best of my knowledge no existing study of this sort, such a synthesis would represent an important advance in linguistic humorology. In a similar vein, the concept of genre could be examined more closely with respect to its intersection with satirical discourse. In the present book, commentary on genre was often negatively framed so as to make for a point of contrast with satire: that is, satire is not a genre of discourse but it does things to and with genres of discourse. This assumption is of course heavily dependent on what precisely is meant by the term “genre”, and, as noted in Section 4.2

Analysing satire as discourse

above, this area is very much open to debate. Although the existence of different research traditions is acknowledged in Section 4.2, the present study tends as a whole to follow the systemic-functional model in which greater store is set on genre’s status as a culturally-relevant linguistically-achieved activity type. While the functional model was used to help to chart aspects of verbal play in localised features of the lexico-grammar, agreement about the broader implications of its theoretical design is far from unanimous in the scholarly literature. This tends to make the “satire-is-not-a-genre-of-discourse” argument rather more contingent on the narrowness of the concept of genre than has perhaps been allowed. For example, other approaches to genre tend to be “thicker” in the way they bring to the description important sociocultural, ethnographic, psycholinguistic and cognitive criteria (Bhatia 1993: 11). The “North American” school, which was touched upon, again, in Section 4.2, is altogether more culturally-orientated in its bearing, casting genre in terms of the conventions of discourse that a society establishes as a way of “acting together” (C. Miller 1994: 37). In the context of satire’s capacity to draw together certain of the subject placements in its interactive triad, this approach to genre, with an emphasis on consolidation and consensus, does to some extent sit more easily alongside a definition of satirical discourse. However, this more expansive macro-social approach to genre does not of itself work to overthrow completely the satire-is-not-a-genre-of-discourse argument. For a start, difficulties remain in trying to accommodate the crucial dialectical strand in satire, the strand which serves to fracture and distort the echoic frame. Moreover, the consolidating thrust in satire is invariably offset by a distancing movement because, as one bond shortens between two positions on the triad, so another simultaneously lengthens. A further consequence of trying to accommodate satire within a more expanded definition of genre is that it tends to “allow in” too much that is not satire. In other words, the wider one casts the net theoretically, the more heterogeneous become the text-types that accommodate that definition, and such a move simply masks the special and distinctive qualities of satire as outlined across this book. Finally, satire does not easily satisfy the criterion of recognition in the way that established genres of discourse do. It is a key principle of the “thicker” description that genres be recognised by so-called competent adult members (Swales 1990: 58, 127; see also §4.2). While this criterion helps get around the sometime overreliance, in the functional generic model, on patterns of linguistic structure, satirical discourse remains curiously elusive in respect of its capacity to be identified by competent adult members. Indeed, as the evidence from Chapter 6 onwards suggests, the criterion of recognition is very much a key problematic



 Chapter 8

in the model of satire. Pfaff and Gibbs’s experiment, for example, shows how satirical uptake was reached by less than a quarter of their relatively homologous group of student informants (1997: 55; and see Chapter 6 passim). Clearly, further investigation of this area is warranted, where the theoretical categories of the present model of discourse might productively inform and supplement a quantitative study, of the sort carried out by Pfaff and Gibbs, which explores satirical text processing at the micro-level of informant response. Another consideration, worth remarking upon here, is the extent to which the methods developed across this book can be replicated more generally in the analysis of other satirical material. In other words, to what extent is the model proposed a genuine, broad-based blueprint of satirical discourse? A basic assumption of this study is that it deals with texts which are, to adopt van Noppen’s distinction, “symptomatic according to the analyst’s judgment” rather than “a corpus representative of discourse as a whole” (van Noppen 2003: 180). Nevertheless, the sorts of texts appearing in Private Eye which postdate those analysed in earlier chapters are very revealing because they suggest strongly that the same basic techniques of satirical method are in operation. This is not to suggest that the writers concerned work consciously within a fixed linguistic paradigm, although most of examples analysed in this book do, it must be said, have parallel stylistic reflexes in subsequent issues of the magazine. For example, and to be brief, here is a short piece from Private Eye which “celebrates” the rise to prominence, so to speak, of part of the anatomy of famed Australian songstress, Kylie Minogue:

(From Private Eye 1049; March 2002; p. 22)

A vestigial text in comparison with the more carefully crafted “Delhi Telegraph” example (Text C from Chapter 4), “Kylie’s Bum” nonetheless replicates the same basic satirical formula. Much of what was said of Text C’s arrangement is relevant here, especially in the way that that earlier text, by inverting sundry

Analysing satire as discourse 

and substantial news items, functioned to critique the news gathering practices of elite nations. The design of the Kylie text too serves to place in the spotlight the print media’s tendency to upgrade to news items trivia about elite individuals at the expense of more serious, even cataclysmic events about (perceived) non-elite peoples. Another case in point, again concerning material whose publication supersedes the equivalent example used in this book, concerns the consequences in discourse of controversial or “red-flagged” material, a subject covered at length in Chapter 6. In its issue of 21st September 2001, the first publication after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington D. C., Private Eye magazine ran a cover with a spoof banner heading “Bush Takes Charge” under which was placed the well-publicised photograph of George W. Bush, while on presidential duties, being told of the attacks by one of his aides. Against this prime element, and in a technique almost anatomically identical to that used in the controversial “Diana cover” (Text G in Chapter 6), two staged speech bubbles are assigned to the two figures in the photograph. The first, from the aide, says “It’s Armageddon, sir”; the second, from the president, says “Armageddon outahere!”. It is the in-text collision brought about by the second bubble, very similar to the mechanism used in the “Diana cover”, that activates the dialectic component in this satirical text. It is worth noting in passing that the particular device used to trigger the dialectic element is, yet again, the phonological sequencing pun (see Chapter 2). The pun is organised through a phonetic string which approximates to the “Armageddon” element in the aide’s bubble. Bush’s “reply” is thus cast as a notional Southern United States rendition of “I’m getting out of here”, complete with “a-prefix” (“a-gettin”) and fronted by the so-called “confederate vowel”, [a™], which is a monophthongal realisation of the glide in “I”. The use of the pun here further underscores the importance of the lexico-grammar in being able to glue together two disjunctive frames of reference in satirical texts. Lest there should be any ambiguity, the disapprobation that acts as the principal impetus for this piece of satirical discourse is subject position A’s perception of a degree of wavering and vacillation in the president’s actions in the hours immediately following the attacks. Not surprisingly in view of its difficult material, the “Bush cover” attracted as much negative reaction as it did positive. Complaints of indecorousness and poor taste were directed at the magazine by those who objected, while affirmations of the importance of satire were provided by those who approved of the cover. Just as in the controversy that followed the “Diana cover” (see §6.3), the same debate was played out with neither side fully understanding or even listening to the arguments of the other.

 Chapter 8

Indeed, it was with some measure of cynicism that Private Eye published, in the subsequent issue of the magazine, a spoof “cancellation form”, in a mocking gesture which “generously” helped save time for those objectors, for whom the satire misfired, who wished to cancel their subscription. Clearly aware of the fallout from the earlier “Diana cover”, the Eye had to some extent brought the discourse practice of satire full circle, making the very act of satirical misfire itself a target for satirical attack.

. Development In spite of the sort of replication of stylistic technique which has been observed across various issues of Private Eye magazine, it is nonetheless a limitation of the present study that it did not explore in any real depth the methods, techniques and reception of satirical discourse in countries other than Britain, Ireland and the USA and, for that matter, in languages other than English. In its defence, there were in the book more than enough textual examples to get through, and in many places, such as in Chapter 5, a line simply had to be drawn under the number of texts that could be harnessed in illustration of this or that satirical technique. However, a model such as the one proposed clearly calls out for some lateral expansion, ideally by being tested in different cultural contexts (cf. Draitser 1994, surveyed in §5.1). Furthermore, it could also be employed to probe further the respective status of satire even in those national contexts which it did cover. With specific reference to Ireland, for instance, Dixon and Falvey, in an admittedly informal study, point out that in spite of the proliferation of many forms of humour in the last decade of the twentieth century, there has been a strange and notable absence of genuine Irish satire. They remark caustically that “[p]eople of the new smug and affluent Ireland are too busy patting the Celtic Tiger to have space for satire” (Dixon & Falvey 1999: 37). Carpenter, similarly, testifies to a fall-off in satire in Great Britain after its golden period in the “Satirical Sixties” (Carpenter 2000: 2). Another type of longitudinal application, not so much diachronic as developmental, could explore the acquisition of satirical humour. Just how adult is satirical humour? Winner has already offered an illuminating study of how irony is acquired in the preadolescent and early adolescent years (Winner 1988), while Oppliger and Zillman (1997) have modelled changing humour preferences among adolescents, observing how, for instance, “disgusting humour” is a particular favourite among the more rebellious male youths (1997: 425). A project which therefore examined developmentally the “acquisi-

Analysing satire as discourse 

tion” of satire is certainly warranted, and it might complement in useful ways Pfaff and Gibbs’s work on undergraduate students reactions to satirical texts (see above, §8.2, and see also §6.1). Moreover, there remain, in spite of attempts to address some of them in this book, many unanswered questions about how satire intersects with other types of humorous discourse. Genuine difficulties arise, as Chatman (2001) observes, in trying to distinguish satire from other cognate forms of discourse such as parody, pastiche and travesty. The same sort of difficulties apply to satire’s relationship to farce (see Bermel 1982), and even to its relationship to broader “aggression-based” models of humour (see Gruner 1997). Finally, it has always been a central aim of this book that satirical discourse be grounded in a framework of actions and events and that it be situated as a form of discourse which has tangible outcomes for its participants. This emphasis led to a study, in Chapter 7, of two humour events, played out on both sides of the Atlantic, which had serious consequences in both British and American law. Again, this is an area that would merit further study, and which might be profitably extended to an examination of the place of satire in divided societies and nations. An interesting test case would concern the satirical materials used by the popular South African comic, and sometime cross-dresser, PieterDirk Uys, who, in spite of his repeated acerbic sideswipes towards it, managed for many years to escape retribution from the apartheid regime in his country. The point that satire has real repercussions for real people has perhaps not yet been made forcefully enough. There are many ways of talking about satire as discourse, about its methods, its subject placements, its use of irony and its pragmatic outcomes. This issue emerged ever more stridently as the writing of this book progressed. Indeed, the selection of a discourse-stylistic model as a suitable mechanism for dealing with satire is itself open to question: perhaps a more cognitive, or more cultural, or even more political orientation in the framework of analysis would have yielded different insights and been more theoretically sophisticated. This book is in no sense intended to foreclose on the debate about where the best vantage point for a study of satire should be located. But it has at least framed the terms of that debate.

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Name index

A Abelson, R. 30, 31 Aitken, J. 191 Al Fayed, M. 12 Alexander, M. J. 16, 49 Allen, W. 120, 121, 123, 187 Archer, J. 191 Ashenden, S. 162, 213 Attardo, S. 16, 17, 21, 24, 25, 37–41, 43, 117, 124, 125, 133, 178, 182 Aubouin, E. 40 Auden, W. H. 50, 54, 200 Austin, J. L. 70, 153, 158, 159, 211

B Bakhtin, M. M. 80, 81, 211, 212 Barendt, E. 12, 194, 195 Basu, S. 2–4, 162, 213 Bauman, R. 2 Benson, J. D. 73 Bentley, D. 138 Berger, A. A. 53 Bermel, A. 219 Bex, A. 80, 119, 143, 144, 148 Bhatia, V. J. 215 Biber, D. 35 Bindman, D. 129 Bradford, R. 145 Bradshaw, P. 194, 196, 200 Brown, J. 16 Brown, G. 31 Brown, P. 25, 147, 148 Burton, D. 26 Bush, G. W. 217

C Caldas-Coulthard, C. R. 104 Camacho, J. A. 128, 129 Campbell, O. J. 4 Candlin, S. 84 Carpenter, H. 4, 11, 12, 218 Carrell, A. 43, 59, 60, 174, 175 Carretta, V. 49 Carstyn, R. 118, 120, 122 Chaplin, C. 179, 181 Chatman, S. 219 Chiaro, D. 16–18, 25 Clark, A. 188–200, 202–205, 207, 209, 210 Clark, J. R. 4, 49, 54, 55, 61, 139 Coates, J. 50 Combe, K. 48 Connery, B. 48, 64 Cook, G. 16, 40, 41 Cook, P. 12 Corbett, R. 177, 178 Coulthard, M. 138, 139 Crone, T. 194 Cruse, D. A. 132 Crystal, D. 16 Culler, J. 24, 119 Culpeper, J. 26 Cummings, L. 162 Curcó, C. 45, 114, 115 D Dane, J. 120, 145 Davies, C. 3 De Palma, P. 42 Delabastita, D. 21, 24 Dentith, S. 118, 119, 212

 Name index

Dixon, S. 116, 218 Draitser, E. 4, 45, 112, 113, 120, 131, 140, 154, 218 Dyer, G. 49, 52, 55, 64 E Eagleton, T. 50 Eaton, T. 61 Eggins, S. 35, 73–76 Ehrenpreis, I. 56, 149 Eliot, T. S. 119, 120 Elliott, R. C. 50, 52, 55 Emmott, C. 88, 89, 95, 122 Esar, E. 32 F Fairclough, N. 84, 100 Falvey, D. 116, 218 Falwell, J. 206–209 Fanshel, D. 117 Farb, P. 16 Fein, O. 101 Finegan, E. 35 Fletcher, M. D. 137 Flynt, Larry C. 188, 205–209 Forabosco, G. 39, 40 Forman, M. 205–208 Foucault, M. 64, 65, 83, 84, 108, 211–214 Fowler, H. W. 53 Fowler, R. 104, 130, 131, 134 Francus, M. 55, 63 Freedman, A. 78 Freud, S. 17 Fromkin, V. 17–19 Fry, W. F. Jr. 2, 16, 21 Frye, N. 52, 53, 58 G Galtung, J. 104–107 Gans, H. J. 104 Garland, N. 129 Garner, J. 154–158 George, W. 1, 49, 146, 157, 217

Gibbs, R. W. Jr. 45, 102, 115, 116, 118, 127, 128, 154–158, 173, 182, 216, 219 Gill, J. E. 48 Giora, R. 45, 101, 150, 151 Givón, T. 136, 137 Goatly, A. 127 Goffman, E. 27, 87, 88, 94, 118, 177 Goldstein, J. H. 2 Goldwyn, S. 20 Greaves, W. S. 73 Grice, H. P. 17, 90, 94, 115 Griffin, D. 49, 50, 55, 149 Grundy, P. 178 Gruner, C. 39, 45, 157, 219

H Habermas, J. 10, 66, 158–163, 168, 185, 190, 211–214 Hall, G. 23, 211 Halliday, M. A. K. 73, 135 Hammond, Mary 126 Hammond, Mike 179 Harrelson, W. 205 Haslett, M. 66 Heller, E. L. 16, 24 Heller, J. 137, 138, 208 Hemingway, E. 51, 120, 121 Hendrickson, G. L. 4, 51, 52 Henman, L. 3, 85 Hidalgo Downing, L. 137, 138 Hillenbrand, F. K. M. 85 Hockett, C. F. 16, 19, 24 Hogan, P. J. 180 Howes, C. 212 Hutcheon, L. 66, 90, 118, 139

I Isaacman, A.

J Jones, A.

207, 208

183, 184

Name index 

K Kane, T. R. 2 Kermode, M. 180, 181 Klingender, F. D. 129 Knox, R. A. 61, 62 Kress, G. 169 L Labov, W. 117 Latta, R. L. 44, 154 Laver, J. 116, 117 Lawrence, D. H. 120 Leavis, F. R. 61 Legman, G. 32 Lemke, J. 77, 80 Levinson, S. 25, 147, 148, 159 Lew, R. 22, 24–26 Lewis, W. 52 Lightman, Mr. (Justice) 204, 209 M Mack, M. 52, 60, 61 Mackay, R. 57 MacMahon, B. 18, 19 Marnette, S. 93, 94 Martin, J. R. 73, 74, 76, 77, 183, 193 McCarthy, T. 159, 160, 162, 163 McGhee, P. E. 2, 21, 40 McGough, R. 176–178 Medway, P. 78 Merton, P. 179 Miller, C. R. 78, 215 Miller, J. 2 Minogue, K. 216 Montgomery, M. 163–165, 168, 190 Morgan, D. 36 Morgan, P. 145, 146 Morreall, J. 2, 18 Motto, A. L. 49, 139 Mulkay, G. 2, 87 N Nagel, J. 137

Nash, W. 2, 11, 16, 19, 20, 25, 30, 70, 86, 119, 120, 122 Neale, S. 178, 179 Nilsen, D. L. F. 45 Noh, E. 118 Nokes, D. 49, 51, 54, 56, 66, 145, 146, 148, 149 Norrick, N. 16, 21, 25 Norton, E. 207 Nussbaum, F. 48, 56, 66 O Okada, N. 17, 26 Oppliger, P. A. 218 Owen, D. 162, 213 P Paulson, R. 48–51 Payne, D. C. 64 Peel, J. 125, 126 Pfaff, K. 45, 102, 154–158, 173, 216, 219 Philo, G. 104 Pollard, A. 49, 55, 57, 60 Popper, K. 89, 90, 95, 100, 145, 211–213 R Rahilly, J. 19 Randolph, M. C. 52 Raskin, V. 16, 17, 21, 25, 29–34, 36, 37, 39, 41, 54, 65, 85, 114 Rawson, C. 49 Redfern, W. 16, 21, 24 Reiner, R. 183 Roberts, D. 107 Rose, M. 118, 119 Ross, A. 16, 55, 176 Ruch, W. 44 Ruge, M. 104–107 Russo, M. 139 S Sacks, H.

16, 27, 39

 Name index

Salameh, W. 2 Saltykov-Scedrin, N. 112, 113 Schank, R. C. 30, 31, 138 Searle, J. R. 70, 82, 158, 159, 162, 214 Semino, E. 40, 41, 79 Shappeck, M. 169 Sherzer, J. 20, 26–28, 102 Short, M. 57, 80, 121 Simpson, P. 3, 18, 19, 26, 61, 69, 71, 72, 120, 131, 148 Smith, N. 170, 181 Spalding, H. D. 32 Sperber, D. 90–94, 114–116, 118, 119, 124 Steen, G. 41, 81, 127, 156 Stockwell, P. 31, 84, 95, 119, 127, 139 Swales, J. M. 59, 78, 215 Swift, J. 49, 54, 56, 61, 62, 66, 101, 112, 130, 131, 143–146, 148, 149

T Tannen, D. 118 Taylor, R. 182 Thatcher, M. 129, 189, 190, 199 Thompson, G. 36, 73, 75 Thompson, J. O. 36 Threadgold, T. 73 Toolan, M. 115, 124 Travers, P. 181 Tyson, M. 79, 82

U Uys, P.-D.

219

V van Leeuwen, T. 84, 169 van Noppen, J.-P. 216 van Peer, W. 41 Veatch, T. 42 Veisbergs, A. 22 Ventola, E. 35 W Wales, K. 20, 22, 164, 168 Walsh, C. 139 Weinbrot, H. 49, 52, 56 Weiner, E. J. 41, 42 Werth, P. 138 White, S. 162, 191, 192 Wilson, D. 90–94, 114–116, 118, 119, 124 Winner, E. 218 Wood, E. 181, 182 Wood, M. 55 Worcester, D. 51, 52, 55, 58, 60 Wright, T. 129, 140 Y Yule, G. 31 Z Ziv, A. 2, 3

Subject index

A All England Law Reports (AELR) 195, 200, 201, 203, 205, 209 allegory 52 Anglo-Irish satirists 49 animator 94 antifeminist (satire) 56 antithesis 9, 89, 100, 106, 107, 136 see also dialectic triad anxiogenic (topic) 3 appropriateness 10, 158–165, 172–174, 176–181, 184, 190, 191, 202 see also universal validity claims Artificial Intelligence 30 attenuated focalisation (attenuation) 9, 126, 130, 131, 151, 198, 199 B B-movie footing 96, 166, 182, 184 Bollywood 98, 99, 106 bona-fide communication 34 British Labour party 6, 140, 199 British Royal Family media representations of 132, 163–165 the ‘Diana cover’ 171–175, 180, 184, 217, 218 broadcast media 99, 104, 106, 134, 164 Buffy the Vampire Slayer 125 burlesque 52, 120 C canonical satire 96, 165, 166, 182, 184

caricature 129, 130, 140 Casualty 35 Catch-22 137 class of discourse 81 “classical” satire 5 and the literary “canon” 50, 56, 61, 63 cloze-test 136 cognitive psychology 30, 45 collapsed idiom 21, 22 see also puns combinatorial rules 33, 34 comic butt (of satire) 54 see also target communicative competence 4, 160 conceptual domain 9, 127, 128, 139, 140, 198 conceptual mapping 41, 126, 139 cross-domain 128, 143, 145 conceptual transfer see conceptual mapping Conservative Party (British) 190, 191, 203 contraexpectation 142, 150, 151, 201 conversational maxims 17 critical discourse analysis 75, 84, 85 critical linguistic analysis 104 cross-generic mapping 9 cultural cognitive models (CCMs) 145, 146 cultural proximity 104, 106, 107

D deidiomatization 22 see also puns

 Subject index

dialectic

9, 88–90, 94–96, 101–104, 133, 136, 142, 144–146, 149, 169, 183, 196–199, 201, 205, 217 imbricated 103, 145, 146 isochronous 89, 101, 145 staggered 101, 145 triad (Popperian) 89, 212, 214 discursive practice 64–66, 105, 106, 108 satire as a 8, 72, 76, 78, 83–86, 100, 141, 195, 196, 212 disjunction 10, 124

E East Timor 190 echoic discourse 9, 80, 91–95, 113–119, 121–124, 165, 196, 199, 215 see also irony, echoic elite-centred nations 105, 106, 134 ER 35 etymology (of satire) 4 Evening Standard 188, 192–200, 202–205, 209 ex-colluded (party in satire) 8, 87, 88, 99, 203, 209

F Face Threatening Acts see politeness false attribution of authorship 195, 204 fantasy assimilation 40 Father Ted 116 Federal and State Caselaw (FSC) 206–209 figurative meaning 90 film satire 178–184 First Amendment 208, 209 foregrounding theory 41 formal verse satire 52 Free Indirect Discourse 93 French cuisine 145 fuzzy set theory 50

G garden-path reasoning 82 General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) 37–40, 43–45, 70, 71, 114, 124, 177, 178 generic structure potential 75, 80 see also genre genre of discourse 8, 35, 36, 74–83, 141, 144, 155, 180, 209, 214, 215 of literature 51, 52, 55, 63, 72, 112 of film see film satire genus 8, 70, 86, 100, 101, 131, 154 global discourse community 59 see also humour, community Graeco-Roman satirists 49 Gricean model of irony 115 grotesque 52, 129, 138–140

H Have I Got News for You? 179 Holby City 35 humorology 1, 3, 4, 30, 31, 37, 45, 65, 85 linguistic 15, 16, 29, 111, 154, 214 humorous anecdotes 4 humour absurdist 3, 43 community 57, 59–63, 86, 100, 103, 144, 146, 157, 173, 182, 184 coping 3 functions 3, 4 in married life 3 Jewish self-disparaging 32 L-theory of 44 positions 26, 28 practices 4, 5 racist 3 relief theory of 17

Subject index 

suppression 54 taxonomy of 2 Hustler Magazine 206–208

I ideology 10, 76, 77, 83, 148, 212 illocutionary acts 159 impetus 6, 8, 71, 86, 99, 119, 136, 140, 194, 217 incongruity 30, 33, 34, 37–44, 70–72, 94–96, 112, 150 India 97, 98, 100, 107 infantilization 112 inferencing mechanisms see inferencing strategies inferencing strategies 7, 87, 90, 153, 156, 158, 184, 185 informant-based experiments 154 informativeness requirement 150, 151 interdiscursivity 9, 83 intersemiotic mediation 142 intertextual set 77 invective 145 irony 12, 52, 53, 58, 90–97, 113–119, 123–125, 139, 149, 156, 196, 207 echoic 91–93, 114–118, 124, 193 of conferral 96, 153, 166, 175, 181–185 oppositional 95, 101, 102, 106, 113, 119, 125, 128, 129, 131, 133, 136, 146, 149, 168, 196, 207 phases of 9, 64, 93–95, 153

J jab-line 133 joke carrying text see jokes jokes 4, 12, 18, 21–26, 30, 32, 38–41, 43, 44, 54, 85, 111, 121, 150, 175

K knowledge cultural and encyclopaedic 7, 131 resources of 103, 131, 144 of typical text structures 9, 95, 122, 131 world / general 33, 122

L laughter 2, 17, 28, 44, 176, 177, 179, 211 Le Canard Enchaîné 129 lexical specificity 132, 133 lexico-grammar 25, 46, 73–76, 86, 135, 142, 217 libel 194, 195, 206–208 literary-critical approaches to satire 47–67 logic mechanism 39

M macro-model of discourse 157 malicious defamation 206 Market and Opinion Research International (MORI) 6 Mary Poppins 24 mental representation 95, 122, 146 merging (as satirical method) 9, 70, 128, 143 meta-discourse 71, 120, 207 metafunction experiential 73, 74, 142 interpersonal 73, 74, 142, 145, 147 textual 73, 74 metaphor 9, 41, 42, 126–128 metaphoric method 9, 139–151, 199 metonymy 9, 125–128 metonymic method 128–139, 198, 199, 205 micro-model of discourse 157

 Subject index

misfire 10, 166, 184, 188, 202, 213, 218 mode adoption 182 mode rejection 182 “Modest Proposal” 66, 143, 144, 146, 149, 166 Monty Python 15, 36 ‘Cheese shop sketch’ 36 Muñecos de Canal Plus 129 multimodal texts 168 N narrative 5, 88, 95, 112, 113, 121, 131, 169 naturalised order 84 Nazi Germany 85 negation (as satirical method) 9, 134–139, 142, 205 news media 79, 81, 82, 88 news selection 104, 105, 107 nominalisation 142 Northern Ireland 191, 192 O O-events 117 Oh What a Lovely War 189 order of discourse 80, 84, 126, 130, 198 P paradigmatic axis 27, 102 parody 53, 76, 92, 93, 113, 118–126, 197, 206, 207, 209, 212, 219 participation framework 87, 99, 108, 176, 185, 197, 203, 210 see also triad political correctness 154, 155, 157 perlocutionary status 14, 62, 70, 153 see also uptake phatic communion 116, 118 Plan 9 from Outer Space 181, 182 polarity 9, 73, 135–137, 139 see also negation politeness 25, 145, 147, 148

political satire 5, 11, 107, 108, 144, 209 polyphony 80, 211 Pressdram 195 prime 8–10, 88–90, 93–96, 100–103, 129, 136, 141–145, 149, 169, 183, 193, 196, 197, 217 Private Eye 6, 11, 12, 66, 79, 98, 109, 132, 135, 141, 167, 168, 170–172, 180, 185, 195, 199, 216–218 pseudoparody see parody public service encounter 35, 36 Punch magazine 12 punchline 28, 38, 39, 177, 178 puns 4, 10, 15, 16, 20–29, 43, 53, 76, 86, 102, 113, 142, 211 basic phonological 25 graphological 25 lexical 20 modality 25 phonological sequencing 23, 24 pragmatic 25 referent ambiguity 23 syntactic 22, 23, 26 R Radio Times magazine 4, 5, 179 referfictionality 99, 167, 196, 201 register 8, 19, 73–77, 80, 142, 145 relevance theory 114, 115 resolution 38–40, 42–45, 70 see also General Theory of Verbal Humour riddles 25, 29, 41 rightness see appropriateness Russian Formalists 41, 130 S sarcasm 53, 58, 115–118 satire boom 11 satirical footing 10, 82, 103, 149, 158, 165, 175 satirical method 9, 112–151, 167, 216

Subject index 

saturation (as satirical method) 9, 126–130, 134, 185, 198 schema 30, 85, 128 refreshment 40 script 29–37, 44, 45, 70, 71, 94, 115, 121 script opposition see script script overlap see script Scrutiny movement 61 secondary speech genres 80, 81 semantic script theory of humour (SSTH) 29–37, 114, 121 see also script setup 23, 37–39, 42–45, 70, 72, 178 see also general theory of verbal humour seventeenth-century Quakers 2 Shoulder Arms 179 sincerity 10, 96, 123, 125, 149, 158–167, 172, 176, 178, 181–184, 190, 191, 202, 207 see also universal validity claims sincerity condition see sincerity skit 12, 170 slip of the tongue 17, 18 anticipation 18 cross-linguistic lapse 19 Freudian 17, 18 malapropism 18, 19 perseverance 18 phonetic paraphrasia 19 metathesis (Spoonerism) 18, 20 “SMUT” model 70, 71 sociocultural matrix 160 source domain 126, 127 see also metaphor Soviet Union 54 speech bubbles 12, 169, 217 Spitting Image 129 spoof 12, 80, 82, 93, 94, 134, 192–205, 217, 218 standfirst 193 style-shift 10, 177 stylistic hooks 10, 102, 142

subject placements see subject positions subject positions 8–10, 64, 65 84–90, 99, 100, 106, 136, 148, 156, 157, 162, 163, 170, 173, 181, 184, 187, 199, 203, 215, 219 successful satire 3, 10, 87, 173, 197 Sydney Olympics 136 synecdoche 127 see also metonymy syntagmatic axis 27 synthesis 89, 90, 100, 108, 136, 139, 212 see also dialectic, triad systemic-functional linguistics 35, 73–78

T tag-line 179–181 target (of satire) 8, 43, 54–56, 70, 86–88, 133, 136, 155–157, 168, 169, 174, 183, 192, 198, 200, 203, 209, 210 episodic 71, 148 experiential 71, 148 discursive practice as 100, 102–109, 134, 187 personal 71 textual 71, 120 target domain 126, 127 see also metaphor The Daily Telegraph 26, 100–102 The Donkeys 189 The Hindu 103 The Last Waltz 183 The Onion 12 The People versus Larry Flynt 188, 205 the three “Rs” 163, 165 see also universal validity claims The Times 147, 189–191 The Tribune 103 thesis see dialectic, triad This is Spinal Tap 183, 184 tort 194, 195, 205, 208, 209

 Subject index

triad (of subject positions) 8, 85–90, 99, 108, 148, 154, 157, 158, 170, 173, 184, 87, 198, 203, 204, 207–210, 212, 215 see also subject positions truth 10, 92, 158–162, 165, 167, 191, 202–204, 207 see also universal validity claims truthfulness see sincerity U undercoding 130, 131 United States Court of Appeals 187, 206 universal pragmatics 158, 159, 161–163, 212 universal validity claims 10, 96, 123, 159–167, 171–175, 178–182, 190, 201–203, 207

uptake 10, 60, 70, 72, 108, 117, 151, 153–170, 173–176, 178, 179, 181, 182, 184, 188, 201, 216 United States Supreme Court 208 use-mention distinction 91, 92, 118 see also irony, echoic V Vietnam war 85 visual grammar 169 W WH-interrogative 20, 25, 28 wisecracks 25, 29 witticisms 4, 39, 150 word play 3, 10, 20, 24, 76 1-2-3 formula (in joke telling)

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