The Primer of Humor Research

The Primer of Humor Research

Edited by Victor Raskin

Mouton de Gruyter

The Primer of Humor Research

≥

Humor Research 8

Editors

Victor Raskin Willibald Ruch

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

The Primer of Humor Research

edited by

Victor Raskin

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines 앪 of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The primer of humor research / edited by Victor Raskin. p. cm. ⫺ (Humor research ; 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-11-018616-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-3-11-018685-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Wit and humor ⫺ History and criticism. I. Raskin, Victor, 1944⫺ PN6147.P76 2008 809.7⫺dc22 2008039782

ISBN 978-3-11-018616-1 hb ISBN 978-3-11-018685-7 pb ISSN 1861-4116 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ” Copyright 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Contents Theory of humor and practice of humor research: Editor’s notes and thoughts������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 1 Victor Raskin Psychology of humor ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 17 Willibald Ruch A primer for the linguistics of humor������������������������������������������������������� 101 Salvatore Attardo Undertaking the comparative study of humor ����������������������������������������� 157 Christie Davies Humor in anthropology and folklore ������������������������������������������������������� 183 Elliott Oring Philosophy and religion ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� 211 John Morreall Literature and humor ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 243 Alleen and Don Nilsen Humor and popular culture ��������������������������������������������������������������������� 281 Lawrence E. Mintz Historical views of humor ����������������������������������������������������������������������� 303 Amy Carrell Computational humor: Beyond the pun? ������������������������������������������������� 333 Christian F. Hempelmann The sociology of humor ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� 361 Giselinde Kuipers

vi 

Contents

Beyond “Wit and Persuasion”: Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 399 Tarez Samra Graban Applications of humor: Health, the workplace, and education����������������� 449 John Morreall Humor and health ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 479 Rod A. Martin Humor in literature ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 523 Katrina E. Triezenberg Communication and humor����������������������������������������������������������������������� 543 Dineh Davis Verbally expressed humor and translation ����������������������������������������������� 569 Delia Chiaro Cartoons: Drawn jokes? ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� 609 Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson Index of authors ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 641 Index of subjects��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 661

Theory of humor and practice of humor research: Editor’s notes and thoughts Victor Raskin Introduction This chapter is different than the others because it does not have a disciplinary or topic-oriented focus: it is not the ____ology/ics of humor nor even humor and _____. First, it addresses the goal and composition of the book. Second, it briefly introduces the chapters. Third, it introduces a variety of thoughts on the nature of humor and humor research that have not been addressed by the contributors – or addressed very differently. The first-timer pest and the idea of the book This book was originally designed and collected as a first-line defense against, and a helpful tool for, the first-timers in humor research, those who venture into humor from their disciplinary perch in total innocence and/or oblivion of the often sizable and growing body of knowledge on the subject and adjacent areas. In 1987, the author was invited to address a rare linguistic session of the Modern Language Association, and its focus was humor research. That was the session where two colleagues were presenting their work based on Raskin (1985), and when the eponymous author presented his own paper criticizing the theory, one of those colleagues exclaimed that the fact of being a namesake does not secure him, the author, the privilege of criticizing “the dead classic.” Entertaining as it was, the most humiliated presenter was a very solid, well-known sociolinguist who addressed humor without any knowledge of preceding work. A decade or so later, Peter L. Berger, a prominent enough scholar of religion to know better, committed the same sin in a major book. A reasonably well-known professor of philosophy – well, esthetics actually – from The University of Chicago decided to tell a few jokes in print disguising it as a  research book – in total ignorance of humor research as well. Conferences, including the Annual Meetings of the International Society of Humor Studies, also billed as the International Conferences on Humor

2 

Victor Raskin

(Research), saw such first-timers as well: the author witnessed the massive embarrassment of a prior-research-ignorant Canadian psychologist, who had brought an entire adoring entourage to the 2000 conference in Osaka. It was there and then that this author conceived the idea of the Primer as the one-stop place for a not so quick and dirty introduction to the multidisciplinary area of humor research. He had just resigned, after 12 years, as the founding editor of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research a year earlier and apparently wanted to continue to dominate the field from a different venue. His idea (does everybody understand that his is my?) was to select the major, leading author in each major discipline contributing to humor research and suggest a more or less rigid template for a 30–50-pp. essay on the approach. Their task was not to propose original research nor to push forth their own particular school of thought too much; rather, their mandate was something like this, “You are awakened in the middle of the night and asked to deliver a two-hour lecture on the subject to a reasonably educated audience without any specific knowledge on humor or your area. You deliver it. Now write it up. This is what I need.” Not everybody was happy with the task: some felt lazy, others just resisted the tyranny – and then there was Elliott. But most authors answered the call and did it valiantly – at various speeds. Other projects intervened, including the editor’s major involvement in further research in ontological semantics and applying it to information security and meaning-based Internet search. A significant effort was spent on developing a particularly brilliant and highly select group of young scholars, one of them a difficult and reluctant part-time genius, already planning her escape from this author’s clutches. And procrastination took its toll, the editor’s as well as, obligingly, some contributors’. In the meantime, new developments in humor research have emerged, and the editor was out of live classics, and as the dead ones, including the ever grouchy Sig, refused to cooperate, he went for the young firebrands, the future classics, most of them recognized by ISHS as emerging scholars and awarded the eponymous prize at its meetings (two of those were members of that select group of the editor’s advisees). So a bit of nepotism kicked in also, and the project thus matured. Primer structure It is somewhat odd to organize an interdisciplinary primer by the disciplines but it is really hard to think of a different way of presentation – neither the

Editor’s notes and thoughts 

3

alphabet nor the seniority of the authors sounded more promising. An interesting idea to arrange the chapters by the street numbers of the authors’ residences faced the difficult choice of the ascending or descending order as well the philosophical challenge of using the address at the time of submission or publication, and several contributors have moved once or twice since. So the contributions are introduced here more or less disciplinarily but they are arranged in the volume in a complicated multi-factor way that may strike an occasional reader as chaotic. There are no full-time humor researchers in the world. A few years ago, there was a rumor that there was one in France but it has never been independently confirmed, and the oddity of French academic affiliations and titles, before the EU attempts to homogenize them into some sort of an Americanlike system, has made it even harder. It is a definite fact, however, that all the major humor researchers have always been “part-timers,” as are indeed all the Primer contributors. Everybody was educated and established in an adjacent widely recognized basic field. The older ones had to satisfy the mainstream requirements of their discipline to get promoted and recognized, and only then, protected by tenure or equivalent, they migrated to some sort of application of the discipline to humor research. Their right to do so was made easier, in the USA, by the late 1980s–early 1990s, thanks to the prestige of the principals and the success of Humor, founded in 1987 and recognized by all the major abstracting services within the next several years. It was also a backlash to the shameful denial of tenure by Northwestern University to somebody who has become a major force in his field as well as in humor research within less than a  decade on the grounds that he had been writing “joke books.” An advocate, who physically produced the candidate’s two excellent books on the nature of humor at the highest university committee meeting and ventured a statement that there was nothing funny in the books, had no effect; nor did a dozen or so of first-rate refereed no-humor articles published in the most prestigious journals of the time. This ignorant prejudice about interdisciplinary areas: in Film Studies, they watch movies; in Humor Research, they tell jokes; in sexology, they . . . – can still be encountered in remote areas of the globe like some rare and basically eradicated infection. In the current scientific/scholarly/academic rigorous study of humor, psychology has the longest history. It is represented here by Willibald Ruch, a dominant force in the psychology of humor, whose seminal work on humor and personality and on the sense of humor measurement, has influenced a generation of researchers. Rod Martin presents a psychological perspective on the non-scholarly humor and health advocacy, whose claims he was one

4 

Victor Raskin

on the first to challenge on serious scientific grounds back in the late 1990s. Linguistics made a grossly overrated entry into humor research (in this author’s work) in the late 1970s–early 1980s and has since developed into a major contributor. It is represented by Salvatore Attardo and complemented, in its computational aspect, by Christian Hempelmann. Its imperialist ambitions are curtailed by Katrina Triezenberg, who takes it on herself to defend the literary studies’ right of way in studying literary humor. Triezenberg also complements somewhat Don and Alleen Nilsen’s take on that right of way. Literary humor has indeed been studied for a long time, but it seems important to differentiate between literary analyses of the use of humor, on the one hand, and much rarer studies of the nature of literary humor: in the former case, the field of inquiry is literary studies per se, and the goals of research come from there, for example, the establishment of influence or the attribution to a certain style. In the latter case, it is indeed humor research, and the authors had been urged to stay within those constraints. Sociology has lagged behind those two disciplines in spite of Henri Bergson’s (1899) early entry. Christie Davies, the most prominent sociologist of humor and a supreme authority on ethnic humor, considered this author’s request for a chapter on the sociology of humor but decided it was too boring. So instead, he contributed an insightful chapter on comparative humor, and the volume is all the better for it. The task to write the basic chapter eventually fell on Giselinde Kuipers. John Morreall, the major philosopher of humor, kindly contributed two chapters, one on the philosophy of humor per se and the other on an interesting application of humor research to morale-boosting corporate seminars and workshops. Fully versed in the field, he is one of the very few seminargivers who do not oversell humor as a product, so he is impervious to Rod Martin’s well-justified criticism of those who do aggressively pitch humor as a panacea for maintaining and improving good health, both for individuals and corporations. Elliott Oring presents a  major perspective on humor and anthropology, with a healthy dose of folklore studies. Adjacently even though very disciplinarily differently, Larry Mintz, one of the pioneers of humor research revival in the mid-1970s, deals with humor in popular culture, an area he has cofounded and maintained for several decades. The younger cohort addresses a number of less well-established subdisciplines in humor research. Amy Carrell provides a solid historical overview. Dineh Davis looks at humor from the perspective of communication studies. Tarez Graban pioneers the rhetorical take on humor. Hempelmann, already

Editor’s notes and thoughts 

5

mentioned under Linguistics, talks about computational humor. Triezenberg, also mentioned there, proposes a  new methodology for studying literary humor. Last but not least, Delia Chiaro, who owes this author big for listing her with these youngsters, firmly establishes the fascinating field of humor and translation. Hempelmann also contributed, with Andrea Samson, a chapter on visual humor, the only one in the volume that looks beyond verbal humor. Being naturally lazy and respectful, this author, qua editor, tried not to interfere with the individual authors’ styles, to the point of not trying to correct the literature types’ annoying habit of hiding their references in the footnotes. The rationale for that is to make it comfortable for other literature types to learn about theit discipline’s contribution to humor research in the familiar format. That pertains, to a smaller extent, to other disciplines’ little quirks. The publisher has, of course, insisted on and brought about a minimum of conformity to their sacrosanct style sheet. The remaining sections of this chapter pick up some loose ends and pieces, from the linguistic and philosophy of science perspectives. It also attempts to impose a superego – or at least a Yid – on this constellation of strong academic egos. Things left unsaid or said differently It is perfectly possible that things left unsaid should have remained so but this is not in the nature of this author. Over the years, largely unsuccessfully in the larger humor research community, in spite of sufficient recognition and influence, and somewhat more successfully among the captive audience of his former Ph.D. advisees, he has pursued a number of difficult topics in humor research. His hope is that this chapter and book will promote his advanced agenda. Theory This author’s main discipline, linguistics, is the most theoretically advanced discipline among the humanities and social sciences, and it can probably beat quite a few natural sciences on this count. Since at the earliest, Noam Chomsky’s (1965) work, linguistics has developed a view of itself that requires an explicit theory. As Nirenburg and Raskin (2004, Ch. 2) demonstrate, this

6 

Victor Raskin

t­heory comes complete with a methodology that generates descriptions for the object of linguistics, text. Linguistics has been most successful in developing such theories in the syntactic analysis of sentences, providing methodologies that match natural language sentences with syntactic descriptions that may be represented as trees or as constructions with parentheses. Linguistics extends this approach to humor research by addressing the short verbal jokes and offering a methodology to match the text of the jokes with a description/ explanation (see e.g. Raskin 1985). Such a theoretical approach enables the scholars to justify and/or defend their proposed methodologies against the competing proposals and to rear a generation of scholars trained to ask themselves and to attempt to answer the why-questions: Why are we doing things with language the way we are? Are their better ways? How to compare or to justify them? In many other disciplines, the methodology is a  given and hardly ever questioned, and the evolution of a field can be seen as a succession of fashions/gimmicks, often introduced by a temporarily dominating figure. In fact, for a number of years, after the author’s obligatory appeal to develop the theory of humor, the brazen Giselinde Kuipers immediately challenged him and accused him of linguistic imperialism because, in her areas and quite a few others, an appeal to theory is seen as foreign. In fact, even in the psychology of humor, back in the early 1990s, Willibald Ruch practiced the nullhypotheis in his brilliantly designed experiments because his field associated theory with arbitrary unproven tenets. As Chomsky convincingly claimed in his cited work, especially in his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), no theory means simply unexamined, explicit theory, a point of view energetically furthered in Nirenburg and Raskin (2004). Yet even in such a- and often anti-theoretical disciplines, at any time, there is a large consensus on what constitutes good research. In other words, there exists an implicit theory and a related implicit methodology. One would think that the idea of making all of that explicit would be quite exciting. It has not, however, caught on, and without the ability to coordinate the premises and tenets of an approach, it is hard to amalgamate the various disciplinary approaches to humor into a single field of study that Mahadev Apte named humorology. Most recently, in a kind of a retreat (or is it maturity?), this author started proposing a multi-theoretical basis for humor research, an amalgam of theoretical foundations emanating from the contributing disciplines. In fact, the sermons came with an implicit promise: give those theories for me, and I will blend them. But the holdout areas continue to hold out, and listening to or

Editor’s notes and thoughts 

7

reading a paper in such a discipline, one has to reverse-engineer the underlying premises, and when challenged about them, the authors often sincerely do not understand why they are questioned about something they never explicitly claim. They often fail to see the connection between what they actually say and what they presuppose. Just like people. Ontological Semantics of Humor The author’s original Script-based Semantic Theory of Humor (SSTH – Raskin 1985) was based on the notion of script. The script, frame, schema is a bunch of terms alternately used to denote a structured chunk of information. A serious linguistic semantic study of humor only became possible when, by the mid-1970s, a number of independent scholars, this author included, found a way to transcended the meaning of an individual word or even of an individual sentence and realized that people’s semantic competence was organized in bunches of closely related information. Thus, when we think of a car, we know most of their obvious components, such as wheels, doors, seats, windows, steering wheels, that they take fuel, that they are driven by licensed adults and senior children (except in Wyoming – don’t ask!), that they are used for transportation – and sex initiation and perpetuation, preferably not at the same time, but things happen! – that they are driven on the roads, that they cost a considerable amount of money, and so on and so forth. All this information, appropriately structured and presented, constitutes the script of car. The more advanced version of SSTH, the General Theory of Verbal Humor, developed by Salvatore Attardo and his humble doctoral advisor at the time (Attardo and Raskin 1991; Attardo, in this volume), opened the theory to multidisciplinary input but it left the semantic foundation the same. Over the last two decades, the script-based semantic theory, in linguistics and computational linguistics, outside of humor research, has evolved into a much more powerful, better formulated, and empirically tested ontological semantics (Nirenburg and Raskin 2004), and the time has come to try and put humor research on its basis. The first tentative attempts have been made in Raskin (2002), Raskin and Triezenberg (2005), and Petrenko (2008) – see also Hempelmann 2004, Hempelmann et al. 2006, and Hempelmann, in this volume, Here is an illustration of how ontological semantics works. It uses a few resources and programs to represent, comprehensively, the meaning of each

8 

Victor Raskin

sentence and, ultimately, of the entire text in a simple LISP-like formalism to model as closely as possible the human understanding. Its ontology contains around 10,000 concepts, each a set of property slots and fillers, with each of the hundreds of properties being a  concept as well. Most of the 100,000 lexical entries in the lexicon is anchored in a concept, with its properties appropriately constrained. (1) below is a  simplified lexical entry for a sense of the English verb say, while (2) is the concept inform in which it is anchored. (1) say-v1

syn-struc 1 root

2 root

sem-struc 1 2 inform

(2)

; say

cat subj root cat obj root cat say cat v subj root cat comp root agent theme

v $var1 n $var2 n $var1 n $var2

; as in Spencer said a word

; as in Spencer said  that it ; rained

; both syntactic structures have ^$var1 ; the same semantic structure, ^$var2 ; agent ^$var1, where ‘^’ is read ; as ‘the meaning of,’ and theme ; ^$var2 – the variables provide ; mappings between syntactic ; and semantic structures

inform definition “the event of asserting something to provide information to another person or set of persons” is-a assertive-act agent human theme event instrument communication-device beneficiary human

Editor’s notes and thoughts 

9

Using first the preprocessor taking care of special characters, removing the markups, stemming the morphology, and performing the minimal syntactic parsing driven by the syn-struc zones of each lexical entry, the semantic processor called the OntoParser transforms the sentence (3) into the simplified text-meaning representation (TMR), also – believe it or not – somewhat simplified, in (4) (3) Dresser Industries said it expects that major capital expenditure for expansion of U.S. manufacturing capacity will reduce imports from Japan. (4) author-event-1 agent value unknown theme value inform-1 time time-begin > inform-1.time-end time-end unknown inform-1     agent   value Dresser Industries     theme value decrease-1 time time-begin unknown time-end (< decrease-1.time-begin) (< import-1.time-begin) (< reduce-1.time-begin) (< expend-1 .time-begin) (< increase-1.time-begin) decrease-1 agent value unknown theme value import-1 instrument value expend-1 time time-begin (>inform-1.time-end ) (> expend-1.time-begin) (> import-1.time-begin) time-end < import-1.begin-time import-1 agent value unknown theme value unknown

10 

Victor Raskin

source value Japan destination value USA time time-begin (> inform.time-end ) (< expend-1.begin-time) time-end unknown expend-1 agent value unknown theme value money-1 amount value > 0.7 purpose value increase-1 time time-begin > inform.time-end time-end < increase-1.begin-time increase-1 agent value theme value time time-begin time-end

unknown manufacture-1.theme (> inform.time-end ) (< manufacture-1.begin-time) unknown

manufacture-1 agent value unknown theme value unknown location value USA time time-begin > inform.time-end time-end unknown modality-1 type potential ; this is the meaning of expects in (1) value 1 ; this is the maximum value of potential scope decrease-1 modality-2 type potential ; this is the meaning of capacity in (1) value 1

Editor’s notes and thoughts 

11

scope manufacture-1 co-reference-1 increase-1.agent manufacture-1.agent co-reference-2 import-1.theme manufacture-1.theme Essentially, the TMR is a set of embedded events, with the properties for each event filled with the appropriate case role fillers. Lower events fill a case role for a higher event. Notably, events and objects do not correspond at all to the verbs and nouns in the sentence. The modalities, aspects, co-references and other “parametric” elements make the meaning of the sentence even more explicit that it is for the native speaker. Thus, for instance, speakers are not aware of the top authoring event, even if they know that somebody did write the sentence. One of the main bragging rights in ontological semantics has been its disambiguation ability. Ambiguity is indeed one of the two or three major problem in formulating and explicating the rules of language, as internalized in the native speakers’ minds, and the said native speakers are protected from fully realizing the nature of the ambiguity disaster in natural language by a naïve but amazingly successful natural disambiguation mechanism: it just highlights, as it were, one of the meanings of the word as appropriate, the speaker “runs” with it, and most of the time succeeds. When it does not work out, the speaker actually reveals his or her subconscious awareness of the ambiguity by backtracking, i. e., going back to the source of the incorrect interpretation, and tries to pull the trick with an alternative one. Thus, if a native speaker hears the sentence It’s a lovely table, he or especially she may think furniture. But the continuation, I love the sixth row data sends them back to the alternative, chart meaning of table. To be useful for ontological semantics, the disambiguation mechanism of ontological semantics, besides trying to model as faithfully as possible the native speaker’s natural mechanism, must also take into consideration that humor, unlike the ordinary language usage where disambiguation is a must, is often deliberately ambiguous. So, in the ontological semantics of humor, an ongoing search for intended ambiguity must take place. One advantage over the scripts that ontological semantics has is a built-in opposedness of the handful of properties, such as normal/abnormal, real/unreal, good/bad, etc., on which most jokes are based (cf. Raskin 1987).

12 

Victor Raskin

It is probably somewhat premature yet to attempt a full-fledged ontological semantic analysis of jokes because some elements, especially the semantic analyzer, or OntoParser, are still in rapid development. One should probably expect a collective volume on the subject within the next 3–5 years. But it seemed timely to warn the humor research community that linguistic imperialism is continuing unabated, and even more complex and unreadable formalisms are coming! Sophistication in humor My interest in sophistication started with humor: I realized that there were levels of sophistication in jokes (Raskin 1990; Raskin and Triezenberg 2003 – cf. Raskin 2005, 2008)). I knew that it was so – except that I did not ­really know what sophistication was. A book can be sophisticated, but so can a meal be, and a car, and sex, and politics – and all in rather different ways: thus, for instance, really sophisticated sex cannot be really had in the most sophisticated cars (why does this topic keep coming back?). Perusing corpora, thesauri, Wordnet, and the Internet in general, one runs into a lot of synonyms and near-synonyms for the English word sophisticated – it looks like its ­usages vary a great deal: – rare – expensive – not easily available – not well known – complex – non-naive, knowledgeable, experience-related – subtle, refined – non-obvious – prestigious – enviable – desirable – unexpected – oblique (not straightforward) This is quite confusing: all of these adjectives characterize a different kind of sophistication, it appears, and quite a few of those do not seem to have any linguistic significance. Thus, what do I care that caviar is considered sophis-

Editor’s notes and thoughts 

13

ticated food while eggs are not – and how about Beluga served on halves of hard-boiled eggs? I have a strong intuition about sophistication in jokes, however, and my listeners at conferences as well as my students in humor seminars seem to agree with my crude ranking from 1 to 10 of the jokes below: (1) He was a man of letters, He worked at the Post Office. (0) (2) I am very unhappy, I have two girlfriends, and both are cheating on me. (2) (3) . . . . (3–9) (4) What’s the difference between the sparrow? No difference whatsoever. Both halves are identical, especially the left one. (10) My strongest guess for supporting the rankings is that I am thinking about the complexity of the inferences. Thus in (5), which probably ranks somewhere in the range of the elided examples in (3) above, the inferences are probably following the path of (10): (5) When I was young I helped a good fairy in distress, so she offered me a choice, an excellent memory or a big penis. I do not recall what I chose. (6) Inference: Cannot recall → bad memory → did not choose memory → chose penis → → has large penis → ha-ha! Sophistication can be also measured in psychological experiments: fewer and fewer people “get” the jokes as sophistication increases. Very few people appreciate (4), probably one of the most sophisticated jokes this author has ever heard or told. Its path runs something like (7): (7)

– Difference between the Sparrow and ??: no bail-out → have to make your own two out of one → divide the one you have into two → halves – “Identical halves”: no work – “Especially the left”: no possible interpretation → absurd → funny

Perhaps sophistication correlates with the number of missing links in inferencing like in (6–7) above, and not just in humor. My own sophistication about sophistication is still growing: it is a work in progress.

14 

Victor Raskin

References Attardo, Salvatore, and Victor Raskin 1991 Script Theory revis(it)ed: Joke similarity and joke representation model. Humor 4 (3/4): 293–347. Chomsky, Noam 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hempelmann, Christian F. 2004 An ynperfect pun selector for computational humor. In: Damir Cavar and Paul Rodriguez (eds.), Proceedings of the First Annual Midwest Colloquium in Computational Linguistics. Bloomington: Indiana University. Hempelmann, Christian F., Victor Raskin, and Katrina E. Triezenberg 2006 Computer, tell me a joke ... but please make it funny: Computational humor with ontological semantics. In: Ingrid Russell and Zdravko Markov (eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society, 746–751. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. Nirenburg, Sergei, and Victor Raskin 2004 Ontological Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Petrenko, Maxim S. 2008 Narrative joke: Conceptual structure and linguistic manifestation. Ph.D. disseration, Program in Linguistics, Purdue University. Raskin, Victor 1985 Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. 1987 Linguistic heuristics of humor: A script-based semantic approach. In: Mahadev L. Apte (ed.), Language and Humor, special issue of The International Journal in the Sociology of Language 65 (3). 1990 Sophistication in humor and beyond, In: M. Glazer (ed.), Abstracts of the Eighth International Conference on Humor. Sheffield: University of Sheffield. 2002 Computational humor and ontological semantics. In: Oliviero Stock, Carlo Strapparava, and Anton Nijholt (eds.), The April Fools’ Day Workshop on Computational Humor. TWLT 20: Twente Workshop on Language Technology, An Initiative of HAHAcronym, European Project IST-2000-30039, ITC-irst, Trento, Italy. 2005 The threshold of triviality in telling tales: Is it inherent in inferences? In: Salvatore Attardo and Lorene Birden (eds.), Abstracts of ISHS 2005, the 17th Annual Conference of the International Society of Humor Studies, Youngstown, Ohio: Youngstown State University. 2008 Computational Linguistics is the field linguistics of today, and other thoughts. In: Olga Fedorova and Olga Krivnova (eds.), Fonetika i Ne

Editor’s notes and thoughts 

15

Fonetika/Phonetics and Non-Phonetics. A  70th Birthday Festschrift for Sandro Kodzasov. Moscow (forthcoming). Raskin, Victor, and Katrina E. Triezenberg 2003 Getting sophisticated about sophistication: Inference at the service of humor. In: Abstracts of ISHS 2003: Annual Meeting of the International Society for Humor Studies. Chicago: Northeastern Illinois University. 2005 Ontological semantics of humor: Pre-conference tutorial. ISHS-05: The 17th Annual Meeting of the International Society of Humor Studies, Youngstown, Ohio: Youngstown State University.

Psychology of humor Willibald Ruch Introduction Psychology is about people. Hence the psychology of humor refers to the study of humor and people, not humor of humorous material only. We don’t consider psy­chology to be the science of the psyche or soul, as those latter terms are rather vague. Definitions these days typically refer to psychology as being the science of the behavior of living organisms, its causes and consequences. Behavior refers to activities and processes that can be objectively assessed and recorded. They may be visible externally (like walking, or talking), or via a recording device (such as the action of a particular muscle). Behavior may also refer to internal processes and what the mind does, like sensations, perceptions, memories, thoughts, dreams, motives, emotional feelings, and other subjective experiences. Causes of behavior may be internal (like personality) or external (like the social situation), and so may be the consequences. Psychology wants to describe (e.g., how is it?), explain (e.g., why do we do it?), predict (e.g., who will do it?) and control (e.g., can we change it?) behavior. For a psychology of humor then we need to be precise in describing the behav­iors and phenomena involved, like the cognitive processes involved in the creation of a funny remark, or the many levels of the emotional response to a brilliant joke. When explaining humor behavior we ideally want to arrive at laws, such as “per­ceived funniness of a joke varies in an inverted u‑form as a function of the degree of incongruity”, and when we study whether extraverted individuals smile more at a clowning experimenter than introverts we predict humor. When we ultimately are able to make humorless people funny entertainers, or turn sarcastic types into be­nevolent whimsical jesters, we have ultimate proof that we control humor behavior. Psychology has its roots in both philosophy and physiology and intersects with, or is informed by many other academic disciplines. Not surprisingly, early psy­chological studies were in the tradition of either two. Following the early accounts of laughter by Darwin (1872) and Spencer (1860), the empirical study of various physiological components of laughter, like respiration,

18 

Willibald Ruch

vocalization, pupil dilation, or heart rate was undertaken (Boeke 1899; Feleky 1916; Hecker 1873; Heitler 1904; Raulin 1900; Schirmer 1903) as well as the first observations of pathological and drug-induced laughter and possible neurophysiological correlates were made (Brown 1915; James 1882; Meunier 1909; von Bechterew 1894). The influence of philosophy was most visible and lasting through its subfield of aesthetics, which addressed not only qualia like beauty, harmony tragedy, but also the “comic”. The first empirical studies of the “comic” by psychologists, like Hall and Allin (1897), Heymans (1896), Hollingworth (1911), Kraepelin (1885), Lipps (1898), and Martin (1905) continued in this tradition albeit aimed at providing experimental evidence for early theories and notions. Experimental aesthetics (see Berlyne 1974; Ruch and Hehl 2007) would indeed be one natural home for the psy­chological study of humor if we had not merged into an interdisciplinary field. Readers of other disciplines, however, should note that as a science, psychology endeavors to answer questions through the systematic collection and logical analy­sis of objectively observable data. An empirical study typically utilizes a sophisti­cated methodology, e.g., carefully thought out experimental designs, psychometri­cally sound assessment tools, and statistical treatment of the data collected. Those and related features separate scientific articles from pop psychology books and essays. Psychology has always been one of the disciplines contributing most to the knowledge on humor. However, research in humor and laughter, like in other posi­tive phenomena, surprisingly, has been peripheral in psychology during the 20th century. Not only were relatively few studies dedicated to humor (compared to anger, anxiety or depression), but also interest in psychology came in waves, each of which had a different focus. For example, while the rediscovery of humor as a research topic in the 1970 had a strong experimental, developmental, and cognitive focus, the research starting in the mid 80-ies was directed more towards personal­ity, and applied issues like health and therapy. However, we can’t say that the basic issues addressed in the 1970s are solved by now and we are on safe grounds when having progressed to the application of humor. Luckily, a recent textbook summa­rized most of the pertinent literature including the more historical ones (Martin 2007a). Nevertheless, readers are advised to study the anthologies and journal articles of those times, as not all knowledge from that time is preserved in recent books. Books like the ones by Goldstein and McGhee (1972), McGhee (1979), Chapman and Foot (1976, 1977), McGhee and Goldstein (1983a, 1983b) can be considered to be classics and up to date in some respect. Also,

Psychology of humor 

19

it should be consid­ered that excellent research on humor is done outside of the humor research com­munity from people using other umbrella terms, like amusement, facial expression etc. However, the times of humor research being on the edge of psychology might change drastically as positive psychology (see Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000) has discovered humor (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths (Peterson and Seligman 2004) contributing to the good life. The focus on positive traits led to a classification of character strength and virtues. The Values in Action (VIA) Classification of Strengths is intended to be psychology’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM, American Psychiatric Association 1994). It is aimed at achieving a  similar goal to what the DSM does for psychiatry (i.e., understanding, treating, and preventing psychological disorders), but only for positive traits. It will provide an international frame of reference for the definition of character and its assessment across the lifespan. It also forms the basis for designing and evaluating interventions that bring about individual character strength. This has been the research agenda for humor already for a while, and thus humor research forms a solid column of positive psychology, and humor research will also profit from looking at progress achieved in other areas of positive psychology. Nevertheless, all subfields of psychology seem to contribute to the understanding of humor and laughter. In fact, humor can be studied in relation to cognition, moti­vation, and emotion. There are individual differences in humor that maybe habitual or transient, and there is a development across the life span. Changes in humor may be brought experimentally and by systematic training. There are genetic and envi­ronmental factors. Humor contributes to emotional health, and is important in learning and social relationships. Thus, humor is an important domain of human functioning and gets attention from both basic research as well as the applied fields. Literature review The following review will group the literature around some basic issues relating to the structure and dynamics of humor. As psychology is concerned with people, the view onto humor will be made from the individual’s perspective; e.g., the phenom­ena associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself. It is not aimed to give a full account of the psychological literature, which is not possible given the space constrictions. Rather sources will be mentioned where further information can be looked up

20 

Willibald Ruch

if needed. For a fuller account of the literature the reader is referred to other sources (e.g., Martin 2007a; Roeckelein 2002). The “this is funny” perception The core of the experience of humor is the perception that something is “funny,” and indeed ratings of degree of funniness are the most frequently used assessment tool in experimental research on humor. Although the perception that something is funny (i.e., the “humor response”, an expression coined by McGhee 1971) is a  unique experiential quality, it is not a  primary quality of one single stimulus that we perceive directly (like warmth) but it involves a comparison. Typically we experience an incongruity between objects, between elements of an object, or between an event and an expectation. Perceiving such stimuli properties may cause us to engage in playful processing of incongruity and we feel the “lightness” involved in amusement (Lyman and Waters 1986). How­ever, the second meanings of the terms (e.g., funny, comical) are also referring to the unusual (e.g. peculiar, strange, or odd) as well as to the suspicious (“There was something funny about these extra charges”) reminding us that not all incongruities are perceived as non-serious or not consequential. In humor the information we perceive is not really important and does not require an immediate and appropriate response: we know this is play, a play with ideas. There is no need to upgrade our knowledge system as the information we received only has an “as if ”-truth; it is playing with sense and nonsense (Ruch 2001). The nature and intensity of the subjective experience is most frequently measured via a 7-point Likert scale ranging from not at all funny (= 1) to extremely funny (= 7). Studies show that positive responses of different qualities (humorous, witty, amusing) do overlap, but they are independent of negative evaluations (Ruch and Rath 1993). It should be mentioned that “funniness” ratings typically are prone to produce skewed distributions. Most individuals do find a given stimulus not funny, and typically there are always individuals finding the poorest joke maximally funny (Ruch and Hehl 2007). However, the analysis of the “funny” and its relation to related qualities is also one of the most neglected aspects of psychological humor research. In research we commonly assume that there is only one experiential quality that humor evokes, namely funniness, albeit to a different degree. This position does neglect the fact that in most languages we do have different terms to refer to humorous stimuli and events, such as witty, humorous, comical,

Psychology of humor 

21

hilarious, or droll. Humor also seems to have different “flavors”, such as bitter, salty or dark. Depending on how narrow or broad we define the realm of humor (see below) we also do have phenomena like irony, satire, sarcasm, or mock/ridicule. While those may well be perceived as funny, it is questionable that the sole rating of degree of funniness fully represents the experiential world of the receiver. In other words, do ratings of ironic and sar­castic covary with judgments of funny in irony and sarcasm, respectively? A factor analysis of 23 qualities (e.g., funny, droll, bizarre, macabre, absurd, subtle) used to judge 60 jokes and cartoons yielded a  two-dimensional space (Samson and Ruch 2005). One dimension was more cognitive (subtle, ingenious vs. odd, bizarre) and referred to more structural features of jokes and the other referred more to motiva­tional qualities (stinging, macabre vs. droll, touching) presumable reflecting the impact of the content of jokes and cartoons. Nevertheless, all 23 terms assumed unique places in that space suggesting that they all measured different aspects. The perception of “funniness” was located exactly in the diagonal (subtle high, droll high) suggesting that both dimensions contributed equally to this perception. Smiling Smiling is the most frequent response to jokes. A review of studies reveals that in experiments smiling occurs roughly five times more often than laughter (Ruch 1990). However, “smiling” is a misleading category as there might be about 20 types of smiles that can be distinguished on an anatomical basis (Bänninger-Huber 1996; Ekman 1985). For example, there are five facial muscles that are able to create an upward move of the lip corners (i.e., the zygomatic major, zygomatic minor, levator anguli oris, buccinator, and risorius muscles) but only one of them, the zygomatic major muscle, is involved in the smile of enjoyment. When individuals genuinely enjoy humor they show the facial configuration named (Ekman, Davidson, and Friesen 1990) the Duchenne display (to honor Duchenne who first described how this pattern distinguished enjoyment smiles from other kinds of smiling). The Duchenne display refers to the joint contraction of the zygomatic major and orbicularis oculi muscles (pulling the lip corners backwards and upwards and raising the cheeks causing eye wrinkles, respectively). Typically there is a harmonic time course in the action of both muscles across onset, apex, and offset, and the contraction is symmetric and is in the time span between one half and 4 to 5 seconds

22 

Willibald Ruch

(Ekman 2005; Frank and Ekman 1993; Ruch 1990). Smiles not following those definitions are unlikely to reflect genuine en­joyment of humor. This does not exhaust the number of types of smiles as there may be smiling in­volved in blends of emotions (e.g., when enjoying a disgusting or frightening film), smiles masking negative emotions (e.g., pretending enjoyment when actually sad­ness or anger is felt), miserable, flirting, sadistic, embarrassment, compliance, coordination, contempt, and phony etc. smiles (see Ekman 1985; Bänninger-Huber 1996). In humor experiments unilateral contractions of the buccinator muscle (i.e., the smile of contempt) often goes along with finding the jokes distasteful (Ruch 1990, 1997; Ruch and Rath 1993). While the expression of smiling is innate we have learned when and to who show or not show enjoyment, and with what intensity. Also in experiments the social situations may activate those display rules, which might alter our facial actions. Scholars of humor should therefore look at facial signs of the attempt to dampen, control, or suppress smiling, as those are of significance (e.g., Ekman and Rosenberg 2005; Keltner 2005). When the experimenter or a companion is present, phony smiles may occur. Phony smiles try to convince somebody that one enjoys humor when actually nothing much is felt. These are deliberate (voluntary, contrived) contractions of the zygomatic major muscles (that might be unilateral, outside the time limits given above, and most likely also not having a smooth ballistic move­ment). Most importantly, the eye region is not involved in this type of smiling. Deliberate facial actions probably have their origin in the motor strip of the neo­cortex, while spontaneous emotional movements originate in the subcortical motor centers (Wild, Rodden, Rapp, Erb, Grodd, and Ruch 2006). Smiling (and the facial component of laughter) is best assessed with the help of the Facial Action Coding System (FACS; Ekman and Friesen 1978; Ekman, Friesen, and Hager 2002). FACS is a comprehensive, anatomically based system for measur­ing all visually discernible facial movement. It describes all visually distinguishable facial activity on the basis of 44 unique action units (AUs), as well as several cate­gories of head and eye positions and movements. FACS coding procedures allow for coding of the intensity of each facial action on a 5-point intensity scale, for the timing of facial actions, and for the coding of facial expressions in terms of events. An event is the AU-based description of each facial expression, which may consist of a single AU or many AUs contracted as a single expression. FACS therefore allows for a  comprehensive assessment of all facial events related to humor. Learning FACS takes approximately 100 hours or one week of inten-

Psychology of humor 

23

sive training. Also applying FACS is time consuming, and less sophisticated systems, such as the MAX (Izard 1983) and the AFFEX (Izard, Dougherty, and Hembree 1983) exist, which require less time to score. Applications of FACS to humor and the measure­ment of smiling can be found in Ekman and Rosenberg (2005). Laughter Laughter is often seen as synonymous with humor. Our field was occasionally referred to as the realm of the ridicula, the laughable (objects), and titles of books or talks might be, e.g., “laughter in the medieval ages”, although then not actually laughter is studied but occasions for laughter. In psychology the two concepts are more carefully distinguished, as there is laughter without humor (e.g., social, em­barrassed, or nervous laughter) and enjoyment of humor not always involves laughter (McGhee 1979), especially in experiments, when research participants are tested in solitude (Ruch 1990). Still the psychological study of humor includes the study of smiling and laughter for a myriad of reasons. Not only are they a good indicator of the intensity of the emotional response to humor (Ruch 1995), they also might mediate some of the effects of humor on health or other outcomes (Martin 2001; Rotton 2004). Laughter is also not unambiguously defined in research articles and encyclope­dias. Sometimes researchers refer only to the respiratory or vocal component of the expressive pattern (neglecting the face), sometimes they refer to the whole act or behavioral episode. In studies of primates laughter the face gets most attention (“relaxed open-mouth display”) and in everyday life a smiling face is often referred to as “laughter” although the vocal parts are missing. As a consequence of the lack of a comprehensive view on laughter, estimation of such basic parameters as dura­tion yielded quite discrepant results. While studies of the face suggest a mean du­ration of laugher of about 4.5 seconds (Ruch 1990), acoustic studies of laughter yield a mean duration of 1.2 seconds. This is not surprising as the latter includes only the parts during which respiratory changes occur and they cover only a smaller portion of the entire response. Also, while a morphology-based taxonomy exists for smiling (Ekman 1985), nothing comparable has been achieved for the more com­plex behavior of laughter. While dictionaries distinguish between, for example, hearty and derisive laughter, or between a guffaw, chuckle or chortle, the separa­tion is not done at an objective (e.g., physiological, muscular,

24 

Willibald Ruch

acoustic) basis so far. Huber, Drack and Ruch (in press) report of a pilot study with actors posing 23 putative categories of laughter. Decoder studies will show whether actors agree in their interpretation of the laughs, whether some types of laughs will yield different FACS-codes and whether naïve listeners will be able to identify the nature of the laughs. Acoustic analyses of laughter occasionally distinguish among types of laughs, such as laughter induced by tickling, mocking laughter, or hearty laughter (Habermann 1955; Szameitat 2007). Already Darwin (1872) gave a comprehensive and in many ways remarkably ac­curate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture, which was updated, elaborated, or corrected in contemporary writings (Bachorowski, Smoski, and Owren 2001; Nwokah, Davies, Islam, Hsu, and Fogel 1993; Ruch 1993; Ruch and Ekman 2001; Szameitat 2007). He addressed the important issues. Thus, he noted that “... [t]he sound of laughter is produced by a deep inspiration followed by short, interrupted, spasmodic contraction of the chest, and especially of the diaphragm” (Darwin 1997 [1872]: 199). “A man smiles - and smiling, as we shall see, graduates into laughter.” (Charles Darwin 1997 [1872]: 195). “A graduated series can be followed from violent to moderate laughter, to a broad smile, to a gentle smile, and to the expression of mere cheerfulness” (p. 206). “Between a gentle laugh and a broad smile there is hardly any difference except that in smiling no reiterated sound is uttered, though a single rather strong expira­tion, or slight noise - a rudiment of a laugh - may often be heard at the commence­ ment of a smile” (p. 208). “During exces­sive laughter the whole body is often thrown backward and shakes, or is almost convulsed.” (Darwin 1997 [1872]: 206–207). Cognitive processes Numerous theories have been proposed to explain the perceived funniness of hu­mor, with cognitive approaches being the most prominent together with arousal and superiority theories (for a review of theories, see Keith-Spiegel 1972; Martin 2007a). Recently, cognitive theories have also been applied to the study of individ­ual differences in humor but also neuropsychological processes. Cognitive theories typically analyze the structural properties of humorous stimuli or the way they are processed; sometimes these two levels are also mixed up. Per­haps beginning with Aristotle, incongruity was considered to

Psychology of humor 

25

be a necessary condi­tion for humor (Deckers 1993). From this perspective, humor involves the bringing together of two normally disparate ideas, concepts, or situations in a surprising or unexpected manner. Koestler’s (1964) term “bisociation” refers to the juxtaposition of two normally incongruous frames of reference, or the discovery of various simi­larities or analogies implicit in concepts normally considered remote from each other. Despite some critics (e.g., Ferroluzzi-Eichinger 1997; Latta 1999), there is widespread agreement that incongruity is a necessary condition for humor. How­ever, it was occasionally argued that it is not a sufficient one. Sheer incongruity may also lead to puzzlement and even to aversive reactions (see Forabosco 1992). Therefore, such variables as the resolution of the incongruity (Suls 1972), appropri­ateness of the incongruity (Oring 1992, 2003), the acceptance of unresolvable incongruity, or the “safeness” of the context in which the incongruity is processed (Rothbart 1976) have been proposed. Rothbart and Pien (1977) emphasized the importance of the distinction between possible and impossible incongruities and between complete and incomplete resolutions. This is important, as only possible incongruities can be resolved completely while for an impossible incongruity only a partial resolution is possible, and a residue of incongruity is left. The definitions of incongruity (“… a conflict between what is expected and what actually occurs in the joke”) and resolution (“… second, more subtle aspect of jokes which renders incongruity meaningful or appropriate by resolving or explaining it” Shultz 1976, pp. 12–13) refer to the process already, and less to the material. Linguists provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Raskin (1985) presented in detail the first formal semantic theory of jokes, which – due to its reliance on the concept of “script” (a  structured chunk of information about lexemes and/or parts of the world) – became known as the Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH). The SSTH can be summarized as two necessary and sufficient conditions. A text is funny if and only if both of the two conditions ob­tain: (i) the text is compatible, fully or in part, with two distinct scripts; and (ii) the two distinct scripts are opposite (i.e., the negation of each other, if only for the purpose of a given text), following a list of basic oppositions, such as real/unreal, possi­ble/impossible, etc. For example, Raskin’s prototypical joke (“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.”) is compatible with the two scripts “doctor” and “lover” and the scripts are opposite on the sex vs. non-sex ba­sis (for an elaborated interpretation see Raskin 1985).

26 

Willibald Ruch

How are jokes cognitively processed? Perhaps we need to distinguish three stages. Historically, often two stage models were described, however, referring to two distinct albeit different stages or recursive processes. For Kant (1790) laughter was “... an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expecta­tion into nothing”. In other words, that which is originally perceived in one (often serious) sense is suddenly viewed from a totally different (usually implausible or ludicrous) perspective. Eysenck (1942) goes beyond disconfirmation of an expec­tation by positing that the incongruity needs to be reintegrated. For him (Eysenck 1942: 307) “… laughter results from the sudden, insightful integration of contra­dictory or incongruous ideas, attitudes, or sentiments which are experienced objec­tively.” Suls (1972) introduced the perhaps best-known two-stage model. Accord­ing to this model, the perceiver must proceed through two stages to find a joke or cartoon funny. In the first stage, “... the perceiver finds his expectation about the text disconfirmed by the ending of the joke ... In other words, the recipient en­counters an incongruity – the punchline. In the second stage, the perceiver en­gages in a form of problem solving to find a cognitive rule which makes the punchline follow from the main part of the joke and reconciles the incongruous parts.” (p. 82). In the doctor’s wife joke above, the ending (“come right in”) is incongruous, as it does not readily follow the prior “no” (especially as it is not supplemented by a statement to the patient that he was welcome to wait for the doctor‘s return). Thus, it does not make sense for the doctor’s wife to invite the apparent patient in. Here­with ends the incongruity stage. However, the hints young and pretty help the re­cipient to reinterpret the text along the lines that not the doctors’ patient, but his wife’s lover is knocking on the door, and suddenly the ending (including the wife’s unexplained whispering) makes sense and follows from the joke body. These proc­esses are part of the “resolution”stage. According to Suls’s model there are two possible outcomes of the second stage, namely laughter (if the rule is found) or puzzlement (if the rule is not found). While the latter is plausible, the former has been doubted. Why should the resolution immediately lead to laugher? It was argued (Ruch 2001) that having borrowed the flow chart of a problem-solving computer program, this model could not go much beyond seeing humor as being a problem-solving activity. While the model de­scribed the comprehension part well, it does not explain appreciation (McGhee and Goldstein 1972). It is likely that the cognitive processes continue after resolving the incongruity. Unlike after real problem solving, the recipient is aware that the fit of the solution is a pseudoor “as if ”-fit.

Psychology of humor 

27

This idea is part of a different two-stage model. Lipps noted already in 1898 that what makes sense for a moment is subsequently abandoned as not really making sense. Thus, the two stages he spoke about came later in the processing of humor (its is sense and no sense). At a meta-level we experience that we have been fooled; our ability to make sense, to solve problems, has been misused. Thus, in particular for the impossible incongruities and their partial resolution, the two-step (i.e., step I: detection of incongruity or violation of a build-up expectation; step II: resolution of incongruity) model needs to be expanded to include a third stage of detecting that what makes sense is actually nonsense. This third stage then allows distinguishing between joke processing and mere problem solving. If the processes indeed ended with the resolution of the incongruity, we would not be able to distin­guish whether we just resolved a problem (as in riddles) or whether we processed humor. We would believe in the outcome of the problem-solving activity and as­sume that it has truth-value. In humor we do realize that the resolution only makes sense in the playful context. Thus, while Suls’s incongruity-resolution model covers stages one and two, Lipps’s distinction refers to stages two and three. Some authors postulated even further oscillations between the two interpretations of the text or two perspectives involved; like playing with sense and nonsense (for conflict or ambivalence theories, see Keith-Spiegel 1972). One can argue that the problem-solving aspect in humor appreciation is periph­eral. Indeed, Derks, Staley, and Haselton (2007) rightfully raised the question whether joke comprehension is so challenging that it has a ­problem-solving quality. Based on their results Derks at al. (2007) suggest that perceiving humor is more an automated expert-like behavior. Likewise, individual differences in humor appre­ciation do relate more strongly to cognitive style than to ability measures. However, fluid intelligence does predict finding nonsense humor funny, and also the “mas­tery” studies show inverted-u functions between children’s development, complex­ity of jokes and appreciation (McGhee 1979). However, recent results indicate a negative (rather than an inverted-u) relation between funniness and difficulty (Cun­ningham and Derks 2005; Derks et al. 2007; Herzog, Harris, Kropscott, and Fuller 2006). The importance of incongruity and resolution is underscored by experiments; for example, different versions of a joke are generated that do allow for incongruity or not, or for meaningful resolution or not. This was tested in children but also neu­rological patients (see reviews by Forabosco 1992, 2007; Suls 1983; Uekermann, Channon, and Daum 2007). However, the variation of the key ingredients (e.g., degree of incongruity, resolution, salience of contents) cannot be varied independ­ently of each other by manipulating

28 

Willibald Ruch

a joke or cartoon. For example, making the punch line more incongruous may simultaneously mean to change its content or other properties. One way out is, for example, to leave the jokes intact, but under­take a differential priming of the two meanings of a key word in a joke (Wilson 1979), or a priming of the structure (Derks and Arora 1993) of the jokes to follow. Another possibility is the use of artificial humor stimuli. This may take, for exam­ple, the form of sequences of words deviating from proper grammatical sequences (Ehrenstein and Ertel 1978), adjective-noun pairs varying in semantic distance (God­kewitsch 1974), a  domains-interaction approach (Hillson and Martin 1994), com­puter-drawn caricatures with various degrees of exaggeration (Rhodes, Brennan and Carey 1987), or the weight-judging paradigm (WJP; Deckers 1993; Ruch 2001; Ruch, Köhler, Beermann, and Deckers 2008). Such studies typically demonstrate the importance of an intermediate degree of ­incongruity. So far little research was devoted to the temporal characteristics of the perception of humor. For example, wit is quick, in jokes there is still a sudden manifestation of the incongruous, while in humorous stories there might be a gradual realization of the incongruous. Thus, also the perception of funniness differs in intensity, duration and form over time. Finally, humor may involve different modes; for example, it can be verbal (e.g., jokes), graphical (cartoons, caricatures), acoustical (funny music), or behavioral (e.g., pantomime), again making matters very complex. So far, the scope of most theories is limited to the analysis of jokes and cartoons (but see Attardo 2001). Motivational processes One can argue that the cognitive-structural aspects in jokes are peripheral, as we might respond more to the connotative elements involved. For example, in the joke above some might experience a rapid succession of one’s sympathy for a patient in pain and one’s feelings towards adultery. Or, we just love the sexual element in there or are repulsed by it. Indeed, sexual themes apparently are one of the most prominent contents in humor (Grumet 1989). Also, other topics like scatological ones (bathroom humor), violence and aggression, sick, black, ethnic, blondes and Scots etc. come into mind when one does an intuitive classification and those are all content-related. Indeed, several theories tried to explain the favorite topics and targets. Generally, two principal models can serve as a theoretical framework for deriv­ing hypotheses for research on appreciation of tendentious content in

Psychology of humor 

29

humor. Ac­cording to Freud (1905), repressed impulses find relief in a disguised form in jokes as well as in dreams. The basic idea is that the Id is a pool for desires and drives. As society and parental influence (represented in the super ego) do not allow the direct expression of sexual and hostile impulses, gratification can only be achieved in an indirect way. Therefore, individuals repressing their sexuality or aggression should show a preference for sexual and aggressive jokes, respectively. Likewise, the actualization of sexual or aggressive drive (e.g., by presenting photos address­ing the respective motive prior to presentation of humor) should increase funniness of jokes of the same content to follow. Further hypotheses deducible from Freudian theory are discussed by Kline (1977). However, an alternative model was provided by the salience theory (Goldstein, Suls, and Anthony 1972). Their experiment showed that experimentally established salience of certain themes (in their case aggression, but also automobiles and mu­sic) leads to enhanced attention to these themes, to a better availability of the in­formation necessary to understand the joke and finally to enhanced funniness of jokes with these themes. Salience theory was also extended to the study of individ­ual differences in appreciation of sexual humor (Ruch and Hehl 1987, 1988). It was hypothesized that sexual topics are habitually more salient for individuals with positive attitudes towards sex, with more sexual experience and a  higher degree of satisfaction, and therefore a positive correlation was expected between sexual expe­rience and libido and appreciation of sexual humor on the other. Thus, in case of individual differences the salience theory and the Freudian theory predict opposite results. It was also argued to distinguish between positive and negative salience (Ruch and Hehl 1987). Results do favor a salience rather a Freudian interpretation (see section in this chapter), however, this can only be confirmed when the variance due to appreciation of the structure is controlled for. Disparagement/superiority theory also does explain liking of aggressive content and preferred targets in humor (McGhee and Duffey 1983; Zillmann 1983). In short, according to the theory, funniness of a joke depends on the identification of the recipient with the person (or group) that is being disparaging and with the victim of the disparagement. The theory proposes that “... humor appreciation varies inversely with the favorableness of the disposition toward the agent or the entity being dis­paraged, and varies directly with the favorableness of the disposition toward the agent or the entity disparaging it”. (Zillmann and Cantor 1976: 100–101). This theory is in the tradition of a line of thinking that can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle reasoned that laughter arises in response to

30 

Willibald Ruch

weakness and ugliness. Thomas Hobbes (1651) stated that the passion of laughter is nothing else but some sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminence in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly. Laughter is thought to result from a sense of superiority derived from the dispar­agement of another person or of one’s own past blunders or foolishness. Currently Gruner (1978) is one of the most outspoken champions of this approach as for him ridicule is the basic component of all humorous material, and if one wants to un­derstand a piece of humorous material it is necessary only to find out who is ridi­culed, how, and why. So for Gruner a combination of a loser, a victim of derision or ridicule, with suddenness of loss is necessary and sufficient to cause laughter. Disparagement theory was most often tested with pre-existing groups, or in an individual differences approach, but there is also experimental support (Zillmann 1983). In an experiment half of the research participants were first negatively pre­disposed to a female experimenter (who behaved inappropriately to them). Then, in one experimental condition, a  mishap occurred to the experimenter (she spilled a cup of tea on herself). Only this combination (angered subjects see experimenter spilling tea on herself) led to higher facial enjoyment. Spilling the tea alone did not do it when subjects were not negatively predisposed to experimenter or when the angered subjects saw her just spilling the tea (but not on her). Research utilizing pre-existing groups (e.g., males vs. females, US-Americans vs. Canadians, professors vs. students, employers vs. employees) typically uses two sets of jokes or cartoons. One in which a member of the first group disparages a member of the other group, and another where the agent – victim – roles are re­versed. Then the degree to which members of particular groups are amused by humor that disparages members of their own versus other groups is examined. For example, McGhee and Lloyd (1981) and McGhee and Duffey (1983) found that preschoolers found it funnier when an adult/parent is victimized in humor than when a  child is victimized. Also, Zillmann and Cantor (1976) found evidence in support of this theory in a study in which a group of college students and a group of middle aged business and professional people were presented jokes involving peo­ ple in superior–subordinate relationships (father–son, employer–employee, etc.). As predicted, students gave higher ratings of funniness to the jokes in which the sub­ordinate disparaged his superior than to those in which the superior disparaged his subordinate, whereas the ratings of the professionals revealed the opposite relation­ship. These theories have been quite successful in ­predicting appreciation of racial, ethnic, political, and gender forms of

Psychology of humor 

31

disparagement humor (see Zillmann 1983). However, it seems that the model works well in predicting the preferences of groups, which are traditionally superior (e.g. males appreciated jokes in which females were disparaged but showed less appreciation for jokes in which a female disparaged a male) but not of the inferior groups (females showed no preference for ‘put down of male’-jokes). On the contrary, sometimes the inferior groups laughed more at jokes putting down a member of their own group. Unfortunately studies of disparagement humor do not report the size of the inter­correlation among funniness scores of the humor categories (e.g., anti-male, anti-female humor) studied, nor do they report correlations with appreciation of non-disparagement humor. While the role of disparagement is supported by studies we do not know exactly how much of the variance in humor appreciation it actually accounts for. A simple but convincing demonstration of the relevance of dispar­agement in differential humor appreciation would be that, for example, there is a  negative correlation between rated funniness of “American puts down Canadian” humor and funniness of “Canadian puts down American” when computed across a mixed sample of Canadians and Americans. Furthermore, even for the separate groups the correlations between parallel sets of disparagement humor (with the same target) should be much higher than their correlation with funniness of dispar­agement humor (with different targets) and even much higher with funniness of nondisparaging humor of the same (most likely the incongruity-resolution) struc­ ture. No such evidence yet exists. In summary, the superiority/disparagement approach offers an explanation for how negative or hostile attitudes are expressed through humor. However, Suls (1977) has argued that the processing of disparagement jokes is the same as for all other humor (i.e., other incongruity-resolution jokes). There are the same two stages and the topic just affects how well the recipient masters those two. Suls suggested that disparagement humor typically involves an incongruity relating to some misfortune befalling a victim, and this incongruity can only be recognized or resolved (and therefore found funny) if one has a negative or unsympathetic atti­tude toward the victim. Mood and other states Humor may be facilitated or impaired by certain types of mood, frame of mind, and other states. In everyday language phrases like to be in good humor, in the mood for laughing, out of humor, ill-humored, in a serious/

32 

Willibald Ruch

playful mood or frame of mind, etc. refer to such states of enhanced or lowered readiness to respond to humor or act humorously. We are all inclined to appreciate, initiate, or laugh at humor more at given times and less at others. Thus, we also need to consider and measure actual dispositions for humor; internal states and moods that vary over time. Like traits, those are internal dispositions. However, they are of a transient nature and may be affected by environmental and social factors. A  play signal (McGhee 1979) may shift a serious frame of mind into a playful one, and alcohol might raise our level of cheerful mood; both, in turn, might facilitate responding more favorably to humor. A reciprocal relationship is likely too; laughing a lot will have an impact on mood level and frame of mind. Thus, there will be a feedback loop between actual states and moods and humor behavior. For a more complete understanding of humor (and for successful experimenting) we do seem to have to distinguish among the components of trait, state/mood, and behavior/acts. Traits are relatively stable over time and consistent across situations. They may predict the emergence of humor-related mood and of humor behavior; e.g., individuals high in sense of humor may get into a cheerful mood more quickly when joining a merry group and they also might smile more often in response to attempts at jocularity. States are of shorter duration, fluctuate in intensity, and may vary in response to eliciting conditions. In cases of homologous states and traits, the trait may be seen as the average state; e.g., trait cheerfulness will correlate highly with measures of state cheerfulness aggregated across a longer time period. States may also be seen as dispositions for behavior. When we are in a silly mood we more readily engage in clowning behavior, and in an elated mood we will more likely laugh at a joke rather than merely smile. Humor research has acknowledged the effects of mood/states on humor (see re­view by Deckers 2007). McGhee (1979) emphasized the importance of a playful (as opposed to serious) frame of mind for the successful processing of a  humorous message. Apter and Smith (1977) distinguish between telic and para-telic states with the latter being conducive to humor. In their reversal theory (see Apter 1982) seriousmindedness is one defining element in the telic or goal-oriented metamoti­vational state, while playfulness marks its obverse, the paratelic or non goal-ori­ented state. Svebak and Apter (1987) report that a funny videotape changed partici­pants’ state to paratelic. Relatedly, Raskin (1985) distinguishes between the bona-fide (serious, truth-committed) mode of communication and the non-bona-fide (humorous) mode of joke telling and argues that the non-humorous, serious person wants to function exclusively in the bona fide mode of communication. While no

Psychology of humor 

33

explicit reference to frame of mind is made, one can see that this volitional aspect refers to a preferred state or frame of mind. Thus, whatever name they used, the theorists stated that the actual level of seriousness vs. playfulness is essential. Fi­nally, several theoretical accounts of the humor process more or less indirectly refer to changing states of seriousness vs. playfulness. For example, Frijda (1986) con­siders laughter to be preceded by a sudden annulment of seriousness; for Sroufe and Waters (1976) and Wilson (1979) if follows the buildup of strain or tension and its abrupt relief, and Rothbart (1976) highlights the necessity that the setting in which the incongruity is processed is “safe” (i.e., non-dangerous, non-serious). While theoretical accounts clearly suggest that humor research needs a concept of state seriousness (vs. playfulness or humorousness) to account for the fact that the individuals’ tendency, preparedness, and readiness to engage in humorous inter­actions differs over time, the empirical research conducted did not frequently in­volve this dimension of frame of mind (Deckers 2007). One reason might be that scales assessing current mood states do not include frame of mind but more affect-based mood states like elation, sadness or excitement. Thus, the few studies of mood and humor appreciation had to rely on whatever mood state was included in the multidimensional scale used. In such studies scales of elation, vigor and sur­gency did predict subsequent subjective and/or facial enjoyment of humor (Ruch 1990; Wicker, Thorelli, Barron, and Willis 1981). Those scales are not really tailored to the needs of humor research. Analyses at the level of individual items showed that in two studies mood states relating to cheerfulness predicted facial enjoyment better than the global category of elation (Ruch 1990, 1995). This effect and the fact that negative mood states were not predictive of appreciation of humor anyway, gave rise to the idea to tailor the mood states more specifically to humor research and look for actual disposi­tions that might facilitate but also impair the induction of humor. Based on research of several sources (e.g., literature review, lexicon) a state-trait model of cheerful­ness, seriousness, and bad mood was put forward, and scales for their assessment were created (Ruch, Köhler, and van Thriel 1996, 1997). The inspection of the factor loadings of the positive mood terms allowed distinguishing between the compo­nents of cheerful mood and hilarity (see Table 1). The former is more calm and composed and the latter is more aroused and contains the items relating to action tendencies (e.g., I  feel the urge to laugh). State cheerfulness is expected to repre­sent a state of heightened readiness to respond to a humor stimulus with enjoyment. It turned out that most interventions to increase appreciation of humor

34 

Willibald Ruch

Table 1.  The definitional components of the state concepts Facets of State cheerfulness cheerful mood

Short description

hilarity

Presence of a cheerful mood state (more tranquil, composed) Presence of a merry mood state (more shallow, outward)

State seriousness earnestness pensiveness soberness

Presence of an earnest mental attitude, task-oriented style Presence of a pensive or thoughtful mood state Presence of a sober or dispassionate frame of mind

State bad mood sadness/melancholy ill-humor

Presence of a sad or melancholy mood state Presence of an ill-humored (grumpy or grouchy) mood state

only worked for those being in a cheerful state (Ruch 1990, 1995, 1997; Ruch and Köhler 2007). The model foresees two different states of humorlessness. While both serious individuals and those in a  bad mood may be perceived as humorless, the reasons are different. In the latter case, the generation of positive affect is impaired by the presence of a predominant negative affective state; in the former, there is lowered interest in engaging in humorous interaction or in switching to a more playful frame of mind; i.e., a stronger aspect of volition is involved. There may be differences among bad mood facets as well. While an ill-humored person, like the serious one, may not want to be involved in humor, the person in a sad mood may not be able to do so even if he or she would like to. Also, while the sad person is not antagonistic to a  cheerful group, the ill-humored one may be. Individuals high in trait bad mood might be predisposed to be “out of humor” easily; i.e. losing humor. Bad mood might also be a disposition facilitating certain forms of humor, such as mockery, irony, cynicism, and sarcasm (see Dworkin and Efran 1967; Ruch and Köhler 2007). The state part of the State-Trait Cheerfulness Inventory (STCIS, Ruch et al. 1997) allows for scoring the seven facets as well as the three scales and thus the hypotheses relating to different states of humorlessness can be empirically examined. Nevertheless, we need more research on the structure of mood states that have an impact on humor or are outcomes of humor. Furthermore, we need to investigate the dynamics of mood relating to humor. Deckers (2007) out-

Psychology of humor 

35

lines the various effects linking humor and mood, such as mood and cognitive processing, mood regulation, effect of mood on activity preferences. Personality The trait approach to personality assumes that there are personality characteristics stable over time and consistent across situations. A trait or personality characteristic is a descriptive hypothetical construct, an invention, not an “existing” entity. It is a disposition for behavior, not the behavior itself. It cannot be observed directly but inferred via indicators, such as tests, questionnaires, behavior observation, etc. A certain conceptualization of sense of humor may be useful or not useful, but not true or false. Its usefulness has to be demonstrated empirically. There are different types of personality traits; at least we distinguish between ability (maximal performance) and style (typical behavior). However, the non-cognitive traits may be further divided into temperament, interests, attitudes, motivation, character strength, virtues, etc. Likewise, different forms of abilities may be distinguished, such as memory, convergent and divergent ability (or creativity). Those distinctions are not trivial, as they influence, for example, the type of questions to be asked, but also the type of measurement approach. Everyday observation tells that there are enduring interindividual differences in humor behavior and experience. Some people tend habitually to appreciate, initiate, or laugh at humor more often, or more intensively, than others do. In everyday language this enduring disposition typically is ascribed to the possession of a “sense of humor.” Dictionaries typically contain various type nouns (e.g., cynic, wit, wag), trait-describing adjectives (e.g., humorous, witty, cynical), and verbs (to tease, to joke, to humor or wind up someone) that describe individuals characterized by one form of humor or the other. When members of a  culture validly observe, distinguish and communicate among types of humorous and humorless people, when poets, play writers, and philosophers describe humorous characters, then there is plenty to base a  psychological analysis on. Surprisingly, this has not been done to a  great extent. Neither the pre-scientific accounts of the sense of humor have been modernized, nor is there a published attempt at systematizing the language of humor traits. Rather, psychologists worked on designing instruments, and some also worked on the concept. Craik and Ware (2007) is a good source for new directions in personality research on humor. A review of the historical and current accounts as well as a survey of instruments

36 

Willibald Ruch

can be found in a ­recent edited volume on the sense of humor (Ruch 2007a). Some representative approaches are discussed next. It should be mentioned beforehand that there is a  variety of expressions in use often meaning the same thing (e.g., sense of humor, styles of humor, humorous temperament, creation of humor, wit etc.) and often the same expression is used for totally unrelated aspects of humor (Ruch 2007b). Humor as a personality trait McGhee (1999) presented a  multi-faceted concept of the sense of humor. McGhee (1979) understands humor as a form of play – the play with ideas. Without a playful frame of mind, the same event is perceived as interesting, puzzling, annoying, frightening, etc., but not as funny. Therefore, playfulness and its counterpart, seriousness, were assigned core roles in McGhee’s model of sense of humor (playfulness and seriousness are considered to be somehow antagonistic but form separate components of the model). While people might be very good at spotting the incongruities, absurdities, and ironies of life, only the mentally playful will find humor in them while those with a serious attitude or frame of mind will not treat them humorously. Therefore, playfulness is seen as the foundation or the motor of the sense of humor. While playfulness forms the basis for the sense of humor, it is not a quality specific to humor. Six other facets represent more genuine humor skills and humor behavior and relate to individual differences in the fields of enjoyment of humor, laughter, verbal humor, finding humor in everyday life, laughing at yourself, and humor under stress. McGhee postulates that while children inherit playfulness, influences of socialization counteract it and may cause a shift into seriousness making individuals lose their ability to be playful. Again, the rediscovery of a playful attitude or outlook is a key element for change; its activation triggers the components specific to sense of humor. There is empirical support for the structural part of this model. A study with the American and German versions of McGhee’s sense of humor scale indeed confirmed that the six components (and only those) form a homogeneous factor that is separate from the good vs. bad mood and seriousness vs. playful factors (Ruch and Carrell 1998). However, the heterogeneity of the components “seriousness and negative mood” and “playfulness and positive mood” was apparent, and factor analysis of the items of the two scales clarified that it is better to reconceptualize them as “playfulness vs. seriousness” and “positive mood/optimism vs. negative mood/pessimism.”

Psychology of humor 

37

The dynamic part of the model is not yet substantiated. There is no empirical study yet aimed at examining whether a shift in seriousness vs. playfulness indeed enhances the sense of humor; i.e., that playfulness (and low seriousness) are “motors” for the other components of the sense of humor. While there is evidence that the training changes several components of the sense of humor (Sassenrath 2001), the intervention program that comes with the scale does involve a training of the skills measured by this scale. Therefore, strictly speaking, a  positive evaluation of the effectiveness of the program cannot count as evidence. A convincing test of the hypothesis would involve a training of general playfulness (without any humor-related content) and yet the study provides evidence that the humor skills develop. McGhee’s positive vs. negative mood (or good vs. bad humor) scale refers to a very old understanding of humor. After being a medical term (referring to the four basic body fluids blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile associated with the so-called humor theory of temperament and humoral-pathology) since the ancient Greeks the term humor survived in anthropology. At that time one assumed that the predominance of humors or body fluids was responsible for labile behavior or mood in general. So in the middle of the 16th century humour referred to a more or less predominant mood quality, which could be either positive (good humour) or negative (bad humour). Good humoured and bad humoured eventually became dispositions. By the turn of the 16th century the dictionary definition of good humour was “the condition of being in a cheerful and amiable mood; also, the disposition or habit of amiable cheerfulness.” Such an affect-based state-trait approach to humor is the core of the next model. Ruch and colleagues (Ruch and Köhler 1999, 2007; Ruch et al. 1996, 1997; Sommer and Ruch in press) start from an entirely different perspective than McGhee but yield a rather similar outcome. Their temperament approach to humor is based on the premise that the affective and mental foundations of humor are likely to be universal, even if the expression of humor may vary across cultures and time. Therefore they bypass the concept of “sense of humor” and also specific humor behaviors that may be culture specific but focus on the “underlying” temperamental factors. Considering that humor is not unidimensional, not unipolar and covers both affective and cognitive factors they postulate that cheerfulness, seriousness, and bad mood are the traits forming the temperamental basis of humor. Based on the study of several sources for each trait a facet model consisting of five to six facets was generated and tested in several (German, American, English) samples. For example, trait cheerfulness (i.e., the disposition

38 

Willibald Ruch

for being in good humor) was considered to be composed of a prevalence of cheerful mood, a low threshold for smiling and laughter, a composed view of adverse life circumstances, a responsiveness to a broad range of elicitors of amusement and smiling/laughter, and a generally cheerful and humorous interaction style. Factor analyses as well as a  facet-sorting task confirmed that those components indeed go do together and form a broad factor of trait cheerfulness (i.e., the disposition for ”being in good humor”). Trait cheerfulness and the sense of humor according to McGhee correlate to the extent of .85; i.e., they are practically interchangeable (Ruch and Carrell 1998). Similarly, the postulated facet models for trait seriousness (a quality of the frame of mind relating to humorlessness) and bad mood (i.e., the disposition for ”being in bad humor” composed primarily of melancholy and grumpiness) found empirical confirmation. The relationships between the three concepts were outlined and tested and it was found that cheerfulness is negatively correlated with both seriousness and bad mood (with the coefficients being smaller for the former and higher for the latter). Seriousness and bad mood are slightly positively correlated. The same pattern of relationship also emerged for the three concepts as states. Furthermore, the testing of the structural assumptions also involved as joint factor analysis of state and trait items that confirmed that while homologous states and traits form distinguishable factors they are positively intercorrelated (Ruch et al. 1997). Several studies show that these three components of the humorous temperament can predict a variety of humor behaviors (see Ruch and Köhler 2007). Pilot studies investigating the neural bases of trait cheerfulness are underway (Rapp, Erb, Rodden, Ruch, Grodd, and Wild 2008). Martin, Puhlik-Doris, Larsen, Gray, and Weir (2003) adopted a combined rational and empirical approach in their search for potentially adaptive and maladaptive styles of humor. They started by examining the past theoretical literature for forms, uses, or styles of humor that have been described as adaptive and beneficial versus maladaptive and malignant (e.g., Allport 1961; Freud 1928). Based on this review, they concluded that adaptive and maladaptive humor should each be further divided into two separate components, one involving humor that is interpersonal (i.e., directed towards others), and the other being intrapersonal (i.e., focused more on the self). This led them to hypothesize four distinct dimensions of humor, namely affiliative, selfenhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating humor, each postulated to be composed of a set of definitional components. Affiliative humor involves the tendency to say funny things, to tell jokes, and to engage in spontaneous witty banter to amuse others, to put others at

Psychology of humor 

39

ease, to facilitate relationships, and to reduce interpersonal tensions. According to the authors this adaptive interpersonal humor style may also include self-deprecating humor (i.e., the tendency to say funny things about oneself, while maintaining a sense of self-acceptance) and is a non-hostile, tolerant sort of humor that is affirming of self and others. Self-enhancing humor involves a  generally humorous outlook on life, a  tendency to be frequently amused by the incongruities of life, and to maintain a humorous perspective even in the face of stress or adversity. The authors hypothesize that self-enhancing humor relates to perspective-taking humor, the use of humor as an emotion regulation or coping mechanism, and that this adaptive intrapsychic humor style is consistent with the Freudian definition of humor. Aggressive humor involves sarcasm, teasing, ridicule, derision, “putdown,” or disparagement humor (as referred to by the “superiority” theories of humor). Furthermore, this maladaptive interpersonal styles also was thought to involve humor that is used to manipulate others by means of an implied threat of ridicule, the tendency to express humor without regard for its potential impact on others (e.g., sexist or racist humor), and compulsive expressions of humor in which one finds it difficult to resist the impulse to say funny things that are likely to hurt or alienate others. Finally, self-defeating humor involves excessively self-disparaging humor, attempts to amuse others by doing or saying funny things at one’s own expense as a means of ingratiating oneself or gaining approval, allowing oneself to be the “butt” of others’ humor, and laughing along with others when being ridiculed or disparaged. This maladaptive self-directed humor dimension is also hypothesized to involve the use of humor as a form of defensive denial, or the tendency to engage in humorous behavior as a means of hiding one’s underlying negative feelings, or avoiding dealing constructively with problems. Individuals who are high on this humor dimension may be seen as quite witty or amusing (e.g., “class clowns”), but there may also be an element of emotional neediness, avoidance, and low self-esteem underlying their use of humor. Martin et al. (2003) used several samples to carefully examine what the best set of items is to represent those concepts in the final version of the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ). Also they tried to keep the intercorrelations among the scales low. In order to achieve this some components that correlate on two or more scales needed to be dropped. Martin et al. (2003) used peer-evaluation on a single representative item to provide initial evidence for convergent and discriminant validity (Campbell and Fiske 1959) of the four concepts. The validity is also supported by the fact that there are plausible correlations with other humor scales. For

40 

Willibald Ruch

example, the self-enhancing humor scale correlates highly with the Coping Humor Scale (CHS); the author’s (Martin and Lefcourt 1983) prior measure of the degree to which subjects report to use humor in coping with stress. The HSQ also aims to replace the Situational Humor Response Questionnaire (SHRQ; Martin and Lefcourt 1984). This instrument defines the sense of humor as the “frequency with which a person smiles, laughs, and otherwise displays mirth in a variety of life situations”, and was used rather successfully in research on stress and coping (see review by Martin 1996: 253–254). While the self-enhancing and affiliative humor scales correlate significantly and fairly strongly with the SHRQ and CHS, the aggressive and self-defeating scales seem to assess dimensions that are not tapped by these measures. Adaptation of the concept underlying the HSQ to other cultures yielded that the four dimensions by and large can be recovered from the translated items (Chen and Martin 2007; Kazarian and Martin 2006; Saroglou and Scariot 2002; Tümkaya 2007). Martin and colleagues used a top-down approach. They grouped theories and derived representative statements for them. These were then empirically purified with the aim to derive homogeneous scales. A contrary approach would be to disregard homogeneity but underscore the representativeness and exhaustiveness of the humor behaviors, attitudes, feelings, habits or whatever is being sampled. Indeed, research shows that the list of humor-related acts is not endless. For a comprehensive approach to humor one could collect statements that can be made to describe individuals’ everyday humor behavior. Furthermore, it is difficult to justify that some behaviors are more important or central than others, as it is implicitly done when scales are built around a cluster of items (perhaps at the expense of items that are less redundant). The approach by Craik and collaborators (Craik, Lampert, and Nelson 1993, 1996; Craik and Ware 2007) bears in mind such considerations. They also pursue a theory-guided approach to humor and highlight the importance of a  community-oriented analysis of personality and humor. During their lives people obtain a reputation in the social network they live in and other members of the community can provide a comprehensive portrait of the target person’s style of humor when aided by an appropriate assessment tool, such as the Humorous Behavior Q-sort Deck (HBQD; Craik et al. 1996). Three features characterize the measurement approach underlying the HBQD, namely the attempt to cover the whole behavioral domain of everyday humorous conduct as comprehensively as possible (rather than formulating partly redundant items for the assessment of a few selected traits or components of humor), the focus on humor-related behaviors or behavior tendencies and,

Psychology of humor 

41

when aggregated, styles of humorous conduct, and the application of the Q-sort technique to the assessment of humor rather than using conventional questionnaires. Craik et al. (1996) generated the set of 100 non-redundant statements from a  survey of the theoretical and empirical psychological research literature on humor and from observations of everyday social life. For each of Table 2.  The 10 styles of humorous conduct sensu Craik et al. (1996) I+. Socially warm humorous style Maintains group morale through humor. Has a good sense of humor. Uses good-natured jests to put others at ease. Relative to other traits, displays a noteworthy sense of humor. II+. Reflective humorous style Is more responsive to spontaneous humor than to jokes. Uses humor to express the contradictory aspects of everyday events. Takes pleasure in bemused reflections on self and others. Appreciates the humorous potential of persons and situations.

I–. Socially cold humorous style Smiles grudgingly. Responds with a quick, but short-lived smile. Is a ready audience but infrequent contributor of humorous anecdotes. Has a bland, deadpan sense of humor. II–. Boorish humorous style Imitates the humorous style of professional comedians. Recounts familiar, stale jokes. Tells funny stories to impress people. Is competitively humorous, attempts to top others.

III+. Competent humorous style III–. Inept humorous style Displays a quick wit and ready repartee. Reacts in an exaggerated way to mildly humorous comments. Manifests humor in the form of clever Laughs at the slightest provocation. retorts to others’ remarks. Enhances humorous impact with a deft Spoils jokes by laughing before finishing sense of timing. them. Has the ability to tell long, complex Laughs without discriminating between anecdotes successfully. more and less clever remarks. IV+. Earthy humorous style Has a reputation for indulging in coarse or vulgar humor. Delights in parodies which others might find blasphemous or obscene.

IV–. Repressed humorous style Does not respond to a range of humor due to moralistic constraints. Is squeamish about “sick jokes.”

42 

Willibald Ruch

Table 2. (cont.) IV+. Earthy humorous style Relishes scatological anecdotes (bathroom humor).

IV–. Repressed humorous style Enjoys hearing jokes but rarely remembers them.

V+. Benign humorous style Finds intellectual word play enjoyable.

V–. Mean-spirited humorous style Occasionally makes humorous remarks betraying a streak of cruelty. Needles others, intending it to be just kidding. Is scornful; laughs “at” others, rather than “with” them. Jokes about others’ imperfections.

Enjoys witticisms which are intellectually challenging. Enjoys limericks and nonsense rhymes. Enjoys exchanging topical jokes and keeps up to date on them.

Note: Table adapted from Craik and Ware (2007)

the statements they determined the degree of social desirability. Based on a principal components analysis of self-descriptive HBQD portraits by 456 university students they arrived at a tentative, and as yet not replicated, set of 10 humor styles that are grouped along five bipolar factors. Table 2 presents illustrative statements characterizing each of these 10 styles. What is the nature of those styles? The Socially Warm versus Cold Humorous Style, at its positive pole, reflects a tendency to use humor to promote good will and social interaction, and, at its negative pole, an avoidance or aloofness regarding mirthful behavior. The Reflective versus Boorish Humorous Style describes a knack for discerning the spontaneous humor found in the doings of oneself and other persons and in everyday occurrences, at the positive pole, and an uninsightful, insensitive and competitive use of humor, at the negative pole. The Competent versus Inept Humorous Style suggests an active wit and capacity to convey humorous anecdotes effectively, at its positive pole, and a lack of skill and confidence in dealing with humor, at the negative pole. The Earthy versus Repressed Humorous Style captures a raucous delight in joking about taboo topics, at the positive pole, and an inhibition regarding macabre, sexual, and scatological modes of humor, at the negative pole. Finally, the Benign versus Mean-spirited Humorous Style, at its positive pole, points to pleasure in humor-related activities that are mentally stimulating and innocuous and, at its negative pole, focuses on the dark side of humor, in its use to attack and belittle others. Craik et al. (1996) show that the ”sense of humor” primarily covers two styles, the socially warm and the competent humorous styles. However, the

Psychology of humor 

43

study is based on the quotidian term (i.e., the current understanding of sense of humor by laypeople), not the concept stemming from a  theory, or the philosophical literature. Craik and Ware (2007) demonstrate the usefulness of the tool for the analysis of the humor style of comedians, such as Woody Allen, Whoopi Goldberg, and Lucille Ball. This approach did yield the most differentiated structural model so far. Also, it seems to be most comprehensive in terms of the behavioral indicators. Several studies made use of this approach (e.g., Kirsh and Kuiper 2003; Saroglou 2004). Unfortunately, most studies only apply the scale, or variants of it, but the pool of statements was rarely used to investigate the model or to develop it further (Esser 2001). The model also seems ideally suited to test method variance in humor assessment as some of its dimensions can be assessed by different measurements approaches as well. For example, earthy humor could be compared with the typical joke test of funniness of sick, sexual or bathroom humor, and competent humor might be related to performance tests of being witty. Humor as an ability The etymology of the term wit involves knowledge, mind and reasoning capacity and even today the term wit (like esprit) is the humor term showing the strongest semantic link to superior intelligence (Schmidt-Hidding 1963). In the past humor and wit sometimes meant the same thing, but often they were seen as opposed to each other. As Schmidt-Hidding (1963) pointed out, the term wit, like humor, did not enter the field of the comic before the late 16th century. At this time a humour meant an odd, uncommon, and eccentric character whose peculiarities emerged from an imbalance of body fluids and who therefore was laughed at. This involuntary funny, odd and quaint object of laughter later became known as the humourist, and the man of humour took pleasure in exposing and imitating the peculiarities of the humourist. During this period humor and wit became seen as talents relating to the ability to make others laugh. Before that humor was merely understood as a predominant mood. The idea that humor involves a component of ability prevails until today, although this concept is less well understood and a variety of names (e.g., wit, humor creation, humor production) are being used. Today, wit may be defined as the ability to make clever remarks in an amusing way. It is a  talent referring to using unexpected associations between contrasting or disparate words or ideas to create a  clever humorous

44 

Willibald Ruch

effect. Thus, it is appropriate to conceptualize this aspect of humor as ability, rather than style. The instructions would ask the test taker to deliver his or her maximal behavior – to do the best. The outcome can be judged for its quality (i.e., degree of funniness or originality), suggesting we are talking about divergent intelligence (not convergent, as in the case of right or wrong answers), or creativity. The crucial point here is though that the person is creating a  humorous effect (not retelling or performing something created by someone else); i.e., is confronted with something not inherently funny but manages to bring it into a funny context. In contrast to this performance or ability approach to humor production, some psychologists also pursued a  temperament or competence approach. Here we are not so much interested in the ability to actually create humor, but in the stylistic aspects (e.g., skills, motivation) of delivery. We all know people who love to entertain others using prefabricated material (stories, jokes) who can’t come up with any funny line themselves. Also, those who love to entertain others differ in how well they actually are performing. Babad (1974) distinguished between humor production and reproduction, and showed that the two are uncorrelated in individuals. So there are additional factors involved beyond the ability to create humor, and for a fuller description and prediction of humor performance behavior there is indeed room for other, non-cognitive, concepts. It should be noted that in a similar manner appreciation of humor might involve ability too. Jokes differ in complexity and some are “hard to get”. This has been discussed especially in the developmental psychology literature where an optimal fit between the child’s cognitive ability and the difficulty level of jokes was expected to result in maximal funniness (McGhee 1974; Zigler et al. 1966). However, as mentioned above, Derks et al. (2007; see also Cunningham and Derks 2005) argued that appreciation of humor should be discussed in terms of expertise rather than intelligence. Initial studies of wit tried to separate humor creation from humor appreciation (and they indeed turn out to be largely independent), and intended to show its strong relationship to creativity and a weaker one to intelligence (Babad 1974; Brodzinsky and Rubien 1976; Fabrizi and Pollio 1987; ­Koppel and Sechrest 1970; Köhler and Ruch 1996). Wit typically was assessed by presenting a  set of cartoons with captions removed, and testees were instructed to make up humorous captions, which were subsequently rated for funniness by trained judges. In other studies they were asked to comment on films in a funny way or to write a funny presidential campaign slogan. Unfortunately, we don’t have studies using several such tests at once (of dif-

Psychology of humor 

45

ferent types, e.g., repartee, humorous fiction, cartoons etc.) to see how their convergent validity and dimensionality is. Components have been separated at a rational basis. Feingold and Mazzella (1991, 1993) developed a  multidimensional model of “wittiness.” They defined wittiness as the ability to perceive in an ingeniously humorous manner the relationship between seemingly incongruous things. According to them wittiness is composed of the three dimensions of humor motivation, humor cognition, and humor communication. This model of wittiness is not a pure ability model as it covers not only the person’s ability to create humor, but also the degree to which the person is motivated to be funny and is able to communicate the humor effectively. Humor cognition is an intellectual variable related to intelligence and creativity, whereas motivation and communication humor are related to social and temperamental variables. The authors developed measures of each facet of the model, which were generally found to correlate with each other. Feingold and Mazzella (1991) distinguished between two types of “verbal humor ability”, namely memory for humor (akin to Cattell’s crystallized intelligence) and humor cognition (comparable to fluid intelligence). The former is measured by tests of humor information and joke knowledge, and the latter measured with tests of humor reasoning and joke comprehension. Research with those measures revealed significant correlations between traditional measures of verbal intelligence and the tests of humor cognition, whereas memory for humor was not strongly related to intelligence. Humor reasoning was also correlated with creative thinking. Finally, some multidimensional models of humor do contain elements that seem to refer to ability in general, and humor creation ability in specific (e.g., Craik and Ware 2007; Svebak 1974; Ziv 1984), although they rely on questionnaire approach. Svebak (1974) suggested that individual differences in sense of humor involve variations in the three dimensions of meta-message sensitivity, personal liking of the humorous role; and emotional permissiveness. The first of these dimensions involves a  cognitive ability (i.e., the ability to take an irrational, mirthful perspective on situations, seeing the social world as it might be rather than as it is) related to intelligence or creativity, the second has to do with attitudes and defensiveness, and the third involves emotional temperament. Similarly, Ziv (1979) distinguishes between humor creation and humor appreciation, and in the model by Craik et al. (1996) one of the five factors relates to a Competent Humorous Style suggests an active wit and capacity to convey humorous anecdotes effectively (compared to the Inept Humorous Style, referring to a  lack of skill

46 

Willibald Ruch

and confidence in dealing with humor at the negative pole). Those scales have been shown to have low correlations with ability measures of humor creativity (e.g., Köhler and Ruch 1996). Humor as a virtue/character strength Wit as an ability to produce a comic effect may be used to hurt or to cheer someone up who is low; i.e., it can be benevolent or malevolent. If someone does a mistake, one may poke fun at the weaknesses of this person or one may portray human weaknesses in general in a benevolent way, so that no-one is excluded and the person who was befallen by a mishap share the amusement. By the end of the 17th century the influence of humanism brought about a gradual shift in dispositions from humor as a sheer ability (a talent of ridicule, wit, or humor) to make others laugh to a virtue of sense of humor. People had become weary of “put-down” witticisms and it was argued that people should not be laughed at because of peculiarities of temperament, since they were not responsible for them. Rather one should smile kindly at an imperfect world and human nature. Moralists tried to distinguish between “true” and “false” wit, as they did between “good” and “bad” humor. The term “humor” acquired its positive, versus formerly neutral, meaning. At this time virtuous use of humor was started and elements like being able to laugh at one’s misfortunes or liking to laugh at one’s own expense were valued. According to Schmidt-Hidding (1963) in the 19th century humor became a specific English cardinal virtue, joining others such as common sense, tolerance, and compromise. The idea of humor as a virtue still prevails in our thinking about humor as we do tend to associate humor with positive phenomena only. Also questionnaires of sense of humor are typically blind to the dark side of humor. Nevertheless, the idea of humor as a virtue was never explicitly transformed into a modern personality concept and there is no instrument specifically measuring virtuous humor behavior. In this sense, humor as virtuous behavior still needs to be rediscovered. However, recently, the positive psychology movement rediscovered the potential of humor as a contributor to the good life. Peterson and Seligman (2004) see humor as part of the “good character.” Their model of character distinguishes between virtues, character strength and situational themes. Six core virtues that are considered to be universal: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. Humor is located at the level

Psychology of humor 

47

of character strength, i.e., the psychological mechanisms and processes that define the virtues. There are 24 such strengths and humor is seen to define the virtue of transcendence. Other strengths in that cluster are appreciation of beauty and excellence (i.e., noticing and appreciating beauty, excellence, and/or skilled performance in all domains of life), gratitude (i.e., being aware of and thankful for the good things that happen), hope (i.e., expecting the best and working to achieve it) and spirituality (i.e., having coherent beliefs about the higher purpose and meaning of life). Those components of transcendence are seen as strengths that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning. However, empirically this cluster proved not to be very ­homogenous. The inventory of strengths based on that classification (i.e., the VIA-IS) is a 240 items self-report questionnaire measuring the 24 strengths with 10 items each. Indeed, studies in Austria, Germany, Japan, the USA, and Switzerland confirm that that the VIA-IS humor scale is a good predictor of satisfaction with life (Peterson, Ruch, Beermann, Park, and Seligman 2007; Ruch, Huber, Beermann, and Proyer 2007), as measured by the SWLS (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, and Griffin 1985). Thus, humor is one component enabling the good life. An analysis of the items of the VIA-IS together with 11 other humor scales shows that all six virtues were present in the item contents (Beermann and Ruch 2008). While overall the items primarily reflected the virtues of humanity and wisdom, the VIA-IS items were assigned to the virtues of humanity and transcendence. Humor as an aesthetic perception From the beginning of testing of sense of humor psychologists were interested in the individual’s “taste” in humor (for a review of scales see Ruch 2007b). What sort of humor does the person find hilarious and which ones are considered to be dull? Does this preference tell something about his or her personality (that conventional personality questionnaires can’t reveal)? Such tests typically consist of a set of jokes, cartoons and/or limericks that are to be rated for degree of funniness. Some tests yield only one total score, but others are multidimensional and represent a classification of humor, that was derived either intuitively, theoretically, or empirically. The Antioch Sense of Humor Test (Mindess, Miller, Turek, Bender, and Corbin 1985) may be regarded as an example for an intuitive classification. It allows to assess a variety of humor categories, such as nonsense, philosoph-

48 

Willibald Ruch

ical, sexual, scatological, social satire, hostile, demeaning to men, demeaning to women, ethnic, and sick humor. While intuitive and theory based classifications provide plausible categories, they may have difficulties to empirically demonstrate that the scales are indeed homogenous and distinguishable from each other. Factor analysis was used to empirically explore the stimulus and response dimensions. There is some agreement across studies; for example sexual humor always emerges as one separate factor, but jokes pre-classified as “aggressive” rarely end up in the same factor. Also, beginning with the first factorial study by Eysenck (1942), structural factors, like complexity/simplicity showed to be of importance. However, unlike in general research on personality, humor studies do not use each other’s items (i.e., the best markers of factors) and hence comparability of findings is often limited. Also, there have been few systematic attempts at building taxonomy and many “one shot”studies. Also, different research strategies may account for discrepant outcomes. For example, Catelli and coworkers advised participants to keep the number of funny and dull jokes about equal (thereby keeping their average level of humor appreciation equal). This probably eliminated the major factors and so he extracted 12 presumably minor ones that are difficult to replicate (for reviews of all approaches, see Martin 2007b; Ruch 1992). What aspects are then reflected in individual differences in the perception of humor? Humor theorists have long acknowledged that, in humor, content and structure (or: joke work vs. tendency (Freud 1905); thematic vs. schematic (Sears 1934); cogni­tive vs. arctic factors (Eysenck 1942)) have to be distinguished as two different sources of pleasure, and factor analytic studies confirm that both are potent variance-producing factors. While intuitive and rational taxonomies typically distinguish only between content classes, factor analytic studies show that structural properties of jokes and cartoons are at least as important as their content, with two factors consistently appearing: namely, incongruity-resolution (INC-RES) humor and nonsense (NON) humor. Jokes and cartoons of these factors have different contents (e.g., themes, targets) but are similar with respect to structural properties and the way they are processed. In short, jokes and cartoons of the INC-RES humor category are characterized by punch lines in which the surprising incongruity can be completely resolved. The common element in this type of humor is that the recipient first discovers an incongruity which is then fully resolvable upon consideration of information available elsewhere in the joke or cartoon. There is a certain projective element in these jokes as essential things are not spelled out and have

Psychology of humor 

49

to be supplemented by the recipient; often resolving the incongruity requires attributing motives and traits (e.g., stingy, mean, stupid, absent-minded) to the characters depicted in the jokes. Although individuals might differ with respect to how they perceive and/or resolve the incongruity, they have the sense of having “gotten the point” or understood the joke once resolution information has been identified. At the time this factor was first extracted, it seemed that the two-stage structure in the process of perceiving and understanding humor described by Suls (1972) is a model that fits well to these jokes and cartoons, and hence incongruity-resolution humor was considered to be an appropriate label for that factor. Nonsense humor also has a surprising or incongruous punch line, however, “... the punch line may (1) provide no resolution at all, (2) provide a partial resolution (leaving an essential part of the incongruity unresolved), or (3) actually create new absurdities or incongruities” (McGhee, Ruch, and Hehl 1990: 124). In nonsense humor the resolution information gives the appearance of making sense out of incongruities without actually doing so. The recipient’s ability to make sense or to solve problems is exploited; after detecting the incongruity he is misled to resolve it, only to later discover that what made sense for a moment is not really making sense. Rothbart and Pien’s (1977) impossible incongruities that allow only for partial resolutions are characteristic of the nonsense factor, while their possible incongruities allowing for complete resolutions are more prevalent in INC-RES humor. There is evidence for different neural bases of INC-RES and NON humor. Samson, Hempelmann, Zysset, and Huber (in press) presented 30 cartoons of each humor type to 17 subjects and found that in the superior frontal gyrus bilaterally, right medial frontal gyrus and the temporo-parietal junction bilaterally there is more activity for incongruity-resolution humor in contrast to nonsense humor. The third factor, sexual (SEX) humor, may have either structure, but is homoge­neous with respect to sexual content. All jokes and cartoons with a sexual theme (and exclusively those) load on this factor. While the sexual humor category was initially the easiest to identify, it had to be considered that sex jokes and cartoons typically have two loadings: one on the sexual humor factor and a second on one of the two structure factors. The size of this second loading seems to depend on the degree of the theme’s salience. Thus, one has to distinguish between a factor of sexual humor, which is composed of the content variance of the sexual jokes and cartoons only (bereft of the structure variance), and the sexual humor category (as used in humor tests), in which both content and structure are involved. Whereas a sexual humor

50 

Willibald Ruch

Table 3.  The 3 WD categories distinguished by (original and derived) GTVH­parameters GTVH-parameters INC-RES

NON

SEX

Degree of incongru­ity Degree of residual incongruity Degree of resolution Script opposition

medium

high

medium

high

very simple to complex diverse

very simple to very complex actual/not actual less often; possible/ impossible more often diverse diverse

medium (high for NON SEX) low (high for NON SEX) –

SO antonymy Logical mechanism

diverse diverse

Narrative Strategy

Text, cartoons with 1 panel

Pornotopia

does not apply

Target

involves targets frequently

diverse

sex/non sex prevails False analogies (especially in INCRES and PURE) Cartoons with Text, cartoons with a higher number of 1 panel (NON SEX panels with more panels) does not apply prevails in PURE SEX involves targets rarely involves targets frequently (NON SEX rarely a target)

Note: Adapted from Hempelmann and Ruch (2005)

factor usually is orthogonal to the two structure factors, the sexual humor category correlates with nonsense and incongruity-resolution humor due to the structure overlap. Hempelmann and Ruch (2005) undertook a  GTVHanalysis of the 60 jokes and cartoons of the 3 WD. The distinguishing features are listed in Table 3. Table 3 shows that the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH; Attardo and Raskin 1991) can contribute to the analysis of the 3 WD. However, it is more the parameters derived from the GTVH that seem to distinguish among the humor types rather than the original parameters (e.g., script opposition, logical mechanism, narrative strategy, target). These three humor factors consistently explain approximately 40% of the total variance. They are considered to provide an exhaustive taxonomy of jokes and car­toons at a very general level. Even when the recipients typ-

Psychology of humor 

51

ically are asked how funny they find the joke at the moment and not in general, the response is quite trait-like. Factor analytic studies show that there is only about 5% state variance in the funniness scores. Also, manipulation of internal state or external conditions (Derks et al. 2007) does not yield strong effects and retest correlations are sufficiently high (Ruch 1992). These factors were first extracted in studies of Austrian samples and later replicated in Western countries like Belgium, England, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, and Turkey (Ruch and Hehl 2007). While most of these studies were in collaboration with researchers from the respective countries, they cannot be regarded as independent replications of the factor structure. Such studies would perhaps use markers of the factors but else use representative samples of humor from the respective country. Carretero-Dios, Perez, and Buela-Casal (in press) were able to separate factors of incongruity-resolution and nonsense in Spain; however, they did not use the 3 WD to confirm the convergent validity. Recently, Ruch and Hehl (2007) argued that other structural models need to be tested that might be more appropriate and maybe would allow for the identification of further, perhaps more specific content categories. More studies need to be done on substantiating the interpretation of the factors. Factor analysis was also used to uncover the dimensions of appreciation. Results show that the response mode in humor appreciation is defined by two nearly orthogonal components of positive and negative responses best represented by ratings of funniness and aversiveness (Ruch 1992). Maximal appreciation of jokes and cartoons consists of high funniness and low aversiveness; while minimal appreciation occurs if the joke is not considered funny but is found aversive. However, a  joke can also be considered not funny but be far from being aversive; or it can make one laugh although there are certain annoying aspects (e.g., one can consider the punch line original or clever but dislike the content of the joke). Subsequent work, however, suggested that the component of positive responses might actually be a  broad dimension transcending by far what has been called the “humor response” (i.e., the perception that a  stimulus is funny). Factor analytic studies (Ruch and Rath 1993) of responses to humor yielded a strong factor of positive evaluation fusing the perception of the stimulus properties (e.g., funny, witty, orig­inal) and the induced feeling state (being amused, hilarity). Furthermore, studies of facial responses (e.g., Ruch 1995) show that rated funniness or experienced amusement correlates very highly with smiling and laughter. It has therefore been suggested that the responses to humor are explicitly conceptualized as an emotion covering

52 

Willibald Ruch

the experiential level, behavior, and physiology (Ruch 1993). Factor analysis also suggested that negative ratings might be further split into two separate but correlated clusters, representing milder, and more cognitive (e.g., plain, feel bored) and stronger affective (e.g., tasteless, feel angered) forms of aversive reactions (Ruch and Rath 1993). Joke and cartoon based tests of humor appreciation were the dominant approach to the measurement of the sense of humor. When Lefcourt and Martin (1986) started their stress-moderation studies they did not find such tests useful for their purposes. While their judgment was probably right, they were misinterpreted often as if they had said that tests of humor appreciation were not of use at all, and subsequently the interest in such tests declined for a while. Questionnaire measures became more fashionable and showed their utility. However, humor questionnaires don’t predict actual creation of humor and appreciation of jokes and cartoons well. Meanwhile the interest in humor appreciation measures got stronger again (e.g., Carretero-Dios, Perez, and Buela-Casal in press). Humorlessness and “pathologies” of humor and laughter The different approaches discussed above can be scrutinized how they treat “absence of humor” and whether or not they see forms of humor as disrespectable or even pathological. Being in a “paratelic state” or serious frame of mind will prevent individuals engaging in humorous interactions or non bona fide mode of communication. In terms of appreciation of jokes and cartoons, being prone to respond with negative affect (i.e., find humor easily aversive) might count as humorless, but it might also show a  superior moral attitude. Furthermore, some would probably suggest that joking about certain topics is “bad taste,” “sick,” and showing a bad vicious character (Kuipers 2006). Again, this might be the blind spot of the recipient of humor rather than telling something about the person acting. Humor as a strength clearly involves a unipolar dimension running from low to high humor, assuming that humor has no clear “opposite.” The term “humorless” is indicating the lack of humor, not an opposite trait. The question is what is below this zero point? When we look for antonyms, dictionaries point to serious-mindedness. Indeed, serious-mindedness is seen as a crucial factor in several temperamental models (McGhee 1996; Raskin 2007; Ruch and Köhler 2007). So is bad (or negative) mood; a trait needed to predict how

Psychology of humor 

53

easily people are “out of humor” (McGhee 1996; Ruch and Köhler 2007). The aggressive and self-defeating humor styles might represent bad taste or unhealthy forms of humor but they do not explicitly represent humorlessness. The other style approach to humor (Craik et al. (2007) involves styles that tap into the region below zero and might be seen as humorless (e.g., inept, socially cold), and earthy might be seen to represent bad taste. The ability approaches to humor contribute to humor impairment in a variety of ways. One can see the habitual inability to get a joke as a form of lacking humor. Likewise, people might have low skills in performing humorously and not be able to make up funny things on the spot. These might probably best be described as phenomena located at the lower end of an else unipolar scale. The question arises whether there are more severe “pathologies.” Clearly, there are pathologies of laughter, such as laughter as part of an epileptic fit, as an effect of poisoning, or unmotivated laughs due to pseudobulbar palsy (Wild, Rodden, Grodd, and Ruch 2003). Furthermore, various brain damages go along with impairments either to detect incongruity (or “surprise”) or resolve it (or “coherence”) (Bihrle, Brownell, Powelson, and Gardner 1986; Forabosco 2007). In the clinical field, Salameh (2006) described “humorphobia” and “sado-maso” humor, and Titze (1996) postulated the existence of a pathological fear of being laughed at: Gelotophobia. Derived from Gelos, the Greek word for laughter, and phobia, meaning fear, drawing from both literature and clinical observations, Titze (1996, in press) applied a phenomenon called the Pinocchio Complex (wooden physical appearance in psychosomatic patients) to gelotophobes – those with a fear of being laughed at. Gelotophobes have the distinct conviction that there is something wrong with them and that they are ridiculous to others, who enjoy laughing at them. Ruch and Titze (1998) designed a pilot instrument for the assessment of Gelotophobia, the Geloph <46>, from descriptions given by clinical Gelotophobic patients. Ruch and Proyer (2008a) studied these items in healthy adults and various clinical groups (non shame-based neurotics, shame-based neurotics, gelotophobes) and found that this list of statements describing the experiential world of gelotophobes was basically unidimensional. Most importantly, the group of gelotophobes (identified via a clinical interview) scored highest on this dimension. Ruch and Proyer (2008b) proposed a scoring key for a final scale containing 15 items, which should enable more in-depth explorations of the concept of the fear of being laughed at. Based on the insights from the clinical case studies provided by Titze (1996) a model of the putative causes and consequences of Gelotophobia was

54 

Willibald Ruch

produced (Ruch 2004), which guided the empirical studies of the concept. It should be noted that while Titze sees Gelotophobia as a clinical category, Ruch and Proyer (2008b) outlined and studied the fear of being laughed at as a non-pathological dimension, to be studied among healthy adults. Nevertheless, cut-off points for diagnosing slight, marked and extreme manifestation of the fear of being laughed at were developed. The concept was originally developed in Germany. Hence a cross-cultural study (Proyer, Birden, Platt, Altfreder, Glauser, and Ruch 2005) was started to verify that Gelotophobia does exist in other countries as well. Indeed, the 14 countries (with altogether 3526 participants) studied yielded a noticeable number of gelotophobes. Later this study was expanded to include more than 70 nations. Furthermore, the fear of being laughed at was studied in answers given to ambiguous social situations; i.e., in a semi-projective test (Altfreder 2000). Studies showed that gelotophobes misperceive auditorily presented laughter of a  positive quality, and consider it to be negatively motivated. Likewise, Platt (2008) illustrated that gelotophobes have difficulty in discriminating good-natured teasing from ridicule. Individuals with pronounced Gelotophobia respond to prototypical ridicule scenarios with shame and fear; but they also report experiencing these emotions in response to good-natured teasing as well. Ruch, Beermann, and Proyer (in press) show that gelotophobes score lower in most components of humor, but not generally so. While gelotophobes consider their humor abilities to be inept, this cannot be verified by a performance test of wit. Other studies show that gelotophobes indeed have experienced shame in a higher intensity than others and happiness in a lower intensity. Furthermore, their personality may be described by neurotic introversion with a  tendency towards psychoticism (Ruch 2004). Other studies investigated the prevalence of the fear of being laughed at among psychiatric groups, the actual frequency of being laughed at for a variety of reasons, the body image, and the satisfaction with life (see the special issue by Ruch in press). In sum, one can state that gelotophobia represents one form of humor pathology. Factor analytic studies of humor tests The above-mentioned approaches coexist and might be useful or different for different purposes. There is no single model that claims to cover all ­aspects of humor. Some are intentionally narrow and focus on one or a few aspects. Others are quite comprehensive. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that they make

Psychology of humor 

55

all others redundant. In the domain of self-reports, the model underlying the HBQD is the most complex one as it involves five bipolar dimensions with 10 styles. So it might be the best candidate for a  single all encompassing measure. However, as discussed above, it is not clear whether it predicts appreciation of jokes and cartoons, and it does not predict humor creation behavior well. So right now, there is no universal measure for all aspects of humor. It is also questionable whether we should aim at such a measure. Nevertheless, it is very important to see how these measures overlap and how many dimensions we need to distinguish to describe a person’s sense of humor. This leads to questions like where do the current approaches overlap? How much redundancy is there? Do we arrive at a better or more comprehensive model when we jointly look at all conceptual approaches simultaneously? One could apply the most widely used scales to the same sample and then perform factor analysis at the level of individual items or at the scale level. Exactly this has been done in a few studies (Köhler and Ruch 1996; Korotkov and Hannah 1994; Ruch 1994; Ruch and Carrell 1998). The two studies with the highest number of scales used (Köhler and Ruch 1996; Ruch and Carrell 1998) involved 24 subscales of humor inventories. Joint factor analyses confirmed that all sense of humor scales available at that time and all facets of cheerfulness always merged in a potent first factor. In study one this comprised elements such as a prevalent cheerful mood, the tendency to smile or laugh and to be merry, coping humor and cheerful composedness, initiating humor/liking to entertaining others, liking of humor stimuli, and a  positive attitude about things being related to cheerfulness and playfulness. In the second study McGhee’s (1999) sense of humor components (i.e., enjoyment of humor, laughter, verbal humor, finding humor in everyday life, laughing at yourself, and humor under stress) marked this factor equally well as the facets of cheerfulness did. Thus, the affect-based temperament and the major factor underlying the sense of humor instruments used seem to be indistinguishable. Of the inventories published meanwhile most likely the affiliative and self-enhancing humor style of the HSQ (Martin et al. 2003) and the socially warm vs. socially cold humorous style (of the HBQD) would load on this factor too. While the sense of humor scales in the first study all shared a common loading on the cheerfulness (or affect-based sense of humor components) factor, they differed with respect to whether they were also loaded ­negatively by seriousness, the second factor, and how marked this loading was. While the more affect-related humor scales were close to the axis, the sense of humor

56 

Willibald Ruch

scales involving mentality or attitudes were additionally loaded negatively by seriousness and thus located in the cheerfulness/low seriousness quadrant. In the second study the seriousness factor was bipolar due to the use of McGhee’s component of playfulness. Thus, a variety of humor concepts can be represented on these two dimensions of cheerfulness and seriousness/ playfulness. The third factor in study two was mainly composed of the bad mood facets and the negative mood scale of the McGhee scale. Obviously, the relevance of trait seriousness and bad mood for the sense of humor can only be demonstrated if the inventories sampled also cover humorlessness. Thus, traditional humor scales seem primarily to tap into a two-dimensional system of affect (good vs. bad humor) and mentality (serious vs. playful frame of mind). Taking into account that the HBQD humor measures five styles of humorous conduct one can assume that at least three dimensions are unaccounted for by the traditional sense of humor scales. Thus, future research will need to study whether those additional factors are replicable and what their nature is. Also, the aggressive and self-defeating constructs of the HSQ (Martin et al. 2003) go well beyond the scope of the conventional sense of humor scales. Replication of the factors in the domain of self-report is not the only criterion. A  confirmation in other domains such as peer-reports, behavior observation, or performance tests should be required. For example, aggressive, earthy, or mean-spirited humor may be reflected also in ratings of best friends or in the liking of humorous material of such content. Likewise, selfreports of being witty or competent in humor would gain in validity if they correlate to a reasonable extent with behavioral tests of wittiness, or humor creation. A pilot study of self-report and performance measures of appreciation and creation of humor, however, did not yield high correlations across assessment approaches suggesting the presence of method variance and low convergent validity for the measures (Köhler and Ruch 1996). Such studies might look like statistical exercises to some. Nevertheless, they are essential if humor research wants to make a significant step forward. In order to be able to accumulate research findings we need to have a common taxonomy or classification of humor traits and states. How else can we compare findings from different laboratories all over the world? This problem is not unique to humor. Also in other disciplines progress was mainly made once a common frame of references was established (e.g., the periodic system in chemistry; diagnostic manuals in psychiatry). Serious humor researchers should primarily work on establishing such a framework. While we had an enhanced activity to construct humor scales during the last 25 years, too little

Psychology of humor 

57

effort was spent on comparing the approaches and working on a more general model transcending the different domains. Humor instruments Within psychology the branch of psychometrics was developed which provides knowledge about how to construct tests and evaluate their quality (Kline 2000). There are several ways to construct a  scale, several test theories to choose from, recommendations on how to write items etc. In psychological assessment different measures for both, personality and mental abilities are available. In both cases a broad variety of strategies exists. For example, in personality assessment most commonly questionnaires (self-reports) are used. However, (semi‑) projective tests, (structured) interviews, or (structured) behavior observations (ratings of behavior) are available as well. A psychological test should fulfill several criteria that show its usefulness. Objectivity, reliability, and validity are the most important ones. A test that fulfills the objectivity-condition is a test for which everyone who scores the test follows the same scoring rules and gets the same report from the scoring procedure. Thus, it is aimed at diminishing the influence of subjective evaluations of a test score. The reliability of a test is a criterion that defines the degree to which the score of a test is not biased by a random measurement error (i.e. a not expected influence on the score). A high reliability of a test ensures that the results are reproducible and stable over time. It is possible to compute the so-called “standard error of measurement” which allows an estimation of a persons’ true score in the test (the true score is not biased by measurement errors). For each test a reliability coefficient ranging from 0 (lowest) to 1 (highest; i.e., no measurement error) can be computed. The coefficient may mainly be interpreted in terms of alternate-forms reliability (correlation of two test forms), parallel-forms reliability (correlation of two parallel forms of a test), split-half reliability (the test is split into two halves – e.g., by taking the even and odd-numbered items – and the correlation between the two halves is computed), test-retest reliability (“temporal stability”, administering a test at two independent occasions and computing the correlation between the two scores), and in terms of internal consistency (“coefficient alpha”, “Cronbach’s alpha”). The latter provides information on the consistency of a  person’s scores in the test and is one of the most commonly used statistic for showing the reliability of a test. A commonly used rule of thumb is that a test should not be used (at least for important

58 

Willibald Ruch

d­ ecisions) if the ­alpha-coefficient is below .70 and that it should be above .90 for decision about an individual. Reliability is a precondition for the validity of a test. The validity describes in how far a test measures what it is intended to measure. There are different forms of validity. For example, face validity (the assumption that the items from a test “look good”, i.e. seem to measure what is intended), content validity (the items of a test are representative for a special domain) or predictive validity (the degree to which a test predicts a specific criterion; e.g., behavior). Additionally, the construct validity is of special interest. It is aimed at showing the relation between the test score and the psychological construct it is intended to measure. Usually this is shown by its convergent (correlation to a well-established test for the same construct; same trait) and divergent validity (correlation to measures of unrelated constructs; different trait). Campbell and Fiske (1959) suggested that convergent and divergent validity are best tested in a so-called multitrait-multimethod matrix (MTMM). Their approach of testing the validity of a test includes tests of the same and different traits and additionally, they demand that the relations should even be stable if the methods used for the data collection are different. While objectivity, reliability, and validity are the most important quality criteria of psychological tests there are many other criteria to be considered as well. For example, the fairness of a measure (i.e. equal opportunities for members of different groups that take the test) or the use of appropriate norm values for the respective research questions. Further information can be retrieved from Cronbach (1984) or Cooper (2002). Measuring humor has sometimes been considered to be an impossible task due to the elusive nature of the concept. Nevertheless, throughout the 20th century there were numerous attempts to develop measures of the sense of humor and related states and traits. Ruch (2007b) surveyed the existing humor measurement tools and found more than 60 instruments. Mostly those were self-report questionnaires or joke/cartoon tests, but occasionally also methods, like humor diaries, informant questionnaires/peer-reports, behavioral observations, experimental tasks or interviews and informal surveys were used. In self-report trait measures of humor the testee reacts to statements or answers to questions how he or she typically behaves. The testees either indicate how strongly they endorse a statement or disagree with it, or give the quantity/frequency of a certain behavior. As humor is a desirable trait a few individuals might overestimate their humor. Using a Q-sort technique, in which

Psychology of humor 

59

the frequency for each step of the answer scale is set, may prevent such tendencies. A peer-report version of a trait measure of humor typically uses the identical questions. Then two or three good acquaintances of the target person fill in the questionnaire (questions are reformulated in a “he/she”-format) and inform how the target person typically behaves, thinks, or acts. The use of friends, spouse, siblings, parents or colleagues at work typically adds complementary non-redundant information about the humor of the target person, as the target and acquaintances do have access to different information. Typically, the aggregate of two peer-ratings personality traits and the self-report yields coefficients of .40. This is also a coefficient that should be expected for humor instruments. Such questionnaires may be unidimensional (e.g., the Situational Humor Response Questionnaire-SHRQ; Martin and Lefcourt 1984) or multidimensional; i.e., measuring several dimensions (e.g., Multidimensional Sense of Humor Scale–MSHS; Thorson and Powell 1993). In state measures of humor the testee indicates how he or she feels or is mentally set in the moment, the last hour, or the last day or week. Obviously, state measures should be as homogenous as trait measures, but the temporal stability cannot be expected to be high, but in a .20–.40 range. In performance (joke/cartoons) tests of humor the individual does not reflect on how he or she typically behaves in daily life but this behavior is elicited and recorded under controlled conditions. More precisely, in humor appreciation tests the individual is confronted with a test booklet containing the set of humorous stimuli and an answer sheet with rating scales where the testee records his or her subjective experience (e.g., the IPAT humor test of personality by Cattell and Tollefson 1966; the Antioch sense of humor test by Mindess, Turek, Bender, and Corbin 1985; EUHA by Carretero-Dios, Perez, and Buela-Casal in press). Sometimes the material is grouped into piles (“like,” “dislike” or “indifference”), or nonverbal indicators of enjoyment are recorded (e.g., the Mirth Response Test by Redlich, Levine, and Sohler 1951). Performance tests of wit or humor creation can be quite diverse, but most often the individual is confronted with an incomplete joke or cartoon, and is asked to write as many funny captions as possible. Or they are asked to comment something in a funny way etc (Lefcourt and Martin 1986). The frequency and quality of the captions, also contents may be later evaluated. For example, e.g., 5 to 10 raters judge the degree of funniness of the material produced or the persons humor creation ability and wit (Köhler and Ruch 1996). Once a great range of answers is assembled and evaluated for funniness (e.g., 6–10 raters), anchors for different quality might be derived and used as an aid for scoring individual answers by a fewer numbers of people doing the coding.

60 

Willibald Ruch

Is humor research equipped with appropriate measuring instruments? While probably more than 70 humor measurement tools may have been constructed meanwhile, the state of the art is not really satisfactory. Many of the methods were ad hoc measures constructed and used in only one single study. The construction did not always use the state of the art methodology. Also, they were not very explicit about the concept that was being measured. While most often these scales were simply labeled ”sense of humor” tests, the contents were quite diverse (suggesting a lack of convergent validity), and none of those scales measured actually the sense of humor as described in the classic literature (e.g., as a world view). Also, often there was not much empirical work done on the meaning of the concept prior to the construction of the own questionnaire. Therefore most instruments are not representing any existing theory or offering a new model. A special issue on the measurement of the sense of humor (Ruch 1996) documented the progress that has been made in the 90-ies of the last century, and some new instruments were constructed. In the following a few prototypical current instruments are described (see Ruch 2007b for a comprehensive list of tools, and Martin 2003 and Peterson and Seligman 2004 for reviews of humor instruments). The Coping Humor Scale (CHS; Martin and Lefcourt 1983) is a  seven items self-report questionnaire reflecting the degree to which individuals report using humor to cope with stress which respondents rate in terms of endorsement on a four-point scale. The internal reliability (alpha coefficient) of the CHS ranges from .60 to .70, and the test-rest reliability (12-week period) is .80. There is considerable construct validity support for the CHS (summarized in Lefcourt and Martin 1986; Martin 1996, 2007). For example, high scores in the CHS were correlated with peer ratings of individuals’ tendency to use humor to cope with stress (r = .50) and to not take themselves too seriously (r’s = .58 to .78). Also, the CHS was significantly correlated with the rated funniness of participants’ humorous monologues created while watching a stressful film (r = .50). Finally, the CHS scale moderates the effects of life stress on mood disturbance (Martin 1996). The CHS probably does not measure what Freud (1928) understood by humor as a mature defense mechanism. Führ (2002) developed a coping humor scale for use with children. The Situational Humor Response Questionnaire (SHRQ; Martin and Lefcourt 1984) is a  self-report questionnaire of sense of humor composed of 21 items measuring the frequency with which a  person smiles and laughs in a  wide variety of life situations. These situations may be aversive but also pleasant. The testee rates the items in terms of intensity of response on

Psychology of humor 

61

a 1–5 scale. The internal reliability of the SHRQ ranges from .70 to .85 and the test-rest reliability is .70. Martin (1996) gives a review of validity studies of the SHRQ. For example, the SHRQ correlates with the frequency and duration of spontaneous laughter during unstructured interviews and with peer ratings of participants’ frequency of laughter and tendency to use humor in coping with stress (r’s ranging from .30 to .50). Furthermore, scores correlated with rated funniness of monologues created by participants in the laboratory. Finally, the SHRQ has been shown to moderate the effects of life stress on mood disturbance (for reviews see Martin 1996, 2007). The Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ; Martin et al. 2003) is a self-report questionnaire composed of 32 items in a  seven point-answer format measuring four styles of humor, namely self-enhancing, aggressive, affiliative, and self-defeating humor. Internal reliability (alpha coefficients) ranges from .77 to .81, and the (one week) test-retest reliability from .80 to .85. Initial evidence for construct validity is provided in terms of multiple correlations with other humor scales (they range from .47 to .75) and correlations between questionnaire and one peer report (one item per scale; coefficients range from .22 to .33). Evidence for criterion validity is provided by correlating the HSQ with a variety of indicators of psychological health, well-being, mood, and personality. The scales of social and self-enhancing humor correlate moderately positively with self-esteem, well-being, and social intimacy, and negatively with depression and anxiety. The aggressive and self-defeating humor scale correlates positively with aggression and hostility, and self-defeating relates negatively with depression, anxiety, well-being, self-esteem, and social support. The scale has been used to study regional differences in the USA (Romero, Alsua, Hinrichs, and Pearson 2007). Furthermore, international versions are available for use with participants from countries such as, China, Belgium, Germany, Lebanon and Turkey (Chen and Martin 2007; Kazarian and Martin 2006; Saroglou and Scariot 2002; Tümkaya 2007). The Humorous Behavior Q-sort Deck (Craik et al. 1996) is a Q-sort technique consisting of one hundred descriptive statements describing specific forms of everyday humorous conduct. The respondent (or an observer) sorts those statements into piles from one to nine, with one being the least, five being neutral, and nine being most characteristic of the person being assessed with the following specified distribution: 5, 8, 12, 16, 18, 16, 12, 8, 5. Craik and Ware (2007) recommend the HBQD for studying the everyday humorous conduct of persons in three levels: (1) at the individual level of descriptive statements, by analyzing its 100 items separately; (2) at the overall pattern level, by incorrelating individual or composited HBQD descriptions; and

62 

Willibald Ruch

(3)  at the stylistic level, by calculating factor scores for individual HBQD descriptions. The latter level allows to interpret the five style of humor found by (Craik et al. 1996), namely the socially warm versus cold, reflective versus boorish, competent versus inept, earthy versus repressed, and benign versus mean-spirited humorous styles. The internal reliability (alpha coefficients) ranges from .61 to .71, except for style 2 (which is .43). Information regarding construct validity is provided by several studies (Craik et al. 1996; Craik and Ware 2007). The HBQD discriminates among comedians in a plausible way, and there are correlations with a sense of humor index. In a sample of 60 Irish students the correspondence between self and peer report was very high for socially warm (.52), earthy (.63), benign (.55) and competent (.37) humor styles and low for the reflective (.17) humor style. A study with 91 German adults yielded high coefficients for the earthy (.56), competent (.44) socially warm (.32), and benign (.23) humor styles, and again a low and not significant one for the reflective (.16) humor style (Esser 2001). This suggests that, rater and rated person disagree primarily on one of the styles. Clearly, they have different access to the information necessary for that judgment. Furthermore, the correlations with several personality scales were studied, among them the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), and the Big Five Inventory (BFI) (Craik et al. 1993, Esser 2001). The scale, or variants of it were used in several studies (e.g., Kirsh and Kuiper 2003; Kuiper, Grimshaw, Leite, and Kirsh 2004; Priest and Thein 2003; Ruch, Beermann, and Proyer in press; Saroglou 2004). The State-Trait Cheerfulness Inventory (STCI; Ruch et al. 1996, 1997) is a self-report questionnaire for the assessment of cheerfulness, seriousness, and bad mood both as states (STCI-S) and traits (STCI‑T). There are 20 and 10 items per scale for the trait and state versions, respectively, which respondents rate in terms of endorsement on 1–4 point scales (strongly disagree to strongly agree). The internal reliability (alpha coefficients) of the trait scale for adults ranges from 88. to .94, and the test-retest reliability from .77 to .86 (4 weeks). The state part has high internal consistency too (.85 to .93), and the stability over a month is low (.33 to .36), as expected. The self-reports of the traits correlate .53 to .66 with peer reports (average of three good friends). The self-reports of the traits correlate with the homologous states, with the size of correlations higher for the aggregated states and the longer lasting states than for a single measurement of one state. Recently, Sommer and Hösli (2006) introduced a version for use with children and youth. There are self- and peer-rating forms for both the child and adult versions.

Psychology of humor 

63

State and trait cheerfulness predicts amount of laughter in a variety of experimental settings, and predicts ease of induction of cheerful mood and robustness of mood when facing adversity. The STCI-T cheerfulness scale correlates about .57 with the SHRQ and CHS, and .30 to .74 with various other humor scales (e.g., Köhler and Ruch 1996; Martin et al. 2003). The STCI has been validated in a variety of settings, including the study of the humor of teachers (Rissland 2002), the study of humorous interactions among pupils (Bönsch-Kauke 2003), as well as its relation to personality (Ruch and Köhler 2007; Wrench and McCroskey 2001), emotional intelligence (Yip and Martin 2006), and well-being (Maas 2003). The state part with special instruction was used to evaluate the effects in humor intervention studies in samples of healthy adults (Sassenrath 2001), depressed elderly (Krantzhoff and Hirsch 2001; Hirsch and Krantzhoff 2004), COPD patients (Brutsche et al. 2008), and schizophrenic patients (Falkenberg, Klügel, Bartels, and Wild 2007), but also to examine the effects of experimental interventions (Ruch and Stevens 1995; Thompson, Ruch, and Hasenoehrl 2004). (For more information on the construct validity see Hilscher 2005; Köhler and Ruch 1996; Ruch 1997; Ruch and Carrell 1998; Ruch and Köhler 1999, 2007). Finally, a scale should be mentioned that was not designed for use in research but as a source of personal feedback for individuals` participating in a program for the improvement of the sense of humor. As the effectiveness of this program (McGhee 1996) is best tested when this scale is included as well, one needs to know more about its psychometric properties and hence it needs discussion. The sense of humor scale (SHS; McGhee 1996) is a rationally developed scale utilizing 40 items in a four-point answer format (1 = strongly disagree; 4 = strongly agree) and is aimed at measuring the sense of humor and its eight components, namely enjoyment of humor (SHS‑1), seriousness and negative mood (SHS‑2), playfulness and positive mood (SHS‑3), laughter (SHS‑4), verbal humor (SHS‑5), finding humor in everyday life (SHS‑6), laughing at yourself (SHS‑7), and humor under stress (SHS‑8). The SHS can be scored for the eight subscales by adding the five items per subscale. Furthermore, a “humor quotient” can be derived by adding the eight subscales giving laughing at yourself and humor under stress higher weights (1.5 and 2, respectively). This was based on the untested assumption that the latter two skills are more difficult to develop than the others. A  first psychometric analysis with American and German participants (Ruch and Carrell 1998) yielded reliability coefficients of .92 and .90 for the total scores in the US and German sample, respectively. The reliabilities of the subscales (with 5 items each) yielded coefficients between .56 and 78 with

64 

Willibald Ruch

a median of .71. As .60 is typically seen as the lower bound of acceptable reliability for research purposes, the subscale “laughter” could not be recommended for use. Furthermore, it seemed that the SHS scales are best seen as representing three different factors. The new version of the SHS is a 40 iteminstrument in a 7 point-format (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree) measuring the three domains of playful vs. serious attitude (8 items), positive vs. negative mood (8 items), and sense of humor (24 items). While there are only four items per scale the answer format increased to seven points. There are no psychometric data available for this scale yet. Beermann, Gander, Hiltebrand, Wyss, and Ruch (in press) provide preliminary evidence that the “laughing at yourself ”-subscale of the first version of the SHS is indeed predictive of the homologous behavior in an experimental setting. Also, for the total score there is a satisfactory self-peer correlation (r = .44). The coefficients for the individual scales ranged from .21 (humor under stress) to .57 (Playfulness and Positive Mood) with a median of .35. The SHS scales showed a high convergent validity with the STCI scales (Ruch and Carrell 1998). The fact that the training of the sense of humor (containing elements that cover the contents of the scale) yielded an increase in the SHS scales supports its validity (Sassenrath 2001). The 3 WD (3 Witz-Dimensionen) test of humor appreciation (Ruch 1992) is a performance test measuring funniness and aversiveness of incongruityresolution humor, nonsense humor and sexual humor in which 35 jokes and cartoons are rated on two seven-point scales (e.g., 0 = not at all funny; 6 = very funny). The first five items are used for “warming up” and are not scored. The jokes and cartoons are presented in a test booklet with two or three items on a  page. The instructions are typed on the separate answer sheet, which also contains the two sets of rating scales. Usually, six scores may be derived, three for funniness and three for aversiveness of incongruityresolution (INC-RES), nonsense (NON), and sexual (SEX) humor. Furthermore, several indices have been derived and validated (Ruch 1992, Ruch and Hehl 1988; Ruch et al. 1990). Scores of total funniness and total aversiveness (computed by adding the ratings of the three categories) served as indicators of the subject’s overall positive and negative responses to humor, respectively. A structure preference index (SPI; obtained by subtracting INC-RES from NON) allows assessing the relative preference for resolution in humor over unresolvable or residual incongruities and vice versa. Likewise, when hypotheses relate to the content of sexual humor, indices of appreciation of sexual content (see Forabosco and Ruch 1994) are used to increase the power of the test.

Psychology of humor 

65

Internal reliability (alpha coefficients) of the six regular scales rage from .81 to .91, and the retest reliability (4 weeks) ranges from .60 to .74. The construction of parallel versions allowed the estimation of the reliability based on equivalence of tests, which yielded high coefficients too (.82 to .93). Construct validity was assessed by correlations with other humor instruments. The 3 WD scales are uncorrelated from affect-based sense of humor measures, but correlate with humor performance measures, (low) seriousness, and type nouns related to humor and humorlessness. They correlate with various measures of preference for different types of art (especially with the simplicity-complexity dimension) underscoring the similarity between appreciation of humor and of aesthetics. Finally, a myriad of studies examined correlations with various dimensions of personality, attitudes and values, and so on (see reviews in Ruch 1992, 2002; Ruch and Hehl 2007). Development of humor over life span The development of humor appreciation during childhood received much attention in the 1970s and 1980s of the last century (see Bariaud 1983; Bergen 2007; McGhee 1979, 1983; McGhee and Chapman 1980 and McGhee, Ruch, and Hehl 1990; for reviews). Later, attention was drawn on development during the entire life span (Nahemov, McCluskey-Fawcett, and McGhee 1986) but comparatively few studies followed. The results often stem from applying tests of sense of humor to samples of a broader age range. More recent studies of children’s humor expand the scope of components studied to humor in real life interactions (Bönsch-Kauke 2003) and the use of humor as a coping device (Führ 2002). While philosophers and psychologists have advanced numerous theories of humor, theoretical models of humor development have been rare. Primary attention has been given in these models to the development of incongruitybased humor and to the role of cognitive development in determining general developmental changes. McGhee (1979) reviews the existing theories of humor development and puts forward a four stage-model of humor development during childhood. McGhee viewed humor as a form of intellectual play and argued that the level of humor a child is capable of understanding and producing at any given point in development depends primarily on the level of cognitive functioning achieved. Drawing primarily from a Piagetian theoretical framework, this cognitive-stage theory suggests that each new major cognitive acquisition leads to the appearance of a qualitatively different form

66 

Willibald Ruch

of humor. McGhee et al. (1990) advance a personality-based model of humor development extending from late adolescence until about age 60 which is subsequently tested (Ruch et al. 1990). This model builds upon the earlier taxonomic studies of humor appreciation which document the importance of two principal humor-appreciation factors (nonsense and incongruity plus resolution), and from a broad range of data demonstrating age-related changes in personality measures closely associated with these two factors (Ruch 1992). Methodologically we do need to separate different questions. There might be differences between generations or cohorts; i.e., today’s 20 year olds might find one type of humor funnier that the 20 year-old-ones 50 years ago. Those changes in humor appreciation might be predictable by social and societal changes (e.g., the changing role of men and women and the appreciation of gender stereotypes; or the role of media transporting different forms of humor) or by the sheer fact that some joke contents are topical and do not mean much to people 50 years later. There also might be genuine developmental changes; i.e., humor is different for the same people at different stages in their life. For example, one might expect that the use of philosophical humor increases with age. This requires longitudinal studies where the same individuals are tested repeatedly (i.e., two or more times) years apart. At best with parallel tests that don’t get outdated. So far humor research can only draw on results from cross-sectional studies. Most often these data come from studies where sense of humor instruments are applied to a sample with a wider age range. One such cross-sectional study investigates the age differences in traits considered to be the temperamental basis of humor. In a  study of six age groups from late adolescence to people older than 60 years there were no major trends in trait cheerfulness across age (Ruch et al. 1996; Ruch and Zweyer 2001). A  later analysis with approximately 2000 individuals confirmed this result, however, there was a peculiar drop of trait cheerfulness for the age group between 30 and 40 years. This drop is similar to the ones found for satisfaction with life (Myers and Diener 1993). For trait seriousness, there was no difference among the groups below the age of 40. However, from thereon it significantly increased among all adjacent age groups. A similar increase was observed for cheerful composure, a measure akin to humor in the traditional sense (Ruch et al. 1996). More is known about humor appreciation. McGhee (1979) discusses the results for early development in humor appreciation. Ruch, McGhee and Hehl (1990) tested their model of the development of incongruity-resolution and nonsense humor during adulthood in a sample of 4.292 14- to 66-year-

Psychology of humor  90

67

INC-RESf

28

Total scores

26 24

NON-f

22 20 NONa

18 16 14

INC-RESa 15

20

25

30

35 40 45 Age (in years)

50

55

60

Figure 1.  Development of humor appreciation across the life span (INC-RESf  = funniness of incongruity-resolution humor, NONf= funniness of nonsense humor; NONa = aversiveness of nonsense humor; INC-RESa = aversiveness of incongruityresolution humor) (Drawn from data presented in Ruch et al. 1990).

old Germans. Twenty jokes and cartoons representing structure-based humor categories of incongruity-resolution and nonsense were rated for funniness and aversiveness. The results generally confirmed the hypotheses. Incongruity-resolution humor increased in funniness and nonsense humor decreased in funniness among progressively older subjects after the late teens. Aversiveness of both forms of humor generally decreased over the ages sampled (see Figure 1). Age differences in humor appreciation were strongly correlated with age differences in conservatism. An especially strong parallel was found between age differences in funniness of incongruity-resolution humor and age differences in conservatism, the major predictor of appreciation of incongruityresolution humor. In other words, appreciation of resolvable types of humor changes when degree of conservatism (i.e., the need for closure and stability) changes with age too. Nothing much is known about changes past the age of 60 years. Also we do not know whether those changes depicted above are mere cross-sectional differences or genuine developments. There might be a  generation gap in

68 

Willibald Ruch

humor too. Therefore, we do need longitudinal studies albeit short time ones with different age cohorts. We also lack in developmental studies of other forms of humor. Test constructors typically give information about the correlation of the new humor scale with age (e.g., Martin et al. 2003). However, correlations do only ­indicate the linear trend in age related differences. The samples typically are too small to give a more fine-grained analysis of means for different age groups. Once larger samples are accumulated, reviews of the validity of the scale should involve the study of age differences. This will give a first hint of what differences might be expected in subsequent short-term longitudinal s­ tudies. Factors that support or impede humor Speakers of most languages know expressions referring to somebody losing or cultivating his/her sense of humor. However, most research regarding environmental influences on humor has looked at the effects of current physical and social factors on current perceived funniness of, or amount of laughter to humor (e.g., Chapman 1983) and only rarely have examined the longer lasting effects on humor as an individual differences variable. Nevertheless, some research exists regarding the proximal and distal antecedents of humor. Basically, these factors either posit that humor is a natural extension of one’s emotionality or playfulness, or developed as a means of coping with life’s less pleasant circumstances. Given the current lack of knowledge on the importance of nature and nurture in humor one can only speculate about the relative importance of those factors. As regards facilitating factors, the existence and cultivation of ”joking relationships” could be crucial. That is, peers that encourage unrestricted indulgence in all forms of humor, where funny ideas can be exchanged and humor skills developed; where people can freely ”regress” and even be silly and childish. If humor is modeled, then besides parents, teachers and peers also the media will have to be considered. Nowadays humor is offered in abundance in form of books, funnies in newspapers, films, TV, on stage, etc. so that there are plenty of occasions to learn how to be funny, either by sheer reproduction or by learning the rules and generating ones own humor on the spot. Obviously, with all those factors a bidirectional relationship can be assumed (e.g., humorous people might be more likely to engage in joking relationships, and engaging in joking relationships might increase one’s humor) and hence a design allowing for a causal analysis is necessary.

Psychology of humor 

69

Intervention programs As mentioned in the beginning, psychology is not only interested in describing, explaining and predicting behavior, but also in controlling it. Being able to change behavior is a proof for controlling it. So can we change humor? Does it make sense to try so? So far behavioral genetic studies show only a  medium size contribution of genetic factors to individual differences in sense of humor and most studies show no genetic contribution to appreciation of cartoon humor. Thus, there is plenty of room for environmental factors and for learning in the etiology of humor. Therefore knowledge of the factors that bring about humor might be used to deliberately change people’s sense of humor – if they wish. As humor is a highly regarded personal resource many might be interested in raising their humor skills. Likewise, some forms of humor are not considered to be socially appropriate, and thus there might be the need for a retraining of humor as well. Psychologists have a longstanding interest in developing and evaluating intervention programs aimed in fostering desirable and reducing undesirable behavior. How can such changes be brought about? According to Nevo, Aharonson and Klingman (2007) theoretically two opposing approaches to improving humor can be distinguished. Adopting a  psychoanalytic perspective one can predict that improvements in sense of humor will emerge indirectly as a result of therapy or maturation. A general inner change into a more healthy direction will bring about improvements in humor. An application of techniques directed at the humor itself is not needed; nor will they be of any effect. Alternatively, one can adopt a cognitive behavioral approach and predict that the direct learning of deficient behaviors, reinforcement, and cognitive restructuring will activate and improve humor. Before such a program can be recommended and routinely applied it needs to be evaluated empirically. This requires instruments that are sensitive to change (for pre-post comparisons) and the utilization of groups getting the humor training (at best over many weeks) but also control groups that merely meet as often (but do not get a humor training) or just fill in the scales in same time ­intervals. Several programs aimed at the improvement of the sense of humor exist and they are applied, for example, in hospital, educational and counseling settings (see Nevo et al. 2007). They most often are based on the assumption that humor is a set of skills those typically are taught in group-settings during approximately 5 to 10 meetings. Few such programs underwent an evaluated though, and those who did yielded mixed results (Krantzhoff and

70 

Willibald Ruch

Hirsch 2001; Lowis and Nieuwoudt 1994). Lowis and Nieuwoudt (1994) published results from a  workshop aimed at increasing humor usage as a coping aid. Twenty-two participants met for five sessions and the only significant change found was an increase in the Coping Humor Scale. The most elaborate published evaluation study first designed a systematic program for the improvement of the sense of humor and then tested its effectiveness in a sample of 101 female high-school teachers (Nevo et al. 2007). The program consisted of 14 well-documented units, and the interventions were designed to specifically activate the proposed motivational, cognitive, emotional, and social components of sense of humor. One group received the full program, while another groups received only part of the program, and two others formed a control group or were only tested before and after. Results provide only partial support for the effectiveness of the program. While participants in the humor improvement program received higher peer-ratings of humor appreciation and humor production after the program (as in compared to rating before the program and compared to the control group), there were no differences in a variety of questionnaires or the humor production tests used. McGhee (1999) developed a program that is both most explicit and theoretically founded. The program is based on the assumption that playfulness forms the basis for the sense of humor, and the rediscovery of a playful attitude or outlook on life (that got lost during education, school years and work) is a key element for change. The set of skills to be taught during group meetings and ”home play” is distributed across eight steps ordered in difficulty from simple (e.g., enjoying humor in everyday life) to difficult (e.g., laughing at yourself) to acquire. Earlier steps need to be successfully mastered to finally be able to have access to humor skills in the midst of stress. To assess progress in the skills to be acquired the sense of humor scale (SHS; see Ruch and Carrell 1998, for a  psychometric evaluation of the scale) is provided consisting of subscales that partly match these steps. Simone Sassenrath (2001) applied McGhee’s program over a span of two month to four groups. She reports that the group of 20 adults that underwent the theoretical and practical part of the program (but not the three other groups) yielded increases in self-reports of humor, with some of those increases still prevailing one month after the end of the intervention. Changes involved increases in the six scales measuring the skills comprising the sense of humor, in playfulness, positive mood (subscales of the SHS), and the CHS, and also reductions in the seriousness and bad mood scales of the STCI. While both studies (Nevo et al. 2007; Sassenrath 2001) had a placebo control, the circumstances of the

Psychology of humor 

71

studies did not allow for a random assignment of participants to groups. Heidi Stolz and Sandra Rusch (2008) were testing the eight-step-program in a sample of Swiss adults and yielded, among others, an increase in satisfaction with life in the experimental groups. While the participants were randomly assigned to the four groups, these were still differing in baseline levels and group dynamics. While there is some preliminary evidence for effect of the intervention programs many issues remain unresolved. For example, the optimal length of such programs is not known. Also, what are the requirements on the leaders conducting the program (does anyone qualify?), who will likely profit from the course (everyone or specific groups?), what is expected to be improving (e.g., selective skills or the global sense of humor?). Do changes in the sense of humor occur, as McGhee would predict, when merely playfulness is nurtured but no humor skills are trained? Does a program for the training of the more humorless individuals need to be different from the one for the average person and the one with superior wit? Or is there no need to tailor it to the humor skills level of that group? Finally, one needs to consider broadening the goals of such programs. Humor may be used in destructive ways (as in put down witticisms). But when guided by benevolence, wisdom or transcendence, it may be used in virtuous ways to foster relationships, strengthen group morale, act as a social lubricant, promote intimacy, provide insight and facilitate the ‘good life’ generally. Therefore, programs might also want to incorporate the unlearning or refraining from destructive uses of humor, and we need studies examining whether the virtuous use of the humor skills can be learned as well. Cross-national and cross-cultural perspectives Already for a long time, people characterize their own group and their neighbors in terms of how much or what type of humor they supposedly possess. This took the form of regional differences (i.e., within countries) but also national differences (i.e., across countries). Usually more flattering forms of humor were attributed to themselves than to others (Eysenck 1944–1945; Nicholson 1946; Schmidt-Hidding 1963). Rarely, a country disliked by someone will be praised with much good humor. Having or not having a sense of humor is part of the national stereotype and may or may not go along with average scores of representative samples of citizens. In Europe, for example, chances are that Germans and English will turn out on opponent poles of

72 

Willibald Ruch

such scales, and many people in both countries seem to believe in those stereotypes (i.e., the postulated national character). Irrespective of attributions of humor to certain countries, there may also be differences in humor existing in terms of mean levels of certain humor traits. Note again, that a psychological approach would not necessarily compare the humor material produced in two countries (i.e., studying the best 10 comic writings, Sit-coms, or joke collections) but the actual behavior of people. Differences in the type and quality of humor material produced in the countries may exist (especially as often the work of a limited number of writers comes to mind which may or may not be representative for the other citizens of that country) but it may well be that humor produced in one country is more highly appreciated in the other. Regional, cross-national or cross-cultural studies must take a different venue then, namely to study the humor of fairly representative (or at least comparable) samples from the entities to be compared. Such research has been done with other personality traits using translations of scales, and mean levels of representative groups from different cultures were compared quantitatively (e.g., McCrae and Allik 2002). Also, the factor structure of the scales is compared to see whether the scale is indeed applicable to the other country. This approach, however, has drawn extensive criticism, because raw scores obtained in different cultures, often from instruments in different languages, may not be directly comparable. Critics (e.g., Van de Vijver and Leung 1997) have pointed to a number of potential problems: Translations may not be equivalent, response styles may confound results, samples may not be representative of the culture as a whole etc. Such research needs to be aware of the emic–etic distinction. Emic constructs are accounts, descriptions, and analyses expressed in terms of the conceptual schemes and categories that are regarded as meaningful and appropriate by the members of the culture under study. Am emic construct is correctly termed “emic” if and only if it is in accord with the perceptions and understandings deemed appropriate by the insider’s culture. There is a vast amount of information on humor members of a society can share. The validation of emic knowledge thus becomes a matter of consensus – namely, the consensus of native informants, who must agree that the construct matches the shared perceptions that are characteristic of their culture. Etic constructs are accounts, descriptions, and analyses expressed in terms of the conceptual schemes and categories that are regarded as meaningful and appropriate by the community of scientific observers. An etic construct is correctly termed “etic” if and only if it is in accord with the epistemological principles deemed appropriate by science (i.e., etic constructs must be pre-

Psychology of humor 

73

cise, logical, comprehensive, replicable, falsifiable, and observer independent). The validation of etic knowledge thus becomes a matter of logical and empirical analysis – in particular, the logical analysis of whether the construct meets the standards of falsifiability, comprehensiveness, and logical consistency, and then the empirical analysis of whether or not the concept has been falsified and/or replicated. Obviously humor research will profit from the acquisition of both emic and etic knowledge. Emic knowledge is essential for an intuitive and empathic understanding of the humor of a culture. Furthermore, emic knowledge is often a valuable source of inspiration for etic hypotheses. Etic knowledge is essential for cross-cultural comparison, because such comparison necessarily demands standard units and categories. Studies in folklore and anthropology, but also psychology have delivered emic and etic knowledge on humor (e.g., Apte 1985; Eysenck 1944–1945; Ferroluzzi-Eichinger 1997; Jones and Liverpool 1976; Ruch and Forabosco 1996). There is a long-standing interest in comparing humor around the world (Davies 1990, 2007; Davis 2006; Ziv 1988). Actually, the First International Conference on Humour and Laughter in Cardiff, Wales, already had a symposium on cross-cultural aspects (see Chapman and Foot 1977). However, most of the research done involved emic description of national styles of humor, or comparing jokes found in folklore archives of different parts of the world. So far no comprehensive research program compared humor as an individual difference variable across several countries simultaneously. Ideally, the factor structure of a humor instrument would be examined for being universal across countries or not. Then means of the items that are comparable across countries would be used to derive mean profiles for the countries involved in the study. The differences in mean levels of humor then can be compared to other peculiarities of the country (again at the mean level), e.g., Hofstede’s (2001) dimensions of culture, mean level of happiness (Diener and Suh 2000), personality dimensions (McCrae and Allik 2002), values (Schwartz 1992), or other information about the countries involved. For example, countries that are more conservative should show higher appreciation of incongruity-resolution humor; the countries’ permissiveness might show a relationship with appreciation of sexual humor; or the level of conflict might relate to the use of humor as a coping mechanism. Not only the factor structure of humor tests might be compared across countries, also the typical personality correlates. For example, one might study whether the same personality traits that predict appreciation of sexual humor in Australia also are predictive in Scotland?

74 

Willibald Ruch

Indices describing differences among cultures exist. For example, Hofstede (2001) provided scores for five dimensions of culture: power distance (acceptance of status differences), uncertainty avoidance (preference for rules and routines to reduce stress), individualism (emphasis of self over family or group), masculinity (egoistic vs. social work goals), and long-term orientation (orientation towards future rewards). As cultures with high power distance appear to have members who are serious, traditional, task-minded workers, this dimension might be predictive of lower scores in some components of sense of humor. A small-scale cross-cultural project was conducted for humor appreciation using the 3 WD humor test (Ruch 1992). The jokes and cartoons of the 3 WD were translated into different languages and typically administered to undergraduate student samples. Pair-wise comparisons between German data and the data from other countries (e.g., Austria, Canada, England, Germany, France, Italy, Israel Turkey, and USA) were undertaken and the factor structure turned out to be highly comparable (see Ruch, Accoce, Ott, and Bariaud 1991; Ruch and Forabosco 1996; Ruch and Hehl 2007). Likewise, funniness of nonsense is predicted by sensation seeking in Italy and Spain as it was in Germany, and the French conservatives enjoyed incongruity-resolution humor just like their German (and Italian, Turkish etc.) counterparts did (Carreteros-Dios and Ruch in press; Ruch et al. 1991; Ruch and Forabosco 1996). Comparison of means sometimes yielded surprising results; e.g., German students did appreciate nonsense humor more than the English sample did (although nonsense humor historically emerged in England first). This first pilot study was more aimed at estimating whether the factor structure would be comparable across countries and it is. Future studies should do a simultaneous comparison of the mean levels and compare those scores to other indices of the countries. More recently, the fear of being laughed at was studied in different countries (Proyer et al. 2005). It turned out that this fear existed in each of the countries studied. Also the instrument (i.e., the GELOPH; Ruch and Proyer 2008a; Ruch and Proyer 2008b; Ruch and Titze 1998) appeared to be reliable irrespective of cultural variations. As there were systematic differences between the countries studied the project was subsequently expanded to include app. 80 nations filling in translations of the instrument into about 40 languages. Furthermore, also different scales of sense of humor or humor styles (e.g., CHS, GELOPH, SHRQ, MSHS, HBQD, STCI-T) have been translated into other languages for use in research projects, and some byproducts of the

Psychology of humor 

75

adaptation allow being interpreted. Typically, the factor structure, internal consistency and main correlates of those questionnaires were retained (e.g., Martin 1996; Chen and Martin 2007; Kazarian and Martin 2006; Thorson, Brdar, and Powell 1997), suggesting that also the questionnaire measures of humor may be comparable across nations. It might be of interest to do a more comprehensive comparison of humor across countries. However, studies of personality have shown that country does not account for more than 10 % of the variance in test scores; i.e. typically there is much more variation within countries than between them. Heritability Are humor and laughter innate or learned? Can anybody develop a sparkling wit or are some of us doomed to be and stay humorless? Is money and effort on “develop your sense of humor”-programs wasted or may everybody be trained to use humor in stressful situations? What is the etiology of the different forms of humor? Behavior genetics asks the extent to which differences in genetic differences among individuals contribute to the differences we observe in their behavior. This is the issue of nature and nurture and this question needs to be addressed by humor research as well. Smiling and laughter are universal expressions (Darwin 1872) and there is evidence that man is not the only animal that laughs (Panksepp 2007; Preuschoft 1992; van Hoof 1972). While in ontogenetic development laughter emerges around the fourth month, the rare cases of gelastic epilepsy (from Greek; gelos = laughter) among neonates demonstrate that all structures are there and functional on date of birth (Wild et al. 2003). Further evidence for the innateness of laughter comes from early twin studies (Gedda and Neroni 1955) as well as from the fact that laughter was observed among deaf-blind children (even among deaf-blind thalidomide children, who could not ”learn” laughter by touching people’s faces) (see Ruch and Ekman 2001). Little is known about the heritability of the various components of humor. Two twin studies of appreciation of cartoon humor show no genetic influence for appreciation of nonsense, satirical, aggressive, and sexual cartoons (Cherkas, Hochberg, MacGregor, Snieder, and Spector 2000; Wilson, Rust, and Kasriel 1977). In both studies monozygotic twins were not more similar to each other than dizygotic twins. The high correlation among the twins (all reared together) shows that the shared environmental influence seems to be most relevant, followed by the non-shared (i.e., unique) environment. Thus,

76 

Willibald Ruch

familial and peer influences determine what we consider to be funny. This is noteworthy, as a finding of no genetic basis for a personality trait is the rare exception these days. Furthermore, the contents of humor (aggression, sex) and major predictors of humor appreciation (extraversion, conservatism, ­sensation seeking) are known to have a genetic basis. However, it would be premature to conclude that humor appreciation is exclusively determined by environmental factors. We need further studies based on psychometrically sound tests of humor appreciation that utilize larger samples and more comprehensive humor scales. The study by Cherkas et al. (2000), for example, used only five cartoons. This is exactly the number of cartoons that seems to be affected by a “warm-up-effect”, contains state variance, and therefore are excluded from scoring in tests of humor appreciation (Ruch 1992). In a twin study of humor appreciation Weber, Ruch, Riemann, Spinath, and Angleitner (2008) administered the 3WD test to 135 monozygotic (MZ) and 60 dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs. The typical pattern emerged for the regular scores for funniness of nonsense and of sexual humor: there were contributions of shared and non-shared environment but no genetic effect. However, the separation of content and structure of funniness of sexual humor did yield a small genetic effect for appreciation of sexual content in humor. Questionnaire studies of the frequency with which children use specific humor behaviors with their mothers, siblings, and friends (Manke 2007) and of a sense of humor rating (Loehlin and Nichols 1976) yield familiar results. There is a genetic influence of a moderate size and an effect of unique environment but no effect of shared (familial) environment. Non-adopted siblings were more similar in their humor use than adopted siblings (Manke 2007) and monozygotic twins rated their sense of humor more similar than dizygotic twins did. The hereditability estimate was lower than for other personality traits but this might be due to the lower reliability of the scales. However, a more recent study of humor as character strength yielded no genetic effect (Steger, Hicks, Kashdan, Krueger, and Bouchard 2007). No study exists for humor production or wit, or for more sophisticated and less behavioral forms of humor (e.g., a humorous outlook on life, not taking oneself too seriously, or what has been called philosophical humor). These more elusive forms of humor were often considered a to be sign of human maturity, an attitude akin to wisdom, and developed on prior suffering, pain, and exposure to an imperfect world and insight into the human nature. This would obviously allow expecting (non-shared) environmental effects. In any case, the etiology of the sense of humor will have to take both genetic and environmental factors into account.

Psychology of humor 

77

If we find that the affect-based and behavioral forms (e.g., laughter, cheerfulness, social humor) are more strongly genetically determined than humor appreciation or a  humorous attitude or humor as a  virtue, we will have to examine whether the genetic factors involved are the same that are involved in positive affect or extraversion. Studies of the effects of family and peers will have to take a variety of factors into accounts (e.g., learning, models, imitation, life events). So far there is only anecdotal evidence that life events transform a person’s humor as part of a general rearranging of priorities in life (e.g., through the insight that nothing earthly is infinite, typically following a painful loss). Too few intervention studies were conducted and the existing ones do not yield clear results. Therefore, nothing much can be said about the relative contributions of genes and environment on the different components of humor at this stage. Also, we need more studied on humor and assortative mating (Murstein and Brust 1985; Priest and Thein 2003). Evolution of humor and laughter Evolutionary psychology asks the question of how traits have evolved over species. Psychologists and ethologists asked the question of what is the reproductive significance of humor? Knowing the origins of humor and laughter would help understanding their present status; i.e., facilitate deriving hypotheses about people’s current behavior and make predictions in current studies more successful. However, vice versa, speculation about evolutionary origins would be facilitated if we knew more about the current functions of humor and laughter, what their antecedents and consequences are, what changes there are from pre to post when humor and laughter occur. We mostly lack this knowledge. Also, we have not yet established a complete net of the humor-related variables, which would help determining what later forms build upon which earlier ones. While smiling and laughter are recognized as universal and innate expressions, the status of the emotion of amusement (or mirth, hilarity) is less clear. Van Hoof (1972) demonstrated that smiling and laughter have a different phylogenetic development. However, Darwin proposed that laughter preceded smiling. While it seems likely that all humans are capable of the perception that something is funny, the pertinent research is still missing. If one takes appreciation of jokes and cartoons as an index of humor appreciation the situation is somewhat mixed. Research with the 3 WD humor test shows some evidence for cross-cultural stability of factors of ­incongruity-resolution

78 

Willibald Ruch

humor and nonsense humor at least in several Western cultures. However, the Cherkas et al. (2000) twin study of Gary Larson humor (a good marker of nonsense humor) does not yield any genetic effect and also the study by Wilson et al. (1977) seems to suggest only the involvement of environmental ­factors. Surely, jokes and cartoons do not exist long enough to be of evolutionary relevance, but it is reasonable to assume that humans were able to appreciate humor (in whatever precursor) long before jokes and cartoons emerged. Therefore, it seems to make sense that humor appreciation (as a form of aesthetic experience) was included in speculations about evolutionary origins as well. Definitely, humor creation, or wit, would be a good candidate for evolutionary speculation, but no genetic study has been conducted yet and we know less about production of humor than about appreciation of humor. Wit and appreciation of nonsense humor are indeed correlated to intelligence, which may be seen as an indicator of fitness. The use of humor and the sense of humor (as assessed by self-reports) have been demonstrated to have some genetic basis. Studies of humor in apes show reactions that are very similar to laughter and smiling in humans (Darwin 1872; van Hoof 1972). Apes do not only show smiling and laughter and positive emotion in response to tickling and social play (McGhee 1979), they also seem to be able to recognize incongruities when using objects (Gamble 2001). Recently, it has been discovered that rats show play- and tickle-induced ultrasonic vocational patterns inaudible for humans that resembles primitive human laughter neurally and that are functionally homologous (Panksepp 2007; Panksepp and Burgdorf 2003). In humans, laughter emerges early in life. Not only do infants begin to laugh in response to social stimuli as early as at the age of about four month (Sroufe and Waters 1976), but also children born blind and deaf laugh normally (Goodenough 1932). As shown by gelastic epilepsy in newborns, mechanisms of laughter seem to be present at birth already (Sher and Brown 1976). Such evidence points towards the evolutionary basis of laughter and humor. However, the question is, why human beings developed their ability to humor. What was the reproductive significance of humor, amusement and laughter? Several ideas about their adaptive value have been proposed (for reviews, see Caron 2002; Gervais and Wilson 2005; Jung 2003; Vaid 1999). While some were more particularistic and restricted in scope, others proposed unitary explanation of the function of humor that would explain laughter at tickling and other forms of social play, at pratfalls and other forms

Psychology of humor 

79

of physical humor, and at verbal and nonverbal witticisms (Alexander 1986, Weisfeld 1993). For example, humor has been seen as a friend or foe system (Hewitt 2002), or laughter as an aggressive activity of several group members with which they threaten a common enemy (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989). The evolutionary origins of humor and laughter have been explained with ‘the inner eye theory of laughter’ (Jung 2003), the mind reading hypothesis (Howe 2002) or as evolved as a mode of communication distinct from the serious mode (Mulkay 1988). Humor is seen as ‘social stimulation’ (Weisfeld 1993, 2006), as a ‘status manipulation’ (Alexander 1986) or a disabling mechanism (Chafe 1987, 2007). Other approaches are the false alarm theory (Ramachandran 1998), a  rediscovery of Hayworth (1928), or the ‘selfish-gene’ account of smiling and laughter (Owren and Bachorowski 2001). Finally, humor is seen as a vocal grooming (Dunbar 1996), a ‘fitness indicator’ signaling ‘good genes’ (Miller 2000), and as sexually specifically selected based on male’s and female’s different preferences during humorous interaction (Bressler, Martin and Balshine 2006). Gervais and Wilson (2005) present an integrative approach stretching the significance of the distinction between Duchenne and non-Duchenne laughter for the explanation of the evolutionary origins of laughter and humor. Notes Thanks to the editor for his patience as moving from Germany, to UK to Switzerland hindered progress on this chapter.

References Alexander, Richard D. 1986 Ostracism and indirect reciprocity: The reproductive significance of humor. Ethology and Sociobiology 7 (3/4): 253–270. Allport, Gordon W. 1961 Pattern and Growth in Personality. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Altfreder, Olga 2000 Experimentelle Verifikation des “Gelotophobie”-Konzepts. Masters thesis, Department of Psychology, University of Düsseldorf.

80 

Willibald Ruch

American Psychiatric Association 1994 DSM-IV Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. 4th ed. Washington, DC: APA. Apte, Mahadev L. 1985 Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Apter, Michael J. (ed.) 1982 The Experience of Motivation: The Theory of Psychological Reversals. London: Academic Press. Apter, Michael J., and K. C. P. Smith 1977 Humour and the theory of psychological reversals. In: Anthony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (eds.), 95–100. Attardo, Salvatore 2001 Humorous Texts: A  Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Attardo, Salvatore, and J. C. Chabanne (eds.) 1992 Humor research east of the Atlantic. Special issue of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 5. Attardo, Salvatore, and Victor Raskin 1991 Script theory revis(it)ed: Joke similarity and joke representation model. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 4 (3/4): 293–347. Babad, Elisha Y. 1974 A multi-method approach to the assessment of humor: A critical look at humor tests. Journal of Personality 42: 618–631. Bachorowski, Jo-Anne, Moria J. Smoski, and Michael J. Owren 2001 The acoustic features of human laughter. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 110 (3): 1581–1597. Bänninger-Huber, Eva 1996 Mimik – Übertragung – Interaktion: Die Untersuchung affektiver Prozesse in der Psychotherapie. Bern: Huber. Bariaud, Françoise 1983 La Genèse de l’Humour chez l’Enfant. Paris: P.U.F. Bechterew, Wladimir Michailowitsch von 1894 Unaufhaltsames Lachen und Weinen bei Hirnaffektionen. Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 26: 791–817. Beermann, Ursula, Fabian Gander, Damian Hiltebrand, Tobias Wyss, and Willibald Ruch In press Laughing at oneself. In: Doris Peham and Eva Bänninger-Huber (eds.). Beermann, Ursula, and Willibald Ruch 2008 How virtuous is humor? What we can learn from current humor instruments. MS. Bergen, Doris 2007 Development of the sense of humor. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 329–360.

Psychology of humor 

81

Berlyne, Daniel E. (ed.) 1974 Studies in the New Experimental Aesthetics. Washington, DC: Hemisphere Press. Berry John W., Ype H. Poortinga, and Janak Pandey (eds.) 1997 Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology: Vol 1: Theory and Method. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Bihrle, Amy M., Hiram H. Brownell, John A. Powelson, and Howard Gardner 1986 Comprehension of humorous and nonhumorous materials by left and right brain-damaged patients. Brain Cognition 5: 399–411. Boeke, W. 1899 Mikroskopische Phonogrammstudien. Pflügers Archiv für die gesamte Physiologie des Menschen (und Tieres) 76: 497–516. Bönsch-Kauke, Marion 2003 Zur Psychologie des Kinderhumors. Opladen: Leske & Budrich. Bressler, Eric R., Rod A. Martin, and Sigal Balshine 2006 Production and appreciation of humor as sexually selected traits. Evolution and Human Behavior 27: 121–130. Brodzinsky, David M., and Janet Rubien 1976 Humor production as a  function of sex of subject, creativity, and cartoon content. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 44: 597–600. Brown, T. Graham 1915 Note on the physiology of the basal ganglia and mid-brain of the anthropoid ape, especially in reference to the act of laughter. Journal of Physiology 49: 195–202. Brutsche, Martin H., Paul Grossman, Rebekka E. Müller, Jan Wiegand, Pello, Florent Baty, and Willibald Ruch 2008 Impact of laughter on air trapping in severe chronic obstructive lung disease. International Journal of COPD 3 (1): 185–192. Campbell, Donald T., and Donald W. Fiske 1959 Convergent and discriminant validation by the Multitrait-Multimethod Matrix. Psychological Bulletin 56: 81–105. Caron, James E. 2002 From ethology to aesthetics: Evolution as a theoretical paradigm for research on laughter, humor, and other comic phenomena. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 15 (3): 245–281. Carretero-Dios, Hugo, Cristino Perez, and Gualberto Buela-Casal In press Assessing the appreciation of the content and structure of humor: ­Construction of a new scale. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research.

82 

Willibald Ruch

Carretero-Dios, Hugo, and Willibald Ruch In press Humor appreciation and sensation seeking: Invariance of findings across culture and assessment instrument? Humor: International Journal of Humor Research. Carroll, John B. 1993 Human Cognitive Abilities: A survey of Factor-Analytic Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cattell, Raymond B., and Donald L. Tollefson 1966 The IPAT Humor Test of Personality. Champaign, IL: Institute for Personality and Ability Testing. Chafe, Wallace 1987 Humor as a disabling mechanism. American Behavioral Scientist 30 (1): 16–25. 2007 The Importance of Not Being Earnest: The Feeling Behind Laughter and Humor. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Chapman, Anthony J. 1983 Humor and laughter in social interaction and some implications for humor research. In: Paul E. McGhee and Jeffrey H. Goldstein (eds.), 135–157. Chapman, Anthony J., and Hugh C. Foot (eds.) 1976 Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications. London: Wiley. 1977 It’s a Funny Thing, Humour. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon. Chen, Guo-Hai, and Rod A. Martin 2007 A comparison of humor styles, coping humor, and mental health between Chinese and Canadian university students Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 20 (3): 215–234. Cherkas, Lynn, Fran Hochberg, Alex J. MacGregor, Harold Snieder, and Tim D. Spector 2000 Happy families: A twin study of humour. Twin Research 3: 17–22. Cooper, Colin 2002 Individual Differences (2nd ed.). London: Arnold. Craik, Kenneth H., and Aaron P. Ware 2007 Humor and personality in everyday life. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 63–​94. Craik, Kenneth H., Martin D. Lampert, and Arvalea J. Nelson 1993 Research Manual for the Humorous Behavior Q-sort Deck. Berkeley, CA: University of California, Institute of Personality and Social Research. 1996 Sense of humor and styles of everyday humorous conduct. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 273–302. Cronbach, Lee J. 1984 Essentials of Psychological Testing (4th ed.). New York: Harper and Row.

Psychology of humor 

83

Cunningham, William A., and Peter Derks 2005 Humor appreciation and latency of comprehension. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 18: 389–403. Darwin, Charles 1872 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: Murray. (3rd edn.); ed. by Paul Ekman. Harper & Collins, London. [Oxford University Press, New York 1998]. Davies, Christie 1990 Ethnic Humor Around the World: A comparative Analysis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2007 The dog that didn’t bark in the night: A new sociological approach to the cross-cultural study of humor. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 293–308. Davis, Jessica Milner (ed.) 2006 Understanding Humour in Japan. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Deckers, Lambert 1993 On the validity of a weight-judging paradigm for the study of humor. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 6: 43–56. 2007 Influence of mood on humor. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 309–328. Derks, Peter, and Sanjay Arora 1993 Sex and salience in the appreciation of cartoon humor. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 6: 57–69. Derks, Peter, Rosemary E. Staley, and Martie G. Haselton 2007 “Sense” of humor: Perception, intelligence, or expertise? In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 143–158. Diener, Ed, Robert A. Emmons, Randy J. Larsen, and Sharon Griffin 1985 The satisfaction with life scale. Journal of Personality Assessment 49 (1): 71–75. Diener, Ed, and E. M. Suh (eds.) 2000 Subjective Well-being Across Cultures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dunbar, Robin 1996 Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. New York: Norton. Dworkin, Earl S., and Jay S. Efran 1967 The angered: Their susceptibility to varieties of humor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 6: 233–236. Ehrenstein, Walter H., and Suitbert Ertel 1978 Zur Genese des Lustigkeitseindrucks. Psychologische Beiträge 20: 360–374. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenäus 1989 Human Ethology. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

84 

Willibald Ruch

Ekman, Paul 1985 Telling Lies. New York: Berkley Books. 2005 What have we learned by measuring facial behavior. In: Paul Ekman, and Erika L. Rosenberg (eds.), 469–485. Ekman, Paul, and Wallace V. Friesen 1978 The Facial Action Coding System (FACS): A Technique for the Measurement of Facial Action. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. 1982 Felt, false, and miserable smiles. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 6: 238–252. Ekman, Paul, and Erika L. Rosenberg (eds.) 2005 What the Face Reveals. Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expressions Using the Facial Action Coding System. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ekman, Paul, Richard J. Davidson, and Wallace V. Friesen 1990 The Duchenne smile: Emotional expression and brain physiology II. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58: 342–353. Ekman, Paul, Wallace V. Friesen, and Joseph C. Hager 2002 The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) on CD ROM. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. Esser, Claudia 2001 Der “Humorous Behavior Q-sort Deck” nach Craik, Lampert und Nelson: Ein erschöpfendes Modell für Humor? Masters Thesis. University of Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf. Germany. Eysenck, Hans-Jürgen 1942 The appreciation of humor: An experimental and theoretical study. British Journal of Psychology 32: 295–309. 1944–1945 National differences in the “sense of humor”: Three experimental and statistical studies. Character and Personality 13: 37–54. Fabrizi, Michael S., and Howard R. Pollio 1987 Are funny teenagers creative? Psychological Reports 61: 751–761. Falkenberg, Irina, Kilian Klügel, Mathias Bartels, and Barbara Wild 2007 Sense of humor in patients with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Research 95: 259–261. Feingold, Alan, and Ronald Mazzella 1991 Psychometric intelligence and verbal humor ability. Personality and Indi­vidual Differences 12: 427–435. 1993 Preliminary validation of a multidimensional model of wittiness. Journal of Personality 61: 439–456. Feleky, Antoinette 1916 The influence of the emotions on respiration. Journal of Experimental Psychology 1: 218–241.

Psychology of humor 

85

Ferroluzzi Eichinger, Gabriela 1997 On unnecessary incongruities. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 10 (1): 117–120. Forabosco, Giovannantonio 1992 Cognitive aspects in the humor process: The concept of incongruity. In: Salvatore Attardo and Jean Charles Chabanne (eds.): 45–68. 2007 The ill side of humor: Pathological conditions and sense of humor. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 271–292. Forabosco, Giovannantonio, and Willibald Ruch 1994 Sensation seeking, social attitudes, and humor appreciation in Italy. Personality and Individual Differences 16: 515–528. Frank, Mark G., and Paul Ekman 1993 Not all smiles are created equal: The differences between enjoyment and nonenjoyment smiles. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 6: 9–26. Freud, Sigmund 1905 Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten. Wien: Deuticke. 1928 Humor. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 9: 1–6. Frijda, Nico 1986 The Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Führ, Martin 2002 Coping humor in early adolescence. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 15 (3): 283–304. Gamble, Jennifer 2001 Humor in apes. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 14 (2): 163–179. Gedda, Luigi, and Lydia Neroni 1955 Reazioni posturali e mimiche di 56 coppie di gemelli alla proiezione di film umoristici ed ansiogeni. Acta Genetica Medicae et Gemellologiae 4: 15–31. Gervais, Matthew, and David Sloan Wilson 2005 The evolution and functions of laughter and humor: A synthetic approach. The Quarterly Review of Biology 80 (4): 395–430. Godkewitsch, Michael 1974 Correlates of humor: Verbal and nonverbal aesthetic reactions as functions of semantic distance within adjective-noun pairs. In Daniel E. Berlyne (ed.), 279–304. Goldstein, Jeffrey H., and Paul E. McGhee (eds.) 1972 The Psychology of Humor: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues. New York: Academic Press. Goldstein, Jeffrey H., Jerry Suls, and Susan Anthony 1972 Enjoyment of specific types of humor content: Motivation or salience. In: Jeffrey H. Goldstein and Paul E. McGhee (eds.), 159–171.

86 

Willibald Ruch

Goodenough, Florence L. 1932 Expressions of the emotions in a blind-deaf child. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 27:328–333 Grumet, Gerald W. 1989 Laughter: Nature‘s epileptoid catharsis. Psychological Reports 65: 1059–1078. Gruner, Charles R. 1978 Understanding Laughter: The Workings of Wit and Humor. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Habermann, Günther 1955 Physiologie und Phonetik des lauthaften Lachens. Leipzig, Germany: Barth. Hall, George Stanley, and Allin Arthur 1897 The psychology of tickling, laughing, and the comic. American Journal of Psychology 9: 1–41. Hayworth, Donald 1928 The social origin and function of laughter. Psychological Review 35: 367–384. Hecker, Erich 1873 Die Physiologie und Psychologie des Lachens und des Komischen. Berlin: Dümmler. Heitler, M. 1904 Pulskurve, während des Lachens aufgenommen. Zentralblatt für innere Medizin 25: 17–18. Hempelmann, Christian F., and Willibald Ruch 2005 3 WD meets GTVH: Breaking the ground for interdisciplinary humor research. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 18: 353–338. Herzog, Thomas R., Anne C. Harris, Laura S. Kropscott, and Katherine L. Fuller 2006 Joke cruelty and appreciation revisited. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 19: 465–467. Hewitt, John Alexander 2002 The Architecture of Thought: A new Look at Human Evolution. Dunstable: Holmhouse Press. Heymans, Gerardus 1896 Ästhetische Untersuchungen in Anschluss an die Lipp’sche Theorie des Komischen. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnes­organe 11: 31–43 and 333–352. Hillson, Tim R., and Rod A. Martin 1994 What’s so funny about that? The domains-interaction approach as a model of incongruity and resolution in humor. Motivation and Emotion 18:1–29.

Psychology of humor 

87

Hilscher, Matthew B. 2005 Performance implications of alternative color codes in airport x-ray baggage screening. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Central Florida, Dept. of Psychology, Orlando. Hinde, Robert A. (ed.) 1972 Non-verbal Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hirsch, Rolf, Jens Bruder, and Hartmut Radebold (eds.) 2001 Heiterkeit und Humor im Alter. Kassel: Schriftenreihe der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Gerontopsychiatrie und -psychotherapie., Band 2. Chudeck-Druck, Bornheim-Sechtem. Hirsch, Rolf, and Erhard U. Krantzhoff 2004 Humor group therapy in old age. Reports of a  scientifically guided therapeutic investigation. Gruppenpsychotherapie und Gruppendyna­ mik 40: 106–129. Hobbes, Thomas 1651 Human nature. Reprinted in: William Molesworth (ed.), The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Vol. 4. London: John Bohn, 1840: 1–76. 1660 The Leviathan. London: John Bohn. Hofstede, Geert 2001 Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations (2nd edn.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hollingworth, Harry Levi 1911 Experimental studies in judgement: Judgement of the comic. Psychological Review 18: 132–156. Horn, John. L., and Raymond B. Cattell 1966 Refinement and test of the theory of fluid and crystallized general intelligence. Journal of Educational Psychology, 57: 253–270 Howe, Norman E. 2002 The origin of humor. Medical Hypotheses 59 (3): 252–254. Huber, Tania, Phillip Drack, and Willibald Ruch In press Sulky and angry laughter: The search for distinct facial displays. In: Doris Peham and Eva Bänninger-Huber (eds.), Proceedings of the FACS-Workshop 2007. Innsbruck, Austria: Innsbruck University Press. Izard, Carol E. 1983 The Maximally Discriminative Facial Movement Coding System. Newark, NJ: Instructional Resources Center, University of Delaware. Izard, Carol E., L. M. Dougherty, and E. A. Hembree 1983 A  System for Identifying Affect Expressions by Holistic Judgements (AFFEX). Newark, NJ: Instructional Resources Center, University of Delaware.

88 

Willibald Ruch

James, William 1882 Subjective effects of nitrous oxide. Mind 7: 186–208. Jones, James M., and Hollis V. Liverpool 1976 Calypso humour in Trinidad. In: Anthony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (eds.) 259–286. Jung, Wonil Edward 2003 The inner eye theory of laughter: Mindreader signals cooperator value. Evolutionary Psychology 1: 214–253. Kant, Immanuel 1790 Kritik der Urteilskraft. Berlin: Lagarde. Kazarian, Shahe S., and Rod A. Martin 2006 Humor styles, culture-related personality, well-being, and family adjustment among Armenians in Lebanon. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 19 (4): 405–423. Kaszniak, Al W. (Ed.) 2001 Emotion, Qualia, and Consciousness. Tokyo: Word Scientific Publisher. Keith-Spiegel, Patricia 1972 Early conceptions of humor: Varieties and issues. In: Jeffrey H. Gold­ stein and Paul E. McGhee (eds.), 3–39. Keltner, Dacher 2005 Signs of appeasement: Evidence for the distinct displays of embarrassment, amusement, and shame. In Paul Ekman and Erika L. Rosenberg (eds.), 133–157. Kirsh, Gillian A., and Nicholas A. Kuiper 2003 Positive and negative aspects of sense of humor: Associations with the constructs of individualism and relatedness. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 16 (1): 33–62 Kline, Paul 1977 The psychoanalytic theory of humour and laughter. In: Anthony J. Chap­man and Hugh C. Foot (eds.), 7–12. 2000 A psychometrics Primer. London: Free Association Books. Korotkov, David, T. Edward Hannah 1996 Extraversion and emotionality as proposed superordinate stress moderators: A prospective analysis. Personality and Individual Differences 16: 787–792. Koestler, Arthur 1964 The Act of Creation. London: Hutchinson. Köhler, Gabriele, and Willibald Ruch 1996 Sources of variance in current sense of humor inventories: How much sub­stance, how much method variance? In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 363–​ 397.

Psychology of humor 

89

Koppel, Mark A., and Lee Sechrest 1970 A multitrait-multimethod matrix analysis of sense of humor. Educational and Psychological Measurement 30: 77–85. Kraepelin, Emil 1885 Zur Psychologie des Komischen. In Wilhelm Wundt (ed.), 128–160 and 327–361. Krantzhoff, Erhard U., and Rolf D. Hirsch 2001 Humor in der gerontopsychiatrischen Klink: Ergebnisse einer therapiebegleitenden Studie. In: Rolf D. Hirsch, Jens Bruder and Hartmut Radebold (eds.), 139–162. Kuiper, Nicholas A., Melissa Grimshaw, Catherine Leite, and Gillian Kirsh 2004 Humor is not always the best medicine: Specific components of sense of humor and psychological well-being. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 17 (1/2), 135–168. Kuipers, Giselinde 2006 Good Humor, Bad Taste. A Sociology of the Joke. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Latta, Robert L. 1999 The Basic Humor Process: A  Cognitive-Shift Theory and the Case Against Incongruity. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Lefcourt, Herbert M., and Rod A. Martin 1986 Humor and Life Stress. New York: Springer-Verlag. Lewis Michael, Jeannette M. Haviland (eds.) 1993 The Handbook of Emotions. New York, NY: Guilford Publications, Lipps, Theodor 1898 Komik und Humor. Eine psychologisch-ästhetische Untersuchung (Bd. 6, Beiträge zur Ästhetik). Leipzig: Voss. Loehlin, John C., and Robert C. Nichols 1976 Heredity, Environment, and Personality. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Lopez, Shane J. (ed.) In press The Encyclopedia of Positive Psychology. Massachusetts, MA: Blackwell. Lopez, Shane J., and C. Rick Snyder (eds.) 2003 Handbook of Positive Psychological Assessment. Positive Psychological Assessment: A Handbook of Models and Measures. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association (APA). Lowis, Michael J., and Johan M. Nieuwoudt 1994 Humor as a coping aid for stress. Social Work 30: 124–131. Lyman, Bernard E., and Janet C. E. Waters 1986 The experiential loci and sensory qualities of various emotions. Motivation and Emotion 10: 25–37.

90 

Willibald Ruch

Maas, Cliff 2003

Sense of Humor and Spirituality as Correlates of Psychological Wellbeing in Men With and Without Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Ph.D. dissertation. Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Palo Alto CA.

Manke, Beth 2007 Genetic and environmental contributions to children’s interpersonal humor. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 361–384. Martin, Lillian J. 1905 Psychology of aesthetics I: Experimental prospecting in the field of the comic. American Journal of Psychology 16: 36–116. Martin, Rod A. 1996 The Situational Humor Response Questionnaire (SHRQ) and Coping Humor Scale (CHS): A decade of research findings. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 251–272. 2001 Humor, laughter, and physical health: Methodological issues and research findings. Psychological Bulletin 127: 504–519. 2003 Sense of humor. In: Shane J. Lopez and C. Rick Snyder (eds.), 313–​ 326. 2007a The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach. Burlington, MA: Elsevier Academic Press. 2007b Approaches to the sense of humor: A historical review. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 15–62. Martin, Rod A., Herbert M. Lefcourt 1983 Sense of humor as a moderator of the relation between stressors and moods. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45: 1313–​1324. 1984 Situational humor response questionnaire: Quantitative measure of sense of humor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 47, 145–​155. Martin, Rod A., Patricia Puhlik-Doris, Gwen Larsen, Jeanette Gray, and Kelly Weir 2003 Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation to psychological well-being: Development of the humor styles questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality 37: 48–75. Mayne, Tracy J., and George A. Bonanno (eds.) 2001 Emotions: Current Issues and Future Directions. Guilford: New York McCrae, Robert R., and Jüri Allik (Eds.) 2002 The Five-Factor Model of Personality Across Cultures. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. McGhee, Paul E. 1971 Cognitive development and children’s comprehension of humor. Child Development 42: 123–138. 1974 Cognitive mastery and children’s appreciation of humor. Psychological Bulletin 81: 721–730.

Psychology of humor  1979

91

Humor: Its Origin and Development. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company. 1983 The role of arousal and hemispheric lateralization in humor. In: Paul E. McGhee and Jeffrey H. Goldstein (eds.), 13–37. 1996 Health, Healing and the Amuse System: Humor as Survival Training. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. McGhee, Paul E., and Anthony J. Chapman (eds.) 1980 Children’s humour. Chichester, UK: Wiley. McGhee, Paul E., and Nelda S. Duffey 1983 The role of identity of the victim in the development of disparagement humor. Journal of General Psychology 108: 257–270. McGhee, Paul E., and Jeffrey H. Goldstein 1972 Advances towards an understanding of humor: Implications for the future. In: Jeffrey H. Goldstein, and Paul E. McGhee (eds.), 243–259. McGhee, Paul E., and Jeffrey H. Goldstein (eds.) 1983a Handbook of Humor Research (Vol. 1, Basic Issues). New York: Springer. 1983b Handbook of Humor Research (Vol. 2, Applied Aspects). New York: Springer. McGhee, Paul E., and Sally A. Lloyd 1981 A developmental test of the disposition theory of humor. Child Development 52: 925–931. McGhee, Paul E., Willibald Ruch, and Franz-Josef Hehl 1990 A personality-based model of humor development during adulthood. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 3: 119–146. Mervielde, Ivan, Ian Deary, Filip De Fruyt, and Fritz Ostendorf (eds.) 1999 Personality Psychology in Europe (Vol 7). Tilburg: University Press. Meunier, Raymond 1909 Le Hachich. Paris: Libraire Bloud. Miller, Geoffrey F. 2000 The Mating Mind: How the Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. New York: Doubleday. Mindess, Harvey, Carolyn Miller, Joy Turek, Amanda Bender, and Suzanne Corbin 1985 The Antioch Sense of Humor Test: Making Sense of Humor. New York: Avon Books. Mulkay, Michael 1988 On Humor: Its Nature and its Place in Modern Society. New York: Basil. Murstein, Bernard I., Robert G. Brust 1985 Humor and interpersonal attraction. Journal of Personality Assessment 49: 637–640. Myers, David G., and Ed Diener 1993 Who is happy? Psychological Science 6 (1): 10–19.

92 

Willibald Ruch

Nahemow, Lucille, Kathleen A. McCluskey-Fawcett, and Paul E. McGhee (eds.) 1986 Humor and Aging. New York: Academic Press. Nevo, Ofra, Haim Aharonson, Avigdor Klingman 2007 The development and evaluation of a systematic program for improving sense of humor. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 385–404. Nicolson, Sir Harold 1946 The English Sense of Humour: An Essay. London: The Dropmore Press. Nwokah, Evangeline E., Patricia Davies, Asad Islam, Hui-Chin Hsu, and Alan Fogel 1993 Vocal affect in three-year-olds: A quantitative acoustic analysis of child laughter. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 94: 3067–3090. Oring, Elliott 1992 Jokes and their relations. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 2003 Engaging Humor. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Owren, Michael J., Jo-Anne Bachorowski 2001 The evolution of emotional expression: A ‘selfish-gene’ account of smiling and laughter in early hominids and humans. In: Tracy J. Mayne and George A. Bonanno (eds.), 152–191. Panksepp, Jaak 2007 Neuroevolutionary sources of laughter and social joy: Modeling primal human laughter in laboratory rats. Behavioural Brain Research 182 (2): 231–244. Panksepp, Jaak, and Jeff Burgdorf 2003 “Laughing” rats and the evolutionary antecedents of human joy? Physiology and Behavior 19: 533–547. Peham, Doris, and Eva Bänninger-Huber (eds.) In press Proceedings of the FACS-Workshop 2007. Innsbruck, Austria: Innsbruck University Press. Peterson, Christopher, Willibald Ruch, Ursula Beermann, Nansook Park, and Martin E. P. Seligman 2007 Strengths of character, orientations to happiness, and life satisfaction. Journal of Positive Psychology 2 (3): 149–156. Peterson, Christopher, and Martin E. P. Seligman 2004 Character Strengths and Virtues: A  classification and Handbook. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association/New York: Oxford University Press. Platt, Tracey 2008 Emotional responses to ridicule and teasing: Should gelotophobics react differently? Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 21 (2): 105–128. Preuschoft, Signe 1992 “Laughter” and “smile”. In: Barbary macaques (Macca sylvanus). Ethology 91: 220–239.

Psychology of humor 

93

Priest, Robert F., and Melinda Taylor Thein 2003 Humor appreciation in marriage: Spousal similarity, assortative mating, and disaffection. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 16 (1): 63–78. Proyer, René, Lorene Birden, Tracey Platt, Olga Altfreder, Nadine Glauser, and Willibald Ruch 2005 Gelotophobia: Are there cross-national differences? [Poster presented at the 9th European Congress of Psychology, Granada, July 3–8]. Ramachandran, Vilayanur S. 1998 The neurology and evolution of humor, laughter, and smiling: The false alarm theory. Medical Hypotheses 51 (4): 351–354. Rapp, Alexander M., Michael Erb, Frank A. Rodden, Willibald Ruch, Wolfgang Grodd, and Barbara Wild 2008 When the brain is “not amused”: A pilot fMRI study on trait cheerfulness. Manuscript. Raskin, Victor 1985 Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. 2007 The sense of humor and the truth. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 95–108. Raulin, Jules M. 1900 Le rire et les exhilarants. Paris: Librairie J. B. Bailliere et Fils. Redlich, Frederick C., Jacob Levine, and Theodore P. Sohler 1951 A mirth response test: Preliminary report on a psychodiagnostic technique utilizing dynamics of humor. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 21: 717–734. Rhodes, Gillian, Susan Brennan, and Susan Carey 1987 Identification and ratings of caricatures: Implications for mental representations of faces. Cognitive Psychology 19: 473–497. Rissland, Birgit 2002 Humor und seine Bedeutung für den Lehrerberuf. Heilbronn: Julius Klinkhandt. Roeckelein, Jon E. 2002 The Psychology of Humor. A reference Guide and Annotated Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Romanian Academy, “George Barit“ Institute of History, Department of Social Research (ed.) 2007 Studies and Researches in Social Sciences (Vol. 16). Cluj-Napoca: 
Argonaut Press. Romero, Eric J., Carlos J. Alsua, Kim T. Hinrichs, and Terry R. Pearson 2007 Regional humor differences in the United States: Implications for management. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 20 (2): 189–201. Rosen, David H., and Michael C. Luebbert (eds.) 1999 Evolution of the Psyche. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers/Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.

94 

Willibald Ruch

Rothbart, Mary K. 1976 Incongruity, problem-solving and laughter. In: Anthony J. Chapman, Hugh C. Foot (eds.): 37–54. Rothbart, Mary K., and Diana Pien 1977 Elephants and marshmallows: A theoretical synthesis of incongruityresolution and arousal theories of humour. In: Anthony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (eds.): 37–40. Rotton, James 2004 Humor and well-being. In: Charles D. Spielberger (ed.): 237–241. Ruch, Willibald Emotion Erheiterung: Ausdrucksformen und Bedingungen. [Unpublished habilitation thesis, University of Düsseldorf, Department of Psychology, Düsseldorf, Germany. 1992 Assessment of appreciation of humor: Studies with the 3 WD humor test. In Charles D. Spielberger and James N. Butcher (eds.), 27–75. 1993 Exhilaration and humor. In: Michael Lewis, and Jeannette M. Haviland (eds.), 605–616. 1994 Temperament, Eysenck’s PEN system, and humor-related traits. Humor 7: 209–244. 1995 Will the real relationship between facial expression and affective experience please stand up: The case of exhilaration. Cognition and Emotion 9: 33–58. 1996 Measurement approaches to the sense of humor: Introduction and overview. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 239–250. 1997 State and trait cheerfulness and the induction of exhilaration: A FACSstudy. European Psychologist 2: 328–341. 2001 The perception of humor. In: Al W. Kaszniak (ed), 410–425. 2002 Computers with a personality? Lessons to be learned from studies of the psychology of humor. In: Oliviero Stock, Carlo Strapparava and Anton Nijholt (eds.), 57–70. 2004 Gelotophobia: A useful New Concept? IPSR Spring 2004 Colloquium Series, Department of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley. 2007b Humor measurement tools. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 405–412. Ruch, Willibald (ed.) 2007a The Sense of Humor: Explorations of a  Personality Characteristic. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. In press Fearing Humor, special issue of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research. Ruch, Willibald, Jeannine Accoce, Christiana Ott, Françoise Bariaud 1991 Cross-national comparison of humor categories: France and Germany. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 4: 391–414.

Psychology of humor 

95

Ruch, Willibald, Ursula Beermann, René T. Proyer In press Investigating the humor of gelotophobes: Does feeling ridiculous equal being humorless? In: Willibald Ruch (ed.) Ruch, Willibald, Gabriele Köhler, Ursula Beermann, and Lambert Deckers 2008 The Weight-Judging Paradigm as a Model for Humor? A FACS-Study. Manuscript. Ruch, Willibald, and Amy T. Carrell 1998 Trait cheerfulness and the sense of humor. Personality and Individual Differences 24: 551–558. Ruch, Willibald, and Paul Ekman 2001 The expressive pattern of laughter. In: Alfred W. Kaszniak (ed.), 426–443. Ruch, Willibald, and Giovannantonio Forabosco 1996 A  cross-cultural study of humor appreciation: Italy and Germany. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 9: 5–22. Ruch, Willibald, and Franz-Josef Hehl 1987 Personal values as facilitating and inhibiting factors in the appreciation of humor content. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality 2: 453–472. 1988 Attitudes to sex, sexual behaviour and enjoyment of humour. Personality and Individual Differences 9: 983–994. 2007 A  two-mode model of humor appreciation: Its relation to aesthetic appreciation and simplicity-complexity of personality. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 109–143. Ruch, Willibald, Alain Huber, Ursula Beermann, and Rene T. Proyer 2007 Character strengths as predictors of the”good life” in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. In: Romanian Academy, “George Barit“ Institute of History, Department of Social Research (ed.), 123–131. Ruch, Willibald, and Gabriele Köhler 1999 The measurement of state and trait cheerfulness. In: Ivan Mervielde, Ian Deary, Filip De Fruyt, and Fritz Ostendorf (eds.), 67–83. 2007 A  temperament approach to humor. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 203–230. Ruch, Willibald, Gabriele Köhler, and Christoph van Thriel 1996 Assessing the “humorous temperament”: Construction of the facet and standard trait forms of the State-Trait-Cheerfulness-Inventory, STCI. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), 303–339. 1997 To be in good or bad humor: Construction of the state form of the State-Trait-Cheerfulness-Inventory, STCI. Personality and Individual Differences 22: 477–491. Ruch, Willibald, Paul E. McGhee, and Franz-Josef Hehl 1990 Age differences in the enjoyment of incongruity-resolution and nonsense humor during adulthood. Psychology and Aging 5: 348–355.

96 

Willibald Ruch

Ruch, Willibald, and René T. Proyer 2008a The fear of being laughed at: Individual and group differences in Gelotophobia. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 21 (1), 47–67. 2008b Who is gelotophobic? Assessment criteria for the fear of being laughed at. Swiss Journal of Psychology 67 (1), 1–9. Ruch, Willibald, and Sigrid Rath 1993 The nature of humor appreciation: Toward an integration of perception of stimulus properties and affective experience. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 6: 363–384. Ruch, Willibald, and Markus F. Stevens 1995 The differential effects of nitrous oxide on mood level: The role of traitcheerfulness. Paper presented at the 7th Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences – ISSID, Warschau, July 15–19. Ruch, Willibald, and Michael Titze 1998 GELOPH <46>. Unpublished questionnaire. Department of Psychology, University of Düsseldorf, Germany. Ruch, Willibald, and Karen Zweyer 2001 Heiterkeit und Humor: Ergebnisse der Forschung. In: Rolf D. Hirsch, Jens Bruder, and Hartmut Radebold (eds.), 9–43. Salameh, Waleed A. 2006 Humorophobia and sado-humor personality disorder: Two new clinical diagnoses? Humor & Health Journal 15 (4): 1–13. Samson, Andrea C., and Willibald Ruch 2005 Perceptual qualities in humor: A 3WD study. Paper presented at the Seventeenth International ISHS Humor Conference, Youngstown, OH, June 13–17. Samson, Andrea C., Christian F. Hempelmann, Stefan Zysset, and Oswald Huber 2008 Neural substrates of incongruity-resolution and nonsense humor. Manuscript. Saroglou, Vassilis 2004 Being religious implies being different in humour: Evidence from selfand peer-ratings. Mental Health, Religion & Culture 7 (3): 255–267 Saroglou, Vassilis, and Christel Scariot 2002 Humor Styles Questionnaire: personality and educational correlates in Belgian high school and college students. European Journal of Personality 16 (1): 43, 54. Sassenrath, Simone 2001 Humor und Lachen als Stressbewältigungsstrategie. Masters thesis, University of Vienna. Schirmer, Otto 1903 Studien zur Physiologie und Pathologie der Tränenabsonderung und Tränenabfuhr. v. Graefe’s Archiv für Ophthalmologie 56: 197–291.

Psychology of humor 

97

Schmidt-Hidding, Wolfgang (ed.) 1963 Europäische Schlüsselwörter. Band I. Humor und Witz. Munich: Huber. Schwartz, Shalom H. 1992 Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. In: Mark P. Zanna (Ed.), 1–65. Sears, Richard N. 1934 Dynamic factors in the psychology of humor. Dissertation, Harward University. Seligman, Martin E. P., and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 2000 Positive psychology: An introduction. American Psychologist 55: 5–14. Sher, Phyllis K., and Stuart B. Brown 1976 Gelastic epilepsy: Onset in neonatal period. American Journal of Diseases of Childhood 130: 1126–1131. Shultz, Thomas R. 1976 A cognitive-developmental analysis of humour. In: Anthony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (eds.), 11–36. Sommer, Karin, and Karin Hösli 2006 Entwicklung einer Kinder- und Jugendlichenversion des State-TraitHeiterkeits-Inventars (STHI): Konstruktpräzisierung, Testkonstruktion und erste Validierung. Masters thesis, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich. Sommer, Karin, and Willibald Ruch In press Cheerfulness. In: Shane J. Lopez (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Positive Psychology. Massachusetts, MA: Blackwell. Spencer, Herbert 1860 The physiology of laughter. Macmillan’s Magazin 1: 395–402. Spielberger, Charles D. (ed.). 2004 Encyclopedia of applied psychology (Vol. 2). San Diego, USA: Elsevier Science. Spielberger, Charles D., and J. N. Butcher (eds.) 1992 Advances in Personality Assessment (Vol. 9). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Sroufe, L. Alan, and Everett Waters 1976 The ontogenesis of smiling and laughter: A perspective on the organi­za­ tion of development in infancy. Psychological Review 83: 173–189. Steger, Michael F., Brian M. Hicks, Todd B. Kashdan, Robert F. Krueger, and ­Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. 2007 Genetic and environmental influences on the positive traits of the values in action classification, and biometric covariance with normal personality. Journal of Research in Personality 41: 524–539. Stock, Oliviero, Carlo Strapparava, and Anton Nijholt (eds.) 2002 Proceedings of the International Workshop on Computational Humor (TWLT14). University of Twente, Enschede, NL.

98 

Willibald Ruch

Stolz, Heidi, Sandra Rusch 2008 Evaluation of a program aimed at improving the sense of humor. Paper delivered in the Personality and Assessment Research Colloquium, University of Zurich. Suls, Jerry M. 1972 A two-stage model for the appreciation of jokes and cartoons. In: Jeffrey H. Goldstein and Paul E. McGhee (eds.), 81–100. 1977 Cognitive and disparagement theories of humor: A theoretical and empirical synthesis. In: Anthony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (eds.), 41–45. 1983 Cognitive processes in humor appreciation. In: Paul E. McGhee and Jeffrey H. Goldstein (eds.), 39–57. Svebak, Sven 1974 A theory of sense of humor. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 15: 99–107. Svebak, Sven, and Michael J. Apter 1987 Laughter: An empirical test of some reversal theory hypotheses. Scandi­navian Journal of Psychology 28: 189–198. Szameitat, Diana P. 2007 Perzeption und akustische Eigenschaften von Emotionen in mensch­ lichem Lachen. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Tübingen, Tübingen. Titze, Michael 1996 The Pinocchio Complex: Overcoming the fear of laughter. Humor & Health Journal 5: 1–11. In press Gelotophobia:The fear of being laughed at. In Willibald Ruch (ed). Thompson, Richard, Willibald Ruch, and Ruediger U. Hasenoehrl 2004 Enhanced cognitive performance and cheerful mood by standardized extracts of Piper methysticum (Kava-kava). Human psychopharmacology: clinical and experimental 19 (4): 243–250. Thorson, James A., Ingrid Brdar, and Falvey C. Powell 1997 Factor-analytic study of humor in Croatia and USA. Psychological Reports 81: 971–977. Thorson, James A., and Falvey C. Powell 1993 Development and validation of a  multidimensional sense of humor scale. Journal of Clinical Psychology 49: 13–23. Tümkaya, Songül 2007 Burnout and humor relationship among university lecturers. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 20 (1): 73–92. Uekermann, Jennifer, Shelley Channon, and Irene Daum 2007 Towards a  cognitive and social neuroscience of humour processing. Social Cognition 25 (3): 428–447.

Psychology of humor 

99

Vaid, Jyotsna 1999 The evolution of humor: Do those who laugh last? In: David H. Rosen and Michael C. Luebbert (eds.), 123–138. van de Vijver, Fons, and Kwok Leung 1997 Methods and data analysis of comparative research. In: John W. Berry, Ype H. Poortinga, and Janak Pandey (eds.), 257–300. van Hoof, Jan A. R. A. M. 1972 A comparative approach to the phylogeny of laughter and smiling. In: Robert A. Hinde (ed.), 209–241. Weber, Marco, Willibald Ruch, Rainer Riemann, Frank M. Spinath, and Alois Ang­­ leit­ner 2008 A  twin study on humor appreciation: The importance of separating structure and content. Manuscript, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich. Weisfeld, Glenn E. 1993 The adaptive value of humor and laughter. Ethology and Sociobiology 14: 141–169. 2006 Humor appreciation as an adaptive esthetic emotion. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 19 (1): 1–26. Wicker, Frank W., Irene M. Thorelli, William L. Barron III, and Amy C. Willis 1981 Studies of mood and humor appreciation. Motivation and Emotion 5: 47–59. Wild, Barbara, Frank A. Rodden, Wolfgang Grodd, and Willibald Ruch 2003 Neural correlates of laughter and humour. Brain 126: 1–18. Wild, Barbara, Frank A. Rodden, Alexander Rapp, Michael Erb, Wolfgang Grodd, and Willibald Ruch 2006 Humor and smiling: Cortical areas selective for cognitive, affective and volitional components. Neurology 66: 887–893. Wilson, Christopher P. 1979 Jokes: Form, Content, Use, and Function. (European monographs in social psychology 16). London: Academic Press. Wilson, Glenn D., John Rust, and Judith Kasriel 1977 Genetic and family origins of humor preferences: A  twin study. Psychological Reports 41: 659–660. Wrench, Jason S., and James C. McCroskey 2001 A temperamental understandig of humor communication and exhilaratability. Communication quaterly 49 (2): 142–159. Wundt, Wilhelm (ed.) 1885 Philosophische Studien. Band 2. Leipzig: Engelmann. Yip, Jeremy. A., and Rod A. Martin 2006 Sense of humor, emotional intelligence, and social competence. Journal of Research in Personality 40 (6): 1202–1208.

100 

Willibald Ruch

Zanna, Mark P. (ed.) 1992 Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 25). New York: Academic Press. Zigler, Edward, Jacob Levine, and Laurence Gould 1966 Cognitive processes in the development of children’s appreciation of humor. Child Development 37: 507–518. Zillmann, Dolf 1983 Disparagement humor. In: Paul E. McGhee and Jeffrey H. Goldstein (eds.), 85–107. Zillmann, Dolf, and Joanne R. Cantor 1976 A disposition theory of humour and mirth. In: Anthony J. Chapman, Hugh C. Foot (eds.), 93–115. Ziv, Avner 1979 L’humour en éducation: Approache psychologique. Paris: Les Editions Sociales Françaises. 1984 Personality and Sense of Humor. New York: Springer. 1988 Humor in teaching: Educational experiments in high school. Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Psychologie 2: 127–133.

A primer for the linguistics of humor Salvatore Attardo Introduction This paper seeks to introduce the field of the linguistics of humor for the nonspecialist. It assumes a certain degree of familiarity with linguistic terminology, but should be readable by the general educated public. Conversely, it assumes no prior familiarity with humor research, besides what can be gathered by the chapters of this primer. The historical survey was kept deliberately short since a general treatment of the subject is available in Attardo (1994) and bibliographic references and secondary literature are available in that source. However, sources that were not listed in 1994, either because they did not exist then or had been overlooked, have been added in the text. The reader should be aware of the fact that the historical survey is focused entirely on linguistic analyses and therefore would appear partial to a non linguistically-oriented observer. I am unapologetic about this; the other surveys in this book will provide the balance of an impartial review. The rest of the essay will be dedicated to an overview of the field as it is currently. Emphasis is given to width of coverage, rather than depth, especially where in-depth coverage of some areas is available in other sources, which are then referenced in the text. Technical terms such as isotopy are used without special definition, but most of them are discussed in Attardo (1994). Literature review I have dedicated a preponderant part of Attardo (1994) to the review of the literature of the linguistics of humor, so this section will consist largely of a summary of the central issues that I found in the field, but with two advantages over the 1994 text: over ten years of hindsight and the fact that I will be able to assume that the reader can check many details in the 1994 text. A good overview of humor research, overlooked in 1994, is Ceccarelli (1988), which is well worth careful study.

102 

Salvatore Attardo

The linguistics of humor begins (much like any other scientific field) with the Greeks. Obviously, at the time, linguistics was not a distinct science; we have to wait for Saussure for that, since even the great (mostly) German historical linguists saw themselves as working in the historical sciences. Nonetheless, philosophers and literary theorists deal with humor and in doing so deal with its linguistic aspects. For example, Aristotle, in the Rhetorics, anticipates the incongruity theories in a discussion of metaphors and puns (Attardo 1994: 20). The historical importance of Platonic and Aristotelic thought in the theory of humor cannot be overstated: for example, it establishes the opposition comedy–tragedy which will determine theoretical thought on humor for well over 20 centuries (note that in linguistics, the opposition is rather that between serious and humorous discourse). The Latin authors deal with humor within the more practical context of the education of the orator but rely heavily on Greek sources (some lost). Their taxonomies are at times still valid, as is Cicero’s distinction between de re (referential) and de dicto (verbal) humor, which has been rediscovered by countless authors (Attardo 1994: 27). By the time we reach Quintilian’s extensive treatment of humor, we can say that there is a coherent body of thinking about humor, mostly centered around the theme of its appropriateness, but with serious forays in its linguistic aspects (thus ambiguity and irony are singled out as linguistic mechanisms associated with humor). On the classical theories of humor, see the relevant passages of Bremmer and Roodenburg (1997) and Minois (2000). On Ancient humor, see Trédé and Hoffman (eds.) (1998), Desclos (2000) and Olson (2007); on Roman comedy, a 1994 reprint of Duckworth (1952) which includes a bibliographical essay that updates the bibliography, is worth signaling, especially chapter 11, which surveys both ancient and modern theories of humor. The middle ages were not cheerful times and, in keeping with this, nothing original about humor theory comes up. However, recent research is doing much to nuance the image of the period, cf. Le Goff (1989; translated in Bremmer and Roodenburg 1997), Bouché and Charpentier (1990), Horo­ witz and Menache (1994) and Verdon (2001). We will have to wait until the Renaissance, in Italy around the beginning of the 16th century, before some new ideas will come up. For example, Madius (Vincenzo Maggi) in 1550 publishes an essay on humor, along with a commentary on Aristotle’s poetics. In this essay he emphasizes the surprise aspect of humor, somewhat neglected by the classics, but also introduces a novel interest in the physiology of humor, which will culminate a few years later in Joubert’s Traité du Ris (1579), Descartes’s treatment of humor in his Traité des passions de l’âme

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

103

(1649) and of course later on in Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Renaissance humor theory is very much concerned with the discussion of the literary character of humor, especially in plays. On the Renaissance theories of humor, see also Ménager (1995), as well as the relevant passages of Bremmer and Roodenburg (1997) and Minois (2000). After the Renaissance, we witness a specialization of humor theories: we begin to see psychological, philosophical, etc. theories of humor, rather than “global” theories such as those of the classics. Still, linguistics is not a player in the field (witness the monumental – and linguistics-free – collection on French humor in the 18th century in Andries (ed.) 2000). However, the three great families of theories of humor are forming, and linguistics will borrow heavily from them. There are many classifications of the theories of humor. We will adopt Raskin’s (1985: 31–36) tripartite classification into incongruity theories, hostility theories and release theories. There are many synonyms for these classifications, as per a chart in Attardo (1994: 47), here reproduced: Incongruity

Hostility

Release

Contrast Incongruity/resolution

Aggression Superiority Triumph Derision Disparagement

Sublimation Liberation Economy

The incongruity theories claim that humor arises from the perception of an incongruity between a set of expectations and what is actually perceived. This idea, as we saw, goes back to Aristotle, but has been rediscovered several times. The most famous restatements of its basic concept are Kant’s, Shopenhauer’s, Koestler’s (bisociation), Paulos’s mathematical catastrophe theory, and recent cognitive blending theories (e.g., Hofstadter and Gabora 1989; Coulson 1996, 2001, 2005; and see below). Its standard modern statement is Suls (1972). Hostility theories go back to Plato, but have had their best known proponent in Hobbes and current champions in Gruner (1978, 1997) and Billig (2005). Essentially, they claim that one finds humorous a feeling of superiority over something, of overcoming something, or aggressing a target. Release theories claim that humor “releases” some form of psychic energy and/or frees the individual from some constraints. The best known such theory is Freud’s (1905), which claims that humor allows an economy of “psychic energy” although the psychodynamic model he bases it on has been

104 

Salvatore Attardo

completely discredited. On the liberating aspects of humor, see Fry (1963) and Mindess (1971). Freud’s theory deserves special mention because he paid a lot of attention to the linguistic mechanisms of humor: the first part of his book on humor is dedicated to these mechanisms. However, subsequent research has shown that none of the mechanisms located by Freud were unique to humor, but that in fact he had rediscovered some of the mechanisms present in any linguistic form (Attardo 1994: 55). Freud distinguishes between innocent and tendentious jokes (i.e., jokes that do not show aggressive aspects and those that do, respectively), a distinction that the aggression theories seek to undermine. Significantly, Freud’s theory falls under the release theories (the “economy of psychic energy” theory) but has been shown to be equivalent to an incongruity theory (Attardo 1994: 56). The significance of this fact lies in the fact that Freud is the unacknowledged source of some of the structuralist accounts, and specifically of Greimas’s isotopy model (see below). An interesting source on Freud and on his German precursors, is Hill (1993). On German humor research, see also Kotthoff (1996), Müller (2003a, 2003b, 2003c), and references therein. Because the incongruity theories are essentialist (i.e., the attempt to pinpoint what makes humor funny), linguistics has tended to side (largely unwittingly) with this kind of theory. However linguists have show some interest for hostility theories (see for example the concept of “target” in the GTVH, below) and liberation theories. For example, the idea of defunctionalization (Guiraud 1976) of language in puns fits in very nicely with the liberation approach, since it frees the speaker from the constraints of the linguistic code. Similarly, the idea of retractability in discourse of humor and irony frees the speaker from the consequences of his/her actions. These connections with humor theory have not been pursued in any systematic fashion. Other less common theories include attempts to see an evolutionary advantage to humor. The most developed linguistic approach along these lines is Chafe’s (1987) disabling theory. He sees humor as evolutionarily advantageous in disabling the speaker when he/she begins to pursue lines of thought that lead to absurdities, contradictions, etc. The disabling theory is expanded in a full-fledged theory of humor and laughter in Chafe (2007), see below. On the evolutionary theories of humor, including Chafe’s, see Vaid (1999, 2002) and Porteous (1988). A different, non-linguistically aware, approach is to be found in Gervais and Wilson (2005). Developmental studies (e.g., Johnson and Mervis 1997) with an eye to linguistic development are related, but will not be considered in this review.

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

105

Taxonomies of puns Puns have long been presumed to be the sole legitimate field of analysis for the linguistics of humor (cf. Pepicello and Weisberg 1983). The analyses of puns are primarily taxonomic. In Attardo (1994), four types of taxonomies were classified (thus yielding a meta-taxonomy – and without any claim that those are the only possible taxonomies): –– Taxonomies based on linguistic phenomena (e.g., homophony, homography, paronymy, etc.) –– Systematic taxonomies based on linguistic categories (e.g., syntagmatic, paradigmatic, etc.) –– Taxonomies based on surface structure (e.g., the phonetic distance between the two phonetic strings punned upon) –– Eclectic (i.e., taxonomies that mix criteria) The positive sides of these taxonomies are many: primarily that they collect and systematize a  wealth of data vastly more detailed than any other area of the linguistics of humor, for example, it seems that punning may well be a universal since it is attested in many non-Indo-european languages (Guidi Forth). The downside of taxonomic approaches to puns is that taxonomies cannot substitute theory building and, worse, taxonomies always presuppose a theory, but do so implicitly, with all the attendant risks that this poses. A few general points about puns bear stating: –– Puns invoke significantly the surface structure (the signifier) of language, but this claim can be generalized to non-verbal linguistic forms (e.g., signed languages) and in general to semiotic systems (e.g., graphic signs) –– Puns are non-casual speech forms; in casual speech the speaker is unconcerned by the surface structure of the forms he/she is uttering. –– Puns involve the presence of (minimally) two senses, but need not involve two “words,” the two senses can come about via the interpretation of any string and can come about as a result of syntactic, as well as morphological, ambiguity (lexical ambiguity falls in this last category). –– Furthermore, alliterative puns involve the repetition of a given (group of) phonemes and may be scattered along (parts of) the relevant text, as opposed to the punctual location of the punning material in morphological and syntactic puns. –– Not any ambiguous string is a  pun. Ambiguity is generally eliminated by semantic and pragmatic disambiguation. Puns preserve (at least) two

106 

Salvatore Attardo

meanings/interpretations. Hence puns exist only as a byproduct of disambiguation and therefore only in context. –– Once two meanings have been brought together, the two senses may either coexist, or one of the two may win out. There are attested cases in which the meaning accessed first subsists, and cases in which the meaning accessed second subsists. –– The (usually lexical) unit that allows the two senses to coexist is called a connector, while the unit that forces the presence of the second sense is called a disjunctor. Connector and disjunctor may be distinct (i.e., be manifested in the text as two separate entities) or they may be non-distinct (i.e., be manifested as one entity). –– The incongruity aspect of puns is fairly obvious (a string having two incompatible senses). In Attardo (1994: ch. 4), I proposed the controversial hypothesis that the resolution aspect of the humor of puns was provided by a folk-theory of language as a motivated sign (in which sounds correspond to meaning by some reason). In other words, speakers assume that same (or similar) sounds should carry the same meanings and that therefore, if two strings sound the same, it is legitimate to bring together their two meanings, as puns do. Strangely, no challenge of this claim has been advanced, at least in print. Recent work on puns include Hempelmann (2003; 2004), which consists of an application of optimality theory to the question of phonetic distance and Guidi’s (Forth) which applies the same methodology across language families and argues for the universality of the phenomena involved. Kawahara and Shinohara (2007) find similar results in Japanese. Ritchie (2004) has some discussion of pun taxonomy which is of interest. Lippman and Dunn (2000), Lippman et al. (2001; 2002), and Lippman and Tragesser (2005) show that contextual relevance enhances the perception of humorousness in puns. Structuralist analyses Aside from the work on puns, structuralist research, primarily in France, but also in Italy and Germany, developed a model of humor that blends an incongruity-based theory of humor with the research in semantic and narratology that flourished in Europe in the 1960s. The central concepts around which the model I have called “isotopy-disjunction” (Attardo 1994) were built are: –– isotopy (associated with Greimas’s semantics), and

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

107

–– narrative functions, introduced into humor research by Violette Morin, but which originated with Propp’s analysis of Russian fairy tales. The isotopy–disjunction model (IDM) conceptualizes humor as a disjunction (switch, passage) from one isotopy (sense) to another. As we can see, it is essentially a rewording of the incongruity model into a more specific linguistic terminology. Unfortunately, the concept of isotopy proved both very popular but also just as hard to pinpoint. In Attardo (1994), a long section details the various changes in definition, which eventually led to the conclusion that an isotopy is essentially a sense or an interpretation of a text. These problems considerably cast doubt on the approach, since little is gained by a mere terminological substitution. The analysis in narrative functions raised similarly interesting prospects only to result in disappointing conclusions, once it was shown that the threepart analysis proposed by Morin was in fact common to all narratives, and therefore had little specific interest for the study of humor. Nonetheless, the IDM remains significant because it introduced the distinction between disjunctor and connector and opened the way to the possibility of investigating their positions within the text. The results showed that most disjunctors occur in the final part of the text (the last phrase of the last sentence) and that those that do not are predominantly followed by semantically empty material. These studies, summed up in Attardo (1994), were based on large corpora of jokes (in one case, 2000 texts). Recent work (Bucaria 2004) has provided an interesting addition to the typology of connector/disjunctor configurations. Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH) Raskin’s (1985) Semantic-Script Theory of Humor (SSTH) was a radical departure from the traditionally taxonomic approach of most linguistic studies of puns and humor. It argued that the central aspect of humor was semantic/ pragmatic and moreover presented an articulated theory of semantics to implement this claim. Raskin’s theory of semantics is based on scripts (a.k.a., frames) along the lines of, but with significant differences (in degree of formalization) from, the Schank and Abelson (1977), Minsky (1981), Fillmore (1985) approach later to be co-opted by cognitive linguistics in the nineties. Significantly, Raskin claimed that no operational boundary could be identified between the strictly semantic (lexical) and the pragmatic (encyclopedic) information, thus pre-empting claims that the SSTH was a purely semantic

108 

Salvatore Attardo

theory. The SSTH does in fact incorporate a very significant pragmatic component, which sees humor as a violation of Grice’s cooperative principle (see Attardo 1994, chapter 9 for discussion). Raskin’s theory of humor boils down to two separate claims: –– that each joke text is interpretable according to (at least) two distinct scripts (i.e., the scripts overlap over the joke), and –– two that the scripts are opposed (i.e., they are local antonyms; on this issue see Attardo 1997). I have claimed, controversially and against Raskin’s views (1985, and p.c.), that the SSTH can be reduced to an incongruity/resolution model (the leading psychological model of humor). Under this view (Attardo 1997), the opposition requirement is essentially a case of incongruity, but with better formalization than the concept of incongruity in psychology. The alert reader will have noticed that the SSTH makes claims only about jokes, the simplest and least complicated type of humorous text. This methodological restriction made perfect sense for the linguist, who wanted to analyze simple cases first, but was a problem pretty much anywhere else. General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) In 1991, Attardo and Raskin presented a revision/extension of the SSTH, under the name of the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH). The GTVH differs from the SSTH in that it has six knowledge resources (KRs), as follows: 1. SO: the Script Opposition of the SSTH (cf, also Attardo 1997); 2. Logical Mechanism (LM): corresponds to the resolution phase of the incongruity/resolution models, essentially it is the mechanism whereby the incongruity of the SO is playfully and/or partially explained away (cf. Attardo et al. 2002.); 3. Situation (SI): refers to the “props” of the joke, the textual materials evoked by the scripts of the joke that are not funny (so, in a joke about a dog in a pub, the background knowledge about pubs, such that they serve beer, etc. is part of the SI); 4. Target (TA): what is known as the butt of the joke; 5. Narrative Strategy (NS): the “genre” of the joke, such as riddle, 1–2-3 structure, question and answer, etc.; 6. Language (LA): the actual lexical, syntactic, phonological, etc. choices at the linguistic level that instantiate all the other choices.

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

109

As the description of the model implies, a strong hierarchical dependence across the KRs was postulated and justified at length in Attardo and Raskin (1991). This hierarchy, which matches the order of presentation above, was empirically tested and found to be fundamentally correct in Ruch et al. (1993). Let us analyze a sample joke, to exemplify: (1) What do you get when you cross a mafioso with a postmodern theorist? Someone who will make you an offer you cannot understand. A SSTH analysis of this joke would identify the scripts for mafioso and for postmodern theorist (script names are in small caps), see that they overlap in the second line: “Someone who will make you an offer you cannot…” can be attributed equally well to the mafioso (the quote from the Godfather movie is obvious) but as the punch line “understand” reveals, was actually also applicable to the postmodern theorist (we assume that script is complete enough to have information about the fact that PoMo theorists are notoriously hard to understand). Needless to say, the scripts for mafioso and for postmodern theorist are opposed, at least for the purposes of this text. The GTVH would further identify in the quoted stereotypical sentence with a changed word a pun-like mechanism as the LM, a strange “crossing” situation, an obvious target (the PoMo theorists), an equally obvious NS (the “crossing” jokes), and finally the language of the text, would be described as the words, syntactic constructions, etc. Longer humorous texts The GTVH broadened the SSTH to include all linguistic levels, including an interest for social and narratological issues absent in the SSTH. However, the GTVH retained the same almost exclusive focus on the joke. Not all approaches to the SSTH/GTVH shared the same focus, however. Several researchers, and most notably Chlopicki (1987), had turned to longer texts. Their efforts are summarized and critiqued in Attardo (1994). Further research in the humor of “longer texts” (as non-joke-related humor research became known) resulted in a number of seminars (see Chlopicki 1997, for example) and eventually in Attardo (2001a, 2002b) in which I present what I take to be the first full scale application of a much expanded GTVH to the analysis of long humorous texts, such as novels, short stories, TV sitcoms, movies, plays, etc.

110 

Salvatore Attardo

Needless to say, because of space constraints, it is impossible to presented in detail the approach, so I will limit myself to stating the main tenets of the approach, leaving the interested reader to the original source for justification, references, examples, and the likes. In particular, I  will say nothing about the significant effort expended in aligning the theory with research in the psycholinguistics of text processing. Thus, for example, the theory assumes that the reader of a text will elaborate a Text World Representation (similar to a mental space or a possible world) which will include and organize all the information about the events in the text and serve as a starting point for inferences, bridgings, and the likes. The main aspects of the application of the GTVH to longer texts are: –– the analysis of the text as a vector, with each humorous instance coded as per the GTVH; –– the distinction between jab lines and punch lines; –– the importance accorded to the relative distribution of the lines in the text; –– a taxonomy and analysis of humorous plots The text is physically linear and directed (i.e., it can be traveled only in one direction, or in other words, it is a vector). Along the text occur one or more instances of humor. These are labeled and analyzed, as per the GTVH. So, for each instance of humor, an account is given of what the SO, LM, etc. of that particular case are. This immediately leads to the first major difference between this version of the GTVH and previous ones: we introduce a new concept and a neologism to go with it, the jab line. Just like the punch line indicates in humor theory the occurrence of a humorous instance at the end of the text (see Attardo et al. 1994, for evidence), the jab line indicates the occurrence of a humorous instance anywhere else. Jab and punch lines are semantically indistinguishable (and when there is no need to do so the generic term line is used), but they differ at a narratological level. Whereas punch lines are disruptive of the narrative they close, jab lines are not, and in fact often contribute to the development of the text (see Tsakona 2003, for an interesting development of the distinction). Consider the following two examples, in which the lines are bolded: –– at the end of the picture-gallery stood the Princess Sophia of Carls­ruhe, a heavy Tartar-looking lady, with tiny black eyes and wonderful emeralds, talking bad French at the top of her voice… (Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime) –– Do you believe in clubs for young men? Only when kindness fails.

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

111

It is clear that while in (3) the punch line makes the interpretation of the text up to that point as relating to social organizations completely implausible, in (2) no such reconfiguration of the text takes place, and we are witnessing the description of a lady all along, except, of course, that the description is far from flattering. Incidentally, the example occurs at the beginning of the text, which continues for thousands of words. The cataloging of all the lines of the text along the GTVH parameters affords two kinds of novel insights: –– the identification of connections among the lines, and –– the identification of patterns of occurrence of the lines, in relation to one another and globally in the text. The connections among lines lead to the identification of thematic or formal connections among the lines. For example, all lines targeting a given individual are obviously related. These related lines are said to form a strand. Strands may be based on the contents of any of the six KRs and/or combinations thereof. This may give rise to subtle and interesting strands. For example, a strand that shares a targeted individual (e.g., Lord Arthur Savile) and a logical mechanism (such as reasoning from false premises) is found in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime. It is symptomatic of Lord Arthur Savile’s character to be associated frequently with improper reasoning. Strands may have connections along the same lines with other strands. A strand of strands is called a stack. These are common in large corpora (e.g., all the episodes of a sitcom). As far as the patterns of occurrence of the lines, some interesting configurations have begun to emerge. The two most obvious ones have been named, somewhat colorfully, bridges and combs. A bridge is the occurrence of two related lines far from each other. A comb is the occurrence of several lines in close proximity. Perhaps more significantly, the overall distribution of the lines, regardless of strands, in the text has also begun to be available for investigation. Here we face the null hypothesis that the distribution of the lines is random, and a next-to-null, that it is uniform. If the occurrence of the humor in the text is random, there should be no reason for the jab/punch lines to cluster together, beyond what a random distribution of the lines would predict. If the occurrence of the humor were uniform, then all sections of the text should have the same amount of humor. This latter distribution, however strange it may seem, actually is close to occurring in an obscure picaresque text, by Peacham, analyzed in Attardo (2001a). As far as Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime goes, the

112 

Salvatore Attardo

distribution of the lines is not random (Corduas et al, forth). Corduas et al., using statistical tools, determine not only that the distribution of humor in the Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime text is not random, but that another text (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams) differs significantly from Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime. This result is extremely significant, in that it shows that texts have an individual distribution of humor. It remains to be explained what causes the different distributions. Finally, the GTVH is augmented also with a component concerned with the nature of humorous plots. Significantly, their very existence had been denied (Palmer 1987). According to Palmer, all humorous stories are essentially serious plots, with humor attached to it. This is indeed the case in many instances, such as Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which is a fairly grim novel, but includes a humorous strand of anachronistic names and quotations (e.g., Guglielmo di Baskerville, Jorge de Burgos). We label these cases “Serious Plot, with jab lines” There are however, cases of genuinely humorous plots. These include: –– Humorous plot, with punch line These are texts that are structurally similar to a joke. They consist of a (more or less long) setup phase, followed by a final punch line that leads to a reinterpretation of the story. Examples are Katherine Mansfield’s Feuille D’Album (analyzed in Attardo 2001a) and Edgar Allan Poe’s The System of Dr. Tarr and Dr. Fethers (see Attardo 1994). –– Humorous plot, with metanarrative disruption This is a text that contains one or more disruptions of the narrative conventions of its genre and these disruptions have a humorous nature (mere disruption is not necessarily humorous, as Pirandello’s plays show). Examples of this kind of humorous texts are Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs (Attardo 2001a), and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, probably the greatest example of the genre. On humorous self-reference in movies, see Withalm (1997). –– Humorous plot, with humorous central complication This is the most interesting category of humorous plots. It consists of texts in which the central complication of the story is itself humorous. An example is Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, another better know is Eugène Labiche’s Un cha-

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

113

peau de paille d’italie. Unfortunately, this last category is problematic, due to the lack of formal definition of “central complication” of the plot. Intuitively, we know that each story that is not a picaresque story has a central defining event in the plot (Mme. Bovary’s adultery, Raskolnikoff’s homicide, Lolita’s seduction, etc.) that “sets the wheels in motion.” In Campbell’s hero narrative, it is the departure of the hero. In Propp’s folktales it is both a departure and the violation of the interdiction to the hero (functions 1–3). At this point, it is impossible to determine in a non-intuitive fashion what the central narrative complication of a narrative happens to be. Incidentally, it may be significant to correct a misapprehension of the claim made in Attardo (2001a). No claim is made that the above are all the possible cases of humorous plots. Merely that they exist, contra Palmer’s claim of nonexistence. Thus Asimakoulas and Vandaele’s (2002: 433) claim that “mixed” narratives, such as Free Indirect Discourse, somehow refute the examples above seems strangely misguided: at best, humorous FID would simply add another category to the list above, thus strengthening the claim in the text. A case study In what follows, I will analyze a fragment of text, to show how the expanded version of the GTVH would handle it. A complete analysis of the story can be found in Attardo (2001a). Passage from Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime The story relates the trials of a young man (Lord Arthur Savile) who is told by a palm reader (Podgers) that he will commit a murder. Lord Savile is upset by the news and wanders all night in the streets of London, in despair and horror. He then returns home and determines that he cannot marry his fiancée until he has committed the crime he is predestined to. He attempts unsuccessfully to murder two of his relatives and finally as he is about to give up, runs into Podgers and murders him by throwing him in the Thames. He then marries his fiancée and they live happily thereafter. After Lord Arthur Savile has been told that he will kill someone, he is shocked and he wanders the streets of London. After a good sleep, a bath, and breakfast, he comes the following “moral” decision: he recognised none the less clearly where his duty lay, and was fully conscious of the fact that he had no right to marry until he had committed the murder.  (Attardo 2001a: 177)

114 

Salvatore Attardo

His reasoning goes as follows: since he believes Podgers’s prediction that he will commit a murder and if he committed a murder his wife would be involved in the negative attention, he concludes that he must commit it before the marriage. Hence, he sets out to commit a crime out of his sense of duty to his fiancée. This is the central narrative complication of Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime: the entire text depends on this fact for its development and it is itself humorous (the self-reflexiveness of the forecast triggers several contradictions: for example, if Podgers, the cheiromantist, foretells his own death, why does he not decline to alert Lord Savile to this fact, thereby saving himself?) This jab line is driven home by a comb-strand which consists of 15 jab lines which share the same SO. Remarkably, all this happens in a 372 words text passage; this gives us a ratio of slightly over one jab per 25 words of text. A GTVH analysis of the line would include: SO = normal/abnormal, murder/no murder, duty/no duty LM = reasoning from false premises, TA = Lord Savile SI = the context of the story NS = narrative LA = the linguistic choices of the text, irrelevant to the humor, in this case A few words of explanation may be in order: the SO include a high-level, very abstract SO (normal/abnormal), which is instantiated in the text in the lowlevel (concrete) SO duty/no duty and murder/no murder (with the slight complication that duty implies murder). The LM is fairly self-explanatory: it does indeed follow that if one is honor-bound to performing some sort of duty before marrying one’s fiancée one should postpone one’s marriage until such time as the duty has been discharged. However, the premise, that if one fate is to murder someone, one should do so, is absurd (murder is not a duty). That the TA is Lord Savile seems obvious. The SI does not seem to have special identifying features, besides what is known from the text. The NS is straightforward narration and the LA simply whatever verbal choices the author selected. Humor in context: discursive approaches to humor Methodologically, the SSTH was a big step forward: it established both the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humor and the idea of studying the humor competence of speakers (i.e., the necessary and sufficient conditions for a text to be funny). This should not be construed as meaning that the study of humor

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

115

semantic competence is the sole legitimate object of study for the SSTH/ GTVH. In fact, the opposite is true: first, the SSTH incorporates at the very core of its theoretical apparatus a whole battery of pragmatic devices and concerns, in a way unheard of at the time (and in fact still largely unmatched); second, as we saw, the SSTH included a pragmatic component, which went beyond prior suggestions that humor violated the cooperative principle (see Attardo 1994 for discussion); third, from within its fold there have been calls of a theory of the audience in humor (Carrell 1997). We turn now briefly to the pragmatics of humor, before addressing squarely the performance /audience side of humor. Pragmatics of humor As we saw, the SSTH incorporates a pragmatic aspect both in its “semantics” (it claims that the two cannot be separated) and in a more direct way, by claiming that humor violates Grice’s “cooperative principle” (CP; Grice 1989). While some have objected to the characterization of humor as a “violation,” by and large, the consensus is that this position is correct. I have reviewed the literature on this subject in Attardo (1994, ch. 9, 1996). Raskin (1985), in a much-quoted passage, goes so far as providing a set of maxims for “joke telling.” However, few readers seem to have noticed that Raskin’s discussion actually dismissed the joke telling maxims as trivial. Attardo (1990, 1993) has argued that the violation of the CP is actual and not pretended or mentioned, as some have claimed. The most significant conclusions reached in this area seem to be that a) humor is non-cooperative, although b) this violation of the CP may be used for communicative purposes. Recently, some criticisms of the SSTH have been voiced within the Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986) framework claiming that no semantics of humor is necessary and that a purely pragmatic approach, based on relevance theory is sufficient but no alternative account of humor has emerged from this discussion (see Yus Ramos 2003, for a review). Further discussion of relevance-theoretic approaches to humor will be found below. Discourse analysis of humor An audience-side theory of humor (or of humor performance, in the Saussurian sense, not limited to the “stage” sense of performance) needs to be

116 

Salvatore Attardo

grounded in the social, anthropological, interactional, etc., determinants of action that the idealization of performance into competence removed. To put it differently, we need to ask ourselves what is the repertoire of choices that Ss have and what significance is attached to each of them (and/or its absence). For example, laughter after a  joke expresses, on H’s part, some degree of agreement with S that the occasion was appropriate for joking (among other things, of course). Withholding laughter may therefore be seen as rejection of this implicit claim and therefore as disapproving (once more, among other options which include failure of noticing and/or understanding the humor). Interestingly, generalizations over classes of behavior (cf. “repertoire”) introduce an aspect of competence in the heart of performance. This is an interesting methodological issue which would take us too far afield, but see Attardo (2008). There are now several surveys of the discourse analysis of humor: Norrick (1993: 139–164), Attardo (1994: 293–331, 2001a: 61–69), Kotthoff (1996) and several papers in a special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics (2003) on humor. Work in the discourse analysis of humor is characterized by a focus on actual, naturalistic data, in which the research consists in analyzing a transcription of a recording of the data. Early work in discourse analysis/conversation analysis focused on laughter (see Attardo [1994: ch. 10] for a review of the scholarship, and now Chafe [2007] and Trouvain and Campbell (eds.) [2007]) and on an analysis of humor as part of an adjacency pair with laughter: “joking and laughter are linked as two parts of an adjacency pair” (Norrick 1993: 23). Norrick makes a similar argument in the context of puns: “punning (…) always represents a reaction to a previous turn (…)” (65). Antonopoulou and Sifianou (2004) have presented counterexamples of the latter claim. Partington (2006) concludes that his data refute the claim of disruptiveness. We know that laughter does not always follow jokes: laughter far from being exclusively a reaction to humor is used by speakers to signal their humorous intention (which obviously implies that laughter is not exclusively a reaction to some stimulus). For example, Jefferson (1979) is focused on how speakers may “invite” laughter from the hearer, using a “post-utterance completion laugh particle” or, in other words, laughter at the end of what they say. By showing that laughter is an appropriate response to what he/she has just said, the speaker implicitly validates that response. Another technique involves “within speech laughter,” which is the delivery of an utterance interspersed with laughter. Recently, these results have come under criticism, witness the claim that “most laughter is not a response to jokes or other formal

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

117

attempts at humor” (Provine 2000: 42) but his objections, based on an exclusive focus on involuntary laughter, seem to have been refuted (e.g., O’Connor and Kowal 2005; O’Connell and Kowal 2006). Moreover, and needless to say, laughter may be caused by all sorts of nonhumorous stimuli (tickling, laughing gas, embarrassment, etc.) and can be triggered by imitation (e.g., by observing other people laugh). This is hardly news to humor research. Giles and Oxford (1970) list seven causes of laughter: humorous, social, ignorance, anxiety, derision, apologetic, and laughter as a reaction to tickling. Aubouin (1948) and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1974) had already pointed out that one could not use reliably laughter as a one-to-one marker of humor because “laughter largely exceeds humor” (Olbrechts-­Tyteca 1974: 14; see Attardo 1994: 10–13 for more extensive discussion). In general, discourse analysis has focused on the functions of humor (e.g., building in group rapport, controlling the conversation, etc.). Excellent summaries of the functions documented by the research can be found in the surveys mentioned above. The field seems to be particularly active. To the papers reviewed in those surveys, we may add Glenn (1989, 1991/1992, 1995, 2003), Fillmore (1994), Eggins and Slade (1997: 155–167), Priego Valverde (1998, 2003), Downe (1999), Nardini (2000), Buttny (2001), Viana (2001), Schegloff (2001), Branner (2003), and Rogerson-Revell (2007). With significant exceptions (e.g., Priego-Valverde’s “enunciative” theory influenced by the work of Ducrot and Baktine), all these studies suffer from an anecdotal approach since they merely document the existence of one or several functions of humor in conversation; in itself, this is a useful task, but of limited theoretical value, since none of these studies goes beyond the four general primary functions of humor listed in Attardo (1994: 323): social management, decommittment, mediation and defunctionalization. A particularly interesting study, based on spontaneous humor in Greek telephone conversations, is Antonopoulou and Sifianou (2004) which is informed by recent theoretical work in humor research, including the GTVH. Archakis and Tsakona (2005) applies the GTVH to conversational data and the issue of identity, thus demonstrating practically the applicability of the GTVH to conversational data, as postulated by Attardo (2001). Recently, attention has shifted towards an attention to numerical data collected from larger corpora and towards the reactions of the audience. A strong proponent of this approach is Hay (2000, 2001) who has investigated “humor support” i.e., conversational strategies used to acknowledge and support humorous utterances, among which figures prominently the production of more humor and/or laughter. The work of Holmes and her associates (see below) is relevant, and see also below, the section of corpus-based studies.

118 

Salvatore Attardo

Much humor is co-constructed (i.e., both participants jointly produce and elaborate the joking exchange), as had already been pointed out in Davies (1984), although of course not all humor is co-constructed, and in fact some humor is aggressive and disruptive (Priego-Valverde 2003), and hence very much of a single-player production, as well as the fact that some humor fails (hence a fortiori it is not taken up by its hearer/audience), cf. Hay (1996) and work in progress by Nancy Bell. Along the same lines, much humor, presumably among friends and in other intimate contexts, takes the form of elaborate multi-turn sequences in which the speakers play upon one-anothers’ jokes to realize long stretches of humorous conversation. However, once more, much humor also consists of single-turn humorous utterances that are not taken up or even acknowledged by the audience. Eisterhold et al. (2006) have shown that this fact is usefully seen in the context of a wider theory of pragmatics and that presumably it is the different degrees of intimacy in the situations that account, at least in part, for the differences between long and short stretches of humor. One may wonder if the mere existence of long stretches of humorous banter do not falsify the claim that there exists a “principle of least disruption” (Eisterhold et al. 2006) which enjoins the speakers to return to as serious mode as soon as possible. This is not the case, as can be seen by the requirement that long sequences of humor be continuously signaled as such (hence underscoring the marked nature of the humorous sequences). For all the work on the functions of humor, an important conclusion that has been reached (see e.g., Holmes 2000) concerns the multifunctionality and indeterminate nature of humor and irony. Incidentally, this should bring pause to those focus on the positive aspects of humor: what is indeterminate will be inevitably interpreted differently by various speakers. The relationship between humor and politeness is also a significant issue. Holmes (2000) Holmes et al. (2001), for example, find that humor is used for politeness (cf. the mediation function of humor). Tannen (1984) introduced the idea that speakers’ had different “styles” of humor which affected the way their contribution to the conversation was weighed, i.e., the way their persona was perceived. This idea was further expanded to include “family” styles (Everts 2003). One can expand this line of thinking to any sorts of situation where speakers know one another (i.e., interact repeatedly enough to establish a  persona), including most notably workplace situations (Holmes 1998, 2000, 2006, Holmes et al. 2001, Holmes and Marra 2002). This is what Mullany (2004) does, using the “community of practice” approach.

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

119

Attention to the joke-situation A recent development of the discourse analysis of humor is the emphasis on the complete situation of the humorous event. A joke occurs in context, be it impoverished, as when a canned joke is collected in an anthology of jokes, or as rich as an ongoing conversation among people with a shared history. The attention to the situation in which humor occurs has manifested itself primarily in studies that focus on the functions of humor (see above), and in studies that consider the reactions of the audience. One particular kind of reaction is humor support, mentioned above, but several studies have shown a variety of reactions. Already Drew (1987) had emphasized that often speakers react seriously (what he called “po-faced”) to humorous turns. Since his corpus consisted of teases, one could have surmised that this kind of reaction was peculiar to this particular humorous genre. On the contrary, studies by Hay (1994) on playful insults and by Gibbs (2000), Kotthoff (2003), and Eisterhold et al. (2006) on irony, show significant percentages of speakers reacting seriously to a  humorous turn. Attardo (2001b) has proposed the term “mode adoption” for the choice to respond with humor to humor, irony to irony, etc. It is a  matter of contention exactly how frequent mode adoption is: Gibbs’s data show a relatively high percentage, whereas Eisterhold’s show strikingly low levels. It is probable that contextual factors such as familiarity and aggression act as determinants. Haakana (2002 and references therein), Vettin and Todt (2004) show that laughter is most frequently not followed by laughter, i.e., that speakers “mostly laugh alone” (incidentally further proof that laughter is not necessarily the second element of an adjacency pair laughable-­laughter). Sociolinguistics of humor As Gasquet-Cyrus (2004) rightly argues, the relationship between sociolinguistics and humor research can be characterized as “having mutually missed the boat.” It is only very recently that research aware of the advances of humor research has begun to appear and that competence (in the Chomskian sense) theorists have begun to take notice of ethnomethodological and sociolinguistic work. In fact, one could argue that before Norrick (1993) and Attardo (1994: ch. 10) the interplay had been virtually nonexistent (with the obvious exceptions of anthropological work, e.g., Basso 1979, Beeman 1981a,

120 

Salvatore Attardo

1981b; see also Beeman 2000). However, things are beginning to change, witness Gasquet-Cyrus’s own work, Crawford’s work on gender (1989, 1995, 2003) and a  recent crop of researchers (e.g., Georgakopulou 2000; Rutter 2000; Liao 2001; Everts 2003, etc.) whose work is beginning to appear. Of particular significance is a body of work by New Zealand scholars focusing on conversational data, enriched by quantitative methods and with significant theoretical forays, cf. Holmes (1998, 2000), Holmes and Hay (1997), Holmes and Marra (2002), Holmes et al. (2001), Hay (1994, 1996, 2000, 2001) On gender, see Downe (1999), Everts (2003), Crawford (2003), the 2006 special issue of Journal of Pragmatics (38:1) edited by Kotthoff, and the results by Günther (2003). The results of Günther (2003) and Holmes et al. (2001) seriously question the common assumption that women produce less humor. Other sociolinguistic factors, such as race/ethnicity are seldom investigated from a (socio)linguistic perspective. An exception is Rahman (2007) on African-American standup humor. There is little work on the linguistics of African American humor, although the genres of the “dozens” or “signifying” which have some humorous aspects, have been investigated, see Abrahams (1962; 1976), Kochman (1983), Labov (1972) Mitchell-Kernan (1972), and Morgan (1998). Watkins (2002) is an anthology of African-American humor, while Watkins (1994) is a historical essay. Williams (2007) deals with more contemporary material. Other factors, such as class have not been researched extensively: Keim and Schwitalla 1989, Schwitalla (1995), Streeck (1988), Nardini (2000) Porcu (2005) and Günther (2003) show that lower class and older speakers are freer to address taboo topics. Günther also found that very young speakers (less than 25 years old) produced significantly more jokes. Children famously produce more verbal humor. Issues in the field Laughter It has been a well known and established fact that laughter and humor are not coextensive. This line of argument has received recent support by corpus studies (Günther 2003: 203). Recent work (e.g., Provine 2000, Glenn 2003) has appeared that seeks to analyze laughter per se, using for example the concept of “laughable” to describe any laughter situation. This is problematic (Günther 2003: 116;

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

121

­ ttardo 2005). Thus, Provine professes surprise in finding that speakers laugh A also in the absence of humor. This is however entirely predictable from the literature reviewed above: there is spontaneous laughter and there is intentional laughter, just as there is laughter that occurs in the absence of humor and laughter that occurs as a reaction to humor. Vettin and Todt (2004) reach similar conclusions. On the acoustics and prosody of laughter, Chafe (2007) is a  synthesis. Trouvain and Cambell (eds.) (2007) are the proceedings of a conference on laughter. See also Trouvain (2001; 2003) and Trouvain and Schroeder (2004). See also Ellis (2002) on French. Longer texts While Chlopicki’s work (1987, 1995, 1997, 2001), and that of several other scholars (see Csàbi and Zerkowitz 2003), including my own, have made a valiant attempt at dealing with longer and more complex humorous texts than jokes (see above), it is clear that many issues remain to be dealt with. For example, further analyses of longer texts comparable to those in Attardo (2001a) and Corduas et al. (Forth.) would clarify if the results found for those texts are unique or can be generalized to a class of texts (and of course, to which class). Recent work by Attardo has focused on the nature and role of the resolution of the incongruity in humorous texts (Attardo Forth. a). The role and significance of such traditional narratological concerns such as characters, point of view, narrator, etc. in humor is almost entirely to be determined and assessed. A  discussion can be found in Chlopicki’s work, mentioned above, as well as in Semino (1997), Simpson (2000), Fricke and Müller (2000), Attardo (2001a), Culpeper (2001), Müller (2002, 2003c) and Galiñanes (2000, 2005). Galiñanes (2005) is particularly interesting because it blends script-theory, the expanded GTVH and relevance theory accounts of literature in an interesting way, suggesting that a text creates a preponderant “script” which forces the interpretation of the text along the lines of how a stereotypical script forces the interpretation of a joke. Conversely, a distressing number of works often comes tantalizingly close to linguistics (either because they quote some of the classics of the field, such as Raskin (1985), or because they use some of the terminology of linguistics, a fact easy to explain in the age of the “linguistic turn” in philosophy) but eventually fails to engage its contribution to the interdisciplinary field. Examples are Nelson (1990), Purdie (1993), and, possibly the worst such offender, Ross (1998), which however is targeted at high school students.

122 

Salvatore Attardo

Irony It is impossible to give a  summary of all the theories of irony that have been proposed. Such surveys can be found in various articles, such as Giora (1998), Haiman (1998 ch. 1–3), Attardo (2000a, 2000b, 2001b, 2002a), Utsumi (2000), Gibbs and Colston (eds., 2007)and in many of the current contributions to the field. It is more interesting to try to disentangle some trends in the research and to briefly address the thorny issue of the connections between humor and irony. Irony is commonly analyzed as a sextuple, S, H, C, u, p, p’ (Speaker, Hearer, Context, utterance, proposition conveyed by u, and another proposition p’ ≠ p). A central point of contention has been the issue surrounding the processing of irony. Traditionally, the understanding of irony has been seen as a two stage process, in which the “literal” sense of the utterance is “discarded” in favor of a second (often opposed) implied meaning, namely the ironical meaning. As the scare quotes in the previous sentence reveal, debate has surrounded both the existence and nature of a “literal” meaning and its fate: is it abandoned or retained for contrast with the second meaning retrieved? The latter solution is advocated by several recent works, e.g., Giora (2003). Sperber and Wilson (1981) and Gibbs (1994) have presented, the former authors in the context of pragmatics, the latter in the context of psycholinguistic studies, one stage approaches, which deny that a literal meaning is addressed first and successively replaced. Gibbs has supported this claim with experiments that purport to show that speakers do not process irony slower than literal sentences, which we would expect them to do if the two stage process were correct. However, recent studies have contradicted Gibbs’s results (e.g., ­McDonald 1992; ­McDonald and Pearce 1996; Giora 1997; Giora and Fein 1999; Dews and Winner 1999; Schwoebel et al. 2000) and two stage theories have appeared in the Relevance Theoretic camp and the original mention theory of irony has been reinterpreted as being compatible with two stages approaches (see Yus 2003, for discussion). The idea that irony is echoic, which is part of the Sperber and Wilson account, has been challenged by data in Partington (2006). A second issue revolves around the idea of “contrast” or “incongruity” between the actual situation and the expectations and/or utterance of S. For example, Colston and O’Brien (2000: 1563) identify as the central component of irony contrast between the “literal” and the figurative meaning, or “between assertion and reality.” Significantly, they use the general term “incongruity” to cover all the various formulations which they gather under the “contrast” heading “incongruity between a remark’s assertion and real-

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

123

ity” (Colston and O’Brien 2000). Gibbs (1994: 397) speaks of “incongruity” and in (2000: 13) quotes “contrast between expectation and reality.” My own proposal of “inappropriateness” (Attardo 2000) can probably also be reduced to this broad concept, but has the advantage of being formulated in much more formal(izable) terms (i.e., in terms of mismatch of presuppositions). The issue of whether incongruity and inappropriateness are interchangeable is in need of discussion, which should also relate to Giora’s proposal of irony as “negation” (especially in light of my analysis of script opposition as a form of negation, Attardo 1997). On the role of contrast in irony, see also (Colston 2000, 2002, and Utsumi 2000). In general, an area in dire need of research is that of the connections and differences between irony and humor. A recent development, possibly related, is the finding that there is no specific ironic tone of voice (for reviews of the literature trying to identify a specific ironical tone, see Attardo et al. 2003 and Bryant and Fox Tree 2005). Contrast between the ironical turn and those surrounding it is the prosodic marker of irony (Attardo et al. 2003), Bryant and Fox Tree (2005), although prosodic contrast is not unique to irony. An aspect of irony which has traditionally been a source of much debate, namely whether irony is necessarily (or even primarily) negative, should have been put to rest, first by several theoretical discussions (reviewed in Attardo 2000a, 2000b) and then by empirical data (Nelms 2001: 119–120) which show that 15% of occurrences in a naturally observed corpus are instances of positive irony. Situational irony (i.e., irony of events, rather than words) has also begun to be tackled (Littman and Mey 1991, Lucariello 1994, Shelley 2001), however, a theory incorporating situational and verbal irony has not yet been proposed. Other aspects of irony are discussed in various recent publications, such as the functions of irony, which have been investigated by discourse analysts and psycholinguists. Similarly, the issue of the reactions to irony have been the subject of recent work in discourse analysis and of much ongoing work (see Attardo 2001b, for references). Goddard (2006) deals with cultural differences (ethnopragmatics) of Australian irony. Computational and formal approaches to humor The following is a cursory treatment, given Hempelmann (this volume). In Raskin and Attardo (1994), we surveyed the (then nearly non-existent) field of the computational treatment of humor, only to see it blossom a few years later (cf. Hulstijn and Nijholt 1996). For a  more recent survey, see

124 

Salvatore Attardo

Ritchie (2001). First, a number of researchers started implementing programs that generated specific subsets of types of jokes: Lessard and Levinson in a series of papers (1992, 1993, 1995, 1997, forth.) focused on riddles and other genres of humor: e.g., Tom Swifties, as did Binsted and Ritchie (1994, 1997, 2001) whose JAPE program generates riddles, and Shelley et al. 1996, whose program generates humorous analogies. These programs are based on more-or-less blind combinatories of elements. While the authors themselves have been guarded about the evaluation of the degree of creativity and “intelligence” of their programs, speculation has been rampant e.g., Boden (1998), in part fueled by studies such as Binsted et al. (1997) which in comparing the level of appreciation of computer-generated and human-generated riddles seems to imply that the computer program is as creative as the humans, while JAPE’s output is screened by humans and only the best results of what is essentially a blind combinatorial process are then compared to human output. This is the biggest problem that most of these studies share: they produce toy systems, i.e., limited programs that generate a very small set of jokes, puns, etc. and have no possibility of scalability, i.e., to be applied to other kinds of jokes/humor. One could question the usefulness of these studies, given the paucity of results. However, two considerations need to be kept in mind: –– first, the practical applications of the field may be significant (Stock 1996/2003), –– second, some work seems to be progressing from the simplistic, toy-system approaches, for example, Mihalcea’s and Taylor’s work (see below) toward humor recognition (rather than generation) is an important step toward real-world applications. Similarly, Nijholt (2007) discusses the very significant issue of generating humor that is contextually appropriate . –– third, even partial computational implementation of aspects of (a  theory of humor) are bound to shift the attention of researchers towards the formalization of their theories, witness the criticisms of Ritchie (1998, 1999, 2004) towards the GTVH (and see Attardo 2006b for a response). Furthermore, these are merely the first steps in the field. Research is ongoing: see Harpo by Donaldson et Shelley (1997), Tijus et Moulin (1997) who use a semantic network and the papers in Hulstijn and Nijholt (1996). Binsted and Takizawa (1998), Yokogawa (2001, 2002, on generating Japanese puns), Stock and Strapparava (2003, on Hahacronym, a system that generates humorous acronyms), Taylor and Mazlack, (2004a, 2004b, 2005), Taylor et al. 2007, Mihalcea and Strapparava (2005, 2006), Binsted et al. (2006), Mihal-

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

125

cea (2007), Mihalcea and Pulman (2007), Buscaldi and Rosso (2007), Tinholt and Nijholt (2007, featuring an application of the GTVH), Sjöberg (2006), Sjöbergh and Araki (2007). A different approach, utilizing “collaborative filtering” to determine subjects’ tastes in humor gathered a large following and media coverage (Gupta et al. 1999, Goldberg et al. 2001). Some researchers have investigated humor in human-computer interaction Lemeunier (1996), Morkes et al. (1999) and computer-mediated communication (Baym 1995; Holcomb 1997). Corpus approaches In general, the study of humor using corpora is difficult because corpora have not been annotated for the purposes of humor research. Thus, as Chafe (2007) remarks, the indication [laughter] is uninformative if one is researching the type of laughter occurrence. Despite these problems, a few studies have begun appearing that are based on corpora. Günther (2003) is based on the British national corpus and on a corpus of teenage conversations. Partington (2006) is based on several corpora, including White House press conferences. Chafe (2007) is based on the Santa Barbara corpus. It should be noted that early conversation analysis (Tannen 1984) was also based on a conversational corpus (however small), as was Hay’s work (see above) and that the work by Holmes and her associates is also based on a corpus of workplace conversations. It is early to determine whether corpus analysis will develop into a major contributor to humor research, but some of the results mentioned in the discussion of conversation analysis and sociolinguistic analyses are quite sgnificant. Neurolinguistics of humor Recent work in neurolinguistics has begun the overwhelmingly difficult (at least presently) task of mapping the underlying neurological loci of activity during the processing of humor. Despite the tentativeness of all results in this field, some of them are extremely interesting and promising. For example, Goel and Dolan (2001) have shown, using MRIs, that different areas are involved in the processing of verbal and referential jokes (semantic and phonological jokes in their terminology; all humor is semantic, needless to say, so their terminology may be confusing). They also distinguish between

126 

Salvatore Attardo

areas involved in the processing of the semantic and phonological material of the texts (for example, puns activate Broca’s area) and the “affective” components of humor (i.e., the perception of funniness). Derks et al. (1997) show that a “negative-going cortical activity at 400 milliseconds” (N400) is associated with what humor theory has described as the incongruity of humor. Derks et al. describe the N400 as “occurring when categorization, usually semantic, is relatively unsuccessful and a search is initiated for better alternatives” (287). Coulson and Kutas (1998, 2001), Coulson (2001) also find evidence for the N400 response, but also for the second phase of the joke processing process, i.e., the resolution of the incongruity (i.e., the activation of a new frame/script). Other studies of neural activity that are consistent with the incongruity/resolution include Ozawa et al. (2000), Iwase et al. (2002), Mobbs et al. (2003), and Moran et al. (2004). There exists considerable (highly technical) discussion of the lateralization of humor processing, which seems to show that the right hemisphere of the brain is crucial to humor processing. Derks et al (1997), Coulson and Kutas (1998, 2001), Goel and Dolan (2001), Coulson and Williams (2005), and Coulson and Wu (2005) all show that this approach may be in need of some revision. There exists some literature on the neuro-anatomy of laughter, which is outside the scope of this discussion, but see Vaid and Kobler (2000). Overall it is fair to say that the studies in the neurology and anatomy of humor are supporting the cognitive (incongruity/resolution) theories of humor. In fact, the Coulson and Kutas results can be interpreted as directly supporting the SSTH, since they show psychological evidence of script switching (a.k.a., frame shifting). More generally, all the available evidence on humor processing points at a two-stage processing model, since jokes require systematically longer processing times (Giora 2003). A good synthesis of the neuropsychology of humor and irony can be found in Cutica (2007). Translation of humor The translation of humor has long been a topic of interest given its difficult and at times borderline impossible nature. It is widely seen as a challenge for the translator. Yet, it is performed on a daily basis, for example in the dubbing of films and sitcoms. Overall, the research in this domain has highlighted numerous strategies for dealing with the special challenges of the translation of humor. These range from pragmatic translation (i.e., respecting the perlo-

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

127

cutionary goal of humor, but abandoning the sense of the original text), to simply ignoring the humor and perhaps replacing it with another joke, even elsewhere in the text. Since Laurian and Nilsen (1989), several collections of essays have appeared: Delabastita (1996, 1997), Laurian and Szende (2001), Vandaele (2002; see also Vandaele 1999) and a  special issue of HUMOR edited by Delia Chiaro in 2005. I will not address in any detail the topic of the translation of humor, since it is dealt with in Chiaro (this volume). To her bibliographic review we can also add a  little undiscovered gem, Jaskanen (1999) which does an excellent job of analyzing two Finnish translations of an American movie and has much to say about the theory of humor translation (see also Jaskanen 2001). Attardo (2002c) presents an application of the GTVH to the theory of translation of jokes. Antonopoulou (2002; 2004) applies this approach to the translation of Raymond Chandler and so does Koponen (2004), which focuses on comics. Dore (2002) is focused on dubbing. The topics of dubbing and subtitling are very prominent in European humor research, see Bucaria (2007) and references therein. Humor and language learning In Attardo (1994: 211–213), I reviewed some applications of humor to language learning, especially in the ESL situation. Recently, Cook (2000) has presented the first book length treatment of language play and language learning/teaching. In it, he discusses briefly humorous language play (70–84). Despite discussing Raskin’s SSTH, Cook seems to be unaware of the existence of a considerable body of research in the field, as is Crystal (1998) who also deals with language play, but not with the learning aspect in any detail. Deneire (1995) and Schmitz (2002) are focused on language teaching and humor. There exists a veritable cottage industry of advice books/articles on how (and why) to use humor in the classroom. Very few controlled studies have shown that humor improves learning, although it seems that some kinds of humor improve the perception of the teacher. A comprehensive study of the use of humor in the language classroom has yet to be produced (but see Nelms 2001). Vaid (2000) is an interesting study of the interpretation of humor in bilinguals. Morain (1991) describes a study contrasting ESL students’ and American students’ ratings of New Yorker’s cartoons and underscores the necessity to possess a given cultural script to be able to understand the humor, let alone appreciate it. Lucas (2005) shows that focusing on form improves L2 students’ comprehension of puns. Recently, significant work on

128 

Salvatore Attardo

non-native speakers’ use and adaptation to humor, especially in relation to native speakers, has appeared: Davies (2003), Poveda (2005), and Bell (2005; 2006; 2007a, 2007b, 2007c). New approaches to the linguistics of humor In some cases, new ideas from areas in linguistics that have not traditionally contributed to humor research have appeared. For example, in Attardo (1997) I survey two psycholinguistic approaches that focus on saliency and novelty of information. Giora’s work has been focused more on the psycholinguistics of irony (see above), but she has also considered the working of humor. Giora (1991) presents an analysis of jokes as texts that violate the “graded informativeness” requirement (i.e., the fact that texts will introduce less informative material first and increasingly more informative material later, a concept related to the theme/rheme approach of the Prague school). Thus jokes are texts that far from introducing gradually more informative elements, end with a markedly informative element. The positive aspect of this approach is that it captures the surprise element of humor. Giora (2003) addresses these issues, as well as the processing of irony. Weiner and De Palma, in a number of papers (e.g., Weiner 1997), have presented a similar approach, in part based on the SSTH and enriched with cognitive linguistics ideas such as prototypicality and salience. In this model, the switch to the second script involves also a switch from a salient, prototypical script, to a less salient script, in the given context. Cognitive linguistics and humor Cognitive linguistics has increasingly been a significant force in the study of language. It has started to generate some studies relevant to humor research. Panels on humor were held at major cognitive linguistics conference, e.g., at ICLC in 2003 (Logroño) and in 2007 (Krakow). Blending, a recent development of cognitive linguistics (see Coulson and Oakley 2001), has been used to analyze humor (Coulson 1996, 2001, in press). It is clear that blending, i.e., the creation of a new “mental space” (domain, idea) out of existing, and not necessarily related, other mental spaces, can account for some aspects of some types of humor (insofar as it corresponds to the script overlapping aspect of the SSTH). However, it is not clear that it can provide a general account of

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

129

humor. An interesting issue, which has yet to be explored, is how close blends and the kind of mappings used in Attardo et al. (2002) are. Hamrick (2007) presents an interesting analysis which argues convincingly that blends are neither necessary nor sufficient for humor, but that they can, along with other kinds of construals often mentioned in cognitive linguistic accounts of humor, be treated as a kind of logical mechanism. Significant pieces in the CL accounts of humor are the special issue of HUMOR edited in 2006 by Brône, Feyaerts and Veale and Brône’s dissertation (2007). Some of the potential of cognitive linguistic approaches seems to have been wasted on polemical attacks to previous theories (chiefly the GTVH). For a reaction, Attardo (2006a). The connection between cognitive approaches and stylistics has been explored in Antonopoulou (2004), Attardo (2002b), Antonopoulou and Nikiforidou (Forth), and Triezenberg (2004). Veale (2004) is an attack against the notion of incongruity. Other approaches are more conciliatory and compare cognitive approaches and the GTVH (Howell 2007; Hamrick 2007). Attardo has pointedly claimed that the GTVH is a cognitive theory of humor (2002b). Krikmann (2004), which may well be the first monograph on the GTVH, has a discussion of some of the issues (a partial English summary of the original Estonian text is available). Recent work by Attardo on humorous metaphors (forthc. b) is a blend of CL, GTVH, and neo-Gricean pragmatic methodologies. A forthcoming volume (Brône et al. forth.) will likely be a significant contribution. Relevance Theoretic accounts of humor Relevance Theory (RT, Sperber and Wilson 1986) has produced some interesting work on humor. RT does not seem prima facie to lend itself to an analysis of humor, since the principle of relevance is inviolable (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 162). While Sperber and Wilson do not address directly humor, they treat metaphors (which Gricean pragmatics treats as flouts of the CP) without assuming a violation of the principle of relevance, in accordance to the inviolability principle. Since most analyses of humor see it as a violation of cooperation, this presents a prima facie difficulty in treating humor in RT terms. Early relevance theoretic works were replete with hasty generalizations and factual errors (see a  review in Attardo 1996). Recent work by Curcò (1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1998, 2000) is much more carefully hedged and calls attention to the fact that in its present state it is not meant to account for all humorous utterances. Curcò develops a  two-stage (incongruity-resolution)

130 

Salvatore Attardo

model formulated in RT terms. In her terminology, the hearer entertains a “key assumption” (essentially a  proposition consistent with the first interpretation of the text) and subsequently a “target assumption” (a proposition consistent with the second interpretation of the text). The target assumption is “weakly manifest,” i.e., accessible but not activated by the hearer. Curcò’s original idea is that by causing the shift from one assumption to the other “the speaker is implicitly expressing his attitude of disengagement from the target assumption” (1996b: 61). Probably the most elaborate work on humor within RT is Yus Ramos’s (1995a, 1995b, 1995–1996, 1997, 1998a, 1998b, 2000). Yus Ramos’s theory is also an incongruity-resolution model, which acknowledges the non-cooperative aspect of humor. He distinguishes between a manifest and a covert assumption, the latter being revealed by the punch line. Yus Ramos notes that the violations of cooperation do not happen randomly: he finds a  correlation between social status and (non-necessarily humorous) maxim violation: for example, politeness is violated systematically by “proletarian” characters (Yus Ramos 1995a: 121–126; 1995b: 71–83). Let us note, finally, that, as one would expect, all RT accounts place more emphasis on the process of interpretation than on the text itself. It is too early to pass judgement on the contribution of relevance theoretic approaches to humor research (see Yus Ramos 2003 for a survey and critical assessments). Also worth mentioning, Muschard (1999), Galiñanes (2000) and Ruiz Moneva (2001). It is fair to note, however, that these approaches have failed to attract the attention of humor researchers. Perspectives In the final short chapter of Attardo (1994), I foolishly enough made some predictions about the directions in which I saw humor research in linguistics orienting itself. Given the success rate of that little guessing game, one would think that I would refrain from making a greater fool of myself. But, nonetheless, here goes. Where is the linguistics of humor headed? Recently, several publications have begun exploring new and shockingly under-examined domains. It seems desirable, if not necessarily likely, that this

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

131

trend continue. Among these diverse sources we can quote Gajda and Brzozowska (eds.) (2000) which presents a  vast collection primarily on Slavic humor, the special issue of Stylistika on style and humor, edited by Gajda in 2001, and Brzozowska (2000; 2001) which presents a  cross-cultural comparison of Polish and English jokes. Equally important, and on an equally neglected area, is Davis (ed.) (2006), on Japanese humor. A few articles in HUMOR have addressed cross-cultural and comparative aspects of humor (e.g., Al-Khatib 1999) see also issue 20: 3 (2007) of HUMOR. We can expect culture- or language-specific research to continue, see for example Defays and Rosier (1999) and Madini (2002) for French, where a  society for the study of humor (CORHUM) holds conferences and publishes a journal, Humoresques, or Gulotta et al. (2001) and Banfi (ed.) (1995), for Italian, Karasik and Sliskin (2003) for Russian, the just mentoned Gajda (2001) and Gajda and Brzozowska (2002) for Slavic scholarship, Galiñanes and Figuerroa (2002) for Spanish, or the German research reviewed in Müller (2003a, 2003b, 2003c). What is missing is a serious effort to review systematically the research in each tradition, let alone an attempt to integrate it. It seems possible that the computational and formal approaches to humor will yield some solid results, if the trend of the most recent publication continues. Similarly, it is fairly easy to predict that that “longer texts” issue will not rest. I  expect that the work I  have done with Corduas on the distribution of humor will have some impact. The publication of Chlopicki’s new book (his doctoral dissertation at the Jagiellonian university) will inevitably mean a significant step forward (see also Chlopicki 1995). The same holds for Ermida (2002). The proceedings of the Poetics and Linguistics Association conference held in Budapest in 2001 (Csàbi and Zerkowitz , eds. 2003) also contain a number of short articles by several European scholars that are pertinent: besides my own summary of the GTVH, we find contributions by Andor (2003), Chlopicki (2003), Chornovol-Tkachenko (2003), Muller (2003c) and Skowron (2003). A steady number of theses and dissertations utilize the GTVH. Among the many, Gruchala (2005) merits mention, for particularly insightful discussion. The discourse analysis of humor is likely to continue being a very active field. It remains to be seen if the field will evolve in what I see as a positive direction, i.e., attempt a linkage with theoretically-based work and on quantitative grounds, or if it will follow dead-end avenues such as the “laughable” approach. Another area in which progress seems inevitable is irony and its connection with humor. Several important papers have appeared recently, as we saw,

132 

Salvatore Attardo

and there is a large (by humor research standards) group of researchers who are actively publishing in this area. It is also likely that the neurolinguistics of humor will continue to receive some attention, but probably predominantly from outside of the humor research domain, per se. Perhaps some of the recent work on puns will revitalize that field. The sociolinguistics of humor is getting some interest. Issues such as gender and humor are being investigated, especially significantly from within quantitative models (corpus-based work). Other issues such as the connection between class and humor have received much less attention. Perhaps a good note to close on is why it is so hard to make predictions: twenty years ago the field was much smaller and less active. It is wonderful to have to deal with an embarrassment of riches. Note The author would like to thank Victor Raskin, Jen Hay, and Francisco Yus who provided him with extensive feedback on a version of this paper. Many other colleagues helped by sending me their papers, clarifying issues, and being generally supportive. I cannot thank them all by name, but my gratitude for their help and support is undiminished. Needless to say, the opinions expressed in the article are only mine.

References Abrahams, R. 1962 Playing the dozens. Journal of American Folklore 75: 209–220. 1976 Talking Black. Rowley, MA: Newbury House Publishers. Al-Khatib, Mahmoud A. 1999 Joke-telling in Jordanian society: A  sociolinguistic perspective. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 12 (3): 261–288. Andor, Jozsef 2003 On the cohesion and coherence of animal jokes: a frame-semantic analysis of narrative structure. In: Csábi and Zerkowitz (eds.) 90–101. Andries, Lise (ed.) 2000 Le rire. Special issue of Dix-Huitième Siècle 32: 7–320. Antonopoulou, Eleni 2002 A  cognitive approach to literary humour devices: Translating Raymond Chandler. In: Vandaele (ed.) (2002) 235–257. 2004 Humor theory and translation research: proper names in humorous discourse. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 17 (3): 219–255.

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

133

Antonopoulou, Eleni, and Kiki Nikiforidou Forthc. Deconstructing verbal humour with Construction Grammar. In: Geert Brône and Jeroen Vandaele (eds.), Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains and Gaps. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter Antonopoulou, Eleni, and Maria Sifianou 2004 Conversational dynamics of humour: the telephone game in Greek. Journal of Pragmatics 35 (5): 741–769. Archakis, Argiris, and Villy Tsakona 2005 Analyzing conversational data in GTVH terms: A new approach to the issue of identity construction via humor. Humor. International Journal of Humor Research 18 (1): 41–68. Asimakoulas, Dimitris, and Jeroen Vandaele 2002 Review of Humor Research Series. In: Vandaele (ed.) 2002: 424–441. Attardo, Salvatore 1990 The violation of Grice’s maxims in jokes. In: Kira Hall et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the 16th Berkeley Linguistics Society conference. 355–362. 1993 Violation of conversational maxims and cooperation: The case of jokes. Journal of pragmatics 19 (1): 537–558. 1994 Linguistic Theories of Humor. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1996 Humor. In: Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman, and Jan Blommaert (eds.), Handbook of pragmatics, 1–18. 2nd ed. 2005. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 1997 The semantic foundations of cognitive theories of humor. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 10 (4): 395–420. 2000a Irony as relevant inappropriateness. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 793–826. 2000b Irony markers and functions: Towards a goal-oriented theory of irony and its processing. Rask 12: 3–20. 2001a Humorous Texts. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 2001b On the pragmatic nature of irony and its rhetorical aspects. In: Pragmatics in 2000: Selected papers from the 7th International Pragmatics Conference, Vol. 2, 52–66. Edited by Enikö Németh. Antwerp: International Pragmatics Association. 2002a Humor and irony in interaction: From mode adoption to failure of detection. In: Luigi Anolli, Rita Ciceri, and Giuseppe Riva (eds), Say not to Say: New perspectives on miscommunication, 159–179.Amsterdam: IOS Press. 2002b Cognitive stylistics of humorous texts. In: Semino and Culpeper (eds.), 231–250.

134 

Salvatore Attardo

Attardo, Salvatore 2002c Translation and humor: A GTVH-based approach. In: Vandaele (ed.), 2002. 2005 Review of Glenn (2003) HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 18 (4): 422–429. 2006a Cognitive linguistics and humor. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 19 (3): 341–362. 2006b Review of Ritchie (2004) Pragmatics and Cognition 14 (3): 585–​ 589. 2008 Semantics and pragmatics of humor. Blackwell Language and Linguistics Compass. Forthc. a Salience of incongruities in humorous texts and their resolution. In: Proceeding sof the IALS conference. Edited by Grzegorz Szpila and Elzbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska. Oxford University Press. Forthc. b Humorous Metaphors. In: Geert Brône, Kurt Feyaerts, and Tony Veale (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics Meets Humor Research: Current Trends and New Developments. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Forth. Attardo, Salvatore (ed.) 2003 The Pragmatics of Humor. Special issue of Journal of Pragmatics 35 (9): 1287–1449. Attardo, Salvatore, and Victor Raskin 1991 Script theory revis(it)ed: Joke similarity and joke representation model. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research. 4 (3/4): 293–347. Attardo, Salvatore, Christian F. Hempelmann, and Sara Di Maio 2002 Script oppositions and logical mechanisms: Modeling incongruities and their resolutions. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 15 (1): 1–44. Attardo, Salvatore, Jodi Eisterhold, Jennifer Hay, and Isabella Poggi 2003 Multimodal markers of irony and sarcasm. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 16 (2): 243–260. Attardo, Salvatore, D. H. Attardo, P. Baltes, and M. J. Petray 1994 The linear organization of jokes: Analysis of two thousand texts. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 7 (1): 27–54. Aubouin, Elie 1948 Technique et psychologie du comique. Marseilles: OFEP. Banfi, Emanuele (ed.). 1995 Sei lezioni sul linguaggio comico. Trento: Università degli studi. Basso, Keith H. 1979 Portraits of “the Whiteman.” Linguistic Play and Cultural Symbols Among the Western Apache. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

135

Baym, Nancy 1995 The performance of humor in Computer-Mediated Communication. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 1 (2): http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol1/issue2/baym.html. Beeman, William O. 1981a Why do they laugh? An interactional approach to humor in traditional Iranian improvisatory Theatre. Journal of American Folklore 94 (374): 506–526. 1981b A full arena: The development and meaning of popular performance traditions in Iran. In: Michael E. Bonine and Nikki R. Keddie (eds.), Modern Iran: The Dialectics of Continuity and Change, 361–381.Albany: State University of New York Press. 2000 Humor. In: “Linguistic Lexicon for the Millenium,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 9 (1/2): 103–106. Repr. in Alessandro Duranti (ed.), Key Terms in Language and Culture, 2001, 98–101. New York: Blackwell. Bell, Nancy 2005 Exploring L2 language play as an aid to SLL: A case study of humour in NS-NNS interaction. Applied Linguistics, 26 (2): 192–218. 2006 Interactional adjustments in humorous intercultural communication. Intercultural Pragmatics 3 (1): 1–28. 2007a Safe territory? Bilingual women’s humorous narratives. Research on Language and Social Interaction 40 (2/3): 199–225. 2007b How native and non-native English speakers adapt to humor in intercultural interaction. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 20 (1): 27–48. 2007c Humor comprehension: Lessons learned from cross-cultural interaction. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 20 (4): 367–387. Billig, Michael 2005 Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour. London: Sage. Binsted, Kim, and Graeme Ritchie 1994 An implemented model of punning riddles. In: Proceedings of the Twelfth National conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-94), Seattle, WA. 1997 Computational rules for generating punning riddles. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 10 (1): 25–76. 2001 Towards a  model of story puns. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 14 (3): 275–292. Binsted, Kim, and Osamu Takizawa 1998 BOKE: A Japanese punning riddle generator. Journal of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence 13 (6): 920–927.

136 

Salvatore Attardo

Binsted, Kim, Benjamin Bergen, Seana Coulson, Anton Nijholt, Oliviero Stock, Carlo Strapparava, Graeme Ritchie, Ruli Manurung, Helen Pain, Annalu Waller, and Dave O’Mara, 2006 Computational humor, IEEE Intelligent Systems 21 (2): 59–69. Binsted, Kim, H. Pain, and G. Ritchie 1997 Children’s evaluation of computer-generated punning riddles. Pragmatics and Cognition 5 (2): 309–358. Boden, Margaret A. 1998 Creativity and artificial intelligence. Artificial Intelligence 103: 347–356. Bouché, Thérèse, and Hélène Charpentier (eds.) 1990 Le rire au moyen age dans la litterature et dans les arts: Actes du colloque international des 17, 18, et 19 novembre 1988. Bordeaux: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux. Branner, Rebecca 2003 Scherzkommunikation unter Mädchen. Frankfurt: Lang. Bremmer, Jan, and Herman Roodenburg 1997 A Cultural History of Humour. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brône, Geert 2007 Bedeutungskonstitution in Verbalem Humor: Ein kognitiv-linguisticher und diskursematischer Ansatz. Ph.D. dissertation, Catholic University of Leuven. Brône, Geert, Kurt Feyaerts, and Tony Veale (eds.) Forthc. Cognitive Linguistics meets Humor Research: Current trends and new developments. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Bryant, Gregory A., and Jean E. Fox Tree 2005 Is there an Ironic Tone of Voice? Language and Speech. 48 257–277, Brzozowska, Dorota 2000 O dowcipach polskich i  angielskich. Opole: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego. 2001 British and Polish celebrity jokes. Stylistika X: 219–226. Bucaria, Chiara, 2004 Lexical and syntactic ambiguity as a  source of humor: The case of newspaper headlines. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 17 (3): 279–309. 2007 Top 10 signs your humour has been subtitled: The case of The Late Show with David Letterman. In: Diana Popa and Salvatore Attardo (eds.) New Approaches to the Linguistics of Humor, 72–87. Galati: Editura Academica. Buscaldi, Davide, and Paolo Rosso 2007 Some experiments in humour recognition using the Italian Wiki­quote. In: Francesco Masulli, Sushimita Mitra, and Gabriella Pasi (eds), Ap-

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

137

plications of Fuzzy Sets Theory: 7th International Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Applications, WILF 2007, 464–468. Camogli, July 7–10, 2007. Buttny, Richard 2001 Therapeutic humor in retelling the clients’ tellings. Text 21 (3): 303–​ 326. Carrell, Amy 1997 Joke competence and humor competence, HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 10 (2): 173–185. Ceccarelli, Fabio 1988 Sorriso e riso. Saggio di antropologia biosociale. Turin: Einaudi. Chafe, Wallace L. 1987 Humor as a disabling mechanism. American Behavioral Scientist 30 (1): 16–25. 2001 Laughing while talking. In: Deborah Tannen and James E. Alatis (eds.), Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics 2001. Linguistics, Language and the Real World: Discourse and Beyond. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. 36–49. 2007 The Importance of Not Being Earnest: The Feeling Behind Laughter and Humor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Chlopicki, Wladysław 1987 An application of the script theory of semantics to the analysis of selected Polish humorous short stories. M.A. thesis, Purdue University. 1995 O humorze powaznie. Krakow: Polska Akademia Nauk. 1997 An approach to the analysis of verbal humor in short stories. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 10 (3): 333–347. 2001 Humorous and non-humorous stories: Are there differences in framebased reception? Stylistika X: 59–78. 2003 Pragmatic analysis of humour in jokes and short stories. In: Csábi and Zerkowitz (eds.), 102–113. Chornovol-Tkachenko, Olga Olexandrivna 2003 The British literary humour in the 15th–19th centuries from a linguocultural perspective. In: Csábi and Zerkowitz (eds.), 114–118. Colston, Herbert 2000 “Dewey defeats Truman”: Interpreting ironic restatement, Journal of Language and Social Psychology 19 (1): 46–65. 2002 Contrast and assimilation in verbal irony, Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2): 111–142. Colston, Herbert, and J. O’Brien, 2000 Contrast and pragmatics in figurative language: Anything understatement can do, irony can do better, Journal of Pragmatics 32 (11): 1557–​ 1583.

138 

Salvatore Attardo

Cook, Guy 2000

Language Play, Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Corduas, Marcella, Allyson Eggleston, and Salvatore Attardo Forthc. The distribution of humour in literary texts is not random: A statistical analysis. Language and Literature. Coulson, Seana 1996 The Menendez brothers virus: Blended spaces and internet humor. In: Adele Goldberg (ed.), Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language, 67–81. Palo Alto, CA: CSLI. 2001 Semantic Leaps. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005 What’s so funny? Cognitive semantics and jokes. Cognitive Psychopathology/Psicopatologia cognitiva 2 (3): 67–78. Coulson, Seana, and T. Oakley 2001 Blending basics. Cognitive Linguistics 11 (3/4). Coulson, Seana, and M. Kutas 1998 Frame-shifting and sentential integration. UCSD Cognitive Science Technical Report. 2001 Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders. Neuroscience Letters 316: 71–74. Coulson, Seana, and Ying Choon Wu 2005 Right hemisphere activation of joke-related information: An eventrelated brain potential study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 173: 494–506. Coulson, Seana, and Robert F. Williams 2005 Hemispheric asymmetries and joke comprehension. Neuropsychologica 43: 128–141. Crawford, Mary 1989 Humor in conversational contexts: beyond biases in the study of gender and humor. In: R. K. Hunger (ed.), Representations: Social Constructions of Gender, 155–166. Amityville, NY: Baywood. 1995 Talking Difference: On Gender and Language. London: Sage. 2003 Gender and humor in social context. Journal of Pragmatics 35: 1413–1430. Crystal, David 1998 Language Play. London: Penguin. Csábi, Szilvia, and Judit Zerkowitz (eds.) 2003 Textual Secrets: The Message of the Medium. Proceedings of the 21st PALA Conference, April 12–15, 2001. Budapest: School of English and American Studies. Eötvös Lorànd University. Culpeper, Jonathan 2001 Language and Characterization: People in Plays and Other Texts. London: Longman.

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

139

Curcò, Carmen 1995 Some observations on the pragmatics of humorous interpretations: A relevance theoretic approach. UCL Working papers in Linguistics 7: 27–47. 1996a The implicit expression of attitudes, mutual manifestness, and verbal humor. UCL Working papers in Linguistics 8: 89–99. 1996b Relevance theory and humorous interpretations. In: Hulstijn and Nijholt (eds.), 53–68. 1998 Indirect echoes and verbal humour. In: Villy Rouchota and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), Current Issues in Relevance Theory, 305–326. (Pragmatics and Beyond 58.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 2000 Irony, negation, echo and metarepresentation. Lingua 100 (4): 257–​280. Cutica, Ilaria 2007 The neuropsychology of irony and verbal humor: patterns of impairment in different types of cerebral damage. In: Popa and Attardo (eds.), 111–139. Darwin, Charles R. 1872 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: John Murray. Davies, Catherine Evans 1984 Joint joking: Improvisational humorous episodes in conversation. In: Claudia Brugman, Monica Macaulay, Amy Dahlstrom, Michele Emanatian, Birch Moonwomon, and O’Connor (eds.), Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 360–371. Berkeley: University of California. 2003 How English-learners joke with native speakers: An interactional socioliguistic perspective on humor as collaborative discourse across cultures. Journal of Pragmatics 35: 1361–1385. Davis, Jessica Milner 2006 Understanding Humor in Japan. Detroit, MI. Wayne State University Press. Defays, Jean-Marc, and Laurence Rosier (eds.) 1999 Approches du discours comique. Liège: Mardaga. Delabastita, Dirk (ed.) 1996 Wordplay and Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome. 1997 Traductio: Essays on Punning and Translation. Manchester/Namur: St. Jerome Pub./Presses Universitaires de Namur. Deneire, Marc 1995 Humor and foreign language teaching. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 8 (3): 285–298. Derks, Peter, Lynn S. Gillikin, Debbie S. Bartholome-Rull, and Edward H. Bogart 1997 Laughter and electroencephalographic activity. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 10 (3): 285–300.

140 

Salvatore Attardo

Descartes, René 1649 Traité des passions de l’âme. Desclos, Marie-Laurence (ed.). 2000 Le rire des Grecs: Anthropologie du rire en Grèce ancienne. Grenoble: Jerôme Millon. Dews, S., and E. Winner 1999 Obligatory processing of literal and non-literal meanings in verbal irony, Journal of Pragmatics 31 (12): 1579–1599. Donaldson Toby, and Cameron Shelley 1997 HARPO. International Conference on Humor and Laughter, July 8–13, 1997. Edmond, OK. Dore, Margherita 2002 The feasibility of dubbing the verbal function of humour: A contrastive analysis of the English original and the Italian dubbed version of The Simpsons, First Season. MA thesis, University of Manchester. Downe, Pamela J. 1999 Laughing when it hurts: Humor and violence in the lives of Costa Rican prostitutes. Women’s Studies International Forum 22 (1): 63–78. Drew, Paul 1987 Po-faced receipts of teases. Linguistics 25: 219–253. Duckworth, George E. 1952 The Nature of Roman Comedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (2nd ed., Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.) Eggins, Suzanne, and Diana Slade 1997 Analyzing Casual Conversation. London: Cassell. Eisterhold, Jodi, Salvatore Attardo, and Diana Boxer 2006 Reactions to irony in discourse: Evidence for the least disruption principle. Journal of Pragmatics 38 (8): 1239–1256. Ellis, Yvette 2002 Identifying a French-specific laughter particle. Journal of French Language Studies 12: 263–277. Ermida, Isabel 2002 Humour, language and narrative: Towards a discourse analysis of literary comedy. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minho, Portugal. Everts, Elisa 2003 Identifying a particular family humor style: A sociolinguistic discourse analysis. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 16 (4): 369–412. Fillmore, Charles 1985 Frames and the semantics of understanding. In: V. Raskin (ed.), Roundtable on script/frame semantics. Quaderni di Semantica 6 (2): 222–254.

A primer for the linguistics of humor  1994

141

Humor in academic discourse. In: A. D. Grimshaw (ed.), What’s Going On Here? Complementary Studies of Professional Talk, 271–310. New York: Academic Press. Freud, Sigmund 1905 Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten. Leipzig: Deuticke. Engl. tr. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. New York: Norton, 1960. Fricke, Harald, and Ralph Müller 2000 La “pointe” nell’aforisma. In: G. Cantarutti (ed.), Configurazioni dell’aforisma. Ricerca sulla scrittura aforistica diretta da Corrado Rosso. Vol. 1, 31–45. Bologna: CLUEB. Fry, William F. Jr. 1963 Sweet Madness. Palo Alto, CA: Pacific Books. Gajda, Stanisław (ed.) 2001 Style and Humor. Special issue of Stylistika 10. Gajda, Stanisław, and Dorota Brzozowska (eds.) 2000 Swiąt Humoru. Opole: University of Opole. Galiñanes, Cristina Larkin 2000 Relevance theory, humour and the narrative structure of humorous novels. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 13: 95–106. Galiñanes, Cristina Larkin 2005 Funny Fiction: Or, jokes and their relation to the humorous novel. Poetics Today 26 (1): 79–111. Galiñanes, Cristina Larkin, and Jorge Figuerroa Dorrego (eds.) 2002 Aspectos lingüísticos e literarios do humor. Special issue of Babel: Aspectos de Filoloxia Inglesa e Alemana. Gasquet-Cyrus, Méderic 2004 Pratiques et représeentations de l’humour verbal. Étude sociolinguistique du cas marseillais. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Aix-Marseille. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra 2000 On the sociolinguistics of popular films: Funny characters, funny voices. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 18: 119–133. Gervais, Matthew, and David Sloan Wilson 2005 The evolution and functions of laughter and humor: A synthetic approach. The Quarterly Review of Biology 80 (4): 395–430. Gibbs, Raymond W. 1994 The Poetics of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000 Irony in talk among friends. Metaphor and Symbol 15: 5–27. Gibbs, Raymond W., and Herbert L. Colston (eds.) 2007 Irony in Language and Thought. New York:Lawrence Earlbaum. Giles, H., and Oxford, G. S., 1970 Towards a multidimensional theory of laughter causation and its social implications. Bulletin of British Psychology Society 23: 97–105.

142 

Salvatore Attardo

Giora, Rachel 1991 On the cognitive aspects of the joke. Journal of Pragmatics 16 (5): 465–485. 1997 Understanding figurative and literal language: The graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics 7: 183–206. 1998 Irony. In: J. Vershueren, J.-O. Östman, J. Blommaert, and C. Bulcaen. (eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics, 1–21. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 2003 On Our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giora, R., and O. Fein 1999 Irony: Context and salience, Metaphor and Symbol 14: 241–257. Glenn, Phillip J. 1989 Initiating shared laughter in multi-party conversations. Western Journal of Speech Communication 53: 127–149. Glenn, Phillip J. 1991/1992 Current speaker initiation of two-party shared laughter. Research on Language and Social Interaction 25: 139–162. 1995 Laughing at and laughing with: Negotiating participant alignments through conversational laughter. In: P. ten Have and G. Psathas (eds.), Situated Order: Studies in the Social Organization of Talk and Embodied Activities, 43–56. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. 2003 Laughter in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goddard, Cliff 2006 “Lift your game Martina!”: Deadpan jocular irony and the ethnopragmatics of Australian English. In: Cliff Goddard (ed.), Ethnopragmatics: Understanding Discourse in Cultural Context, 65–98. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Goel, Vinod, and Raymond J. Dolan 2001 The functional anatomy of humor. Segregating cognitive and affective components. Nature Neuroscience 4 (3): 237–238. Goldberg, Ken, Theresa Roeder, Dhruv Gupta, and Chris Perkins 2001 Eigentaste: A constant time collaborative filtering algorithm. Information Retrieval 4 (2): 133–151. Grice, H. Paul 1989 Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gruchala, Pawel 2005 The application of the general theory of verbal humor (GTVH) to the analysis of Polish translations of mark Twain’s novels. MA thesis. Jagiellonian University, Krakow. Gruner, Charles R. 1978 Understanding Laughter. Chicago: Nelson Hall. 1997 The Game of Humor. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

143

Guidi, Annarita Forthc. Are pun mechanisms universal? A  comparative analysis across language families. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research. Guiraud, Pierre 1976 Les jeux de mots. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 2nd ed. 1979. Gulotta, Guglielmo, Giovannantonio Forabosco, and Maria Letizia Musu 2001 Il comportamento spiritoso. Scherzare e ridere di sé, degli altri e della vita. Milan/New York: McGraw Hill. Günther, Ulrike K. 2003 What’s in a laugh: Humour, jokes and laughter in the conversational corpus of the BNC. Dissertation, University of Freiburg. Gupta, Dhruv, Mark Digiovanni, Hiro Narita, and Ken Goldberg 1999 Jester 2.0 (poster abstract) Evaluation of an new linear time collaborative filtering algorithm. In: Proceedings on the 22nd annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, 291–292. August 15–19, 1999, Berkeley, CA. Haakana, Markku 2002 Laughter in medical interaction: From quantification to analysis and back. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6 (2): 207–235. Haiman, John 1998 Talk Is Cheap: Sarcasm, Alienation, and the Evolution of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hamrick, Phillip 2007 Notes on some cognitive mechanisms of humor. In: Popa and Attar­do (eds.). Hay, Jennifer 1994 Jocular abuse patterns in mixed-group interaction. Wellington Working Papers in Linguistics 6: 26–55. 1996 No laughing matter: Gender and humour support strategies. Wellington Working Papers in Linguistics 8. 2000 Functions of humor in the conversation of men and women. Journal of Pragmatics 32 (6). 2001 The pragmatics of humor support. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 14 (1): 55–82. Hempelmann, Christian F. 2003 Paronomasic puns: Target recoverability toward automatic generation. Ph.D. dissertation, Purdue University. 2004 Script opposition and logical mechanism in punning. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 17 (4): 381–392. Hill, Carl 1993 The Soul of Wit. Joke Theory from Grimm to Freud. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

144 

Salvatore Attardo

Hofstadter, Douglas, and Liane Gabora 1989 Synopsis of the workshop on humor and cognition. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 2 (4): 417–440. Holcomb, Christopher 1997 A class of clowns: Spontaneous joking in computer-assisted discussions. Computers and Composition 14: 3–18. Holmes, Janet 1998 No joking matter! The functions of humor in the workplace. Proceedings of the Australian Linguistics Society Conference Brisbane University of Queensland. July 1998, http://www.cltr.uq.oz.au:8000/ als98/ Holmes, Janet 2000 Politeness, power and provocation: How humor functions in the workplace. Discourse Studies 2 (2): 159–185. 2006 Sharing a laugh: Pragmatic aspects of humor and gender in the workplace. Journal of Pragmatics 38: 26–50. Holmes, Janet, and Jennifer Hay 1997 Humour as an ethnic boundary marker in New Zealand interaction. Journal of Intercultural Studies 18 (2): 127–151. Holmes, Janet, and Meredith Marra 2002 Over the edge? Subversive humor between colleagues and friends. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 15 (1): 65–87. Holmes, Janet, Meredith Marra, and Louise Burns 2001 Women’s humour in the workplace: A quantitative analysis. Australian Journal of Communication 28 (1): 83–108. Horowitz, Jeannine, and Sophia Menache 1994 L’humour en chaire. Le rire dans l’église médiévale. Genève: Labor et fides. Howell, Tes 2007 Two cognitive approaches to humorous narratives. In: Popa and Attardo (eds.), 55–71. Hulstijn J., and A. Nijholt (eds.) 1996 Automatic Interpretation and Generation of Verbal Humor. Ensche­de: University of Twente. Iwase, Masao, Ouchi, Yasuomi, Okada, Hiroyuki, Yokoyama, Chihiro, Nobezawa, Shuji, Yoshikawa, Etsuji, Tsukada, Hideo, Takeda, Masaki, Yamashita, Ko, Takeda, Masatoshi, Yamaguti, Kouzi, Kuratsune, Hirohiko, Shimizu, Akira, and Watanabe, Yasuyoshi 2002 Neural substrates of human facial expression of human facial expression of pleasant emotion induced by comic films: A PET study. Neuroimage 17 (2): 758–768.

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

145

Jaskanen, Susanna 1999 On the inside track to Loserville, USA: Strategies used in translating humour in two Finnish versions of Reality Bites. Masters thesis, University of Helsinki. 2001 “A fine kettle of fish”: Exploring textual norms in Finnish subtitling. Helsinki English Studies. Jefferson, Gail 1979 A technique for inviting laughter and its subsequent acceptance declination. In: George Psathas (ed.), Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology. New York: Irvington. 79–96. Johnson, Kathy E., and Carolyn B. Mervis 1997 First steps in the emergence of verbal humor: A case study. Infant Behavior and Development 20 (2): 187–196. Joubert, Laurent 1579 Traité du ris. Engl. trans. by Gregory David De Rocher 1980 Treatise on Laughter. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Karasik, V. I., and G. G. Slishkin (eds.) 2003 Axiological Linguistics: Ludic and Comic in Communication. Volgograd: Peremena. (In Russian.) Kawahara, Shigeto, and Kazuko Shinohara 2007 The role of psychoacoustic similarity in Japanese imperfect puns: A corpus study. Under review, Journal of Linguistics. Keim, Inken, and Johannes Schwitalla 1989 Soziale Stile des Miteinander Sprechens: Beobachtungen zu Formen der Konflikt­bearbeitung in zwei Frauengruppen. In: Volker Hinnenkamp and Margret Selting (eds.), Stil und Stilisierung: Arbeiten zur interpretativen Soziolinguistik, 83–125. Tübin­gen: Niemeyer. Kochman, Thomas 1983 The boundary between play and nonplay in black verbal dueling. Language in Society 12: 329–337. Koponen, Maarit 2004 Wordplay in Donald Duck comics and their Finnish translations. Dissertation, University of Helsinki. Kotthoff, Helga 2000 Gender and joking: On the complexities of women’s image politics in humorous narratives. Journal of Pragmatics 32 (1): 55–80. 2003 Responding to irony in different contexts: On cognition in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 35: 1387–1411. 2006 Gender and humor: The state of the art. Journal of Pragmatics 38 (1): 4–25. Kotthoff, Helga (ed.) 1996 Scherzkommunikation. Opladen: Westdeutscher.

146 

Salvatore Attardo

Krikmann, Arvo 2004 Koestler, Raski, Attardo ja teised: Lingvistiliste huumoriteooriate uuemaist arenguist. Tartu: Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum. English summary: http://www.folklore.ee/Folklore/vol33/kriku.pdf Labov, William 1972 Rules for ritual insults. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular, Ch. 8. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Laurian, Anne-Marie, and Don L. F. Nilsen (eds.) 1989 Humour et traduction. Humour and Translation. Special issue of Meta. Journal des Traducteurs. Translator’s Journal. 34 (1). Laurian, Anne-Marie, and Thomas Szende (eds.) 2001 Les mots du rire: comment les traduire? Bern: Peter Lang. Le Goff, Jacques 1997 Laughter in the Middle Ages. In: J. Bremmer and H. Roodenburg (eds.) 40–53. Lemeunier, Thierry 1996 L’usage de l’humour en informatique. Mémoire de stage de DEA communication homme/machine et ingénierie éducative, Université Du Maine, http://www-ic2.univ-lemans.fr/~lemeunie/travaux-dea/stage/ stage.html Lessard, G. M. Levison 1992 Computational Modelling of Linguistic Humour: Tom Swifties. ALLC/ ACH ’92, Oxford (Conference abstracts, 175–178.) 1993 Computational Modelling of Riddling Strategies. ACH/ALLC ’93, Georgetown (Conference abstracts, 120–122.) 1995 Linguistic and Cognitive Underpinnings of Verbal Humour. International Cognitive Linguistics Association Conference, Albuquerque. 1997 Rule-governed wordplay and creativity. Computational Models of Creative Cognition Conference, Dublin. (Full paper in conference proceedings, 11 pp.) Liao, Chao-Chih 2001 Taiwanese Perceptions of Humor: A Sociolinguistic Perspective. Crane Publisher. Lippman, Louis G., and M. L. Dunn 2000 Contextual connections within puns: Effects on perceived humor and memory. Journal of General Psychology 127: 185–197. Lippman, Louis G., and Sarah Tragesser 2005 Puns and near puns in fables. Journal of General Psychology 132 (3): 243–254. Lippman, Louis G., Bennington, K., and Sucharski, I. L. 2002 Contextual connections to puns in Tom Swifties. Journal of General Psychology 129: 202–208.

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

147

Lippman, Louis G., Sucharski, I. L., and Bennington, K. 2001 Contextual connections to puns in fables: Perceived humor. Journal of General Psychology 128: 157–169. Littman, D. C., and J. L. Mey 1991 The nature of irony: Toward a computational model of irony. Journal of Pragmatics 15: 131–151. Lucariello, J. 1994 Situational irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 123: 129–145. Lucas, Teresa 2005 Language awareness and comprehension through puns among ESL learners. Language awareness 14 (4): 221–238. Madini, Mongi, (ed.) 2002 2000 ans de rire. Colloque International GRELIS-LASELDI/ CORHUM, Besançon 29–30 Juin, 1er Juillet 2000. Besançon: Presses Universitaires Frabc-Comtoises. Malone, Bill C. 2002 Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’. Country Music and the Southern Working Class. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. McDonald, Skye 1992 Differential pragmatic language loss after closed head injury: Ability to comprehend conversational implicature. Applied Psycholinguistics 13 (3): 295–312. McDonald, Skye, and S. Pearce 1996 Clinical insights into pragmatic theory: Frontal lobe deficits and sarcasm. Brain and Language 53: 81–104. Ménager, Daniel 1995 La renaissance et le rire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Mihalcea, Rada 2007 Multidisciplinary facets of research on humour. In: Francesco Masulli, Sushimita Mitra, and Gabriella Pasi (eds.), Applications of Fuzzy Sets Theory: 7th International Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Applications, 412–421, WILF 2007, Camogli, Italy, July 7–10, 2007. Mihalcea, Rada, and Stephen Pulman 2007 Characterizing humour: An exploration of features in humorous texts. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (CICLing). February 2007. Mexico City: Springer Mihalcea, Rada, and Carlo Strapparava 2005 Making computers laugh: Investigations in automatic humor recognition. In Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Human Language Technology/Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (HLT/EMNLP), Vancouver, October, 2005.

148 

Salvatore Attardo

Mihalcea, Rada, and Carlo Strapparava 2006 Technologies that make you smile: Adding humour to text-based applications. In IEEE Intelligent Systems, 2006. Mindess, Harvey 1971 Laughter and Liberation. Los Angeles: Nash. Minois, Georges 2000 Histoire du rire et de la dérision. Paris: Fayard. Minsky, Martin 1981 A framework for representing knowledge. In J. Haugeland (ed.), Mind Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Repr. in R. J. Brachman and H. J. Levesque (eds.), 1985, Readings in Knowledge Representation, 246–262. Palo Alto, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.) Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia L. 1972 Signifying and marking: Two Afro-American speech acts. In: John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes (eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics. New York: Blackwell, 161–179. Mobbs, Dean, Michael D. Greicius, Eiman Abdel-Azim, Vinod Menon, and Allan L. Reiss 2003 Humor modulates the mesolimbic reward centers. Neuron 40: 1041–​ 1048. Morain, G. G. 1991 X-raying the international funny bone: A study exploring differences in the perception of humor across cultures. In: Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics, 397–408. Moran, Joseph M., Gagan S. Wig, Reginald B. Adams, Jr. , Petr Janata, and William M. Kelley 2004 Neural correlates of humor detection and appreciation. Neuroimage 21 (3): 1055–1060. Morgan, Marcyliena 1998 More than a mood or an attitude: Discourse and verbal genres in African American culture. In: S. Mufwene et al. (eds.), African American English, 251–281. New York: Routledge. Morkes, John, Hadyn K. Kernal, and Clifford Nass 1999 Effects of humor in task-oriented human-computer interaction and computer-mediated communication: A  direct test of SRCT theory. Human-Computer Interaction 14: 395–435. Mullany, Louise 2004 Gender, politeness and institutional power roles: Humour as a tactic to gain compliance in workplace business meetings. Multilingua 23: 13–37. Müller, Ralph 2002 Pointe. In: G.  Ueding (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Vol. 6. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

149

Müller, Ralph 2003a The Pointe in German research. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 16 (2): 225–242. 2003b Theorie der Pointe. Paderborn: Mentis. 2003c The anecdote – More than punch lines? In Szilvia Csábi and Judit Zerkowitz (eds.), 119–123. Muschard, Jutta 1999 Jokes and their relation to relevance and cognition, or Can relevance theory account for the appreciation of jokes? Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 47 (1): 12–23. Nardini, Gloria 2000 When husbands die: Joke telling in an Italian ladies’ club in Chicago. Pragmatics 10 (1): 87–97. Nelms, Jodi 2001 A descriptive analysis of the uses and functions of sarcasm in the classroom discourse of higher education. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida. Nelson, T. G. A. 1990 Comedy: The Theory of Comedy in Literature, Drama, and Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nijholt, Anton 2007 Conversational agents and the construction of humorous acts. In: Toyo­ aki Nishida (ed.), Conversational Informatics: An Engineering Approach, 21–48. Wiley: Chichester. Norrick, Neal R. 1993 Conversational joking: Humor in everyday talk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. O’Connor, Daniel C., and Sabine Kowal 2005 Laughter in Bill Clinton’s My Life (2004) interviews. Pragmatics 15 (2/3): 275–299. O’Connell, Daniel C., and Sabine Kowal 2006 Laughter in the film The Third Man. Pragmatics 16 (2/3). Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie 1974 Le comique du discours. Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles. Olson, S. Douglas (ed.). 2007 Broken Laughter: Select Fragments of Greek Comedy.   Oxford:  Oxford University Press. Ozawa, Fukujiro, Kayako Matsuo, Chikako Kato, Toshiharu Nakai, Haruo Isoda, Yasuo Takehara, Tetsuo Moriya, and Harumi Sakahara 2000 The effects of listening comprehension of various genres of literature on response in the linguistic area: An fMRI study. Neuroreport 11 (6): 1141–1143.

150 

Salvatore Attardo

Palmer, Jerry 1987 The Logic of the Absurd. London: British Film Institute. Partington, Alan 2006 The Linguistics of Laughter: A  Corpus-assisted Study of Laughtertalk. London: New York: Routledge. Pepicello, William J., and Robert W. Weisberg 1983 Linguistics and humor. In: Paul E. McGhee and Jeffrey H. Goldstein (eds.), Handbook of Humor Research, 59–83. 2 Vols. New York/Berlin: Springer. Popa, Diana, and Salvatore Attardo (eds.). 2007 New Approaches to the Linguistics of Humor. Galati: Dunarea de Jos University Press. Porcu, Leide 2005 Fishy business: Humor in a  Sardinian fish market. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 18 (4): 69–102. Porteous, Janice 1988 Humor as a process of defense: The evolution of laughing. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 1 (1): 63–80. Poveda, Daniel 2005 Metalinguistic activity, humor and social competence in classroom discourse. Pragmatics  15 (1): 89–108. Priego Valverde, Béatrice 1998 L’humour (noir) dans la conversation: Jeux et enjeux. Revue de Sémantique et Pragmatique 3: 123–144. 2003 L’humour dans la conversation familière: Description et analyse linguistiques. Paris: L’Harmattan. Provine, Robert R. 2000 Laughter: A scientific investigation. New York: Viking. Purdie, Susan 1993 Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rahman, Jacquelyn 2007 An ay for an ah: Language of survival in African American narrative comedy. American Speech 82 (1): 65–96. Raskin, Victor 1985 Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Raskin, Victor, and S. Attardo 1994 Non-literalness and non-bona-fide in language: An approach to formal and computational treatments of humor. Pragmatics and Cognition 2 (1): 31–69. Ritchie, Graeme 1998 Prospects for computational humour. In Proceedings of 7th IEEE In­ter­ national Workshop on Robot and Human Communication (ROMAN-98), 283–291. Takamatsu.

A primer for the linguistics of humor  1999

151

Developing the Incongruity-Resolution Theory. In: Proceedings of AISB Symposium on Creative Language: Stories and Humour, 78–85. Edinburgh, April 1999. 2000 Describing verbally expressed humour. In: Proceedings of AISB Symposium on Creative and Cultural Aspects and Applications of AI and Cognitive Science, 71–78. Birmingham, April 2000. 2001 Current directions in computational humour. Artificial Intelligence Review 16 (2) : 119–135. 2004 The Linguistic Analysis of Jokes. London: Routledge. Rogerson-Revell, Pamela 2007 Humour in business: A double-edged sword. A study of humour and style shifting in intercultural business meetings. Journal of Pragmatics 39 (1): 4–28. Ross, Alison 1998 The Language of Humour. London: Routledge. Ruch, Willibald, Salvatore Attardo, and Victor Raskin 1993 Towards an empirical verification of the General Theory of Verbal Humor. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (2): 123–136. Ruiz Moneva, Angeles 2001 Irony in relevance theory: Recurrent features, critical stances and possible trends. The Atlantic Literary Review 2 (1): 161–189. Rutter, Jason 2000 The stand-up introduction sequence: Comparing comedy compères. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 463–483. Schank, Roger C., and Abelson, Robert 1977 Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding. New York: Wiley. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2001 Getting serious: Joke → serious ‘no.’ Journal of Pragmatics 33 (12): 1947–1955. Schmitz, J. R. 2002 Humor as a pedagogical tool in foreign language and translation courses. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 15 (1) Schwitalla, Johannes 1995 Kommunikative Stilistik zweier sozialer Welten in Mannheim­Vogelstang. Kommunikation in der Stadt. Band 4. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Schwoebel, J., S. Dews, E. Winner, and K. Srinivas 2000 Obligatory processing of the literal meaning of ironic utterances: further evidence. Metaphor and Symbol 15: 47–61. Semino, Elena 1997 Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts. London: Longman.

152 

Salvatore Attardo

Semino, Elena, and Jonathan Culpeper (eds.) 2002 Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Shelley, Cameron 2001 The bicoherence theory of situational irony. Cognitive Science 25 (5): 775–818. Shelley, Cameron, Toby Donaldson, and Kim Parsons 1996 Humorous analogy: Modeling The Devil’s Dictionary. In: J. Hulstijn and A. Nijholt (eds.), 173–187. Simpson, Paul 2000 Satirical humour and cultural context: With a  note on the Curious Case of Father Todd Unctuous. In: T. Bex, M. Burke, and P. Stockwell (eds.), Contextualized Stylistics. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Sjöbergh, Jonas 2006 Vulgarities are fucking funny, or at least make things a little bit funnier. Technical Report TRITA-CSC-TCS 2006: 4, School of Computer Science and Communication, the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. Sjöbergh, Jonas, and Kenji Araki 2007 Recognizing humor without recognizing meaning. In: Francesco Masulli, Sushimita Mitra, and Gabriella Pasi (eds.), Applications of Fuzzy Sets Theory: 7th International Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Applications, WILF 2007, 469–476, Camogli, Italy, July 7–10, 2007. Skowron, Justyna 2003 Inadequacy of literary analyses if humour in Oscar Wilde. In: Csábi and Zerkowitz (eds.), 134–139. Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson 1981 Irony and the use-mention distinction. In: P. Cole (ed.), Radical Pragmatics, 295–318. New York: Academic Press. 1986 Relevance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stock, Oliviero 1996 “Password Swordfish”: Verbal humor in the interface. In: Hulstijn and Nijholt (eds.), 1–8. Republished in HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 2003, 16 (3): 281–295. Stock, Oliviero, Carlo Strapparava, and Anton Nijholt (eds.) 2002 The April Fools’ Day workshop on computational humour. Proceedings Twente Workshop on Language Technology 20. Trento: ITCIRST. Stock, Oliviero, and Carlo Strapparava 2003 HAHAcronym: Humorous Agents for Humorous Acronyms. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 16 (3): 297–​314.

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

153

Streeck, Juergen, 1988 Seniorinnengelächter. In: Helga Kotthoff (ed.), Das Gelächter der Geschlechter. Humor und Macht in Gesprächen von Männern und Frauen, 54–77. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch. Suls, Jerry 1972 A  two-stage model for the appreciation of jokes and cartoons. In: Jeffrey H. Goldstein and Paul E. McGhee (eds.), The Psychology of Humor, 81–100. New York: Academic Press. Tannen, Deborah 1984 Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Taylor, Julia M., and Lawrence Mazlack 2004a Computationally recognizing wordplay in jokes. In Proceedings of CogSci 2004, Chicago. 2004b Humorous word play recognition. International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics Proceedings, 3306–3311. The Hague, October 10–13. 2005 Toward computational recognition of humorous intent. Cognitive Science Conference Proceedings (CogSci 2005), 2166–2171. Stresa, July 2005. Taylor, Julia M., Pavel Klinov, and Lawrence J. Mazlack, 2007 A description logic based approach to computational humor. In Popa and Attardo (eds.), 167–179. Tijus, Charles-Albert, and Francis Moulin 1997 L’assignation de signification etudiée à partir de textes d’histoires drôles. L’année psychologique 97: 33–75. Tinholt, Hans Wim, and Anton Nijholt 2007 Computational humour: Utilizing cross-reference ambiguity for conversational jokes. In: Francesco Masulli, Sushimita Mitra, and Gabriella Pasi (eds.), Applications of Fuzzy Sets Theory: 7th International Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Applications, WILF 2007, 477–483, Camogli, Italy, July 7–10, 2007. Trédé, Monique, and Philippe Hoffmann (eds.). 1998 Le rire des anciens. Paris: Presses de l’École Normale Supérieure. Triezenberg, Katrina 2004 Humor enhancers in the study of humorous literature. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 17 (4): 411–418. Trouvain, Jürgen 2001 Phonetic aspects of “speech-laughs.” Proceedings of the Conference on Orality and Gestuality (ORAGE) 2001, 634–639, Aix-en-Provence. 2003 Segmenting phonetic units in laughter. Proceedings of the15th. International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), 2793–2796. Barcelona.

154 

Salvatore Attardo

Trouvain, Jürgen, and N. Cambell (eds.) 2007 Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Phonetics of Laughter, Saarbrücken. Trouvain, Jürgen, and M. Schröder 2004 How (not) to add laughter to synthetic speech. Proceedings of the Workshop on Affective Dialogue Systems, 229–232, Kloster Irsee. Tsakona, Villy 2003 Jab lines in narrative jokes. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 16 (3): 315–329. Utsumi, Akira 2000 Verbal irony as implicit display of ironic environment: distinguishing ironic utterances from non-irony, Journal of Pragmatics 32 (12): 1777–1806. Vaid, Jyotsna 1999 The evolution of humor: Do those who laugh last? In David H. Rosen and Michael C. Luebbert (eds.), The Evolution of the Psyche, 123–138. Westport, CT/London: Praeger. 2000 New approaches to conceptual representation in bilingual memory: The case for studying humor interpretation. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 3 (1): 28–30. Vaid, Jyotsna 2002 Humor and laughter. In: V. S. Ramachandran (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Human Brain. New York: Elsevier. Vaid, Jyotsna, and James B. Kobler 2000 Laughing matters: Towards a structural and neural account. Brain and Cognition 42 (1): 139–141 Vandaele, Jeroen 1999 Each time we laugh. Translated humour in screen comedy. In J. Vandaele (ed.), Translation and the (Re)Location of Meaning. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminars in Translation Studies 1994–1996, 237–269. Leuven: Cetra. Vandaele, Jeroen (ed.) 2002 Humour and Translation, Special issue of The Translator 8 (2). Veale, Tony 2004 Incongruity in humor: Root cause or epiphenomenon? HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 17 (4): 419–428. Verdon, Jean 2001 Rire au moyen âge. Paris: Perrin. Vettin, Julia, and Dietmar Todt 2004 Laughter in conversation: Features of occurrence and acoustic structure. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 28 (2): 93–115. Viana, Amadeu 2001 Temes difícil, estils còmics: el cas de l’humor mèdic. Discurso y sociedad 3 (3): 117–144.

A primer for the linguistics of humor 

155

Watkins, Mel 1994 On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying: The Underground Tradition of African American Humor that Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor. New York: Simon and Schuster. Watkins, Mel (ed.) 2002 African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books. Weiner, E. Judith 1997 The Incongruity of jokes, riddles and humorous situations. In: Gregory R. Guy, John Baugh, Deborah Schiffrin, and Crawford Feagin (eds.), Towards a social science of language: Papers in honor of William Labov, 139–151. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Williams, Dana A. (ed.). 2007 African American Humor, Irony, and Satire. Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Withalm, Gloria 1997 “How did you find us?” – “We read the script!”: A  special case of self-reference in the movies. In: Winfried Nöth (ed.), Semiotics of the Media, 255–267. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Yokogawa, Toshihiko 2001 Generation of Japanese puns based on similarity of articulation. IFSA World congress and 20th NAFIPS International Conference. Vol. 4, 2259–2264. 2002 Japanese pun analyzer using articulation similarities. Proceedings of FUZZ-IEEE, Vol. 2, 1114–1119. Honolulu. Yus Ramos, Francisco 1995a La significación social de las màximas de Grice: El caso del cómic alternativo inglés. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 30/31: 109–128. 1995b Conversational cooperation in alternative comics. Departamaneto de filología inglesa: Universidad de Alicante. 1995–96 La teoría de la relevancia y la estrategia humorística de la incongruencia-resolución. Pragmalingüística 3/4: 497–508. 1997 La interpretación y la imagen de masas. Instituto de Cultura “Juan Gil-Albert”. Alicante. Yus Ramos, Francisco 1998a Relevance theory and media discourse: A verbal-visual model of communication. Poetics 25: 293–309. 1998b A  decade of relevance theory. Journal of Pragmatics 30 (3): 305–​ 345. 2000 On reaching the intended ironic interpretation. International Journal of Communication 10 (1/2): 27–78. 2003 Humor and the search for relevance. The Pragmatics of Humor, special issue of Journal of Pragmatics 35 (9): 1295–1331.

Undertaking the comparative study of humor Christie Davies

The comparative study of humor involves making systematic comparisons between the humor and in particular the jokes associated with different nations, ethnic and regional groups, religious traditions, social classes, occupations, genders and any other social or cultural entities. I say ‘in particular the jokes’ because jokes are easier to work with than other forms of humor. Jokes are numerous and do not have authors; they are invented by, improved by and circulated among large aggregates and networks of individuals. Jokes are a true spontaneous product of the imaginations of and a good reflection of the tastes of ordinary people. It is for example more revealing to study comparatively the jokes of the Czechs and the Irish than to compare the humor of, say, Jaroslav Hašek (Davies 2000) with that of Oscar Wilde (Attardo 2001), if we wish to gain an insight into the everyday social world of these two peoples. Jokes are also easier to work with because they are simpler, even though their inventors and tellers can display remarkable ingenuity and creativity. Jokes are short, compact units which in most cases can be quickly understood and enjoyed by the broad masses of the workers, peasants and petit-bourgeoisie alike. Indeed it is for this reason that they are scorned by the mopped up, over-educated upper middle class of the Netherlands who see them as not involving the kinds of rarified sensibilities that they feel distinguish their own humor but this finding too is a product of comparative research (Kuipers 2001). Likewise I have deliberately used the vague phrase jokes ‘associated with’ a group. ‘Associated with’ can refer either to the distinctive jokes told within a group or to those told about the group by outsiders. Given the ease with which jokes are transmitted from one group to another, there is often a considerable overlap between the two sets of jokes, which in itself provides interesting research possibilities. However, it is also vital to recognize that many jokes fail to cross social and cultural boundaries even though it would be easy for them to do so and the absence of a genre of jokes in a group under these conditions is an important social fact that calls for an explanation. Comparisons can be made not merely across social boundaries but also over time. It is possible, though often with difficulty, to compare the jokes

158 

Christie Davies

told in the same society at different points in its history. One of the difficulties is that we only have access to past jokes that were written down ( and in some cases published) and these may not be typical of the jokes in oral circulation at the time. Censorship, self censorship and publishers’ fear of controversy and criticism limit the kinds of jokes that get printed. Thus in the late twentieth century many excellent racial and ethnic jokes were in oral circulation in Canada but they did not get into print. We only know about them today because the tellers are still alive and can remember them and because researchers recorded them at the time and indeed are still doing so. The same problem exists in relation to the vast numbers of sexual and scatological jokes that circulated in the Victorian era in Britain and America. They could not be recorded and disseminated other than in small privately published editions or else were written down in diaries or sexual samizdat. Even those who wrote about jokes as part of their scholarly work were constrained in what they could publish. It is striking that even the jokes about sexuality in Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Freud 1960 (1905)) are exceedingly restrained relative to the general run of jokes that must have circulated in male social gatherings in Vienna at the time. Freud, who was so obsessed with sexuality that he even arbitrarily invented sexual fantasies and motives for his patients, was unable to publish the more outrageous jokes of his contemporaries. It was not socially permissible for him to do what his erratic successor Gershon Legman (Legman 1982) was able to do in more permissive times. Likewise Alan Dundes [1984] would have been quite unable to publish his brilliant treatise about the Germans and their excremental humor, including filthy Mozart, if he had been writing in the nineteenth century. The problem I have described is even worse for those studying the jokes of yet earlier times, for which the sources are even more limited. We may suspect from descriptions that have been given of the irreverent carnivals and deliberate humorous inversions of behavior of the medieval and early modern world that blasphemous jokes and comic tales might have circulated widely but we can not decide this question with any degree of certainty. This creates a particular problem for those using the comparative method that I have elsewhere called ‘The Dog that did not Bark in the Night’ (Davies 1998a) that involves the study of jokes that could exist in that society or context but do not. When I say could, I am assuming that a roughly similar cycle of jokes does exist in a society to which the joke tellers have access ie the jokes have failed to cross a cultural boundary. It is a tricky assumption to make since jokes may be concealed rather than absent but at least in the contemporary

Undertaking the comparative study of humor 

159

world it is often possible to get round these problems. Dealing with the past is much more difficult. Officially, jokes making fun of the regime did not exist in the former socialist regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe, yet there were enormous numbers of these jokes (Adams 2005; Banc and Dundes1986; Krikmann 2004, 2006; Skrobocki 1992; Viikberg 1997) and it was easy to collect them simply by talking to trusted citizens of these countries where you could not be overheard (Brunvald 1973; Cochrane 1989). The ubiquity of this kind of joke telling in the countries where they were forbidden (Davies 2007; Oring 2004; Yurchak 1997) confirmed what could be inferred from collections of these jokes published in a number of countries in the free world by émigrés (Beckmann 1969, 1980; Kolasky 1972). Collecting such jokes directly showed that the externally published joke books were not merely a representation of the perverse sense of humor of disgruntled dissidents in exile who were unrepresentative of the population at large. It is not possible to consult the joke-tellers of the distant past in this way because of the difficulties of communicating with the dead. The messages conveyed to us from the ‘other side’ through spiritualist mediums and their nun, shaman and Red Indian spirit guides do not, so far as I know, contain jokes, nor do reincarnated Hindus or memory regressed Westerners going back to a pre-life recall the jokes of their previous existence. When I hear a series of new and funny jokes from such sources, I will begin to take their claims seriously. We are now in a position to review the sources of the jokes that will provide the basic data for the comparative study of humor. The most obvious source of jokes is to get other people to tell you their jokes. It is easy enough for an observer with a high degree of social adaptability to do this simply by merging with the joke-tellers and letting them get on with it. A notebook or a tape-recorder are optional extras which provide textual accuracy but at the potential cost of interfering with what is being observed. In a society with whose language the observer is unacquainted or whose culture is very different it is usually necessary to work with and to a large extent through an interpreter and intermediary. Such a process is fraught with dangers as we can see from the grossly and disgracefully incompetent work done by Margaret Mead in Samoa (Mead 1928) which gulled entire generations of wishful thinkers in the English speaking world (Freeman 1983). Mead did not speak Samoan and in large measure became a victim of the Samoan sense of humor – what fun it must have been for lively young Samoans to deceive this tiny, pink, foolish American woman who was asking them silly questions. There is less risk of being deceived in this way when what is being conveyed is itself

160 

Christie Davies

humorous – the jokes are less likely to be a humorous distortion of humor! Even so they may be bowdlerized and some jokes may be withheld from an outsider. Just as Margaret Mead was deceived into thinking there was no rape in Samoa (which had a far higher incidence of that crime than most other societies (Freeman 1983: 347–9) ), so too it would be foolish to conclude that jokes about rape among feminists or about homosexuals in Qazvin in Iran are absent simply because they are not forthcoming, even on prompting. It may simply mean that one’s informers are reticent or fearful or one’s interpreter is unwilling to reveal this aspect of his or her own people’s pattern of jokes. Obviously jokes suffer in translation, particularly if they depend on wordplay but this is less of a problem than might be thought. Most good joketellers do not memorize jokes. They simply remember the punch-line, the theme of the joke and possibly a particularly good jab line and then reinvent the story each time it is told. There is thus no standard text to be meticulously recorded. In any case it is always possible to ask for clarification even when one has understood the joke perfectly well. It is actually easier for an outsider to do this because he or she may reasonably be expected to be ignorant of local, taken for granted, aspects of a joke and this forces the joke-tellers to make these things explicit in a way that they would not normally do within the group. It is particularly revealing if they then proceed to disagree strongly among themselves. It is difficult for someone collecting material for a comparative study of jokes to have these kinds of direct encounters with people from a sufficiently large number of societies but fortunately the work has often already been done by others, notably folklorists and anthropologists and is available either in published form or in their notebooks or in folklore archives (Davies 1990, 1998, 2002; Davies and Abe 2003). The latter are an excellent source of comparative material drawn from many countries and sub-cultures. Often the collectors also add details about the individual who told the joke and how it was told and what that person thought and felt about the joke that has been recorded. It is also worth noting, though, the limits to what the folklorists can and do collect. From the folklore archives it is possible to derive the texts of jokes from a large number of cultures that can then be compared. What is missing are the very varied contexts in which and tone with which each of these jokes may be told and it is these that provide the purpose and feeling that are attached to a particular telling. It is impossible to infer anything about purpose, function or emotion from the mere text of a joke. Context is all but contexts are so complex, fluid, ambiguous and varied that it is extraordinarily different

Undertaking the comparative study of humor 

161

to undertake any kind of comparative analysis of them. It is of course relatively easy to observe joke telling in individual situations involving everyday human interaction but the problems of aggregating the observations together in order to analyze them on a comparative basis are very great. More to the point it is quite impossible to work backwards from these interactions and to pin qualities of emotion, purpose, tendenz on a particular joke. They are not qualities of the joke but of the situation and interaction that has been observed. An identically worded joke can work with quite different implications in many different situations and be used in many different ways. Finally there are the stocks of jokes held in jokebooks, audio and video tapes, CDs and DVDs and computers that can be put to use in comparative work. The jokebooks of earlier times sometimes contain comments on each joke or derive some kind of moral from them [for example Ramsay 1874 (1858)], so that it is possible to learn something of the social background to the jokes. Just as written sources are not devoid of background information, so too it is possible to glean far more about the jokes on an internet site than just the jokes themselves, particularly if you take the trouble to email those who set up the site (Oring 2003). The gathering of the jokes, the researcher’s basic information, should take two forms both of which are necessary. First, there are simple fishing trips in which the researcher records or finds, listens to or reads several hundred jokes from different sources and kinds of sources. Second, there are planned searches in which he or she is looking for particular sets of jokes or the absence of a particular set of jokes in order to test a hypothesis based on his or her own or on other people’s research. It is necessary to use both methods. Fishing trips on their own tend to lead to mere descriptive work, to the forcing of unrepresentative sets of jokes to fit an existing theory or ideology based grid in an arbitrary way and to sheer muddle. Hypothesis testing is not simple but as often carried out becomes simplistic. The pompous use of terms, such as ‘dependent and independent variable’, ‘research design’ etc. may look fine in a document designed to screw money out of government committees dedicated to wasting tax-payers’ money, but if taken too seriously it will lead the researcher to ignore the full richness and difficulty of the material with which he or she is working. A successful academic colleague once told me that he had found the best way to get money out of the government was to ask them to finance a project which was nearly completed anyway because he could give a rational and apparently a priori account of it and knew that the final report and publications would match his proposal. He next used the money to finish off the old project and then went on a fishing trip in a related area in order to develop new

162 

Christie Davies

ideas and hypotheses and would complete a large section of a second project. He then used the knowledge he had gained from the second project to complete a proposal for a new research grant to carry out the second project, apparently from scratch but with a pseudo-logical design and guaranteed results. In this way a productive dialectical process was set up and could be maintained indefinitely, unconstrained by the paper walls (Wells 1928) of the iron cage of bureaucracy (Weber 1930). It is not for me to comment on whether it is wise and expedient for young researchers to follow this strange path. I cite my cynical and much granted and promoted colleague, merely to expose the falseness of the language of research design and of the way in which its underlying rationale is merely an artifact of bureaucratic pressures. The main point to remember is that comparative research requires the researcher to fish in the morning, hunt in the afternoon and compose in the evening. That is what comparative research into humor involves. That is how it is done. The comparative researcher can use his or her data in many ways to advance our understanding not only of humor but of other related phenomena in both constructive and destructive ways i.e. either to create new patterns and theories that can be reasonably claimed to being closer to the truth than their predecessors or to falsify and topple an existing thesis. Let us consider some examples of the constructive uses of the comparative method. The first example I want to consider is the comparative study of jokes about stupid groups. A few American and Canadian examples will illustrate the kinds of jokes that are being studied.

How many Poles does it take to change a light bulb? Six. One to hold the bulb and five to turn him round and round. (This was the very earliest of the numerous light bulb series of jokes).



Why did the Polack lose his job as an elevator operator? He couldn’t learn the route (Dundes 1987 (1971): 134].



Do you know why they don’t give Poles a coffee break? It takes too long to retrain them (Dundes 1987 (1971): 135)



What is stamped at the bottom of Coca Cola bottles in Poland? Please open at the other end (Dundes 1987 (1971): 135).

Did you hear about the Polish space scientists who plan to land a man on the sun? When asked if the sun’s heat would burn him up, they replied

Undertaking the comparative study of humor 

163

that they had thought of that and that they were going to land him at night (Dundes 1987 (1971): 134).

How did the Polack get 35 holes in his head? Trying to learn to eat with a fork (Dundes 1987 (1971): 135).

“Le ‘Newfie’ pensait que les crayons à mine (AMIN) venaient de l’Ouganda” (Allard 1976: 69). Untranslateable play on words “Je suis allé dans un magasin ‘Newfie’ et j’ai demandé une robe de chambre... le ‘Newfie’ m’a demandé: ‘Quelle grandeur la chambre?’ (Allard 1976). Untranslateable play on words. Jokes of this kind are to be found in a large number of different countries as shown in Table One below; jokes from each country were gathered from a variety of kinds of sources. The method of finding the jokes was first fishing trips and then later systematic searches. The uncovering of similar (though by no means identical) types of jokes in several countries as different as the United States, Britain, Greece and India led to a systematic search for such jokes from as many other countries as possible and enabled Table 1 to be constructed. In each case the jokes were invented and circulated among the (mainly national) groups listed in the first column of Table 1; the groups, about whom they were told whether national, regional, or about the citizens of a particular town are listed in the second column. The table is interesting in and of itself in that it shows that people in so many different countries like the same kind of joke which they both invent for themselves and adapt from similar jokes in international circulation. There are clearly widespread and shared social circumstances (Davies 1990, 1998) that have led to the popularity of such jokes, for in any one of the countries listed hundreds of such jokes will exist. However, this is only the first stage of the application of the comparative method to the study of these jokes. The second stage is to ask ‘What are the common factors that characterize the relationship between each pair of jokers and persons joked about?’ What are the main common factors that link the groups in the first and second columns? What is clear throughout is that the two groups in the first and second column respectively are very similar in each case. The groups joked about are not in any sense strange or alien to the joketellers who make them the butts of their jokes. In each of the cases listed those joked about are either an

164 

Christie Davies

Table 1.  The stupid Country where jokes about the “stupid” are told United States Canada (East ) Canada (West) Mexico Brazil Guatemala Colombia England Wales Scotland Ireland France Netherlands Greece Austria Germany Italy Switzerland Russia Sweden Spain Finland Denmark Turkey Iraq India Pakistan Iran Syria Egypt South Africa Australia New Zealand

Identity of “stupid” group in jokes Poles (and others locally, e.g., Italians, Portuguese) Newfies (Newfoundlanders) Ukrainians Yucatecos from Yucatan, Gallegos from Galicia in Spain Portuguese Guitecos ( people of Guite) Pastusos from Pasto in Nariño Irish Irish Irish Kerrymen Belgians, French Swiss Belgians, Limburghers Pontians (Black Sea Greeks) Carinthians, Burgenlanders Ostfrieslanders, Saxons Southern Italians Fribourgers/Freiburgers Ukrainians, Chukchees Finns, Norwegians Gallegos from Galicia, Leperos, the people of Lepe in Andalucia Karelians People of Aarhus Laz Kurds Sardarjis (Sikhs) Sardarjis (Sikhs) Rashtis from Rasht, Turks People of Homs and Hama Sa’idis Afrikaners (van der Merwe) Irish, Tasmanians Irish, Maoris (in the North Island), West Coasters (in the South Island)

Undertaking the comparative study of humor 

165

i­mmediately neighboring people or a group of long established and accepted immigrants, who in either case share much of the culture of the group telling the jokes. However, this leads to a second point, namely that the relationship between them is asymmetrical. Those in the second column live on the geographical, economic, cultural or linguistic periphery of the peoples in the first column. The relationship can not be reversed, for Kerry is on the edge of Ireland, Belgium on the edge of France and of the Netherlands, Rasht on the edge of Iran, Newfoundland on the edge of Canada, the Laz live on the edge of Turkey, the Pastusos live on the edge of Columbia, Polish-Americans are merely a part of America and it CANNOT be the other way round. Indeed it would be absurd to try and reverse these statements. It would be a mere rhetorical gesture quite contrary to known and obvious patterns of economic and cultural dominance. In the case of India, an intensely religious society, it is equally clear that Sikhism exists on the edge of Hinduism and not the other way round. The Sikhs aimed to create a new and pure religion and to distance themselves from the Hindus but they can not entirely escape the Hindu influence on their origins and their customs (Uberoi 1967). Polish-Americans must know English and will be able to recite a litany of good, great and successful Americans from Benedict Arnold to Alger Hiss. By contrast Americans in general can afford to be crassly ignorant of the language of Poland and of the very significant achievements of individual Poles such as Kopernic, Korzeniowski or Skladowska who are household names in Europe. French speakers in Brussels buy books teaching them how to speak Parisian French (Hanse 1971) whereas the converse is unknown and the Dublin upper-upper-middle classes shun the brogue of the Kerryman and sound like West Britons. The Laz seek work on the constructions sites of Turkish cities as do Newfoundlanders in Ontario but there is no migration in the other direction. These are additional social facts that are known from sources other than and outside of the texts of the jokes It is not possible to make any sense of the social, historical or psychological significance of jokes without employing variables based on quite different kinds of data from the jokes themselves. To do anything else would be circular, as indeed many studies of humor are, for they infer the social background to the jokes from their content and then use this arbitrary, invented social context to explain why the jokes exist. Most feminist, functionalist and psychoanalytic studies of jokes and humor are of this kind. They are based on arbitrarily applied theories filled with a strange vocabulary and implode when brought into contact with reality.

166 

Christie Davies

The factual information about similarity and asymmetry given above exists independently of the perceptions of particular joke tellers, though it can be demonstrated that many of the joke tellers do make the connection between these social facts and the existence of the jokes. The widespread existence of such a perception is not necessary to the argument being advanced, though it would be unusual if it did not exist at all. What is being suggested here is the less demanding proposition that the joke tellers can and often do perceive the butts of their jokes about stupidity as a comically stupid version of themselves, as themselves seen as if in a distorting mirror at a fairground. The comparative approach to the stupidity jokes taken above also enables us to refute the idea that these jokes are a product of conflict, hostility and aggression, as is often suggested by those who have studied a single example of one group telling stupidity jokes about another. What is striking about the various pairs of joke tellers and butts of jokes listed is how very varied this aspect of the relationship between them is. In some cases there is overt hostility and even violent conflict or a history of this in the recent past, in others an amicable recognition of cousinship sometimes accompanied by rivalry and in others an exchange of paternalism for nostalgia. There is no consistent relationship to be found here and those who wish to continue to maintain the validity of the hostility thesis are forced to put forward a bizarre combination of ad hoc arguments claiming that the jokes are sometimes an adjunct to real hostility and sometimes an expression of a hostility so well repressed that there is no other evidence that it exists. It is an argument of the ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ kind that can not be falsified. We may also reject on similar grounds another widely touted theory of jokes, the functionalist theory which argues that jokes are called into existence to boost morale and solidarity under adverse circumstances (Obrdlik 1942 but also see Bryant 2006). Humor can certainly be used for this purpose within small groups but it is absurd to use it as an explanation for why a particular genre of jokes exists at all. In any case the tellers of ethnic jokes about a stupid neighbor rarely have any reason seriously to fear that the butts of their stupidity jokes could destroy their social order in the way that other and more powerful opponents could. Yet they do not tell stupidity jokes about the latter. The functionalist theory like the hostility, conflict, aggression thesis is refuted by comparative analysis. It is quite possible of course that particular individuals will use jokes under particular circumstances to produce particular effects but this is irrelevant, not just because most tellings of jokes do not have purposes but are simply performances but also because such a use is not something that can be inferred from the text itself. Tendenz is not a property of a text. The way

Undertaking the comparative study of humor 

167

jokes are used and the feelings conveyed by the telling of a joke are a product of tone and context, which are extremely varied and are not part of the joke ­itself. What should now be clear is that the use of the comparative method does enable us to produce superior and more elegant explanations of why some kinds of jokes exist and others do not than an analysis based on single case studies, particularly if it is one permeated by a tendentious ideological ­theory. The other strength of the theory derived by comparison is that it allows us to make predictions about the likely existence of further stupidity jokes involving pairs of groups, examples not known at the time when the theory was formulated. After completing the work on which Table 1 is based, I discovered that in Romania the stupidity jokes are told about the people of ­Altena and in the Faeroes about the people of Klaksvig. Both are geographically and economically peripheral. In 1996, when the late Professor W. M. S. Russell, the distinguished former President of the Folklore Society in London told me that he had learned that Peruvians told ethnic stupidity jokes about the Arequipeños, the people of the province of Arequipa in Peru, I predicted on the basis of the center-periphery thesis that they would live on the geographic and economic periphery of the country, speak Spanish in a distinctive way and be conservative and Catholic. Professor Russell checked with his Peruvian informant and reported back that all these predictions were correct. Should there be countries (such as Japan) where these kinds of stupidity jokes (ones pinned on a group) do not exist (Davies 1998; Davies and Abe 2003) this does not create problems for the theory. The theory of peripheral cousins does not predict that such jokes must exist. It merely says that they are likely to exist and that when they do they will be located within the particular social pattern that has been described.. This pattern is a necessary but not a sufficient reason for these kinds of jokes to be generated. What would falsify the theory would be the discovery of substantial numbers of stupidity jokes being told about a group that enjoys a generally recognized leading economic or cultural position relative to the joke-tellers. The theory clearly predicts that such jokes do not exist. The only difficult case is where stupidity jokes are exchanged between two related countries such as Norway and Sweden, Austria and Switzerland or Estonia and Finland. In each of these cases it is impossible to judge who could be seen as dominant and both partners are peripheral to a third party. Culturally and geographically Scandinavia is peripheral to Europe, Austria and Switzerland to Germany and Estonia and Finland both to Scandinavia and to Russia. You can imagine the former being absorbed into the latter but not the other way round.

168 

Christie Davies

It is important to note that the prediction is specifically made about those occupying leading economic or cultural positions i.e. areas of life that are subject to some degree of open competition. If a group occupies a dominant military and political position without being noted for cultural or economic achievements, then it may well be the butt of stupidity jokes, as can be seen from the case of the Afrikaners (van der Merwe) in Table One. The Afrikaners ruled South Africa because they controlled the franchise, the government and the army and police (Moodie 1975). However, they were in a position of backwardness in economic and cultural terms relative to the English speaking Europeans. Hence they were the butt of stupidity jokes in much the same way as other groups in such a location, such as the ruling political elite, the apparatchiks and the militia in the former socialist countries of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This further comparison also enables us to refute the thesis that power relations theory can be applied to these jokes, for the question of whether the jokers or their butts are the more powerful depends entirely on the nature of the power being exercised. If the power exercised by the jokers is subject to competition as with economic success or cultural predominance, then the jokes will be about the less powerful group (at least on these dimensions). However, if a group exercises power in the form of a political or military monopoly then jokes about its stupidity will be told by the less powerful about their rulers, rulers whose legitimacy is dubious. Power relations theory, and its subvarieties such as class analysis, feminism, gay theory etc are anyway not true theories producing testable and falsifiable propositions but aspects of a crude ideological perspective and bundle of prejudices which we may term ‘underdoggery’. Here we may introduce a second way of using the comparative method in studying jokes – the search for jokes that could have been invented or coopted but which do not exist. During the Soviet socialist period certainly hundreds, probably thousands of jokes circulated in Russian and Eastern Europe about the stupidity of the political elite, the apparatchiks and the militia, and these were not just stupidity jokes about individuals and groups but often jokes about the stupidity of the entire system. These political jokes were exchanged on a daily basis among ordinary people in Russia and Eastern Europe and were far more popular than any kind of official humor (Banc and Dundes 1986; Davies 1998, 2007; Yurchak 1997). The citizens of western democratic countries knew that these jokes were being told and they too found them extremely funny. Why then did the westerners not adapt the jokes for local use and tell them about their own leaders, officials, police and political system? Why is there in general an absence of such jokes in the West?

Undertaking the comparative study of humor 

169

In Britain, for example, a group of people seen exchanging jokes in the years since 1997 will not be or have been telling jokes of any kind about Tony Blair, the oleaginous British ‘New’ Labour Prime Minister 1997–2007 or John Prescott, Blair’s uncouth side-kick or Blair’s unprepossessing Caledonian successor Gordon Brown, There does exist a Tony Blair joke book (Dale and Simmonds 2002) but most of the jokes in it have been clumsily switched and adapted from other sources by the compilers and are inauthentic; those who collected jokes about Stalin, Khruschev and Brezhnev did not need to scrabble and adapt in this way since the ordinary people were inventing new, well targeted jokes all the time. Both Blair and Prescott were relentlessly and regularly lampooned on television by Britain’s leading mimic Rory Bremner, in the esteemed satirical organ Private Eye where Blair was the Reverend A. R. P. Blair MA (Oxon), the absurd and hysterical Vicar of St. Albion’s (Hislop 2003) and in Chairman Blair’s Little Red Book (Bell and Homer 2001) in which Blair’s proletarian side-kick John Prescott was depicted as J. Dog Du on The Long Walkies, but there are no popular jokes about them invented by ordinary people. They were not telling Blair jokes on the Clapham or even the Clapham Common omnibus. When Blair resigned to allow Brown to become Prime Minister in 2007 there was no wave of jokes about Brown but in Private Eye a new feature, Prime Ministerial Decree, From the Desk of the Supreme Leader mocked Brown’s authoritarianism and a cartoon strip The Broon-ites his Scottish speech. The same point may be made about the other western democratic countries such as Australia or Germany or the USA, where strong satire co-exists with an absence of jokes. Even the verbal infelicities of a George Bush or Dan Quayle are mainly funny to pointy jawed intellectuals; most ordinary Americans do not talk with any greater degree of precision. Likewise, the habit of telling political jokes faded in Eastern and Central Europe with the collapse of socialism and the coming of democracy. Once again we can see the significance of an absence of jokes and the vital necessity of always searching for nothing as well as something. However, it is not the presence (or absence) of published or broadcast mockery of the political elite or system that inhibits political joking. There had not been a popular tradition of telling stupidity jokes about political leaders in the time of the British Prime Ministers Macdonald, Baldwin, Chamberlain, Churchill, Attlee or Eden or come to that in the time of Presidents Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy in America, when the generally accepted and rather deferential norms of publishing and broadcasting inhibited open satirical portrayal of the great in much the same way that the press did not reveal details of their sex lives. Historical comparisons then show that

170 

Christie Davies

the example set by the media, which may be exuberant as in present day Britain and America or exercise restraint as they did in the past is irrelevant where the generation of waves of popular political jokes are concerned.1 It is the constraints on serious political speech that are relevant. In the socialist countries there was no freedom of speech and even in conversation critical comments might be reported by an informer (Andrew and Mitrokhin 2000 and 2005; Davies 1997; Oring 2004). Joking was thus playing with forbidden modes of speech, a sly evasion of the rules. The jokes were even enjoyed by those who held power or were beneficiaries of the regime – they too enjoyed time off from official constraints (Deriabin and Gibney 1960). The validity of this view can again be upheld by means of comparison, for other forms of forbidden speech also produce jokes – jokes about sex or excretion or jokes defying politically correctness, such as jokes about mass media reported major disasters like the Challenger explosion or the sudden death of Princess Diana in a drunken car crash, the deaths of other celebrities, famines and accidents or jokes about high levels of violence and illegitimacy among African-Americans. Even a free society has its unmentionables and freedom of discussion, though far greater than in the former socialist world, is circumscribed by politically correct holders of power who enjoy a high degree of cultural hegemony through their dominance of crucial institutions such as the media, education and supervisory agencies. Laughter is a product of the deliberate evasion of the ways in which we are expected to use words according to the conventions of a particular society. Even absurdity sneaks round the socially entrenched rules of rational or at least bona fide communication (Raskin 1985: 99–104). However, there is no need to invoke the unconscious or the pressure of guilt as an explanation. People tell jokes knowing that joking evades externally imposed restraints on speech. Those who listen and laugh know what to expect, even though each joke comes as a surprise. Padded brassières are more common that Freudian slips. In regard to the latter it should be added that we only remember mistakes when they break some kind of rule, when by chance they switch scripts from an anticipated script to a rule breaking script, whether the latter be political, sexual, aggressive, blasphemous, scatological or just plain absurd. It is this that constitutes appropriate incongruity (Oring 1992, 2003), Left out of account are the probably far more common cases where a meaningless error produces an unfunny incongruity and no one laughs but rather feels sympathy or puzzlement. Likewise similar mistakes are made in writing or in type-setting or with computers and are not noticed but carelessly allowed to proceed to publication. Most of the time the errors are not funny. Most spelling mistakes only become really funny if the

Undertaking the comparative study of humor 

171

author of them is high and pompous about such things as in the case of the English newspaper widely referred to as The Grauniad because allegedly it has failed to print even its own title, ‘The Guardian’ correctly. If it had been the Dogpatch Bugle or the Podunk Herald the mistake would not have been as funny. The spelling mistakes that go down in history are those that are multiply disastrous. The editors of a Soviet newspaper were arrested and possibly executed because they published Stalin’s name as Sralin (in Cyrillic) meaning shit. Was this a Freudian slip or an accident? After all shit happens. Indeed the more we strive to avoid an embarrassing mistake the more we are likely to make it.An urban legend tells of a radio interview with Diana Fluck, the real name of the attractive actress Diana Dors. The interviewer tried so hard not to get it wrong …and then introduced her as Diana Clunt. The nature of the clear inverse link between democracy and political joking can be further illuminated by looking carefully at the few exceptions that seem not to fit this generalization. Such exceptions if numerous (i.e. not just the inevitable almost accidental transfer of a couple of jokes across a social boundary) often can and should overturn a theory completely. However, our first step must say whether the exceptions themselves have a structure and one which is congruent with and allows us to dissect the original explanation. Mass joking about the stupidity of politicians in general or about the officials running state organizations does not exist in Western democracies. However, there have been jokes, though not as widespread as in the anciens regimes of the old socialist countries, about particular individual politicians such as Sir Alec Douglas-Home (British Prime Minister 1963–4), President Gerald Ford, Vice-President Dan Quayle and President George “Dubya” Bush, none of whom were outstandingly stupid and some of whom were very insightful. What they had in common was that they were not elected in the usual way and lost legitimacy in consequence. It is difficult to make stupidity jokes about a democratic leader with a popular mandate because it would imply that the people rather than the system were stupid since they put him there. However, Sir Alec was a hereditary peer, an unelected Lord sitting in the House of Lords before he became Prime Minister, Gerald Ford had never run for the Presidency but got in because President Nixon and Vice President Agnew had resigned, Dan Quayle was an unknown riding on George Bush I’s coat-tails and George Bush II was put in office by the Supreme Court on a technicality to do with chads and not by an unambiguous massing of votes. The penalty for holding political office without having properly and clearly won a competition for it is to become to some extent at least the butt of stupidity jokes, though on nothing like the scale found under socialism.

172 

Christie Davies

It ­confirms yet again the key importance of legitimacy through competition, for in a democracy it is those politicians who lack this quality become the butts of stupidity jokes. The particular comparative method employed above has often been used in other fields notably in Union Democracy by S. M. Lipset et al [1956]. The German scholar Robert. Michels [2001 (1915)]] had long ago noted that political parties and indeed labor unions, though possessed of formally democratic constitutions, were in practice inevitably oligarchic. Lipset et al sought to clarify the nature of that oligarchy by studying the one American union, The International Typographical Union, that stood apart from the others by having truly contested elections with serious alternative candidates who might well push the existing leadership out of office. This was found to be related to the high levels of education, literacy and pay of the ordinary members relative to that of union officers enjoyed by the printers at the time. This in turn indicated the reasons for union oligarchy elsewhere not just in America but in other democratic countries. The study of the exception provides the basis for an understanding of what is generally the case. Likewise the study of those few political leaders, and notably Gerald Ford, who are the butt of stupidity jokes in a democracy indicates why in general political leaders are exempt from the jokes told about their counterparts in authoritarian societies. There are many politicians in.democratic countries who really are stupid, i.e. they have limited intellectual capacity, but they are not the subject of popular jokes, merely of witty put downs by their intimates. When Estelle Morris, one of Mr Blair’s Ministers of Education for England, resigned in 2002 saying that she felt she was not up to the job (she was certainly right about that), there were no jokes about her being stupid, even though she had admitted to being so. The study of jokes that could but do not exist can be taken a stage further by comparing the jokes told in the English and French speaking countries that make the butts of stupidity jokes out to be dirty as well as stupid. Such jokes were very common in America, in both English and French speaking Canada and in Switzerland in the period 1960–1995 but were absent in Britain, France and Ireland (Davies 1998). A determined attempt was made to introduce American jokes about dirty Poles into Britain as Irish jokes by Peter Hornby, who transfered American jokes from Pat Macklin and Manny Erdman’s jokebook Polish Jokes published in America (Macklin and Erdman 1976) directly into his best selling British jokebook about the Irish published in Britain (Hornby 1978) by changing dirty ‘Polack’ to dirty ‘Paddy’ but otherwise not changing the jokes in any way. However, these jokes about dirty Paddies did not go into general circulation and have never reappeared.

Undertaking the comparative study of humor 

173

The jokes were available to the British but were never taken up and added to their standard jokes about Irish stupidity, even though many of the other British stupidity jokes about the Irish were of American origin and had originally been jokes about Poles. Likewise Irish jokes about the stupidity of the Kerrymen and French jokes about stupid Belgians do not make these peoples out to be dirty, whereas ­Canadian jokes about Newfoundlanders (in both English and French), Quebec jokes about Italians and Swiss jokes about the people of Fribourg/Freiburg do just that. How are we to explain this contrast? Obviously we have to relate the existence of the jokes to some facet of the social world external to them. It might be for example that those called dirty as well as stupid in the jokes really are dirtier than those who are merely called stupid. It is perfectly possible, though somewhat unlikely, that the Poles, Italians, Newfies and Fribourgers really are filthier than the Irish, Kerrymen or Belgians. I am using the word filthy here in a literal sense and to include modern dirt such as garbage or grease as distinct from a symbolic or metaphorical sense where it refers to. breakers of rules concerning ritual or sexual purity or propriety and/or the proper maintenance of body boundaries.. The hypothesis that the Irish, Kerrymen and Belgians are in this unemotive sense cleaner than the Poles, Italians, Newfies and Fribourgers is a reasonable and testable, though problematic, proposition. There is no evidence to indicate that the proposition is true but it is valid to advance it as one possible explanation. It would be utterly wrong not to investigate it merely because it might offend someone’s sensitivies even to suggest it. There can be no bigoted presumption of equality. Table 2. Tellers of Stupidity Jokes

Butts of Stupidity Jokes

Americans Anglophone Canadians Québecois Swiss

Poles, Italians Newfoundlanders Newfoundlanders, Italians People of Fribourg/ Freiburg

British Irish French

Irish Kerrymen Belgians

Are the butts Filthy as well as Stupid in the jokes Section A Yes Yes Yes Yes Section B No No No

174 

Christie Davies

At this point let us consider what the members of the conflict and hostility school of humor analysts are forced by their theory to predict about these jokes. Given that they see stupidity jokes as an indication of hostility and conflict, then, if dirtiness is added to the jokes, it ought to mean that the jokes became the conveyors of even more hostility and indicators of even fiercer conflict than is the case where stupidity alone is comically suggested. Yet, as an inspection of Table Two comparing the relations between nations and groups in Section A as against Section B shows, no such systematic difference exists. No clear relationship of this kind in any direction can be discerned from Table 2. Now that we have shown by judicious comparisons that the addition of dirtiness to stupidity jokes in some countries but not others is not a product of differences in the nature of the relationship between pairs of jokers and their butts, it is clear that there must have been differences in the late twentieth century cultures of America, Canada and Switzerland on the one hand and Britain, France and Ireland on the other that led to the production of different patterns of joking. What is suggested here is that in the former countries cleanliness is seen as an aspect of rationality whereas in the latter it is not. It is easiest to see this in the case of America versus Britain, France and Ireland. On the basis of market research data and of empirical studies of the American way of death it may be infered that at the time when the jokes were being invented, Americans thought that lasting physical perfection and purity of appearance undiminished by age, decay and even death were attainable through rational cleanliness, cosmetic surgery, deodorants, diet and eventually embalming whereas by contrast the British, the French and the Irish were content to live and die with imperfection (Davies 1990). They felt it was wiser to live in a realistic “can’t do “ world. What is needed to test this suggestion further is more extensive comparative data about the Swiss who also told North American style jokes and who are obsessed with cleanliness but within a different cultural framework and about the nature of the patterns of joking found in other ultra clean and comfortably unperfectable countries respectively. Only in this way can a more comprehensive explanation of these important differences in patterns of joking be produced. The destructive as well as constructive uses of the comparative method can be further illustrated in relation to the analysis of Jewish jokes and humor, a popular field of study because Jewish jokes and Jewish humor scholars exceed those of any other group in both quantity and quality. It is widely held (Ben-Amos 1973; Novak and Waldoks 1981, see Oring 1992) that the jokes are preponderantly self mocking jokes targeting the Jews themselves and that

Undertaking the comparative study of humor 

175

this is a uniquely Jewish phenomenon (Freud 1905), and also that this form of joking among the Ashkenazi Jews reveals a kind of masochistic aggression directed by the group’s members against the group’s own ‘self’, which in turn is a product of the undisputed and uniquely vicious persecution that has been directed against them (Grotjahn 1970). It is possible by the comparative method to demonstrate that none of these propositions is true. Indeed it does more than that – it shows that the very procedures that led to these propositions were in error and that the theories lying behind them are false. We can demonstrate this by looking at jokes about the Scots invented by the Scots and published in Scotland in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the earlier years of the twentieth century, which were extremely numerous and formed the basis of today’s ubiquitous jokes about canny Scotsmen. The jokes are self mocking and make the Scots out to be covetous, argumentative and obsessed with keeping the Sabbath. The original jokebooks were often edited by Scottish intellectuals and ministers of religion and accompanied by commentaries on what the jokes might tell us about Scottish life and character (Davies 2002). The Scots became ‘the people of the joke’ at about the same time as or slightly earlier than the Jews. As jokers the Scots may only have been runners up to the Jews both at that time and subsequently but the very existence of another ‘people of the joke’ undermines the thesis of a unique Jewish tradition of self mockery through jokes. It should also lead us strongly to doubt whether it ever makes sense to analyze the humorous tradition of a people by reference only to that people’s very own particular culture and traditions. On the contrary understanding can only be attained through comparison. What do they know of Jewish jokes who only Jewish jokes know? The Scots have never suffered the kind or degree of persecution, hostility and exclusion experienced by the Jews. Everyday life in nineteenth and twentieth century Scotland and for Scots living in England was free of fear. Yet this immediately demolishes the thesis that Jewish pre-eminence in joking in general and self mockery in particular is rooted in the hostility of and persecution by others. If this had been the case then we would expect the runners up as people of the joke to be not the Scots but another persecuted minority distinguished by commercial and professional skills living outside its own territory and lacking political power and defined as alien by a hostile ideology such as the Christian Armenians in the Islamic Ottoman Empire (Mardiganian 1918) the Asians of East Africa (Davies 1972) or the overseas Chinese in South East Asia. The latter groups have encountered racist and religious hostility of an anti-semitic kind and in some cases it has led to mass murder

176 

Christie Davies

but they are not noted for the production of jokes about their own group. By contrast the Scots who have their own secure territory and institutions, a share in British identity and ideology and a disproportionate share of British political and military power were and are great jokers. Comparative analysis forces us rather to ask first ‘what factors or historical experiences do the Scots and the Jews have in common?’ and second and more important ‘what do they share that other peoples lack?’ In answer to the first question we can say that (in rather different circumstances) members of both groups have a sense of simultaneously belonging to two groups that have rather differing identities and expectations, in a way that is not true of, say, the Swedes, the French or the Japanese, none of whom have invented a plethora of jokes about their own group. However, other minorities or junior partners in a federation such as the Welsh or the Québecois, also have this sense of double identity but have not produced an efflorescence of jokes depending on it. As a further response to the first question we may also note that other groups have enjoyed commercial success and become the butt of canny jokes such as the Dutch, the Regiomontanos, the Paisas or the Catalans (and no doubt they enjoy and invent jokes about themselves ) but they have not produced a proliferation of self conscious jokes exploring their own peculiarities. Only the Jews and the Scots have done that. Why? We must now turn to the second and narrower comparative question about what other people lack, though it should be noted that we have learned a good deal that is relevant to finding an answer to it by asking the broader question in advance.. What may be seen from the distinctive style and content of the jokes that Scots and Jews tell about their own group and which can be and is confirmed by other quite independent evidence (this is absolutely vital) is that both groups see their religious tradition as one that prizes learning and literacy and as one that had evolved in the direction of argumentative democracy. In either case analytical disputation was pursued almost for its own sake. From this arose the Jewish and Scottish pre-eminence in physics, philosophy and economics and in jokes that no other small nation can match. We can now finally ditch the tangled thesis that Jewish self mockery is rooted in an expression of masochism or selbsthass; it was anyway in trouble for other reasons. We may do so with confidence, since a larger proportion of self consciously Scottish jokes seem to be about self mockery than is the case with Jewish jokes. There is no Scottish equivalent of the Jewish jokes that comprehensively trounce outsiders of all kinds. Perhaps, when other factors such as intellectual and commercial acumen, self awareness and disputaciousness are held constant, it is this outwardly directed aggression in Jewish

Undertaking the comparative study of humor 

177

jokes that is the product of past persecution, which is the opposite of what the Jewish masochism thesis suggests (Davies 2002). There are no clear links between real and observable conflicts, hostility and aggression on the one hand and the playing with aggression that underlies a large proportion of jokes or come to that sports or consensual sexual interaction on the other. The differences between the two sets of activities are far more important than the things they have in common. The comparative study of jokes not only enables us to see this more clearly but also undermines widely accepted theories of jokes that employ crude theories of aggression. The followers of Freud and the otherwise psycho-analytically tinged have long since been pushed out of the proper treatment of mental illness by advances in pharmaceuticals and in cognitive and behavioral psychology. The world has said to them – ‘your ideas do not work, your theories are false, get out’. The comparative analysis of jokes enables us to say exactly the same to them in regard to the study of humor. Such uses of the comparative method are not peculiar to the study of humor. Freudian theory had already suffered a fatal rebuff from Malinowski over Freud’s absurd explanation of the tensions between fathers and sons by claiming that the ties between the male child and its mother lead to a surpressed wish on the son’s part to kill his father and obtain undivided and sexual possession of the mother. Malinowski [1927] studied a matrilineal society, the Trobriand islanders, in which property descends not from father to son but from the mother’s brother to her son. The mother’s brother not the father has authority over her male offspring. In such a society there are no tensions between father and son who enjoy an easy-going indulgent relationship but there is conflict between maternal uncle and nephew even though there are no sexual relations between the mother and her brother. Malinowski [1927] used the comparative method to undermine the idea of the Oedipus complex and to show that family tensions arise over quite different questions of authority and autonomy and, where it exists, property. The methodological principle employed here is very similar to that employed by Malinowski and is a descendent of the principles set out by John Stuart Mill [1843]. In this respect the study of jokes is no different from the study of any other social phenomenon. What makes the study of jokes more difficult to carry out is the elusive and ambiguous quality of humorous as opposed to bona fide discourse and the necessity always to avoid the temptation of reducing the former to the latter. Jokes must never be treated as if they were serious statements. Jokes dwell in a special world of their own with its own rules and it is by uncovering these rules that aggregate patterns of joking can be explained and accounted for.

178 

Christie Davies

The comparative methods for doing this do not in essence differ from those used for other purposes. The constructive comparative method used to study ethnic and political stupidity jokes is similar to that used by Emil Durkheim (Durkheim 1897; Pickering and Walford 2000) in his study of suicide or by David Martin [1978] when he produced a general theory of secularization by looking at the history of religion in a large number of Christian countries. As indicated earlier, an example of the use of the comparative method to contradict and overturn a theory based on a narrow analysis of the mores of a single society may be found in Malinowski’s anthropological study Sex and Repression in Savage Society [1927].The method of seeking out the exception in order to understand what are the preconditions of the general case is characteristic of the best early work of S. M. Lipset and his colleagues, including Union Democracy discussed earlier and also Agrarian Socialism [1950]. Reading these classics is the best way to understand the comparative method, far better than getting tangled up in Boolean algebra. In the distant future it may well be possible to use these Boolean methods in the comparative study of humor but their failure so far to produce any significant or interesting results in other similar fields of study shows that it is not appropriate to use them now. The premature use of such methods has the further disadvantage that it creates a false impression of sophistication and enables their user to hide problems and assumptions behind algebraic symbols. You can not easily turn words into numbers. Those who try to do so usually do not understand either. The comparative study of humor is only one approach to understanding humor. I have outlined how it works in more detail in my book The Mirth of Nations (Davies 2002). It is essential to supplement the comparative approach with a wide reading of the leading contemporary studies of humor from the 1980s through to the twenty first century listed below notably Attardo, Davies, Dundes, Oring, Raskin, and Ruch. The making of systematic comparisons is a powerful way of answering questions but a knowledge of modern humor scholarship is necessary if one is to know which questions to ask. Notes 1. Sex is different because the media can withhold the information necessary for sex jokes to be pinned on a politician. The public were not told about Roosevelt or Kennedy’s wild sex lives, so there were no jokes, whereas Profumo’s pecadilloes and Jefferson Clinton’s pecker dildos were public

Undertaking the comparative study of humor 

179

knowledge and hence a subject of jokes. The rules of the game are anyway different for sex jokes and political jokes. There are very few good sex jokes about East European political leaders under socialism despite, say, Lavrenti P. Beria’s exploitation of his position to have sex with under age girls.It is partly that these girls’ experiences never got the coverage of a Monica Wilensky or a Christine Keeler and partly that the East European jokes were about politics and stupidity not sex. The sex jokes about politicians in the Free World were equivalent to those told about Father Hickey or the Christian Brothers or Michael Jackson or anyone else involved in a sex scandal. The joke “ They have found the growth in President Reagen’s colon. It was Rock Hudson’s wrist watch” is not a political joke. It makes fun of a moral majoritarian having to respond to the death of an old friend forced out of the closet by imminently fatal AIDS but it could have been any two prominent people. It is a sick disaster joke with a sexual twist. Bibliography Adams, Bruce 2005 Tiny Revolutions in Russia, Twentieth Century Soviet and Russian History in Anecdotes. New York: Routledge Curzon. Allard, Louis-Paul, 1976 Le Coin du Newfie. Montrėal: Hėritage. Attardo, Salvatore 2001 Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Andrew, Christopher, and Vasili Mitrokhin 2000, 2005  The Mitrokhin Archive, 2 volumes. London: Penguin. Banc, C., and Alan Dundes 1986 First Prize Fifteen Years: An Annotated Collection of Romanian Political Jokes. Cranbury, NJ: Associate University Presses/Fairleigh: Dicken­son University Press. Beckmann, Petr 1969 Whispered Anecdotes, Humor from Behind the Iron Curtain. Boulder: Golem. 1980 Hammer and Tickle, Clandestine Laughter in the Soviet Union. Boulder: Golem. Bell, Steve, and Brian Homer 2001 Chairman Blair’s Little Red Book. London: Methuen. Ben-Amos, Dan 1973 The myth of Jewish humor, Western Folklore 32 (2): 112–131.

180 

Christie Davies

Brunvald, Jan Harold 1973 Don’t shoot comrades: A survey of the submerged folklore of eastern Europe”, North Carolina Folklore Journal 21: 181–188. Bryant, Chad 2006 The language of resistance: Czech jokes and joke-telling under Nazi occupation, 1943–1945. Journal of Contemporary History 41 (1): 133–151. Cochran, Robert 1989 “What Courage!”: Romanian “our leader” jokes. The Journal of American Folklore 142 (405): 259–279. Dale Iain, and John Simmons 2000 The Tony Blair New New Labour Joke Book. London: Robson. Davies, Christie 1972 Asians of East Africa. Quest, July–August, 33–39. 1990 Ethnic Humor around the World: A Comparative Analysis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1998a Jokes and their Relation to Society. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1998b The dog that didn’t bark in the night: A new sociological approach to the cross cultural study of humor in Willibald Ruch (ed.), The Sense of Humor, 293–306. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 2000 The savage style of Jaroslav Hasek: The Good Soldier Svejk as a Politically Incorrect Masterpiece, Stylistyka IX, [Stylistyka ­czeska] 301–315. 2002 The Mirth of Nations. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction. 2007 Humour and Protest: Jokes under Communism, International Review of Social History 52: 291–305. Davies, Christie, and Goh Abe 2003 Esuniku Joku. Tokyo: Kodansha. Davies, Sarah 1997 Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia, Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deriabin, Peter, and Frank Gibney 1960 The Secret War. London: Arthur Barker. Drozdzynski, Alexander 1977 Der politische Witz im Ostblok. Munich: DTV. Dundes, Alan 1984 Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder: A Portrait of German Culture through Folklore. New York: Columbia University Press. Dundes, Alan 1987 Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Humor Cycles and Stereotypes. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press.

Undertaking the comparative study of humor 

181

Durkheim, Emile 1964 [1897] Suicide, a Study in Sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Freeman, Derek 1983 Margaret Mead and Samoa, The Making and Unmaking of an ­Anthropological Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Freud, Sigmund 1960 [1905] Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. London: ­Hogarth. Grotjahn, Martin 1970 Jewish jokes and their relation to masochism. In Werner M. Mendel (ed.), A Celebration of Laughter. Los Angeles: Mara. Hanse, Joseph et al 1971 Chasse aux Belgicisms. Brussels: Charles Plisnier. Hislop, Ian (ed.) 2003 St Albion Parish News. London: Private Eye. Hornby, Peter 1978 The Official Irish Jokebook No 3 (Book 2 to follow). London: Futura. Kolasky, John 1972 Look Comrade – The People are laughing: Underground wit, satire and humour from behind the Iron Curtain. Toronto: Peter Martin. Krikmann, Arvo 2004 Netinalju Stalinist. Tartu: Estonian Literary Museum. 2006 Jokes in Soviet Estonia, (Paper presented at the 18th ISHS conference at the Danish University of Education Copenhagen, July 2006). Kuipers, Giselinde, and Marije Maniouschka 2001 Goede humor, slechte smaak: Nederlanders over moppen. Amsterdam: Boom. Legman, Gershon 1982 No Laughing Matter: An Analysis of Sexual Jokes. 2 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lipset, Seymour Martin 1950 Agrarian Socialism: The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lipset, Seymour Martin, Martin A. Trow, and James S. Coleman 1956 Union Democracy, the Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union. Glencoe: Free Press. Macklin, Pat, and Manny Erdman 1976 Polish Jokes. New York: Patman. Malinowski, Bronislaw 1927 Sex and Repression in Savage Society. London: Routledge. Mardiganian, Aurora 1918 The Auction of Souls. London: Odhams. Mead, Margaret 1928 Coming of Age in Samoa. New York: Morrow.

182 

Christie Davies

Martin, David 1978 A General Theory of Secularization. Oxford: Blackwell. Michels, Robert 2001 [1915] Political Parties, a Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracies. Kitchener, Ont.: Batoche. Mill, John Stuart 1930 [1843] A System of Logic, Ratiocination and Induction, Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation. London: Longman Green. Obrdlik, Antonin J. 1942 Gallows humor: a sociological phenomenon. American Journal of Sociology 47, 709–716. Oring, Elliott 1992 Jokes and their Relations. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 2003 Engaging Humor. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2004 Risky business: Political jokes under repressive regimes. Western Folklore 63 (3): 209–236. Pickering, W. S., and Geoffrey Walford 2000 Durkheim’s Suicide, a Century of Research and Debate. London: Routledge. Ramsay, Edward Bannerman 1874 [1858] Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character. Edinburgh: Gall and Inglis. Raskin, Victor 1985 Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Skrobocki, Eugeninez 1992 1001 Dowcipow Sowieckich. Białystock: Versus. Uberoi, J. Singh 1967 On being unshorn: Sikhism and Indian society. Transactions of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Vol 4, 89–100. Simla: Rashtrapati Nivas Viikberg, Jűri 1997 Anecdotes about Soviet Power and their Leaders, Collected from Estonia 1960–1986. Talinn: Punkt and Koma. Weber, Max 1930 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Unwin. Wells, H. G. 1928 The History of Mr Polly. In A Quartette of Comedies. London: Ernest Benn. Yurchak, Alexei 1997 The cynical realism of late socialism: Power, pretence and the anekdot. Public Culture 9: 161–188.

Humor in anthropology and folklore Elliott Oring Introduction As disciplines, anthropology and folklore emerge at pretty much the same time. Both began in the nineteenth century with the effort to understand the intellectual and spiritual development of mankind. Anthropology would focus on the concept of culture whereas folklore would emphasize the notion of tradition. The great impetus to anthropological studies was European imperialism and the rule over a range of societies with different languages, religions, and customs. Anthropology turned to these exotic cultures in an effort to understand their nature and their relationship to the societies of civilized Europe. Folklore studies, however, were largely a product of the forces of nationalism, and it was to the traditions of the nation – first and foremost their own – that folklorists turned in the effort to glimpse its character and spirit. Humor has never been a central concern for either anthropologists or folklorists. Anthropologists were forced to confront humor because it was embedded in certain social and religious practices whose significance they could not ignore. Folklorists would confront humor because a number of the traditions they studied – tales, songs, proverbs – were humorous. Indeed, jokes and other forms of humorous expression would come to be recognized as the preeminent forms of folkloric expression in contemporary urban society. Although anthropologists would largely remain concerned with exotic societies while folklorists focused on their own (there are of course exceptions to these generalizations), theoretical developments brought them closer together. At one time or another, both disciplines employed evolutionary, historic-geographic, functional, structural, interpretive, and postmodern theoretical frameworks – although the time and energy invested in each by the disciplines were different. Ultimately, the concord between these disciplines in their perspective toward humor arises from their mutual concern with recording and interpreting humor in the context of its expression in the life of society. Both are committed to fieldwork – the first-hand observation of humor in the flow of social life – and the documenting of humorous expression for analysis and interpretation.

184 

Elliott Oring

Previous literature reviews The indispensable reference on the anthropological approach is Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach by Mahadev Apte (1985). The book is a comprehensive survey of anthropological approaches to humor and includes extensive bibliographical references. The book is divided into three major sections. The first is “Humor and Social Structure” which is concerned with joking relationships, sexual inequality, children’s humor, and ethnicity. The second is “Cultural Expressions of Humor” and concerns religion, language, and tricksters. The third, “Behavioral Responses to Humor,” concerns laughing and smiling. The first two sections are about equal in length and comprise the great majority of the book. The book is comprehensive in its scope and accurately represents the directions of anthropological studies of humor. It should be noted that Apte’s sense of an anthropological approach is broad, and he cites not only the works of anthropologists, but folklorists, linguists, sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers as well. By an “anthropological approach,” he means an approach that focuses on humor rooted in social relations and cultural understandings and does not merely intend a disciplinary outlook. Consequently, he does not limit his survey only to researchers who might be strictly defined as anthropologists. “Folklore Methodology and American Humor Research,” (Oring 1988) explores some of the identifying characteristics of folkloristic methodologies and their impact on humor research. It discusses collecting, indexing, and contextualization as three major concerns of folklore studies over the past century and a half and relates these concerns to the folkloristic engagement with humor. It is accompanied by a bibliographic survey relating the discussion to particular examples in the published literature. The essay, however, is focused on methodology, not theory, and it is limited to a discussion of American humor. Even then, it does not attempt to be comprehensive. Issues Anthropologists and folklorists recognize that humorous expressions occur in a wide variety of forms, in a diversity of cultures, and under a great range of circumstances. Consequently neither discipline has attempted to articulate a single theory to be tested against a range of humorous stimuli and expressions. Anthropologists and folklorists encounter humor in day-to-day interaction, and their job is to document and explain the humor produced and

Humor in anthropology and folklore 

185

consumed in those circumstances. The single question that these disciplines repeatedly engage is why does this humor occur when and where it does. This question, however, entails two subsidiary questions: how does the humor function and what does the humor mean? Anthropologists and folklorists have contributed to a range of discussions in linguistics, sociology, and psychology and not all of these can be characterized in this brief chapter. Only the signal concerns of anthropologists and folklorists are discussed: joking relationships, ritual humor, folk genre, jokes and joke cycles, the contexts of humor, and art. Joking relationships “Joking relationship” was the term employed by anthropologists to characterize behaviors they had witnessed in different societies in very distant parts of the globe. These relationships were characterized by the license people had to assault, insult, steal or destroy the property of, throw excrement at, or play pranks upon certain categories of kin. These behaviors were not voluntary but, in some sense, mandatory, and the behaviors had to be received with equanimity by those kin who were the victims of the joking. The term was later extended to characterize more voluntary forms of teasing that occur between friends and workmates even in our own society. In the latter cases, the joking is most often directed at specified individuals rather than categories of individuals. Anthropologists studied this odd behavioral pattern because they felt it could illuminate the organization of relationships in society. They did not see joking relationships as a problem in humor per se. Consequently, anthropologists concentrated on describing and analyzing the relationship between the joking groups, while usually failing to report in any detail the nature of the joking behaviors that were observed or the native explanations of the ­custom. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown theorized these relationships of formalized joking occurred when two groups of kin simultaneously exhibited “both attachment and separation, both social conjunction and social disjunction” (1940: 197). The disjunction refers to the divergence of interests of the groups while the conjunction reflects the common interests that necessitate the prevention of conflict. Radcliffe-Brown held that there were only two ways of accommodating such contradictory tendencies: extreme respect with social avoidance on the one hand, or abusive joking on the other. The abuse and assault ­relieved

186 

Elliott Oring

hostilities arising from the divergence of interests while the acceptance of the assaults as playful reflected their mutual interests. One example of a joking relationship is that between cross-cousins of the opposite sex. Cross-cousins (the children of siblings of the opposite sex) have often been observed to joke – often about sexual matters – with one another. In the same societies, parallel cousins (the children of siblings of the same sex) were forbidden to do so. Cross cousins tend to be members of different unilineal descent groups but are eligible and expected to marry one another. The disjunction resides in the different interests of the two descent groups and the conjunction in the marriage alliances that are formed between them. Radcliffe-Brown’s theoretical orientation was based upon the view that the social arrangements found in different societies served to enhance the stability and well being of that society. Joking relationships could help to corral conflict when divergent interests threatened to destroy the management of a cooperative relationship (Radcliffe-Brown 1941: 137). His was a functional theory and functional theories have been shown to be limited in their explanatory powers (Jarvie 1965; Cancian 1968). Anthropologists have extended the study of patterned joking behaviors to industrial settings in contemporary Western societies. Unlike what was observed among cross-cousins in traditional societies, it was observed in a Glasgow print works, that it was the sexually impossible relationships – those between old men and very young women or old women and much younger men – that were governed by licensed obscene joking. The sexually possible relationships between men and women of the same age group were marked by modesty and restraint (Sykes 1966). Clearly, in traditional and modern societies, joking transmits an important statement about social relationships, although there is no formula that states what joking will communicate about the nature of the relationships in question. Between cross-cousins, sexual joking reaffirms sexual possibilities and alliance between different descent groups; between old and young in a Glasgow industrial setting, sexual joking affirms no possibilities at all. Perhaps modern societies are more disposed towards ironic modes of communication (Oring 2003[1994]: 71–84), but in fact, in traditional societies, abusive joking behavior often takes place between categories of kin whose relations are warm and supportive (Freedman 1977). It has been suggested that what have been called joking relationships occur between very different kinds of groups in societies of different levels of complexity. Consequently, they cannot be comprehended within the frame of a single theory (ibid.: 154–155). Nevertheless, Mary Douglas (1968) attempted to generalize the relation of joking to social structure. She saw jok-

Humor in anthropology and folklore 

187

ing as offering a symbolic representation of underlying social arrangements. Indeed, she maintained that if there were no joke in the social structure, no joke could appear. Jokes, she maintained, were anti-rites that subverted the normative social order – the order regularly validated and maintained by religious and civic rituals. Jokes assert uncontrol against patterns of control. Consequently, joking promotes community over hierarchy and reveals ambiguities in the fabric of society. Folklorists have given less attention to joking relationships than to verbal dueling, practical joking, and dyadic traditions. All of these, nevertheless, bear some similarity to joking relationships. Verbal dueling refers to ritualized insult exchanges that take place between adolescent boys and sometimes between grown men. Folklorists studying the obscenities of the “dozens” among black youth of the inner city (Abrahams 1964; Labov 1972), between Turkish boys (Dundes, Leach, and Özkök 1970; Glazer 1976; Hickman 1979), and the more prosaic routines of lower-class whites (Bronner 1978; Leary 1980) give close attention to the texts of the insults exchanged as well as to the character of the performance. Dueling among Turkish boys is expressed in terms that feminize and subordinate an opponent by portraying him as a submissive female to be sexually penetrated. Alan Dundes (1997) has attempted to reinterpret an entire range of male competitive activities – from games to war – as stemming from similar motivations. Dundes believes that these aggressive activities are compensation for the confused sense of gender identity experienced by males reared in female-dominated environments. He amasses interesting evidence to support his hypothesis but does not entertain the idea that penetration and feminization may be the language of competition and combat rather than the motivations for it. Folklorists have recorded pranks and practical jokes, both as events and stories, for over a century, but serious attention to them has only developed in the past several decades. Tallman (1974a) has outlined a classificatory schema for pranking and practical joking in terms of the jokers, the victims, the actions, the intentions, and the results. Bauman (1986: 33–53) has outlined the structure of certain practical joke stories. Some practical jokes are so traditional (the snipe hunt, the farm animal in the classroom, animating the corpse) that they have served as motifs in popular films (e.g., Straw Dogs; Animal House; Weekend at Bernie’s). Pranking and practical joking are particularly prevalent at certain times of year – April Fools Day and Halloween (Dundes 1989[1988]; McEntire 2002; Siporin 1994); certain events – initiations, weddings, and wakes (Honeyman 1959; Morrison 1974; Narváez 2003); and in certain kinds of groups – students, all male occupations, and

188 

Elliott Oring

summer camps (Bronner 1990; Scott 1974; Posen 1974). They have been regarded as a means of social control (Posen 1974), resistance (Narváez 2003), or an aspect of folk aesthetics (Harlow 2003). “Dyadic tradition” was the term employed (Oring 1992 [1984]: 135–144) to characterize behavioral and linguistics routines generated and maintained by dyads: couples, siblings, or close friends. Dyadic traditions were largely humorous and much of that humor involved insult, abuse, or references to or re-creations of shared, unpleasant experiences. These traditions were employed to register mood, symbolize intimacy, and activate a shared sense of the past and the history of the dyad (Bendix 1987; Tavarelli 1987–88). The abusive nature of many of these expressions could connote intimacy because the sense of the relationship trumped the abusive expression and framed it as a joke. It did not communicate hostility or create antagonism (also Freedman 1977: 162). Ritual humor Ritual humor – the appearance of humor in the context of sacred rituals and texts – posed another problem to anthropologists. As joking relationships seemed a challenge to notions of solidary kinship relations, sexual reference and display, scatology, transvestism, burlesque, and other forms of coarse and unseemly expression seemed an affront to sacred belief and practice. Sometimes these outlandish behaviors were the actions of the multitude, sometimes the province of a designated specialist – a ceremonial clown or buffoon. These clowns were sometimes identified with mythological figures, and they undertook healing, disciplinary, fertility-enhancing, and priestly functions during major ceremonies. The breaking of taboos that was realized in their inverse and perverse antics was, in fact, the source of their powers. As with joking relationships, ritual humor has been viewed as a means of releasing energy and reducing tension: tensions created in the ritual context itself (Gluckman 1963) or those generated more generally in society (Charles 1945). Others have seen ritual humor as a critical practice concerned with controlling behaviors that violate community norms or directing aggression against dominant social classes (Bricker 1973). The taboo breaking of clowns has also been viewed as reinforcing the mores of the society. By framing the violations within a ritual context, they can be safely viewed, contemplated, ridiculed, and rejected as modes of behaviors appropriate to the everyday world (Makarius 1970: 68).

Humor in anthropology and folklore 

189

Humor in the context of ritual behaviors has also been regarded as political, an act of resistance. With French colonialism, the Hauka spirit movement emerged among the Songhay people of Niger. In the course of spirit dances, new spirits began to appear: generals and governors of distant lands, doctors and lawyers, judges and secretaries. They represented a panorama of social and political statuses that had been established and occupied by Europeans and their appointees. The dances were both terrifying and comic, as super strong and belligerent spirit dancers engaged in burlesques of colonial authority and manner. Even after French rule ended, the Hauka spirit dances continued because the way of life that the colonial regime had established continued to shape Songhay life (Stoller 1984). In addition to the safety valve, social corrective, and resistance theories, clowning was regarded as embodying abstract statements about the ideological bases of society and the cosmos. The clown is the violator of the nomos of the social group. That nomos, which protects the social group, also violates individual freedom. The laughter inspired by the clown is the laughter of an infinite God at the presumption of a finite society that regards its prescriptions as absolute (Zucker 1969). Ritual joking highlights the arbitrary nature of the categories of thought (Douglas 1968). Those who bring to ritual the notion of the carnivalesque that Mikhail ­Bakhtin (1984) brought to the analysis of the novel do not regard ritual humor as a contradiction. Play is not the opposite of seriousness. Neither the novel nor ritual has a fixed meaning – not even a highly abstract one. Instead, there is an overlapping of signification systems with a multiplicity of meanings. Rituals have no unambiguous meanings. In rituals, the comic and the serious, the chaotic and the orderly, create meta-commentaries on themselves. The comic in ritual is not comic relief; it is another system of signification that speaks to, against, and with the serious one (Babcock-Abrahams 1974; Mitchell 1992). In Andalusia, for example, alongside the scurrilous coplas sung during carnival, are “scholarly” songs – serious, sentimental, elegiac verses – in praise of traditional, Christian values. These songs celebrate chivalry, compassion, and the brotherhood of humanity. The carnival does not merely turn the world upside-down in reaction to the prevailing social order. It contains within itself a denial of the denial, and expresses contradictions not only between classes but within them as well (Gilmore 1995). Similarly, the Gede spirits, relatives of the grim Bawon Samdi, live in the cemetery and run riot in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on Carnival. The Gedes are colorful, erotic, and obscene figures in the celebration of death and the dead.

190 

Elliott Oring

Uproarious, macabre, and indecent, their antics not only serve as local political critique, but in the context of the festival they offer a kaleidoscopic commentary on human mortality in general and the miseries of Haiti in particular (Cosentino 2003). Folklorists and anthropologists, even when they do not study the carnivalesque, study carnivals. Daniel Crowley, studied carnivals in the United States, New Orleans, Brazil, the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea-Bisseau, the Canary Islands, and the Caribbean. And while Crowley felt Bakhtin’s idea of carnival might serve as heuristic for the analysis of literary texts, he also felt that Bakhtin and many of those who employed his carnival metaphor had little knowledge of what carnivals were really like (Crowley 1999). Carnivals can be affairs of great seriousness requiring enormous discipline, expenditure, and even pain. The preparation for Carnival goes on throughout the year, and these preparations are not something apart from the festive celebration itself. In some ways they seem to be as, if not more, important (Lohman 1999). Folklorists have also paid attention to the role of humor as a commentary on beliefs and practices in religious settings. Larry Danielson (1986) described how a certain casual, humorous remark in a Lutheran congregation actually communicated a serious message about the style of worship and the ideology of the congregation. When Danielson served as worship deacon in his church, he accidentally extinguished the sanctuary lamp in his attempt to light the frankincense for an Epiphany service. A woman also serving in the altar area said to him in a stage whisper, “We know what happens to people who put out the eternal light.” The comment was ironic, indicating that she believed nothing at all happened to such people, but the comment also alluded to the increasing penetration of Catholic practices – such as the use of frankincense – into what she perceived to be plain Lutheran styles of worship. The comment meant to suggest that there were people in the congregation who were truly punctilious about how the objects in the altar area were handled and who supported the type of excessive ritual display in which the two participants were then engaged. The admirers of these new, high church practices were humorously referred to as “chancel prancers” by those critical of the shift from simpler and more traditional forms of worship. Serious messages were also extracted from a series of comic songs that playfully combined descriptions of religious belief and practice among Orthodox Jews with profane references and tunes from American popular culture. The songs – for example, a song that combined a discourse on studying the Talmud with the tune and metaphor of “Home on the Range” – were analyzed to reveal a crisis in identity in the modern orthodox community. They

Humor in anthropology and folklore 

191

explored the contradiction faced by those committed to orthodox religious observance who also participated in the national and popular culture. The songs appeared just at the time that this contradiction had become most acute due to shifts in the political and ideological structure of the American Jewish community (Oring 1992 [1988]: 67–80). Folk genre Bronislaw Malinowski urged anthropologists to pay close attention to the native point of view (Malinowski 1961[1922]: 22–23). He noted that while the differences between liliu, libwogwo, and kukwanebu in the Trobriand Islands resembled distinctions between myths, legends, and folktales in the West (Malinowski 1954: 101–108), the similarities obscured important differences. The category of libwogwo conflated historical accounts witnessed by the narrator, legends lacking a chain of testimony, and hearsay based on events falling outside the experience of the present-day population. Furthermore, unlike in the West, the telling of these types of narrative involved different beliefs and demanded different behaviors. Kukwanebu could be told only during certain seasons of the year, were thought to enhance crop growth, and were individually owned. They could not be told without their owner’s permission. Libwogwo, however, might be told by anybody at any time (104–106). In some cultures, even the distinction employed in the Trobriand Islands between true and false narratives, held no place. The northern Ojibwa, for example, possessed no category of fictional literature; all tales were thought to be true (Hallowell 1947: 547). Subsequent to Malinowski’s injunctions and observations, folklorists and anthropologists became attentive to the terms employed and the characteristics that defined oral genres in various cultures and subcultures. Among the Western Apache, banagozdíʔ are distinguished from other humorous speech because the targets of these jokes are likened to inanimate things, are put in social categories to which they do not belong, or the jokers themselves assume roles and behaviors that are not properly theirs (Basso 1979: 38–40). For the Tzotzil-speaking Mayan community of Chamula, Gary Gossen (1971) articulated an elaborate taxonomy of verbal genres. What is termed ʔištol k’op or “frivolous language” is a subcategory of puru k’op or “pure speech,” not loʔil k’op or “ordinary language.” “Frivolous language” subsumes “lies”, which are prose jokes; “genuine frivolous talk,” i.e., sexual banter or verbal dueling; “obscure words,” which are circumlocutions; “riddles”; and “buried

192 

Elliott Oring

words,” which are like riddles but are tailored to specific situations of behavioral deviation (157–160). All of the above are translations of Tzotzil terms. In Chamula, what is called humor in the West is distributed in numerous genres of speaking, and that world of speech is ultimately connected to Chamula religion and cosmology (165). Chizbat was the term used by the Palmach to name their jokes and anecdotes in the 1940s. The Palmach was a Jewish military group originally trained by the British to oppose an expected invasion of Palestine by the Wehrmacht during World War II. When the threat of invasion passed and the British began to worry about those it had trained, the members moved underground. Since chizbat were told in Hebrew, why was the name derived from Arabic? Why was the available Hebrew term bedikhot (jokes) not used? How did this humor differ from those jokes and anecdotes that were not regarded as chizbat? The answers to these questions depend upon discerning the contours and significance of this folk genre. These answers also suggest why it would be inappropriate to simply categorize the chizbat as “Jewish humor” even though the chizbat was humorous and the tellers and audiences were all Jewish (Oring 1981). The concern with “ethnic” or “folk” classifications attempts to comprehend culture-specific conceptualizations and categorizations of the natural, social, and cultural environment. The study of folk genres can illustrate the difficulties of applying the genre terminology of one culture to the verbal expressions of another. It can also lead to critical reflections on the categories and terminologies that scholars themselves employ. Jokes and joke cycles Anthropologists have played less of a role in the description and analysis of jokes and contemporary joke cycles than folklorists (see, however, Sherzer 1985, 2002; Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi 1992). The Brothers Grimm included comic tales in their famous collection of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales). Jokes and anecdotes comprised approximately a third of the tale types in Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson’s index The Types of the Folktale (1962), and humorous motifs permeate Stith Thompson’s multi-volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1955–58). Comic stories were printed in the Journal of American Folklore from its earliest decades. As folklorists were first and foremost documenters of traditions, they often recorded jokes, anecdotes, and other humorous materials without attending

Humor in anthropology and folklore 

193

to their analysis or interpretation. But since the early 1960s, folklorists have been documenting, analyzing, and interpreting the jokes and joke cycles that have come to dominate oral expression in contemporary society. Perhaps one of the best known of these joke interpreters is Alan Dundes. It was Dundes who insisted that jokes had to be interpreted and not merely recorded. His view of the sick humor of the dead-baby joke cycle (e.g., Q: What is red and sits in the corner? A: A baby chewing on razor blades) was that it expressed hostility and resentment against babies. The recourse to contraception and eventually abortion from the 1960s through the 1980s – when the joke cycle ended – made people anxious and guilty about their complicity in preventing or destroying babies. The telling of dead baby jokes which dehumanized babies relieved their tellers and listeners of some of this guilt (Dundes 1987 [1979]: 3–14). Dundes’s theory of joking is a cathartic one: through jokes people express repressed sexual or aggressive wishes and relieve themselves of their anxieties. This follows Sigmund Freud’s theory that jokes “make possible the expression of an instinct (whether lustful or hostile) in the face of an obstacle that stands in its way” (Freud 1960 [1900]: 101). This cathartic theory characterizes Dundes’s view of Auschwitz jokes (1987 [1983]: 19–38) and quadriplegic jokes as well (Dundes 1987 [1985]: 15–18). In some joke cycles that Dundes studied, the targets of the jokes were not clearly identifiable. Consequently, he had to engage in symbolic interpretation to determine against whom the aggression of the joke was directed. Dundes (1987 [1969]: 41–54) argued that the elephant in elephant jokes – a cycle which circulated in the early 1960s – was a symbol of the American black. The internal evidence for this equation was that some of the jokes concerned the color of the elephant, his prodigious sexuality, and his feminization – even his castration. The external evidence was their similarity to other riddle jokes circulating at the same time that explicitly referred to blacks. These jokes were popular during the heyday of the Civil Right movement. The elephant jokes, according to Dundes, reflected the anxiety of whites about black power, and expressed their unconscious aggression. He made essentially the same argument about the joke of the “wide-mouthed frog” (Dundes 1987 [1977]: 55–61). In dealing with Polish jokes, Dundes was in somewhat of a quandary. Unlike some other theorists (e.g., Welsch 1967), Dundes did not see the jokes as aggressions against American Poles because he had no sense that such hostility existed. He suggested instead that Polish jokes took the heat off blacks. The jokes were directed against the lower class, giving the middle class an

194 

Elliott Oring

outlet for aggression and the means for feeling superior (Dundes 1987[1971]: 115–138) – presumably because explicit anti-black jokes were no longer acceptable at that time. This aggressive/cathartic view of jokes was challenged on several fronts. One re-analysis of elephant jokes showed that they violated very specific rules of traditional riddling. The elephant jokes appeared at a time when traditional knowledge and traditional authority were being challenged on college campuses throughout America. The Civil Rights Movement was just one part of a larger counter-cultural movement in the United States that sought to overthrow traditional ideas and institutions. There was no basis for identifying the elephant as a symbol of any specific person or group. The image of something large and wild abroad in the land captured the sense of the counterculture and its overturning of traditional attitudes and behaviors quite well. Furthermore, it was argued that jokes could not be reduced to outlets for aggression. Jokes were forms of play and they could play with aggression without themselves being aggressive (Oring 1992[1975]: 16–28). Gregory Bateson had made the same point about animal play: the playful nip denotes the bite but not what would be denoted by the bite itself (1972: 180). Others also challenged assumptions about the aggressiveness of ethnic joking. In a broad comparative study of those ethnic jokes that ascribed stupidity to one or another ethnic group, Christie Davies (1990) showed that such jokes were not told about groups that were adversaries but about groups that were peripheral to the mainstream: geographically peripheral provincials, culturally peripheral ethnics, or economically peripheral proletarians. The Polish jokes, therefore, did not express hostility against an ethnic group that was challenging the white middle-class socially or economically. Rather, Poles were perceived to hold to blue-collar occupations and to remain rooted in ethnic neighborhoods. The jokes were about a group that seemed to reject the intellectual, cultural, and social advancement that the American marketplace opened to individuals of all backgrounds. The jokes were about these progressive values, and the Poles were simply the signifier of those who chose not to pursue them (see “Undertaking the comparative study of humor”, in this volume). A similar argument was made about the blonde joke cycle that circulated in the early 1990s in the United States. Most journalists, feminists, and scholars immediately read them as yet another exercise in misogyny. But the question of the jokes’ motives and meanings depended upon how to read the blonde signifier: was it a sign for all women, a sign for certain women, or was it a sign for something else? Among the data suggesting that the blonde

Humor in anthropology and folklore 

195

did not stand for all women was: (1) blonde women themselves often relished telling and hearing the jokes; (2) the jokes included explicit references to blondes and brunettes and the brunette was often portrayed as the opposite of the blonde; (3) the blonde in the jokes was represented as having only two faults: extreme stupidity and promiscuity. The interpretation that was offered of these jokes was that they, like the Polish jokes, were about certain values for which the blonde was a signifier. The workaday world into which women were moving and succeeding, was held to be a world of rationality, calculation, organization, and efficiency. Ideally, intelligence and ability were the coin of this realm and the key to success in it. In the jokes, the blonde is a crystallization of wanton sex and helpless ineptitude. The blonde in the jokes is rejected not because she is a woman, but because she represents values and strategies that are anti-modern and opposed to expectations of conduct in the contemporary workplace (Oring 2003: 58–70). These semiotic perspectives also lead to a reconsideration of some of the sick-joke and disaster cycles that emerged in relatively recent times. The jokes that followed shortly after the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in January 1986 brought about a series of sick jokes concerning the failure of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA), the explosion of the shuttle, the dismemberment of the astronauts, and Christa McAuliffe, “the teacher in space” who was on board the shuttle to promote science education in the schools. Journalists again condemned these jokes as an indication of the depravity of the national psyche. Psychologists and scholars – including Alan Dundes – were more forgiving. They regarded the jokes as a mechanism for coping with the tragedy and distancing oneself from disaster. But these interpretations were formulated without any consideration of the context in which the public encountered the disaster. The disaster was a media event. The public became aware of the disaster only through the media – primarily television – and it was shown images of the Challenger explosion in a seemingly endless series of repetitions. But if images of the explosion miles above the earth were endlessly viewable, the trauma to and mutilation of the bodies of the astronauts themselves was never discussed. In a sense, the television footage was a lie. Furthermore, the media attempted to define for the public the meaning of the event and how it should respond to it. Some anchormen on network news programs, for example, actually recited poetry. The fact that the media create the spectatorship for disaster, its unwillingness to speak about certain topics connected with disaster, and its attempt to define response and control sentiment was probably what inspired the cycle of Challenger jokes. Because the jokes were so outrageous, they could not be reported in

196 

Elliott Oring

the media. In that way, the resistance of a public to the media-defined situation could not be co-opted. This hypothesis would go a long way to explaining some of the other sick humor cycles that arise from time to time (Oring 1992[1987]: 29–40; Kuipers 2005). Disaster humor comes into being with the omnipresence of television, and the interpretation of the Challenger jokes was expanded into a more general theory of disaster humor (Davies 2003). Bill Ellis (1991) noted that the Challenger jokes did not appear all at once, but in stages. Two weeks following the explosion of the shuttle on 28 January 1986, jokes appeared on three different college campuses that focused on the acronym NASA (e.g., Need Another Seven Astronauts); on Bud Light (e.g., they found the flight recorder and all that was on it was, “no, Bud Light,” parodying a series of beer commercials that produced incendiaries when all that was wanted was a light beer); and on Christa McAuliffe’s last words (“What’s this button for?). This wave lasted approximately a week when it was joined and then replaced by more gruesome jokes that traded on graphic images of death and dismemberment. These jokes lasted about a month before declining. Ellis stated that he did not regard the jokes as part of a grieving process. They were a way to declare that the tellers themselves were not grieving. The jokes signaled a move towards closure; meaning a willingness to bring the tragedy back to private discourse, to a realm of discourse not controlled by media or other public definitions of the event. This approach is not at odds with the previous interpretation, although at times it seems to drift towards the notion of grieving that it disclaims. Nevertheless, Ellis’s particular contribution to the study of these jokes was his method of collecting them. He formulated a questionnaire that was used to survey his college classes over a three-week period in February and March following the explosion. He was also able to correlate his surveys with collections made by colleagues at other universities. When the jokes concerning the World Trade Center began after the attack on 11 September 2001, he used the Google.com Groups metasearch to locate disaster jokes in archived messages on Usenet message boards. He was able to sort messages by date and trace the history of the items and note their peaks of popularity. He was also able to see the jokes in the context of a message and conversational exchange (Ellis 2003). Humor contexts There are four contexts that anthropologists and folklorists take into account in the effort to interpret humor: cultural context, social context, individ-

Humor in anthropology and folklore 

197

ual context and comparative context. Cultural context refers to the cultural knowledge, concepts, values, and attitudes necessary to understand a humorous expression. The following Israeli joke is from the early 1950s: After the conquest of Eilat, Ben-Gurion arrived in the Aravah and surveyed the area. In every fortification they honored him with a parade, and he spoke to the soldiers. In one of the encampments, a platoon mustered for him, and Ben-Gurion, who stood on a small rise, began to prophesy: Do you see this wilderness? Here will be a forest!” One of the guys added, “And bears will walk in it.” Eilat is the southernmost town in Israel. It stands on the coast of the Red Sea not far from the Jordanian port of Aqaba. On March 10, 1949, in the final weeks of the War of Independence, it was conquered by Israeli forces. The Aravah – actually the southern Aravah – is the desert in the Rift Valley south of the Dead Sea that provides the major route to Eilat. David Ben-Gurion was the first prime minister and defense minister of the State of Israel. BenGurion was known as a visionary with highly optimistic views of the future. He felt that the agricultural development of the southern desert was crucial for the country, and he later retired to a kibbutz in the desert. Ben-Gurion was also short. In the joke, Ben-Gurion comes to the military encampment and ascends a small rise, in order to speak to and be seen by the soldiers. He conveys his fantastic vision of a forest eventually springing up in the middle of a desperately arid landscape. “And bears will walk in it,” is an inversion of the Hebrew phrase “No bears and no forest” which connotes something that is a figment of the imagination. So when Ben-Gurion conjures up the image of a forest, the soldier populates it with bears, thus communicating that it is something that will never come to be – just another cock-and-bull story. The joke, therefore, emerges as a playful criticism of visionaries in general and of David Ben-Gurion’s fertile imagination in particular (Oring 1981: 71). The above constitutes the minimum of cultural contextual information necessary to comprehend and interpret the joke. The following, however, described by its tellers as one of the “funniest Navajo jokes,” remained cryptic to the folklorist to whom it was told, even though he had spent some forty years studying Navajo folklore:

Long ago they say (a man off to one side): “Which of you dreamed something last night?”

198 

Elliott Oring

Another said, “I don’t know.” Another said, “I don’t know” “I dreamed last night,” another one said. “Last night I dreamed I was sitting on [hatching] four little birds, and three weren’t mine; “Only one was mine,” he said. Despite the observations that Navajo do not usually talk about their dreams, that discrepancies in nature (such as a human hatching birds) often portend physical or mental illness, that the man seems to be a cuckold in that he is caring for offspring that are not his (although Navajo informants assured him that is not what is funny about it), that a male seems to be playing the role of a woman, that Navajo men should not be concerned with paternity because children are the property of women and their families, and the distortion of nature by a man sitting on eggs is not an actual distortion because the man dreamed that he was a bird which properly does sit on eggs, non-Navajos are likely to remain very much in the dark about what makes this exchange funny (Toelken 2003: 150–152). Even when a joke seems fully comprehensible, the sociocultural context necessary to grasp its import may be lacking. In his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud included a good number of Jewish jokes among his examples. Among these jokes were several about the figure of the schadchen or Jewish marriage broker. A Schadchen had brought an assistant with him to the discussion about the proposed bride, to bear out what he had to say. “She’s as straight as a pinetree,” said the Schadchen. – “As a pine tree,” repeated the echo. – “And she has eyes that ought to be seen!” – “What eyes she has!” confirmed the echo. “And she is better educated than anyone!” – “What an education!” “It’s true there’s one thing,” admitted the broker, “she has a small hump.” – “And what a hump!” the echo confirmed once more.  (Freud 1960: 64) While there probably is nothing in this joke that needs explanation for it to be easily understood (the assistant is so conditioned to echo the prospective bride’s virtues that he also mechanically exaggerates her flaw), cultural context is necessary to recognize the significance of the image of the deformed bride in the period that Freud employed it. In 1905, when Freud published his book on jokes, Jews in Central Europe were widely regarded as a spiritually and morally corrupt people. This cor-

Humor in anthropology and folklore 

199

ruption was supposed to manifest itself in Jewish speech and in signs on the Jewish body. The physical signs of this corruption were held to be evident in their feet, gait, skin, eyes, nose, and in a variety of physical and mental diseases. Their speech – their loquacity, duplicity, materialism, and penchant for wit and irony – was also reckoned to reveal their moral deficiencies. Furthermore, endogamous Jewish marriage was held responsible for the creation and perpetuation of these defects in Jewish body and soul. Given these antiSemitic attitudes that pervaded fin-de-siècle Vienna, a joke about a schadchen who promotes marriage with a physically flawed woman and who uses all his rhetoric skills to achieve his purpose was hardly a benign joke for dispassionate scientific analysis (Oring 2003: 116–128). Only the awareness of the jokes’ cultural context would suggest that it probably resonated quite differently for people a century ago than it does for people today. Social context refers to the situation and circumstances in which humor is performed. Time, setting, personnel, the relationships among the participants, the nature of their conversation and interaction are relevant to the description of social context. For when, where, how, and to whom a joke is told bears significantly on how the joke functions and what the joke means. Alf Walle (1976) studied a diner in upstate New York and focused on the dynamics of joking during the period of 12:45 to 2:00 A.M. Many bars in the immediate area of the diner closed at 1:00 A.M. and waitresses who began work the previous evening got off at 1:30 A.M. So this period, known locally as “the bar rush,” was the period in which men from the bars went to try and pick up waitresses who were getting off of work. What Walle discovered was that jokes were used in a calculated manner to ascertain the availability of a waitress for a liaison. Each type of joke signaled a different degree of intimacy in the interaction between customer and waitress. Thus “general humor” like elephant and Polish jokes were relatively impersonal and were used to establish friendly relations between customer and waitress. They indicated no more than a general friendliness. Were such jokes refused by the waitress, however, the possibility for greater intimacy was unlikely. The jokes were a risk-free way to assess the openness of the waitress to greater intimacy. If the general humor was well received, the customer could move on to “topical jokes” on social issues – notably politics and race. For this type of joke to be successful, an alignment of attitudes and views between customer and waitress would be required. These jokes indexed a relationship between the waitress and customer as persons, whereas general humor merely indexed a relationship between customer and waitress in their assigned roles. The success of topical jokes in interaction with the

200 

Elliott Oring

waitress could lead to the use of explicitly sexual humor. The waitresses were free to reject these attempts at humor, laugh at them, or respond with their own examples. The jokes provided a way for customers to test the availability of waitresses without risking a personal rejection. Similarly, waitresses could encourage someone they were interested in or discourage others without having to entertain or reject explicit sexual overtures. Thus joking in the social context of the bar rush was a coded communication about intimacy and sexual availability. The close study of folklore in particular social contexts, gave rise to a focus on performance. Speakers of folklore frame their utterances to suggest that they are a special mode of communication. The frame signals that communications are not to be taken simply for their referential content, and that speakers are to be evaluated not merely for the substance of their communications but for their skill and effectiveness as well. Performance is a way of speaking indicating that communication is to be examined and appraised for its form and style – that is, as art. In choosing to perform, a performer, therefore, assumes responsibility for a communication and is held accountable for it by an audience (Bauman 1977: 7–14). “Keying” is the framing of words and actions as performance. Performance may be keyed by special codes and formulas, paralinguistic features, appeals to tradition, and even disclaimers of performance (Bauman 1977: 16). Jokes, for example, may be keyed by stereotypic actors and locales (“Guy goes into a bar”); a pervasive present tense (“Asks the bartender for a martini”); formulaic introductions (“Have you heard the one about…”); appeals to tradition (“Here’s an old chestnut”); and disclaimers (“My husband is the joke teller in the family, but…”). On occasion, breakthrough into joke performance can prove an arduous social accomplishment (Sacks 1974). The keying of joke performance through disclaimer has been discussed by Edwards (1984). The analysis of performance was meant to direct attention away from an emphasis on text to a consideration of the production of text as only one element in a larger event. Some of these events are institutionalized. Parties and roasts, for example, are standard situations for the production of verbal and behavioral comedy. Jokes and witty remarks may also emerge spontaneously in the course of conversation and other social activities. In these latter instances, performance is said to be emergent; i.e., highly contingent behavior dependent upon a complex interplay of situational factors. In both formal and informal situations, analytic attention is directed to social roles, social structures, interactional rules, and institutional regimes that govern the

Humor in anthropology and folklore 

201

a­ rtistic production of humor and to the way that production feeds back into the structure and character of the event (Bauman 1986). Individual context refers to those aspects of individual experience and disposition that are likely to inform the understanding of humor produced or consumed by an individual. Questions as to why certain jokes are adopted into the repertoires of particular individuals; why they change in content, shape, and style (see, for example, Bronner 1984); why certain jokes become favorites; and why certain performers tend to tell jokes that focus on a few particular themes may be addressed by attention to individual context. Thomas and Inger Burns (Burns with Burns 1976; Burns 1984) identified eleven informants, male and female, who regularly performed the same joke. The researchers’ intention was to explore whether the joke proved significant to these tellers in the same way. The basic form of the joke was: A newlywed couple agrees to refer to sexual intercourse as “doing the wash.” One night the man turns to his wife in bed and suggests they “do the wash.” The wife refuses. Later she reconsiders and consents to “do the wash,” whereupon the husband replies: “Oh, it’s all right. It was a small load and I did it by hand.” The authors then contacted these tellers who agreed to participate in extensive interviewing about their lives and their joke telling. Psychosexual histories of the subjects were taken, and they were given a Thematic Apperception Test that was independently evaluated by a psychologist. Subjects also permitted the researchers to interview one of their close friends. The joke repertoire of each informant was collected in order to ascertain whether particular themes were salient in their joke telling. Informants were also asked to comment on actions in the joke, viz., the use of a euphemism for sex, the husband’s request for sex, the wife’s refusal, the wife’s subsequent acquiescence, and the husband’s recourse to masturbation. The point of the study was to explore the ways that these individual tellers related to the various aspects of the joke and to ascertain the joke’s psychological and social functions. For example, one informant was extremely critical of masturbatory activity and claimed that he never engaged in it. His former girlfriend, however, maintained that he was often unable to achieve climax when they had intercourse, and he would go on to masturbate until he did. The informant was also obsessed with cleanliness. Everything in his house was neat and orderly, and he could get agitated if things were not in their proper places. The informant showered and changed his towels and underwear several times a day. He

202 

Elliott Oring

always showered after sexual intercourse. This informant, when asked about the joke, found it funny that the husband in the joke had to turn to masturbation. Since the couple was married, he said, he should have been able to have sex anytime he wanted (Burns with Burns 1976: 128–148). These were the kinds of data that the researchers brought to the discussion of the “Doing the Wash” joke and its significance for their eleven informants. The range and detail of psycho-biographical information obtained from both the informants and their friends, the data obtained from the projective test, and their exploration of the joke repertoires and performances of each of their informants make this work one of the most thorough clinical investigations of the relationship between humor and personality. (For something comparable by psychologists looking at stand-up comedians, see Fisher and Fisher [1981]). The jokes of Sigmund Freud also became a subject for scrutiny. Freud was an inveterate joke teller and his psychoanalytic disciples regularly reported his fondness for telling Jewish jokes and anecdotes. In his letters, Freud sometimes identified with certain joke characters, and at the time of the self-analysis that led to his initial formulation of psychoanalytic theory, he made a collection of what he described as “deeply significant Jewish jokes.” Although this collection was destroyed, Freud’s favorite Jewish jokes found their way into his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious or were recalled by his psychoanalytic disciples in their memoirs. All of these Jewish jokes were examined in relation to Freud’s character and life circumstances, and they offered new perspectives on Freud’s attitudes toward his wife, economic status, career, ethnicity, and religious beliefs (Oring 1984). Unlike the other contexts, comparative context does not itself bear on the real-time situation of humor. Rather it refers to those traditions of humor that are equivalent, analogous, or otherwise interconnected to those under investigation. Thus Christie Davies (pp. 162–163, this volume) compared Polish jokes with jokes about stupid populations in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Turkey, Russia, Iran, Iraq, and Nigeria. Determining who got called stupid and by whom in these various countries proved critical in the formulation of his theory for these kinds of jokes. Similarly, evidence for the interpretation of blonde jokes (above, p. 196) depended, in part, on a comparison with other joke cycles in which women were assigned stupidity and promiscuity scripts – notably sorority girls jokes, B.Y.U. (Brigham Young University) coed jokes, and Essex girl jokes in England (Oring 2003: 67–70). Alan Dundes took a slightly different tack in his analysis of the JewishAmerican Princess (J.A.P.) jokes that were told in the United States in the

Humor in anthropology and folklore 

203

late 1970s and early 1980s. Rather than search for analogous jokes in other cultural traditions, he compared the stereotype elaborated in these jokes with the stereotype underlying jokes about the Jewish-American Mother. Where the J.A.P is portrayed as spoiled, self-centered, materialistic, excessively concerned about her appearance, and indifferent to sex and the needs of her family, the jokes about the J.A.M., the Jewish-American Mother, were much the reverse. The Jewish mother is over-solicitous of her children, she is ever concerned with their feeding and health, she suffers for them and enjoys her martyr role, and she looks forward to nothing so much as the attention and appreciation of her children. The polarity in the representations of the Jewish daughter and Jewish mother is likely to have some bearing on the significance of both cycles of jokes (Dundes 1987 [1985]: 62–81), but it requires a comparative perspective to note and delineate the polarity. Humor as art The collection of peasant songs in the eighteenth century assumed not only that such songs were art – but that they were an art that might invigorate the creativity of the nation as a whole. The performance approach that developed in folklore studies and anthropology in the late twentieth century recalled attention to the artistic qualities of folkloric communication. Most notably, methods were developed to render a range of features in writing, so that the aesthetics of the performance – including many paralinguistic features – were incorporated in the documentation of that performance. Dennis Tedlock (1971) and Dell Hymes (1975, 1981) pioneered these techniques (but also see Fine 1984), and Peter Seitel (1980) used them to good effect in rendering humorous tales of the Haya people of northwestern Tanzania, as did Charles Briggs (1988) in his study of Hispanic communities of northern New Mexico. Nevertheless, performance analysis is often more concerned with social action than art. The question of how the performance of humor creates, transforms, and challenges social identities, behaviors, and ideologies usually takes precedence over the analysis of aesthetics in its own terms and for its own sake (e.g., Limón 1983; Bell 1983; Bauman 1986). Although philosophers have long regarded humor as a problem in aesthetics (see Freud 1960: 9–11, 95–96), they have never attended to its performance. Their attention was and is directed to the general structure of humor and the pleasurable effects it engenders; not to the style of individual comic exchanges or routines (e.g., Carroll 1991: 294). However, the investigation of

204 

Elliott Oring

the aesthetics of particular performers and performances has been initiated: timing in joke delivery (Norrick 2001); visual imagery (Tallman 1974b); narrative persona (Mullen 1976; Bauman 1986); and the aesthetic preferences of accomplished joke tellers (Oring n.d.). Greater ethnographic and analytic attention need to be directed to the poetic qualities of humorous performances in everyday life. As art, humor remains to be taken seriously. Conclusion There is no single perspective that underlies anthropological and folkloristic approaches to humor. The problem that anthropologists and folklorists jointly share is the effort to document, analyze, and interpret the great diversity of humorous speech and behavior that exists in societies around the world. Their focus on humor in real social situations in different cultures often keeps their interpretations local and rooted in the life and lore of particular groups and particular societies. This attention to the diversity of humorous expression is perhaps the greatest contribution of these disciplines. Humor researchers need to confront the range of phenomena they are called to analyze and explain. They must determine whether they truly understand what others are laughing at. They must make explicit the knowledge needed to comprehend the humor – the domestic as well as the exotic. Theories must account for an extraordinary variety of data spread across a great range of peoples and historical periods. Theories will not stand that do not address the array of humorous expression – whether from Kiriwina or the island of Manhattan References Aarne, Antti, and Stith Thompson 1962 The Types of the Folktale. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. Abrahams, Roger 1964 Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia. Hatboro, PA: Folklore Associates. Apte, Mahadev 1985 Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Babcock-Abrahams, Barbara 1974 The novel and the carnival world: An essay in memory of Joe Doherty. Modern Language Notes 89: 911–937.

Humor in anthropology and folklore 

205

Bakhtin, Mikhail 1984 Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Basso, Keith 1979 Portraits of “The Whiteman”: Linguistic play and cultural symbols among the Western Apache. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bateson, Gregory 1972 Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine. Bauman, Richard 1977 Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. 1986 Story Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bell, Michael J. 1983 The World from Brown’s Lounge: An Ethnography of Black MiddleClass Play. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bendix, Regina 1987 Marmot, Memet, and Marmoset: Further research on the folklore of dyads. Western Folklore 46: 171–191. Bricker, Victoria Reifler 1973 Ritual Humor in Highland Chiapas. Austin: University of Texas Press. Briggs, Charles L. 1988 Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bronner, Simon J. 1978 A re-examination of dozens among white American adolescents. Western Folklore 37: 118–128. 1984 “Let me tell it my way”: Joke telling by a father and son. Western Folklore 43: 18–36. 1990 Piled Higher and Deeper: The Folklore of Campus Life. Little Rock, AR: August House. Burns, Thomas A. 1984 Doing the Wash: Cycle Two. Western Folklore 43: 49–70. Burns, Thomas A., with Inger H. Burns 1976 Doing the Wash: An Expressive Culture and Personality Study of a Joke and Its Tellers. Norwood, PA: Norwood. Cancian, Francesca 1968 Varieties of functional analysis. In David L. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 29–43. Vol. 6. New York: Macmillan. Carroll, Noël 1991 On jokes. In: Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein (eds.), Midwest Studies on Philsophy. Vol 16: Philosophy and the Arts, 280–301. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

206 

Elliott Oring

Charles, Lucille Hoerr 1945 The clown’s function. Journal of American Folklore 58: 25–34. Cosentino, Donald 2003 Death and Laughter in Los Angeles and Port-au-Prince. In: Peter Narváez (ed.), Of Corpse! Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture, 239–260. Logan: Utah State University Press. Crowley, Daniel J. 1999 Carnivals, carnival, and carnivalization, or how to make a living without actually working. Western Folklore 58: 213–222. Danielson, Larry 1986 Religious Folklore. In: Elliott Oring (ed.), Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction, 45–69, Logan: Utah State University Press. Davies, Christie 1990 Ethnic Humor Around the World: A Comparative Analysis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2003 Jokes that follow mass-mediated disasters in a global electronic age. In: Peter Narváez (ed.), Of Corpse! Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture, 15–34. Logan: Utah State University Press. Douglas, Mary 1968 The social control of cognition: Some factors in joke perception. Man, New series, 3: 361–376. Dundes, Alan 1987 Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Humor Cycles and Stereotypes. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press. 1989 April Fool and April Fish: Towards a Theory of Ritual Pranks. In: Alan Dundes (ed.), Folklore Matters, 98–111, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 1997 From Game to War and Other Psychoanalytic Essays. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Dundes, Alan, Jerry W. Leach, and Bora Özkök 1970 The strategy of Turkish boys’ verbal dueling. Journal of American Folklore 83: 325–349. Edwards, Carol 1984 “Stop me if you’ve heard this one”: Narrative disclaimers as breakthrough into performance. Fabula 25: 214–228. Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi, Gabriella 1992 The Taste of Laughter: Aspects of Tamil Humor. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Ellis, Bill 1991 The last thing…said: The challenger disaster jokes and closure, International Folklore Review 8: 110–124. 2003 Making a big apple crumble: The role of humor in constructing a global response to disaster. In: Peter Narváez (ed.), Of Corpse! Death and

Humor in anthropology and folklore 

207

Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture, 35–79, Logan: Utah State University Press. Fine, Elizabeth C. 1984 The Folklore Text: From Performance to Print. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fisher, Seymour, and Rhoda L. Fisher 1981 Pretend the World is Funny and Forever: A Psychological Analysis of Comedians, Clowns, and Actors. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates. Freedman, Jim 1977 Joking, affinity, and the exchange of ritual services among the Kiga of Northern Rwanda: An essay on joking relationship theory. Man, New series, 12: 154–165. Freud, Sigmund, 1960 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton. Gilmore, David D. 1995 The scholar minstrels of Andalusia: Deep oratory, or the carnivalesque upside down. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1: 561–580. Glazer, Mark 1976 On verbal dueling among Turkish boys. Journal of American Folklore 89: 87–89. Gluckman, Max 1963 The role of the sexes in Wiko circumcision ceremonies. In: Meyer Fortes (ed.), Social Structure, 145–167. New York: Russell and Russell. Gossen, Gary H. 1971 Chamula genres of verbal behavior. Journal of American Folklore 84: 145–167. Hallowell, A. Irving 1947 Myth, culture and personality. American Anthropologist 49: 544–​ 556. Harlow, Ilana 2003 Creating situations: Practical jokes and the revival of the dead in Irish tradition. In: Peter Narváez (ed.), Of Corpse! Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture, 83–112. Logan: Utah State University Press. Hickman, William C. 1979 More on Turkish boys’ verbal dueling. Journal of American Folklore 92: 334–335. Honeyman, A. M. 1959 Fools’ errands for Dundee apprentices. Folklore 70: 334–336.

208 

Elliott Oring

Hymes, Dell 1975 Folklore’s nature and the sun’s myth. Journal of American Folklore 88: 345–369. 1981 “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Jarvie, I. C. 1965 The limits to functionalism and the limits to it in anthropology. In: Don Martindale (ed.), Functionalism in the Social Sciences: The Strengths and Limits of Functionalism in Anthropology, Economics, Political Science and Sociology, 18–34. Monograph 5. Philadelphia, American Academy of Political and Social Science. Kuipers, Giselinde 2005 “Where was King Kong when we needed him?” Public discourse, digital disaster jokes, and the functions of laughter after 9/11. The Journal of American Culture 28: 70–84. Labov, William 1972 Rules for ritual insults. In: Thomas Kochman (ed.), Rappin’ and Stylin’ Out: Communication in Urban Black America, 265–314. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Leary, James P. 1980 White ritual insults. In: Helen B. Schwartzman (ed.), Play and Culture, 125–130. West Point, NY: Leisure Press. Limón, José E. 1983 Legendry, metafolklore, and performance: A Mexican-American example. Western Folklore 42: 191–208. Lohman, John 1999 “It can’t rain every day”: The year-round experience of carnival. Western Folklore 58: 279–298. Makarius, Laura 1970 Ritual clowns and symbolical behavior. Diogenes 59: 44–73. Malinowski, Bronislaw 1954 Magic, science and religion and other essays. Garden City, NY: ­Anchor Doubleday. 1961 Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: E. P. Dutton. First publ. 1922. McEntire, Nancy Cassell 2002 Purposeful deceptions of the April Fool. Western Folklore 61: 133–​ 151. Mitchell, William E. 1992 Carnival clowning in Wape society. In: William R. Mitchell (ed.), Clowning as Critical Practice: Performance Humor in the South Pacific, 145–166. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Humor in anthropology and folklore 

209

Morrison, Monica 1974 Pranks and practical jokes at a children’s summer camp. Southern Folklore Quarterly 38: 285–297. Mullen, Patrick B. 1976 The Tall Tale Style of a Texas Raconteur. In: Juha Pentikäinen and Tuula Juurikka (eds.), Folk Narrative Research, 302–311. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Narváez, Peter 2003 Tricks and fun: subversive pleasure at Newfoundland wakes. In: Peter Narváez (ed.), Of Corpse! Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture, 113–139. Logan: Utah State University Press. Norrick, Neal R. 2001 On the conversational performance of narrative jokes. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 14: 255–274. Oring, Elliott 1981 Israeli Humor: The Content and Structure of the Chizbat of the Palmah. Albany: State University of New York Press. 1984 The Jokes of Sigmund Freud: A Study in Humor and Jewish Identity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1988 Folklore Methodology and American Humor Research. In: Lawrence E. Mintz (ed.), Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics, 213–230. New York: Greenwood Press. 1992 Jokes and Their Relations. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 2003 Engaging Humor. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Forthc. Contested performance and joke aesthetics. Posen, I. Sheldon 1974 Pranks and practical jokes at a children’s summer camp. Southern Folklore Quarterly 38: 299–309. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1940 On joking relationships. Africa 13: 195–210. 1941 A further note on joking relationships, Africa 14: 133–140. Sacks, Harvey 1974 An analysis of the course of a joke’s telling in conversation. In: Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer (eds.), Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, 337–353. New York: Cambridge University Press. Scott, John R. 1974 Pranks and practical jokes of the Newfoundland seal fishery. Southern Folklore Quarterly 38: 275–283. Seitel, Peter 1980 See So That We May See: Performances and Interpretations of Traditional Tales from Tanzania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

210 

Elliott Oring

Sherzer, Joel 1985 Puns and jokes. In: Teun A. van Dijk (ed.), Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 213–221. London: Academic Press. 2002 Speech Play and Verbal Art. Austin: University of Texas Press. Siporin, Steve 1994 Halloween pranks: “Just a little inconvenience.” In Jack Santino (ed.), Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life, 45–61. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Stoller, Paul 1984 Horrific comedy: Cultural resistance and the Hauka movement in Niger, Ethos 12: 165–188. Sykes, A. J. M. 1966 Joking relationships in an industrial setting. American Anthropologist 66: 188–193. Tallman, Richard S. 1974a A generic approach to the practical joke. Southern Folklore Quarterly 38: 259–274. 1974b “You can almost picture it”: The aesthetic of a Nova Scotia storyteller. Folklore Forum 7: 121–130. Tavarelli, Paola 1987–88 Dyadic traditions in mixed couples. Folklore and Mythology Studies 11–12: 67–79. Tedlock, Dennis 1971 On the translation of style in oral narrative. Journal of American Folklore 84: 114–133. Thompson, Stith 1955–58 Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. Rev. ed. 6 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Toelken. Barre 2003 The Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West. Logan: Utah State University Press. Walle, Alf H. 1976 Getting picked up without being put down: Jokes and the bar rush. Journal of the Folklore Institute 13: 201–217. Welsch, Roger L. 1967 American numbskull tales: The Polack joke. Western Folklore 26: 183–186. Zucker, Wolfgang 1969 The clown as the Lord of Disorder. In: M. Conrad Hyers (ed.), Holy Laughter, 75–89. New York: Seabury.

Philosophy and religion John Morreall Introduction The first people to write about the nature of laughter and humor, and their place in human life were philosophers and religious thinkers. Before the 18th century, the word “humor” did not mean funniness, and so what philosophers and religious thinkers wrote about was usually laughter, with occasional references to comedy. Lacking the concept of humor, it is not surprising that early writers did not distinguish between laughter at something funny and other kinds, such as laughing on winning a contest or laughing on being tickled. Until the middle of the 18th century, the only developed theory of laughter in Western thought was the Superiority Theory. According to it, laughter is an expression of feelings of superiority over other people. That idea, as we will see, raised moral objections to laughter and comedy. In the 18th century, two other theories arose – the Relief Theory and the Incongruity Theory. In the Relief Theory laughter is the release of pent-­up nervous energy, and in the Incongruity Theory laughter is a response to something unusual or out of place. These new theories liberated at least some laughter and humor from the charge of being antisocial, and they also opened the way for investigations of the connections between humor and positive phenomena such as play and creativity. In the last century, particularly in the last forty years, some philosophers and religious thinkers have joined colleagues in the behavioral and social sciences to study the valuable aspects of humor. Literature review Today it is common to distinguish theories of laughter and humor into three main groups: Superiority Theories, Incongruity Theories, and Relief (or Release from Restraint) Theories. But, as we said, for the first two thousand years there was only one developed theory – the Superiority Theory.

212 

John Morreall

The first Western writings about laughter are found in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and in the writings of Greek philosophers. When laughter is mentioned in the Bible, it is associated with one of three things. In descending order, they are hostility, foolishness, and joy. In the Bible when someone laughs, it is usually an expression of hostility, contempt, or scorn. Laughter is at a person, and that person’s reputation and social standing are diminished by the laughter. This laughter is the only kind attributed to God in the Bible. The Second Psalm is representative:

The Lord who sits in heaven laughs [the kings of the earth] to scorn; then he rebukes them in anger, he threatens them in his wrath.

In Psalm 37: 10–13, a future is imagined when “the wicked will be no more . . . the Lord shall laugh at them, for he sees their time is coming.” Psalm 59 implores God to “punish all the nations. Have no mercy on villains and traitors . . . But you, O Lord, laugh at them, and deride all the nations” (4–8). Similarly, when God’s prophets laugh, it is only out of hostility. In the First Book of Kings the prophet Elijah ridiculed the prophets of Baal, and after getting everyone to laugh at them, he “took them down to the Kishon and slaughtered them there” (18: 27–40). Not only is the laughter of God and his prophets associated with killing those at whom they laugh, but if people laugh at God or his prophets, they deserve to die for it. In the Second Book of Kings, when a group of boys laughed at the prophet Elisha for being bald, “he cursed them in the name of the Lord: and two she-­bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-­two of the boys” (2: 23–24). The second most common kind of laughter in the Bible is the irresponsible and irrational laugh of the foolish person. In Genesis 17: 17, when God tells Abraham at age 99 that he and his aged wife Sarah will have a son, Abraham, out of foolish disbelief, “fell on his face and laughed.” Hearing the news, Sarah also laughed in disbelief, and when God confronted her, she compounded her foolishness by denying that she had laughed (Genesis 18: 12–15). Abraham and Sarah’s laughter did not express superiority or scorn towards God, but it did show two serious shortcomings: the intellectual inability to imagine the maker of heaven and earth performing a simple miracle, and a lack of trust in God. In the Bible, the opposite of the laughing fool is the sad wise person. The Book of Ecclesiastes has this advice:

Philosophy and religion 

213

Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise than to hear the song of fools. For like the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of fools (Ecclesiastes 7: 3–6). Many early Christians took this advice to heart and cultivated sadness to counteract foolishness and give their life sober wisdom. The Letter of James encourages Christians to “Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection” (4: 9). John Climacus, a seventh-­century Christian leader, has similar advice: “In your heart, be like an emperor . . . commanding laughter: ‘Go,’ and it goes; and sweet weeping: ‘Come,’ and it comes.” The Church Father John Chrysostom contrasted foolish laughter with wise tears by having his readers imagine laughers in hell: Therefore, when you see people laughing, reflect that those teeth, that grin now, will one day have to sustain that most dreadful wailing and gnashing, and they will remember this same laugh on that day when they are grinding and gnashing. Then you too shall remember this laugh! Although the Bible generally treats laughter as foolish and even dangerous, the occasional verse associates it with joy or other positive feelings. Psalm 126: 2 says, “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongues with shouts of joy.” Similarly, in the New Testament, Jesus says, “Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.” (Luke 6: 21). In both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, then, laughter was treated mostly negatively. God laughs only in scorn at his enemies, and most humans who laugh are irreligious or foolish for doing so. When we turn from ancient religion to ancient philosophy, the assessment of humor remains mostly negative, especially in Plato and his followers. Plato conflated what we now call humor with laughter, and treated the laugh of ridicule as the only kind. For him laughter was itself an emotion or it expressed an emotion, and so it fell under his general objection to emotions – that they override rationality and self-­control. He was especially concerned about the representation of Greek heroes and the gods as overcome with laughter in the Iliad and Odyssey and in stage comedies. “If anyone repre-

214 

John Morreall

sents men of worth as overpowered by laughter,” he protested, “we must not accept it, much less if gods.” There was a second objection to laughter in Plato. What we laugh at, he said in his dialogue Philebus, is a kind of vice in other people, namely their ignorance about themselves. We laugh, that is, at people who think of themselves as wealthier, better-­looking, more virtuous, or wiser than they really are. While laughter feels good, our pleasure is based on malice, a “pain in the soul,” Plato called it. And so laughter is inherently antisocial or even cruel. Lastly, Plato was concerned with the possibility that as we laugh at people’s vices in comedy, those vices might rub off on us. Comedy is filled with liars, hypocrites, drunks, lechers, and adulterers. Could we spend any time at all reading and watching comedy and expect to keep our own virtue intact? Given all these objections, it is not surprising that when Plato imagined his ideal state in the Republic and in Laws, he imagined it as banning most comedy. Aristotle, Plato’s student, agreed that laughter and humor are based on feelings of superiority. Even wit, he said, is “educated insolence.” But he had a more positive attitude toward laughter and humor, perhaps because the New Comedy of his time was less vulgar and obscene than the Old Comedy which disgusted Plato. Aristotle treated what we now call “humor” under the heading of amusement or play. “Life includes rest as well as activity,” he wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics, “and in this is included leisure and amusement.” We need leisure and amusement because we cannot devote ourselves to work and serious activity all the time. For Aristotle the value of humor and other kinds of play was in their refreshing us to return to serious activity; he did not think of them as valuable in themselves. Still, in light of the uniformly negative assessments of laughter in the ancient world, he was revolutionary in finding any value at all in humor and play. In his Poetics Aristotle had some introductory comments on comedy, the art based on laughter and humor. There he mentioned a  book on comedy which was part of the Poetics, but that book is now lost. In his comments on comedy which we have, he connected it with human shortcomings, as Plato had, but he did not find therein a reason to condemn it: Comedy . . . is an imitation of people who are worse than the average. Their badness, however, is not of every kind. The ridiculous, rather, is a species of the ugly; it may be defined as a mistake or unseemliness that is not painful or destructive. The comic mask, for example, is unseemly and distorted but does not cause pain.  (1941: 1459)

Philosophy and religion 

215

Similarly, when Aristotle considered the morality of amusement in his Nicomachean Ethics, he acknowledged its potential for vice, but did not condemn laughter as Plato had. Aristotle counted overindulgence in humor as a vice, but he also counted the inability or refusal to engage in humor as a vice. The ideal, he said, is a mean between excessive humor and humorlessness. Those who carry humor to excess are thought to be vulgar buffoons, striving after humor at all costs, and aiming more at raising a laugh than at saying what is becoming and at avoiding pain to the object of their fun; while those who can neither make a joke themselves nor put up with those who do are thought to be boorish and unpolished.  (1941: 1000)

The virtue of engaging in humor to the right degree, and at the right time and place, Aristotle called eutrapelia, ready-­wittedness. Those who joke in a tasteful way are called ready-­witted, which implies a sort of readiness to turn this way and that; for such sallies are thought to be movements of the character, and as bodies are discriminated by their movements, so too are characters.  (1941: 1000)

Although Aristotle accepted the Superiority Theory, then, he did not consider all humor objectionable. And in a brief passage in his Rhetoric, he suggested the germ of another way of thinking about humor, which would later be called the Incongruity Theory. A good way to get a laugh in a speech, he wrote, is to set up an expectation in the audience and then jolt them with something they did not expect. His example is from a comedy which is now lost: “And as he walked, beneath his feet were – chilblains [sores].” Unfortunately, Aristotle and those who came after him did not see here a way to analyze humor in general, and so the Incongruity Theory would not be worked out for two thousand years. We have little on humor and comedy from Greek philosophers after Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s objection that laughter involves a loss of self-­control showed up in other ethical systems, especially in the Stoics, who emphasized the value of ataraxia, a state of low emotional arousal. The Stoic Epictetus advised, “Let not your laughter be loud, frequent, or unrestrained.” [Enchiri­ dion, 33] Laughter and humor did not arise as a topic in Roman philosophy, but it was discussed in a few works on rhetoric. In his Institutes of the Orator, Quintilian complained that no one had yet given a satisfactory account of the

216 

John Morreall

nature of humor, though many had tried. In On the Orator Cicero examined the use of humor in public speaking, discussing such techniques as exaggeration, sarcasm, and punning. Extending Aristotle’s comment about the unexpected making an audience laugh, Cicero wrote in ch. 63: “The most common kind of joke is that in which we expect one thing and another is said: here our disappointed expectation makes us laugh. But if something ambiguous is thrown in too, the effect of the joke is heightened.” Cicero also added a  new distinction, between humor in situations and humor in language. In ch. 59 he wrote, “There are two kinds of jokes, one of which is based on things, the other on words.” And in the following chapter, “Whatever is wittily expressed consists sometimes in an idea, sometimes only in the language used. But people are most delighted with a joke when the laugh is raised by the idea and the language together.” The basis of laughter, according to Cicero, “lies in a kind of offensiveness and deformity, for the sayings that are laughed at the most are those which refer to something offensive in an inoffensive manner.” Cicero advised speakers to be careful in their use of humor. “For neither great vice, such as that of crime, nor great misery is a subject of ridicule and laughter. People want criminals attacked with more forceful weapons than ridicule, and do not like the miserable to be derided.” (Morreall 1987: 17). A speaker must also be considerate of people’s feelings. “Do not speak rashly against those who are personally beloved,” he advised (ibid.). As Christianity grew and came to dominate the declining Roman Empire in the fourth century, Christian thinkers added the negative attitudes of Platonism and Stoicism to the Bible’s negative attitudes toward laughter. In their sermons against laughter, the Church Fathers Ambrose, Jerome, Basil, and John Chrysostom hearkened back to the Greek philosophers’ emphasis on self-­control. Basil wrote that “raucous laughter and uncontrollable shaking of the body are not indications of a well-­regulated soul, or of personal, dignity, or of self-­mastery.” Early Christian leaders also came up with new objections to laughter and humor. One was that they fostered sexual licentiousness. This idea has been found in many cultures East and West, in part because women’s laughter is thought to be sexually attractive. In East Asian countries even today, a woman who laughs with her mouth open is judged sexually loose. St. Jerome had this advise for one woman, “When you are present, buffoonery and loose talk must find no place.” In the seventh century John Climacus said that “Impurity is touching the body, laughing, and talking without restraint.” People without temperance, he said, “have a shameless gaze and laugh immoderately.”

Philosophy and religion 

217

The strongest condemnations of laughter came from monastic leaders. The Essenes, an early Jewish monastic group, had imposed a  penance of thirty days for those who “guffawed foolishly.” The oldest Christian monastic rule, of Pachom in Egypt in the fourth century, forbade joking. The Syrian Ephraem advised his monks that Laughter is the beginning of the destruction of the soul . . . when you notice something of that, know that you have arrived at the depth of the evil. Then do not cease to pray God, that he might rescue you from this death.

The rules written by St. Benedict in 529 later became the standard rules for all of Western monasticism. Benedict proposed a “Ladder of Humility” on which Step Ten was a restraint against laughter, and Step Eleven a warning against joking. “Prefer moderation in speech and speak no foolish chatter,” he wrote, “nothing just to provoke laughter; do not love immoderate or boisterous laughter.” The monastery of Columban in Ireland assigned the following punishments: “He who smiles in the service . . . six strokes; if he breaks out in the noise of laughter, a special fast unless it has happened pardonably.” Christian condemnations of laughter based on the loss of self-­control were also found outside monasticism, most notably in the Puritans, who wrote tracts against comedy and closed the theaters in England when they came to power under Cromwell in the mid-­17th century. One of these tracts, by William Prynne, condemned laughter as incompatible with the sobriety of good Christians, who should not be “immoderately tickled with mere lascivious vanities, or . . . lash out in excessive cachinnations in the public view of dissolute graceless persons.” If we consider all that was written about laughter and humor before the 18th century, the consensus is negative. The first dissenter was Aristotle, but his writings on laughter and humor were lost in Europe until the 12th century. Shortly after they were recovered, fortunately, there was someone to adopt his ideas about the benefits of laughter and play into Christian thought – ­Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was familiar with the traditional religious and philosophical objections against humor. He quoted Ambrose, John Chrysostom, and Luke 6: 21 – “Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall weep.” But he argued that such objections do not justify a blanket rejection of humor. In his Summa Theologiae (Handbook of Theology), Question 168, Aquinas assessed humor, and play in general, in three articles: “Whether there can be virtue in actions done in play,” “The sin of playing too much,” and “The sin of playing too lit-

218 

John Morreall

tle.” His view mirrored Aristotle’s: humans are creatures who need to rest from serious activity occasionally, and humor and other forms of play provide that rest. As bodily tiredness is eased by resting the body, so psychological tiredness is eased by resting the soul. As we have explained in discussing the feelings, pleasure is rest for the soul. And therefore the remedy for weariness of soul lies in slackening the tension of mental study and taking some pleasure. In Cassian’s Conferences it is related of blessed John the Evangelist that when people were scandalized at finding him at play with his disciples, he requested one of his questioners who carried a bow to shoot an arrow. When this had been done several times, the man, on being asked whether he could keep on doing so continuously, replied that the bow would break. Whereupon the blessed John pointed the moral that so, too, would the human spirit snap were it never unbent.   Those words and deeds in which nothing is sought beyond the soul’s pleasure are called playful or humorous, and it is necessary to make use of them at times for solace of soul. This is what Aristotle says, that in the social intercourse of this life a kind of rest is enjoyed in playing.

For the moral virtue associated with play and humor, Aquinas used Aristotle’s term eutrapelia, “and the person who has it is called a eutrapelos, a pleasant person with a happy cast of mind who gives his words and deeds a cheerful turn.” Aquinas also agreed with Aristotle that humorlessness is a vice. Anything conflicting with reason in human action is vicious. It is against reason for a man to be burdensome to others, by never showing himself agreeable to others or being a kill-­joy or wet blanket on their enjoyment. And so Seneca says, “Bear yourself with wit, lest you be regarded as sour or despised as dull.” Now those who lack playfulness are sinful, those who never say anything to make you smile, or are grumpy with those who do. Aristotle speaks of them as rough and boorish.

In making his case for a  virtue of humor, Aquinas admitted that humor is sometimes associated with the morally objectionable activities cited by the traditional critiques. In fact, in the middle of his argument, he included three warnings: First and foremost, that the pleasure should not be sought in anything indecent or harmful. So Cicero speaks of some kinds of joke being “discourteous, impudent, shameful, or obscene.” The next is that we should take care not to lose

Philosophy and religion 

219

our poise. Ambrose says that “we should beware when we relax lest we dissolve the harmony made up by good works in concert.” And Cicero, that “just as we do not give children complete liberty to play, but only that which is not inconsistent with good manners, so the light of a sound mind should be cast on our very fun.” Finally we should be careful, as in all other human actions, to suit the person, place, and time, and to be duly adapted to circumstances.1

Aquinas reinforced these warnings in his next article, on the sin of playing too much. Play can be sinful, he says, in two ways. First, the action may not be according to reason, as in jokes which are obscene or intended to harm others. “Second, playing may be excessive because of defect of due circumstances, for instance when giving oneself over to play is mistimed or misplaced or unsuitable to the business in hand or to the company.” Aquinas’s assessment of humor, then, marked an advance in religious and philosophical thought about laughter and humor by showing that while they can be associated with obscenity, hostility, or irresponsibility, they not have to be. The next significant writers on laughter and humor were in the 17th century: Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Thomas Hobbes. Descartes’s comments are found in his book The Passions of the Soul. He offered a physiological explanation of laughter as the repeated rapid expulsion of air from the lungs caused by a sudden flow of blood into the lungs from the heart, with the accompanying movements of the diaphragm and muscles of the chest and face. For Descartes there were six basic emotions – wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. He did not say anything about amusement or what we now call humor. Instead he explained how three of the basic emotions – wonder, (mild) hatred, and (moderate) joy – cause laughter. Like most of his predecessors, he concentrated on laughter in scorn and ridicule. Indeed, in his explanation, even wonder and joy are part of scorn. We do not laugh when we feel great joy, Descartes said, but only when we feel moderate joy, and then only when the joy “has some wonder or hate mingled with it.” He analyzed wonder as a surprised reaction to that which is “rare and extraordinary.” Had he considered the relation of laughter to wonder itself, apart from scorn, he might well have come up with something like the Incongruity Theory. But throughout his analysis, he does not seem able to get away from scornful laughter as the basic kind. The people who most often laugh at others, he wrote, are “people with very obvious defects such as those who are lame, blind of an eye, hunch-­backed, or who have received some public insult . . . for, desiring to see all others held in as low estimation as themselves, they are truly rejoiced at the evils which befall them.”

220 

John Morreall

Spinoza, Descartes’s contemporary, said simply, “A man hates what he laughs at.” Thomas Hobbes’s analysis of scorn as the source of laughter became the classic expression of the Superiority Theory. For Hobbes, human beings are by nature egocentric, and in their natural state they are in constant struggle with one another for power. In this struggle, they watch for signs that they are doing better than other people, or, what is equivalent, that others are failing. Laughter is nothing but an expression of people’s “sudden glory” when they realize that they are superior to someone else in some way. Hobbes acknowledged that some writers have linked laughter to wit and to joking, but he said that there is no necessary connection here, for “men laugh at mischances and indecencies, wherein there lies no wit nor jest at all.” What is essential to laughter is not wit or joking, but simply a feeling of superiority which comes upon us quickly. “Laughter proceeds from a sudden conception of some ability in himself that laughs.” Wit and jokes, according to Hobbes, evoke laughter by boosting people’s estimate of themselves. When we laugh as jokes, “the wit whereof always consists in the elegant discovering and conveying to our minds some absurdity of another” person by contrast with which we feel good about ourselves. Hobbes did acknowledge that we sometimes laugh at ourselves, but then, he said, we are laughing at our former selves, which for the moment we see as a different person. We do not laugh at some action or attribute of ourselves if it brings us “present dishonor.” Because Hobbes saw laughter as something anti-­social and often cruel, he had moral misgivings about it. “It is no wonder,” he wrote, “that men take heinously to be laughed at or derided, that is, triumphed over.” The people who laugh the most, he said, are least confident of themselves, or as we might say today, who have the lowest self-­esteem. They are forced to maintain the little self-­esteem they have by constantly watching for the mistakes and imperfections of other people. “Therefore much laughter at the defects of others, is a  sign of pusillanimity. For of great minds, one of the proper works is, to help and free others from scorn; and compare themselves only with the most able.” Once Hobbes and other early modern philosophers had presented the Superiority Theory in this clear and radical form, other philosophers began to criticize it. A century after Hobbes, Francis Hutcheson published Reflections upon Laughter, which presented counterexamples to the Hobbesian theory and advanced new views about laughter based on the 18th-­century psychology of the association of ideas. In the first part of the book, Hutcheson argued from examples that there is no essential connection between laughing or being amused, and having feelings of superiority. We sometimes laugh

Philosophy and religion 

221

without such feelings, as when we find puns and clever allusions funny. And feelings of superiority do not always lead to laughter. A rich man riding in his coach past ragged beggars, Hutcheson said, is more likely to feel pity for them than to laugh at them. In presenting his own account of humor in the second part of the book, Hutcheson agreed with Joseph Addison that genius in serious literature consists in the ability to evoke ideas of greatness, novelty, and beauty in the reader through the use of apt metaphors and similes. Genius in comic literature, he said, is largely the ability to use somewhat inappropriate metaphors and similes to trigger ideas that clash with each other. Herein lay the germ of the Incongruity Theory of humor. In the last part of the book, Hutcheson explored some of the benefits of humor, most notably the pleasure it brings, its role as social lubricant, and its ability to promote mental flexibility. Once thinkers realized that there was no essential connection between laughter and feelings of superiority, they began to look at it in fresh ways. In doing so, they distinguished between humorous and non-­humorous laughter, and they created two new theories, the Relief (or Release from Restraint) Theory and the Incongruity Theory. We can consider these one at a time. The Relief Theory Lord Shaftesbury’s 1711 essay “The Freedom of Wit and Humour” is the first literary document to use the word “humor” with its current meaning of funniness. It also gave a sketchy version of the Relief Theory. The natural free spirits of ingenious men, if imprisoned or controlled, will find out other ways of motion to relieve themselves in their constraint, and whether it be in burlesque, mimicry, or buffoonery, they will be glad at any rate to vent themselves, and be revenged on their constrainers.

To understand Shaftesbury here, we need to know something about 18th­century physiology, in which our nerves were thought to be tiny tubes carrying not electro-­chemical impulses but spirits, that is, fluids. The spirits flowing through the nerves to the muscles were though to cause our bodies to move. When we are not allowed to do what we want to do, according to this view, spirits are summoned in our nerves, but then they are constrained from moving our muscles to carry out the desired action. As a result the pressure of the spirits against the walls of the nerves increases and so the spirits have

222 

John Morreall

a tendency to vent themselves by moving our muscles in other ways, such as “burlesque, mimicry, or buffoonery.” Today these would be called displacement activities. In Shaftesbury’s account, the spirits do not simply find just any way to vent themselves. Rather they find a way to “be revenged on their constrainers,” that is, to move the body in such as way as to mock the persons or the institutions which forbade the action we wanted to perform! As medical research refined the understanding of the nervous system in the 19th century, talk of “spirits” gave way to talk of nervous energy, but the ideas of constraint and excess pressure continued in explanations of laughter. The theory that laughter is a venting of pressure in the nervous system was worked out in more detail by Herbert Spencer in the mid-­19th century, and then by Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century. In different versions of the Relief Theory, there are two scenarios. First, the laughter may release some pre-­existing nervous energy, or second, the humorous stimulus may itself cause the build up of the nervous energy and then relieve it. As an example of the first kind of laughter, consider any prohibition which blocks desires. When rambunctious children are forced to sit still and keep quiet, for instance, their pent-­up nervous energy shows in their muscle tension and fidgeting. When they get the chance, that nervous energy may be released in horseplay, buffoonery, and laughter. According to Freud, there are two main sources of constrained or repressed nervous energy – the energy of sexual desire and the energy associated with the desire for violent action. Society has rules prohibiting many forms of both sex and violence, and so nervous energy builds up. That energy can be released in laughter, which is why, according to Freud, the two major kinds of jokes are about sex and violence. In the second scenario mentioned above, the energy released in laughter is energy which the humorous stimulus – say a joke or cartoon – has built up itself. As we listen to the “set-­up” of a joke, for example, we may feel emotions for the characters in the story. But then at the punch line, as the story takes an unexpected turn, we suddenly realize that the emotions we had been summoning are inappropriate. The now superfluous nervous energy of those emotions are vented in laughter. Consider the following poem by Harry ­Graham:

I had written to Aunt Maud Who was on a trip abroad When I heard she’d died of cramp, Just too late to save the stamp.

Philosophy and religion 

223

In reading the first three lines, the Relief Theory would say, we experience feelings of sympathy for this dutiful nephew whose aunt has died unexpectedly. But then in the last line, we discover that he is a cheapskate who does not deserve our sympathy. The nervous energy of our sympathetic feelings is suddenly superfluous and we release it in laughter. The emotions we summon and then find unnecessary need not be sympathetic. They could also be negative. Consider Oscar Wilde’s quip, “The youth of today are quite monstrous; they have absolutely no respect for dyed hair.” Until the second last word, we are led to feel indignation toward young people, but then as we hear the word “dyed,” we are led to question the adult generation as young people do, and so our indignation is superfluous. Two classic versions of the Relief Theory are the relatively simple theory of Herbert Spencer, and the more complicated theory of Sigmund Freud. In his essay “On the Physiology of Laughter,” Spencer said that in our nervous systems our emotions take the form of nervous energy, and nervous energy drives our muscles. “Nervous energy always tends to beget muscular motion, and when it rises to a certain intensity, always does beget it.” In fear, for instance, we have a tendency to run away or fight, and if our fear gets strong enough, we do run away or fight. In anger, we clench our fists and want to hit something or someone, and if we get angry enough, that is what we do. Now laughter is a special case of the muscular release of nervous energy, for it is not a practical action like running away or fighting. Rather the muscular movements in laughter are just the release of nervous energy. That release occurs, Spencer said, when feelings build up in us but then are seen to be inappropriate. The energy is released first through the muscles “which feeling most habitually stimulates,” the muscles of speech in our throats. And if our vocal organs are not enough to vent all the superfluous energy, the energy spills over into the diaphragm and muscles of breathing. In the strongest kind of laughter, nervous energy also drives the muscles of the arms, back, and the rest of the body. When Spencer explains the process of the summoning of emotions and their then becoming superfluous, he talks about “incongruity,” which as we shall see, is the basic concept in the third standard theory of humor. Something is incongruous, to put it simply, if it does not fit our ordinary mental patterns. Spencer points out that not all incongruities elicit laughter. If we are at a banquet and suddenly discover a corpse, that is incongruous but hardly funny. “Laughter naturally results only when consciousness is unawares transferred from great things to small – only when there is what we may call a descending incongruity.” (p. 108) The change, that is, must be from high

224 

John Morreall

emotional arousal to low emotional arousal. The excess nervous energy is discharged in laughter. Sigmund Freud’s theory of laughter, the second classic Relief Theory, requires careful reading, for it uses not only terms from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory but also familiar terms with meanings not standard today. Freud distinguishes between jokes, humor and the comic, for example, while most theorists today categorize jokes as a kind of humor. Freud presented his ideas in two works, the 1905 book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and the 1928 essay “Humor.” He distinguished three kinds of laughter situations: joking or wit (der Witz), the comic, and humor. In each, mental energy is summoned for a psychological purpose but then is seen not to be needed for that purpose. The superfluous energy is discharged in laughter. We can describe each kind of laughter separately. In joking, Freud said, we indulge hostile or sexual feelings which we would usually repress. Telling jokes is like dreaming, a way to let repressed feelings into the conscious mind. Because we express our hostile or sexual feelings rather than repress them, we “save” the mental energy we would have expended to repress those feelings. That saved energy is vented in laughter. Freud’s second laughter situation is the comic. Here the “saved” mental energy is energy of thinking. We are presented with an initially puzzling phenomenon which we summon the mental energy to understand. But then we realize that no solution is really called for, and so we vent the mental energy in laughter. An example of something comic would be one of Rube Goldberg’s drawings of a fantastically complicated device to do some simple task, such as watering a plant. On first seeing the drawing, Freud would say, we summon the mental energy to understand how each part of the machine moves the next part, but then in acknowledging that this drawing is just a cartoon, we relax and stop trying to figure out how the machine works. The mental energy we have summoned for thinking is now superfluous, and is discharged in laughter. Freud’s third laughter situation is humor. Here the energy saved is the energy of emotion. Humor arises “if there is a situation in which, according to our usual habits, we should be tempted to release a distressing affect and if motives then operate upon us which suppress that affect in statu nascendi [as it is being born]. . . The pleasure of humor . . . comes about . . . at the cost of a release of affect that does not occur: it arise from an economy in the expenditure of affect.” (Morreall 1983: 35). As an example, Freud told Mark Twain’s story about the time his brother was working on a road-­building project. An explosive charge went off prematurely, blowing him into the sky so that he

Philosophy and religion 

225

came down far from his work site. At this point in the story, Freud says, we have summoned concern and pity for the poor man. But the end of Twain’s story is that his brother was docked half a day’s pay for the time he was in the air “absent from his place of employment.” Listening to this twist, we realize that concern and pity are not called for. And so the psychic energy we have prepared for sympathetic emotions is discharged in laughter. In his essay “Humor,” Freud extended his comments on humor used in his special sense as a saving of emotional expenditure in feeling negative emotions. He was especially interested in situations in which people respond to adverse situations in their own lives with laughter rather than with fear, anger, sadness, or other negative emotions. Like wit and the comic, humor has in it a liberating element. But it also has something fine and elevating, which is lacking in the other two ways of deriving pleasure from intellectual activity. Obviously, what is fine about it is the triumph of narcissism, the ego’s victorious assertion of its own invulnerability. It refuses to be hurt by the arrows of reality or to be compelled to suffer.  (Morreall 1987: 113)

Humor, Freud adds, represents the triumph of the pleasure principle, “which is strong enough to assert itself here in the face of the adverse real circumstances.” Freud also notes that “it is not everyone who is capable of the humorous attitude: it is a rare and precious gift, and there are many people who have not even the capacity for deriving pleasure from humor when it is presented to them by others.” (ibid. 116) The Incongruity Theory The second theory that arose in the 18th century to compete with the Superiority Theory, now dominates humor research. It is the Incongruity Theory. Put in its most general form, it says that humorous amusement is a reaction to something incongruous, that is, something which does not fit our ordinary mental patterns. Different versions of this theory will add various details to this basic claim, as we will see. In their writings on public speaking, Aristotle and Cicero had mentioned that one way to get a laugh from an audience is to set up an expectation and then violate it. According to the Incongruity Theory, this is not just a way to create humor, but the basic way. Another precursor of the Incongruity Theory

226 

John Morreall

was Francis Hutcheson, who in his critique of Hobbes had commented that comic literature is based on the use of somewhat inappropriate metaphors and similes to trigger ideas that clash with each other. In more detail, James Beattie, in his “Essay on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition”, outlined ways in which opposing images and ideas could be juxtaposed for comic effect. The first widely known book in which the Incongruity Theory appeared in relatively complete form is Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment published in 1790: In everything that is to excite a lively convulsive laugh there must be something absurd (in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction). Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. This transformation, which is certainly not enjoyable to the understanding, yet indirectly gives it very active enjoyment for a moment. Therefore its cause must consist in the influence of the representation upon the body, and the reflex effect of this upon the mind.  (Morreall 1989b: 249)

For Kant, the pleasure of laughter was primarily the physical gratification of feeling the movements of the internal organs and the spasms of the muscles in the chest. In the early 19th century Arthur Schopenhauer presented a version of the Incongruity Theory in which the incongruity is between our abstract concepts and our sensory experiences of the things which are supposed to fit under those concepts. In organizing our sense perceptions under concepts and words, we ignore many differences between things, as when we call both a 2-­pound Chihuahua and a 200-­pound St. Bernard “dogs.” Amusement arises when we are suddenly struck by the discrepancy between a concept and a perception of the same thing, and we enjoy the conceptual shock that discrepancy causes. What we are enjoying when we laugh, according to Schopenhauer, is an incongruity of sensuous and abstract knowledge. . . . The cause of laughter in every case is simpy the perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity.  (Morreall 1987: 51–52)

Another incongruity theorist of the 19th century was the essayist and critic William Hazlitt. “The essence of the laughable,” he wrote, “is the incongruous, the disconnecting one idea from another, or the jostling of one feeling against another.” In his lecture “On Wit and Humor,” he developed an Incongruity theory of humor that went significantly beyond Kant and ­Schopenhauer. Like

Philosophy and religion 

227

them, he discussed the cognitive processes in the creation and appreciation of humor. But he also contrasted humorous amusement as a response to incongruity with other responses to incongruity, such as fear and sadness. Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. We weep at what thwarts or exceeds our desires in serious matters: we laugh at what only disappoints our expectations in trifles. We shed tears from sympathy with real and necessary distress; as we burst into laughter from want of sympathy with that which is unreasonable and unnecessary, the absurdity of which provokes our spleen or mirth, rather than any serious reflection on it.  (Morreall 1987: 65)

As a literary critic, Hazlitt explored the many ways comic writers achieve their effects. He distinguished, as Cicero had, between naturally occurring incongruity which we appreciate as someone points it out, and incongruity created in the way someone represents something in words. Hazlitt calls the first “humor” and the second “wit.” “Humor is the describing of the ludicrous as it is in inself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humor is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.” (Morreall 1987: 74) Soren Kierkegaard was a  philosopher and religious thinker with an approach similar to Hazlitt’s. In his version of the Incongruity Theory, “the comical” appears where we have been using “humor,” and “contradiction” where we have been using “incongruity.” “Wherever there is contradiction,” Kierkegaard wrote, “the comical is present.” (Morreall 1987: 83) In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript he discussed the nature and value of the comical. Traditional philosophy and religion emphasized what is serious in life, he noted, and so tended to dismiss comedy and valorize tragedy. But he opposed the idea that the tragic or otherwise serious perspective is “a bliss-­bringing panacea, as if seriousness were a good in and of itself, something to be taken without directions, so that all is well if one is merely serious at all times.” He insisted that it is “quite as dubious, precisely quite as dubious, to be pathetic and serious in the wrong place, as it is to laugh in the wrong place.” (­Morreall 1987: 84) The difference between a tragic view of a situation and a comic view of the same situation is that “the tragic apprehension sees the contradiction and despairs of a way out,” while the comic vision faces the same contradiction but sees a “way out.” In many situations, Kierkegaard said, the comic perspective can be more imaginative, more insightful, and wiser than the tragic p­ erspective.

228 

John Morreall

Kierkegaard was especially interested in humor and its close relative irony, for their place in three philosophies of life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Those making the transition from the merely ethical to the religious way of life, he says, see lots of humor in their situation. Religious people, especially Christians, need to have a sense of humor to live with the incongruities in such puzzling beliefs as the Incarnation and the Trinity. Kierkegaard wrote in his journal that “the humorous is present throughout Christianity,” indeed, that Christianity is the most humorous world view in history. It was largely Kierkegaard’s appreciation of humor in opposition to the traditional Christian prejudices against it that made way for Christian thinkers in the 20th century such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Harvey Cox to wrote positively about humor in relation to religion. While the Incongruity Theory has allowed philosophers and religious thinkers to get beyond the narrowness of the Superiority Theory and the attendant moral objections to humor, it has also given rise to new objections to humor. The basic objection here can be called Irrationality Objection. As the enjoyment of something which does not fit our ordinary conceptual patterns, humor seems to involve a perverse kind of pleasure. Our conceptual patterns are the ways we process our experiences, understand, and get along in the world. Something that clashes with our conceptual patterns should not delight but puzzle us. The creator of humor, according to this objection, creates experiences that undermine our rationality, and packages these experiences as something to enjoy! So humor is conceptually anarchic. At the end of the 19th century George Santayana put this objection in a strong form, arguing that we do not really enjoy incongruity,but only the stimulation it brings. He wrote of an “undertone of disgust” that accompanies our amusement at humor. “Man, being a rational animal, can like absurdity no better than he can like hunger or cold.” The Incongruity Theory has had great influence in humor research over the last forty years. In psychology it has taken two major forms: theorists such as Paul McGhee say that humor is a reaction to incongruity. Others like Jerry Suls and Thomas Schultz say that what we enjoy in humor is not incongruity itself, but the resolution of incongruity. They propose a two-­stage mental process in which we at first are struck by something odd, anomalous, puzzling, but then in the second stage we resolve the incongruity by finding a mental pattern under which the apparently anomalous item does fit. Before leaving our discussion of the three classic theories of humor, however, we need to note that there are several hybrid theories, most notably that of Henri Bergson, whose 1905 book Laughter is often cited in literary studies

Philosophy and religion 

229

as well as philosophy. Bergson’s account of humor grew out of his metaphysics and his ethics, especially his opposition to the materialism and mechanism popular in his day. His own metaphysical theory of “Creative Evolution” posited a non-­material “vital force” (elan vital) which drives biological and social evolution. When we are motivated by this vital force, we have a creative attitude which is open to the uniqueness of each thing and experience, and so to the opportunities which each moment brings. We know this force in ourselves intuitively, even though conceptual, logical thinking has no place for it. When we suppress this vital force and manage our lives with logic, we act in rigid, mechanical ways, treating new experiences merely as repetitions of previous ones. We thus miss opportunities which a creative person would not. Fortunately, human beings have evolved a way of correcting mechanical behavior, and that is laughter. For Bergson, laughter is a social gesture of mockery toward those who are not thinking and acting in a flexible, context-­sensitive way. Its function is to humiliate mechanical people into seeing their inadequacy and returning to flexible, well-­adapted ways of thinking and acting. The object of laughter, Bergson says, is “the mechanical encrusted on the living.” Bergson’s Theory is not a straightforward version of either the Superiority Theory or the Incongruity Theory, but it has elements of both. The essence of laughter is ridicule and its purpose is to humiliate, as in the Superiority Theory. But, as in the Incongruity Theory, the object of laughter is a discrepancy between the way something is and the way it is supposed to be, in this case, human thought and behavior failing to be human. Issues In exploring the history of thinking about humor, we have already presented several of the issues which arise in philosophy and religious studies. Here we will discuss five of them: (1) Is having a religious world view compatible with having a sense of humor? (2) Is there a theory of humor which provides necessary and sufficient conditions for humor? (3) How is humor related to emotions? (4) How is humor related to rationality? (5) In what ways might humor be ethically blameworthy or praiseworthy? 1.  In the study of religion, perhaps the most basic issue is whether humor is compatible with being a religious person. The evaluations of laughter and humor in the Bible and in traditional Christianity, as we have seen, provide many reasons for answering No. And today scholars of non-­Western ­religions,

230 

John Morreall

such as Lee Siegel, claim that the greater people’s sense of humor the less religious they are, and the more religious they are the less sense of humor they have. One way to argue for the incompatibility of religiosity and humor is by appealing to the notion of the sacred. All religions are based on certain beliefs, values, and rituals deemed worthy of absolute respect. Each religion requires of its followers a commitment to these sacred beliefs, values, and rituals which is incompatible with taking a humorous or playful attitude toward them. And the more religious people are, the more their sacred beliefs, values, and rituals will come up in their everyday life. Maximally religious persons will devote most of their waking hours to thoughts and activities centered around sacred beliefs, values, and rituals. Consider the life of the Christian monk or nun, the devout Orthodox Jew, or the Muslim holy person. Whenever something associated with anything sacred arises, they must think and act in a way that shows respect for the sacred. For them to make a joke about something sacred – such as to playfully attribute a base motive to a sacred figure – would be sacrilegious. In the history of humor, however, making fun of religious leaders, scriptures, and even the gods is commonplace. Irreverence has been a central feature of comedy since Aristophanes. And so a pious person would not be able to countenance much comedy. A recent example of this incompatibility of humor and piety is the aftermath of the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses, which gave unseemly characters names of members of Muhammad’s family and gave derogatory names to the Prophet himself. Several Muslim leaders condemned Rushdie as an apostate, and the standard Islamic punishment for apostasy is death. So Rushdie has been under death threats from pious Muslims ever since. When we mentioned the Puritans’s opposition to comedy, we saw another reason for thinking that religion and humor are incompatible. Comedy from the days of Aristophanes has been full of drunkards, lechers, liars, adulterers, and others with major vices, and these characters are the focus of our enjoyment. According to the Puritans’s arguments, the proper response to such vices is not to enjoy them in laughter but to reform them. Still another way to argue for the incompatibility of humor and religion in the Western monotheistic religions is to consider whether God has a sense of humor. Considering what is said about God both in the Bible and in the theology books, the answer seems a definite No. In the Bible, God laughs only in scorn at his enemies, never in amusement, and each mention of God’s laughter at his enemies is followed by his slaughtering them. Furthermore,

Philosophy and religion 

231

there seems to be nothing funny associated with this laughter. The humans who speak for God, the prophets, also laugh only in scorn, and in one case a prophet responded to children’s laughter at him for being bald by cursing them, whereupon God had two bears maul the children. Furthermore, mirthful and joyous laughter are treated with suspicion in the Bible. The author of Ecclesiastes describes such laughter as empty, calling it “madness.” Later he counsels that “Sorrow is better than laughter” (7: 3). The Book of Proverbs warns that “Even in laughter the heart is sad, and the end of joy is grief ” (14: 13). In the New Testament, the letter of James advises us to “Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection” (4: 9), advise followed in many of the Christian monastic traditions. If we consider the theology which developed as Christians, Jews, and Muslims applied Greek philosophical concepts to God, we also have reasons for thinking that God could have no sense of humor. To be amused, according to the Incongruity Theory, a person must enjoy experiencing something which violates their mental patterns, something which seems impossible for God. If, as the theology books tell us, God has a plan for how every creature is supposed to live, then God could not be happy when creatures act in ways that oppose his plan. For human beings to violate God’s plan is precisely the nature of sin, and God cannot enjoy sin. A list of the standard objects of laughter in comedy is a list of the major sins – lechery, avarice, drunkenness, gluttony, lying, adultery, slander, etc. Even the comic human traits which are not sinful, such as stupidity and ugliness, are not something which God would enjoy. If as Hazlitt said, humor is based on enjoying the discrepancy between the way things are supposed to be and the way things are, then, it seems that God is incapable of humor. Although the overwhelming majority of religious thinkers who have addressed the relation of humor with religion have had such negative attitudes to it, there have been a few religious thinkers who have seen value in humor. Thomas Aquinas, as we saw, thought of humor as a kind of play which refreshes us for more serious activity. Some religious thinkers have even seen religious value in humor. Kierkegaard thought that Christianity, with its illogical mysteries, was the most humorous religion of all. The two best contemporary proponents of the compatibility of humor and religion are Conrad Hyers and Harvey Cox. For both a  mature religious sense should include a good sense of humor. Hyers has studied the relationship between humor and religion not only in the Biblical religions but also in Zen Buddhism, which is not constrained by all the monotheistic assumptions we have reviewed. One of the major goals

232 

John Morreall

of Buddhism is to get people not to be blindly committed, not to be attached, as Buddhists say, to anything, including Buddhism itself. Thus Zen does not have a sacred as other religions do, and so it is more open to the playfulness of humor. Indeed, one of the ways Zen tries to break people’s attachments is with incongruities in the form of koans, such as the question “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Even the figure of the Buddha is not sacred, as shown in the response of the Buddhist master who answered the question “What is the Buddha?” with “A wiping stick of dried shit.” A classic tale recounts how another Buddhist master, on visiting a monastery in winter which had run out of firewood, went to the altar, took down a wooden statue of the Buddha, smashed it into pieces and started a fire with it. According to Hyers, such examples show how humor enhances the central insights on which Zen Buddhism is based. As Hyers surveys Western religious literature, he finds the same negative attitude toward laughter and humor which we have surveyed. But he argues that this attitude misses several important humorous elements in the Bible. The story of Jonah, for example, Hyers reads as a satire on a reluctant prophet. In many stories about Jesus, too, he finds wit, imagination, and an openness to people characteristic of someone with a sense of humor. Harvey Cox does not say much about humor per se, but he does argue for the importance of “festivity and fantasy” in Christianity, and these have many comic elements. He analyses festivity in terms of conscious excess, celebrative affirmation, and juxtaposition. Overly solemn and prudish Christians, he says, have largely eliminated these from contemporary religion, but they should be restored. Indeed, Cox closes his book by asking Christians to think of Christ as a harlequin! 2.  In philosophy, there are several issues about laughter and humor. The most basic is whether humor has an essence or nature. Those who espouse the standard theories of humor think that they have presented the essence of humor. Several humor researchers in and outside philosophy, on the other hand, have denied that all cases of humor have something in common. Since Wittgenstein in the 1950s it has been popular to claim that with some words and concepts there is no essence, but only an array of “family resemblances.” The standard example is “game.” According to Wittgenstein, there is no essential feature which all games have in common. Could “humor” be a word and concept like Wittgenstein’s “game”? One way to argue that humor does have an essence is to present some feature that all cases of humor share which makes them all humor. The most

Philosophy and religion 

233

plausible of the three traditional theories here is the Incongruity Theory. The Superiority and Relief theories have too many counterexamples to be viable candidates. Feeling superior to other people occurs in some cases of humor, but there are many other cases of humor which lack such feelings, and many cases of feeling superior which are not instances of humor. Here Frances Hutcheson offered useful examples in his critique of Hobbes, to which we can add. Laughing at the clever and acrobatic way Charlie Chaplin gets out of a tough situation in a silent film, for example, need not involve feeling superior to that character and probably involves feeling inferior to him. And simply feeling superior to someone, as in winning a race, does not by itself involve any humor at all. The Relief Theory is implausible for other reasons, most importantly, its hydraulic account of the build-­up and release of energy in the nervous system. Many funny experiences occur in a few seconds, which hardly seems long enough for nervous energy to build up, be seen to be superfluous, and then be vented. In the 1960s there was a funny sign which read “THIMK.” To be amused by it did not seem to require the build-­up of any emotion which needed venting. Nor did it seem to require the venting of any psychic energy of repression or of understanding. All that seemed required is an enjoyment of the opposition between the advice the sign was trying to give and the way it was spelled. The most widely discussed version of the Relief Theory is that of Freud, but few scholars today would commit themselves to Freud’s complicated account of how psychic energy is expended, saved in statu nascendi, and all the rest. No one, indeed, even uses Freud’s distinction of jokes, the comic, and humor. The example of the THIMK sign was intended not only to argue against the Relief Theory but to argue for the Incongruity Theory. That theory seems comprehensive in a way that the other two are not. What seems both necessary and sufficient for humorous amusement, that is, is an enjoyment of some incongruity. I include the element of enjoyment here, as many Incongruity theorists do not, because the mere perception of incongruity is not sufficient for humor. In many cases of fear, anger, disgust, and sadness, we perceive something which violates our mental patterns, but we do not enjoy the incongruity. What sets humorous amusement from these negative emotions is that in humor there is something about experiencing incongruity which we enjoy. Among proponents of the Incongruity Theory, as we noted earlier, some claim that amusement lies in the resolution of an incongruity. As evidence these theorists appeal mostly to jokes. But while there is resolution of

234 

John Morreall

i­ncongruity in most jokes, there are many other kinds of humor in which the incongruity is not resolved, and in which what seems to amuse us is the incongruity itself. If I see a cloud which looks like Richard Nixon’s profile and laugh, I seem to be taking pleasure in the unexpectedness of a cloud looking like Nixon, not in figuring out how this coincidence might have some explanation. To be amused when I accidentally spill a scoop of ice cream from an ice cream cone on my dog’s head, similarly, I do not have to figure out how I made such a blunder; indeed, going into an explanatory mode would seem to inhibit rather than foster amusement. Even in verbal humor, there is not always resolution of incongruity. One of the running gags on the Bob Newhart TV show of the 1990s was having three disheveled young men come into the hotel. One introduced himself and then turning to his brothers said, “This is my brother Darrell, and that is my other brother Darrell.” No explanation was ever even suggested for why two brothers would have the same name. What viewers enjoyed was the sheer unresolved absurdity. We might add a note here about the traditional connection drawn between superiority and humor. If, as I have argued, feeling superior to someone is neither necessary nor sufficient for amusement, why was the Superiority Theory the only theory of laughter and humor for two millennia? To answer this question, we should note that most of the incongruities we laugh at, especially in comedy, are human shortcomings – ignorance, stupidity, awkwardness, mistakes, misunderstandings, and moral vices. The Incongruity Theory would say simply that it is the unexpectedness, the out-­of-­placeness of these shortcomings that we enjoy. The Superiority Theory says that what we enjoy in humor is feelings of superiority evoked by our awareness of other people’s shortcomings. The trouble with the latter claim is that when we perceive a shortcoming in another person, and even when we laugh at it, we need not feel superior to that person. In kidding our friends about their foibles, we often admit that we have the same shortcomings; what we are really laughing at is our shared shortcomings. And even when we perceive some shortcoming in a person and we do feel superior, our feelings of superiority by themselves do not constitute humor, as the Superiority Theory would have us believe. If I beat my neighbor at a game because she makes several mistakes, and so I feel superior to her, I am not therein experiencing my win or her defeat as funny. For there to be humor here, something must be perceived as incongruous. If, for example, she had been so confident of winning that she bet me $100 on the game at 4-­to-­1 odds, or if the mistakes she made were all things that she criticized me for the last time we played, then I might find her defeat humorous.

Philosophy and religion 

235

3.  In addressing the last three philosophical issues about humor, I am going to be using the Incongruity Theory. The first is the relationship between humor and emotions. Virtually everyone writing about this topic before the 20th century, and the vast majority writing after that, have thought of laughter as either expressing some emotion(s) or in the Relief Theory releasing emotional energy. For Plato it was malice, for Hobbes it was “sudden glory,” for Spinoza hatred. When laughter and humor were distinguished in the 18th century, humor was thought to involve an emotion, often called “amusement.” Hazlitt and Bergson did point out how humor blocks, and is blocked by such emotions as fear, sympathy, and sadness, but even then, amusement was still classified as an emotion. Recently, Robert Sharpe has gone beyond simply assuming that amusement is an emotion by giving seven similarities between it and standard emotions such as fear and love (Morreall 1987: 208–­211). Both amusement and standard emotions, he says, have “intentional objects” – they are about something. Both admit of degrees. Both have behavioral manifestations which we may suppress. Both allow for self-­deception. Both are pleasurable or painful. With both we can distinguish between the intentional object of the mental state and the cause of the mental state. And with both we can cultivate taste. I have challenged the standard view that amusement is an emotion, and have argued that none of Sharpe’s parallels pick out essential features of emotions or humor which unite them. Furthermore, using a standard account of the nature of emotion, I have shown several dissimilarities between amusement and standard emotions. According to a standard theory of emotion, an emotion is a state of physiological upset, along with the sensations of that upset, caused by cognitive events, which motivates practical action. The cognitive events are usually described as beliefs and desires. If I am driving at night and suddenly see a log in the road ahead, to use Jerome Shaffer’s example, I may experience fear. That emotion is a set of physiological changes – my increased heartbeat and blood pressure, muscle tension, sweating, etc. – along with my sensation of these bodily changes. Those changes are caused by my belief that I am in danger and my desire to escape the danger, and I am motivated to avoid hitting the log by putting on the brakes or steering around the log. This standard account of emotion does not fit amusement at all well. There are physiological upsets in amusement – the spasms of the diaphragm, the bursts of exhalation, etc., and we do have sensations of these changes. But the changes in laughter need not be caused by beliefs and desires, and there is no motivation to do anything practical. When I see the cloud as Richard Nixon

236 

John Morreall

and am amused, for example, I do not believe that the cloud is Nixon, and I do not have any particular desires about the cloud or about Nixon. Nor am I motivated to do anything at all. The lack of motivation in humor, its idleness, remember, is the basis for one of the traditional objections to it. Even some of the similarities between humor and emotions which Sharpe appeals to hide deeper dissimilarities. Amusement, like love, for example, is pleasurable. But in love what we take pleasure in is the persons whom we love. We are attracted to the persons themselves. In amusement, however, we need not be attracted to what is making us laugh. If I am amused when I drive past a house with dozens of tacky plastic statues on the front lawn, I am not attracted to those statues and their arrangement. (If I  were, I  wouldn’t be laughing.) What I am enjoying is the experience of seeing this attempt at displaying good taste go awry. Because amusement has no requirement of belief or desire, and does not motivate practical action, the study of humor has not progressed in the ways the study of emotion have progressed in the last half-­century. While the physiological changes in fear and anger are well understood through their connections with actions like fleeing and fighting, the physiology of laughter still seems anomalous. 4. The fourth issue, the relation of humor to rationality, is related to the third. Most thinkers who have considered it have treated humor as making us irrational. From Plato on, humor was classified as an emotion, and emotions were usually thought to be irrational. Once the Incongruity Theory was established, thinkers like Santayana were bothered by the apparent irrationality of enjoying something incongruous. Indeed, Santayana claimed that human beings, as rational animals, are incapable of enjoying absurdity. If humor were utterly at odds with rationality, however, it would be difficult to see how it could have evolved in the human race. At least the emotions have survival value in preparing us for fighting or fleeing, mating, etc. But laughter and humor do not prepare us for appropriate action; intense laughter is physically incapacitating. If humor were also mentally incapacitating, how could it have become part of human nature? I have argued that the enjoyment of incongruity did have survival value for the species, and that its value lay in the way it enhanced rationality. Rationality is our ability to think abstractly, that is, free of the limitations of the place, time, and personal situation we are currently in. Lower animals perceive their surroundings and respond with practical actions in order to get food, find a mate, avoid predators, etc. They are aware of the place and time

Philosophy and religion 

237

in which they find themselves and their current needs. Emotions evolved as ways of equipping animals to take appropriate actions – to get out of danger, fight successfully, reproduce, etc. But while this practical orientation allowed animals to get along, it did not foster abstract thinking. In the lower animals, incongruity is experienced as puzzling or threatening, not as amusing. A striking example is the panic with which chimpanzees respond to a photograph of a chimpanzee with its head separated from its body. Humans, too, often treat incongruity as puzzling or threatening. But somewhere in human evolution, our ancestors developed a new way to respond to situations which did not match their expectations. They enjoyed the mental jolt they gave them, they found them funny. Now such a response would not have been appropriate in life-­threatening situations which called for immediate action. But in situations with no immediate danger, being able to suppress the “fight-­or-­flight” response and enjoy the surprising situation could have had benefits. It could have led to curious exploration and to reflection on normal patterns of events. As the brain’s emotional limbic system did not dominate, the more rational cerebral cortex could operate. Especially important here would have been early humans’ developing the ability to laugh at themselves, for that would have given them a more objective, less ego­centered perspective, and that is the essence of rationality. Many have described the value of humor as its giving us emotional distance from the problems in life. Indeed, some psychiatrists and other therapists now use humor precisely to get people to step back from their problems and see them “in the big picture.” The goal here is much the same as the ancient Stoics’s goal – to get people to be more rational and less bothered by life’s problems. What is unfortunate is that the Stoics, in classifying laughter as an emotion, completely missed its opposition to emotions and its ability to enhance rationality. 5.  The last philosophical and religious issue I  want to comment on is the ethics of humor. Earlier we saw some of the ethical critiques of laughter and humor in traditional religion and philosophy. Today too, we see ethical objections to certain kinds of humor, especially in cases of racial and sexual discrimination and sexual harrassment. Among the traditional charges against laughter and humor, nine stand out:

1.  Humor is hostile. 2.  Humor diminishes self-­control. 3.  Humor is irresponsible.

238 



John Morreall

4.  Humor is insincere. 5.  Humor is idle. 6.  Humor is hedonistic. 7.  Humor fosters sexual license. 8.  Humor fosters anarchy. 9.  Humor is foolish.

Today we seldom hear most of these charges, largely because our culture is long past Puritan objections to idleness and pleasure. American entertainment media are at the heart of our national culture, and are the top U.S. export around the world. But the first charge – that humor is hostile – does arise frequently, usually in cases involving racial or sexual discrimination, or sexual harassment. Ethnic humor, racist humor, and humor which “targets” women, gay men, and lesbians is often held to be an expression of hostility as offensive as physical violence. If we look back through history, we find countless examples of groups which had power over other groups making jokes (publishing cartoons, writing comic songs, staging comic plays, etc.) based on the supposed shortcomings of the less powerful groups. Many have claimed that such humor reinforces the negative image of less powerful groups and thus helps the more powerful groups maintain their dominance. One position concerning the ethics of humor could be dubbed the Joke­as-­Libel position. It goes like this. Jokes and other humor which puts down an individual or group works by representing the target as having some major shortcoming – stupidity, laziness, sexual promiscuity, obsession with money, etc. In such humor, the audience typically laughs at the moment when the representative of the target group is revealed to have the shortcoming – usually to an extreme degree. Consider the joke about the Polish astronaut who announced his plan to fly to the sun. When someone asked about the sun’s intense heat, he answered, “No problem – I’m going to go at night.” That revelation of his stupidity is what makes the audience laugh. The advocate of the Joke-­as-­Libel position would say that tellers of this joke are making an implicit assertion that Poles are stupid, and in doing so they are perpetuating a morally objectionable stereotype. One proponent of some of the basic ideas of the Joke-­as-­Libel position is Ronald de Sousa (1987a, 1987b) In order to enjoy put-­down humor, he says, a person must not only understand that the target group is being represented as having a shortcoming, but must believe that the group in fact has that shortcoming. De Sousa illustrates with a joke about Margaret Trudeau, the former

Philosophy and religion 

239

wife of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who had a reputation for promiscuity: Margaret Trudeau goes to visit the hockey team. When she emerges she complains that she has been gang-­raped. Wishful thinking.  (Morreall 1987: 239)

According to de Sousa, this joke has certain assumptions. One is that Margaret Trudeau is promiscuous. Another is that all women secretly want to be raped. To be amused by a joke like this with malicious content, de Sousa says, it is not enough to understand these assumptions of the joke, or to hypothetically adopt them for the moment. We must endorse them. If we do not share those assumptions with the joke teller, we will not find the joke funny. Sexist and racist jokes are objectionable precisely because they amuse only people who share their assumptions, and those assumptions are not merely false but morally harmful inasmuch as they perpetuate false stereotypes and so unjust treatment of the target group. People who think that all women secretly want to be raped may well condone rape, and at least will treat women in a way that denies them their autonomy and rights. Robert C. Roberts and I  have a  different position on jokes with a  target. In many cases, put-­down jokes are told to perpetuate stereotyped beliefs about a group being, and sometimes an objectionable malice is involved. But malice is not a necessary feature of the telling or the appreciation of such jokes. I once read a joke which put down Laplanders, for example. At the time I had no distinctive beliefs about Laplanders other than that they live in the far North of Europe. If someone had asked me about my attitude toward Laplanders, I would have shrugged my shoulders. But the joke was clever, and I found it funny. Now those who created this joke may well have had malicious, morally objectionable attitudes toward Laplanders, and so someone might morally object to their telling it, much as someone might object to the telling of jokes about blacks at Ku Klux Klan meetings. But I would say that putdown jokes can be funny even for those who do not share their ­assumptions. Even jokes which can express hostility, then, do not require listeners to share that hostility in order to enjoy them. The strongest reasonable position about the ethics of joking here seems to be that such jokes should not generally be told because of the likelihood that they will reinforce people’s hostility toward other groups. So far in exploring the ethics of humor I have focused only on the ways in which humor could be ethically objectionable. But if my earlier comments about the ability of humor to block negative emotions and foster rationality

240 

John Morreall

are correct, then humor can also be ethically praiseworthy. Humor can be used, for example, to calm angry people and get them to look more objectively at a situation. Several years ago California police officer Adelle Roberts was called to a family fight. As she got out of her squad car and approached the front door, she heard yelling and things being thrown against the wall inside. Then a portable TV set came crashing through the front window. She had to knock very loudly, and a voice bellowed, “Who is it?’ “TV Repair” was her reply. The combatants came to the door, smiling, and began to resolve their conflict. Humor can also be used to reduce people’s fear and anxiety. About 100 hospitals in the U.S. now have either “comedy carts” or full-­scale “humor rooms,” precisely for that purpose. Another valuable use for humor is in getting people to see their mistakes objectively rather than defensively. To continue the list of praiseworthy humor, all we need do is think of situations in which negative emotions with bad consequences can be overridden by humor. My favorite approach I first got interested in researching humor for two reasons. First, I had ­always been puzzled by its nature and how it might have evolved. Second, although traditional attitudes toward humor in Western philosophy and religion have been negative, I  found humor to be valuable in a  way nothing else is. As ­Nietzsche said of music, without it, life would be a mistake. So I have tried to do two things: articulate the nature of humor, especially its relation to negative emotions like fear, anger, and sadness; and explore the benefits it has for individuals and groups. To explain the nature of humor, I  have used a  version of the Incongruity Theory. To explain the value of humor, I have asked what possible benefits might accrue to a creature which can enjoy something violating its concepts and expectations. Most recently, I have ­applied both these approaches to examining the “comic vision of life,” and contrasting it with the “tragic vision” of life. In Comedy, Tragedy, and Religion, I develop twenty points of contrast between the comic and tragic ­visions. At the level of individual psychology, the comic and tragic visions represent: complex vs. simple conceptual schemes, high vs. low tolerance for disorder and ambiguity, seeking out vs. avoiding the unfamiliar, divergent vs. convergent thinking, critical vs. noncritical thinking, emotional disengagement vs. engagement, willingness to change one’s mind vs. stubbornness,

Philosophy and religion 

241

pragmatism vs. idealism, getting a second chance vs. finality, celebration of vs. denigration of the body, and playfulness vs. seriousness. Socially, the comic and tragic visions represent: anti-­heroism vs. heroism, pacifism vs. militarism, forgiveness vs. vengeance, social equality vs. inequality, questioning vs. acceptance of authority and tradition, situation ethics vs. duty ethics, and social integration vs. social isolation. With these features in mind, I  have examined traditional Eastern and Western religions, as well as recently emerged religions like Wicca. While no religion embodies the comic vision or the tragic vision in a pure form, several lean heavily toward one or the other. The most comic vision among traditional religions is in Zen Buddhism and Taoism, the most tragic vision in certain forms of Judaism and Calvinist Christianity. Virtually all the New Religions of the past fifty years have embraced the comic vision. References Aristotle 1941 Berger, Peter 1969 1997

Poetics. In: Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York: Random House. Christian Faith and the Social Comedy. In: M. Conrad Hyers (ed.), Holy Laughter: Essays on Religion in the Comic Perspective. New York: Seabury Press. Redeeming Laughter: An Essay on the Experience of the Comic. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Bergson, Henri 1956 Laughter. Trans. by Cloudesley Brereton and Kenneth Rothwell. In Wylie Sypher (ed.), Comedy. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor. Blyth, R. H. 1969 Zen humour. In: M. Conrad Hyers (ed.), Holy Laughter: Essays on Religion in the Comic Perspective. New York: Seabury Press. Buckley, George Wright 1901 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus. Battle Creek, MI: Ellis, Cox, Harvey 1969 The Feast of Fools. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Croissan, Dominic 1976 Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges. New York: Harper and Row. Freud, Sigmund 1959 Humor. In: Collected Papers. Vol. 5. New York: Basic Books.

242 

John Morreall

Hobbes, Thomas 1994 Leviathan. Ed. by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett. 1999 Human Nature and De Corpore Politico. Ed. by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hyers, M. Conrad 1987 And God Created Laughter: The Bible as Divine Comedy. Atlanta: John Knox Press 1991 The Laughing Buddha: Zen and the Comic Spirit. Durango, Colorado: Longwood Academic. 1996 The Spirituality of Comedy: Comic Heroism in a Tragic World. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, Hyers, M. Conrad (ed.) 1969 Holy Laughter: Essays on Religion in the Comic Perspective. New York: Seabury Press, Kerr, Walter 1967 Tragedy and Comedy. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kierkegaard, Soren 1970 Journals and Papers. Ed. and trans. by Howard Hong and Edna Hong. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Lauter, Paul (ed.) 1969 Theories of Comedy. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Morreall, John 1983 Taking Laughter Seriously. Albany: State University of New York Press. 1987 Funny ha-­ha, funny strange, and other reactions to incongruity. In: John Morreall (ed.), 188–207. 1989a Enjoying incongruity. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 2 (1): 1–18. 1989b The rejection of humor in Western thought. Philosophy East and West 39: 243–265. 1999 Comedy, Tragedy, and Religion. Albany: State University of New York Press. Morreall, John (ed.) 1987 The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Albany: State University of New York Press. Sousa, Ronald de 1987a When is it wrong to laugh?’. In: J. Morreall (ed.), 226–249. 1987b The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Trublood, Elton 1964 The Humor of Christ. New York: Harper and Row, Willeford, William 1969 The Fool and His Sceptre: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Literature and humor Alleen and Don Nilsen Note: Because literary humor is such a broad field, we asked nine contemporary scholars to help us by describing their work and making observations to be worked into this chapter. Unless otherwise identified, quoted materials come from what these scholars originally wrote for this primer. We gratefully acknowledge the help of Regina Barreca, Jessica Milner Davis, Steven H. Gale, Paul H. Grawe, D. G. Kehl, Paul Lewis, Daniel Royot, Elaine Safer, and David E. E. Sloane. Samples of their publications are listed in the “Critical Works Cited” at the end of this chapter where there are also brief statements describing them and their work. A matter of analysis Even though highly respected creators of humorous literature have expressed serious doubts about the analysis of humor, most literary scholars are involved in some aspect of that endeavor. The best known argument against analysis was made by E. B. and Katherine White in the preface to their 1941 A Subtreasury of American Humor in which they wrote “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.” They went on to say that humor “won’t stand much blowing up, and it won’t stand much poking. It has a  certain fragility, and evasiveness, which one had best respect. Essentially it is a complete mystery.” White later compared interpreting humor to “explaining a spider’s web in terms of geometry.” D. G. Kehl sent us a  similar statement from George Bernard Shaw: “There is no more dangerous literary symptom than a  temptation to write about wit and humor. It indicates a total loss of both.” But then Kehl went on to say “Those of us who are constantly beset by this deadly temptation – and often yield, it is hoped without the accompanying loss – find consolation in Jane Austen’s observation that in the novel are to be found ‘the liveliest effusions of wit and humour ... conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.’”

244 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

While there is no clear definition of what constitutes literary humor, there are characteristics generally ascribed to the term literary or literature, which can also be applied to humor. In recent years, some critics have started to use the term Belles-Lettres almost sarcastically as a  way of characterizing pretentious or “artificial” writing, but C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon explain in their A Handbook to Literature that in its earlier sense the term referred to imaginative and artistic writing. To illustrate the point, they cite Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland as a  good example of Belles-Lettres, while the writing about mathematics done by the same man under his birth name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson does not qualify. The obvious difference between the two types of writing is what amuses people when they hear the story (which may be apocryphal) of Queen Victoria sending Dodgson a message after the success of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass giving him permission to dedicate his next book to her. He complied by honoring her with a mathematical treatise. Holman and Harmon also explain that a requisite for literature is that it has been carefully constructed. For example, they define a literary ballad as one “composed by an author, as opposed to an anonymous folk ballad.” In a similar way, those of us who work with children’s literature, make a distinction between literary fairytales and common folktales. We say that Rudyard Kipling and Hans Christian Andersen wrote literary fairytales because much of their charm comes from the exactness of the wording. Kipling, for example, took the plots of his stories from the folktales told by native women in India who cared for the children of British colonists. However, he devised his own wording as when he began “The Elephant’s Child” with “In the high and Far-Off times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk.” In a similar way, Hans Christian Andersen did not begin “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” with the traditional “Once upon a time. . . ,” but instead with “There were once five and twenty tin soldiers, all brothers, for they were the offspring of the same old tin spoon.” Because of such exact wording, literary fairytales are more likely to be read to children while more common folktales will be told to children. But even common folktales, those that have been told for hundreds of years, include carefully constructed literary elements. For example, the plots of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” “The Three Little Pigs,” and “Jack and the Beanstalk” are simple enough that storytellers can choose their own wording as they go along. However, the stories contain literary, i.e. carefully constructed, parts that are repeated so often that they can be remembered and recited by both listeners and tellers as with “Somebody’s been (sitting in my chair... sleeping

Literature and humor 

245

in my bed...eating my porridge…),” “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down,” and “Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!” Many people will argue that these old stories are indeed literature at least partly because of these famous lines which rely on surprise, succinctness, and repetition – three common features of humor. Another characteristic of literary humor is that it is a more extended discourse than are individual jokes or witty comebacks. Literary discourses can be short as with poems, essays, speeches, and short stories, but as shown by the work of the nine scholars we consulted for this chapter most serious literary criticism is based on full length novels or plays or on an extended body of work by a single author as in Elaine Safer’s 2006 Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth and in Steven Gale’s 2003 Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter’s Screenplays and the Artisitc Process. Expectations are higher for literary humor than for stand-up comedy as shown by letters to the editor published in a July 17, 1995 New York Magazine. They were written as a follow-up to an article on today’s depressing state of television comedy. One writer answered his own question of “Why were the Bennys, the Aces, the Allens (Steve and Fred, both), Berles, Benchleys, Parkers, Woollcotts intuitively brilliant and where are their kind now?” with the observation that these earlier comedians “were the products of a literate society, widely read or with extensive cultural experience, which gave them backgrounds upon which to draw . . . . They knew how to think and were well edited, either by erudite editors or by perceptive audiences.” Another reader wrote that the place to look for delightful wit today is not in the comedy clubs but “in written form, in comic novels and essays.” Among the reasons that comic novels and essays can more easily qualify as “literature” than can stand-up comedy is that the authors have space to include smart allusions and to tie them together. Because of a lack of space, jokes and cartoons are necessarily filled with stereotypes, while more sophisticated literary pieces are lexically packed, meaning that several strands of humor are being developed simultaneously. In addition to using such surface structure techniques as puns and word play, authors of fuller pieces make use of such deep structure tropes as metaphors, similes, irony, and synecdoche. They have the space to develop truly humorous characters and to establish and then break patterns. An example of this kind of variation on a theme are the several allusions to Girl Scouts that Louis Sachar makes in his 1998 Holes, a book for young readers that won both the Newbery and the National Book awards. Stanley, the teen-aged protagonist, is unfairly sentenced to a “toughlove” camp for juvenile delinquents. When he first arrives, the guard warns

246 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

him “You’re not in the Girl Scouts any more.” Throughout the book, this same guard repeats the idea sometimes by just reminding the boys they aren’t Girl Scouts, while at other times asking such questions as “You Girl Scouts having a good time?” Near the end when Stanley’s lawyer and the Texas State Attorney General drive into the camp to investigate its unorthodox methods, the Warden wonders who’s coming and the guard tells her, “It ain’t Girl Scouts selling cookies.” This leads up to the ironic denouement in which the camp is “bought by a national organization dedicated to the well-being of young girls. In a few years, Camp Green Lake will become a Girl Scout camp.” The study of literary humor is in some ways as broad as the whole field of humor research, plus the whole field of literary criticism, because the literature of the world covers every aspect of life while also providing the fullest accounts that we can get from other times and other places, both real and imagined. This means that literary humor scholars have much in common with critics of literature in general because of the extensive overlap between what humor scholars describe as the most common features of humor and the characteristics that literary critics look for in narratives including ambiguity, exaggeration, hostility, irony, superiority, surprise, shock, word play, incongruity and incongruity resolution. Comedy is a term that literary scholars “owned” long before the popular culture gave it today’s more generalized meaning of something that brings smiles and laughter. In medieval times, the word comedy was applied to literary works that were not necessarily created for the purpose of arousing laughter, but at least had happier endings and less exalted styles than tragedies. Dante was using this meaning in the 1300s when he named The Divine Comedy. Literary comedies typically begin with a disruption of life as it is expected to be or the breaking of some kind of “law.” The body of the play or story consists mostly of futile but perhaps amusing attempts to restore a balance, which is finally achieved as part of the happy ending. By the Middle Ages, the concept of comedy had developed into different strands. High comedy (what we now call smart comedy or literary comedy) relied for its humor on wit and sophistication, while low comedy relied on burlesque, crude jokes, and buffoonery. The breadth of what is included in comedy is shown in Maurice Charney’s 2005 two-volume Comedy: A Geographic and Historical Guide, which includes 38 chapters written by leading scholars. Some are historical (“Middle English Comedy” by Andrew Welsh and “Commedia dell’ Arte” by Frances K. Barasch), some are defined by their audience (“Children’s Humor” by Kathryn Douglas and “Queer Comedy” by Ken Feil), some by their medium (“Television Sitcoms” by Leo Charney and “American Polit-

Literature and humor 

247

ical Cartoons and Comics” by Kalman Goldstein), others by ethnicity (“African American Comedians” by Frank J. Miles and “Native American Trickster Tales” by Arnold Krupat), while still others are defined by country of origin (“Spanish Comedy” by Nina Gerassi-Navarro and Raquel Medina-Bañón and “Irish Comedy” by James M. Cahalan) or by the major techniques of the creators (“Satire” by Harry Keyishian” and “Farce” by Norman R. Shapiro). Romantic comedies, like today’s situation comedies, may – but do not have to – include love stories. The first romances came into English from speakers of the romance languages: Italian, Spanish, and French. These romantic stories were exaggerated with the good parts resembling daydreams while the bad parts resembled nightmares. Many of them told about young heroes embarking on quests in which their success would be rewarded by the love of a beautiful young princess, hence the association of the term romance with sexual liaisons. And because male–female relationships are fraught with emotional complications, which to outsiders often seem funny, the “love” part of romantic comedies has moved up from a secondary to a primary focus in the genre. A Bildungsroman is a romance containing what the Germans refer to as Sturm und Drang, storm and stress. They are also called apprenticeship novels or in today’s library circles, young adult novels. They tell the story of a young person traveling the road to adulthood. Even such serious books as J. D. Salinger’s prototypical Catcher in the Rye have humorous moments that serve as comic relief, while others are primarily humorous but written in a sympathetic tone that allows young readers to smile in recognition. Examples of such humorous books include Louis Sachar’s 1998 Holes, Judy Blume’s 1970 Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Gary Paulsen’s 1993 Harris and Me, and Sue Townsend’s 1982 The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾. Comedies of manners frequently stress the superior intellectual and moral values of middle class characters as compared to the established aristocracy. For readers or viewers this is a  satisfying theme because middle-class or common people far outnumber aristocrats. The history of the genre can be traced to Classical Greek and Roman times. It reached its fullest development in France during the seventeenth Century under the pen of Moliere, and in England under the pens of Thomas Shadwell and William Congreve. Later examples include Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal and The Rivals, and Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest provides a good illustration when Jack responds affirmatively to Lady Bracknell’s question of whether he smokes and she ­answers, “I am glad to hear it. A man should have an occupation of some

248 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

kind.” Later when Jack answers one of her questions by saying, he “doesn’t know,” she again responds cheerfully, “I am pleased to hear it. I do not approve anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.” Humor and humorous as cover terms for things that make us laugh can be traced to medieval physiology, in which the bodily fluids, or humours, were described as yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood. These were thought to be related to people being bilious, melancholy, phlegmatic, or sanguine, respectively. If these bodily fluids were out of balance, a person would likely become emotionally unbalanced. Ben Johnson in 1598 published Every Man in His Humor and the following year Every Man Out of His Humor. These two books established the idea that out-of-balance people, those who are eccentrics or who are so obsessed with a particular idea that they make normal people laugh, are humorous characters. From this idea came the meaning of humor that most people think of today, which is anything that makes them laugh in enjoyment because of being surprised by something absurd, ludicrous, or exaggerated. People’s responses to humorous characters can range from pleasant amusement to shock and disgust. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are filled with humorous characters ranging from the energetic Wife of Bath to the pretentious but little educated Nun and from the overly religious and hypocritical Monk to the crude rascal of The Miller and the comically romantic Knight. Humorous characters are also at the heart of the humor in William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Alazons and eirons are stock humorous characters going back to Greek drama. Alazons are overly confident braggarts getting their way by blustering and bullying. At the other extreme, are the eirons, who are sly rogues getting their way through feigned ignorance or dumb luck. Their name comes from the word irony, because they say one thing and mean something else. Other archetypal characters who often cause readers to laugh are tricksters and fools, along with those rulers and destroyers who fall prey to their own vanity. Rustic, backwoods characters provide much of the humor in regional stories, while the slick, streetwise humor of city slickers is the basis for humor set in urban areas. Satirical literature is created by writers who have a clear notion of what is right and what is wrong with the world. Their goal is to portray life in such a way that readers will be shocked into a new way of thinking and will then take steps to correct the current wrongs of the world. Writers of satires can

Literature and humor 

249

be deadly serious, but they often entice readers or listeners to stay with them through using sarcasm, and wit, along with humor that makes people feel wiser than the characters they are reading about. Aesop did this in his Fables and so did Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. Horatian satire is named after Horace, the Roman lyric poet who lived in 65–68 bc and wrote two books of mild and playful satire. Such books as C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, John Nichols’s The Milagro Beanfield War, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm are generally considered to be Horatian satire. Juvenalian satire is named after the writer Decimus Junius Juvenalis, who lived a century later and was brutally frank in his satirical criticism of the vices of Roman leaders. Such books as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and George Orwell’s 1984 are generally considered to be Juvenalian satire. Black humor, and its close relatives of absurdist humor and gallows humor, grew out of satire, but black humorists are not preaching. They are more concerned with tolerating, than with managing, life. A general consensus is that the black humor of the 1960s was created by intellectuals in reaction to the helplessness they felt against the atomic bomb and their frustrations over a society that was becoming so diverse that it was losing its sense of direction. However, they did not originate the genre out of whole cloth. They honed its effects by bouncing readers back and forth between laughter and tears, but certainly there were strands of black humor in some of Mark Twain’s later writings and in folk humor about death. Books from the 1960s that are often cited as examples of how black humor is a testament to the human spirit and its ability to survive and to laugh in the midst of chaos and destruction include Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. While the above kinds of literary humor revolve around plots and characters, readers also find themselves smiling and occasionally laughing over the surprise that comes with clever word play. Some scholars point to word play as proof that not all humor is a result of feelings of superiority and/or hostility, but believers in these theories argue that word play is pleasurable because its creators feel themselves superior to the “rules” of language as used by everyone else. Levels of sophistication in word play range from obvious puns and insults found in children’s folklore to the sly wit found in the writings of Woody Allen, P. G. Wodehouse, S. J. Perelman, and Dorothy Parker. Fantasies are one of the places where writers feel free to create wordplay, with prime examples being Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through

250 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

the Looking Glass. The writers of fantasy also have the freedom to create mad premises, grotesque creatures, absurd situations and purely imagined landscapes. Douglas Adams did all this for his 1980 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which amuses readers not just with its creativity but also with the way Adams satirizes tax laws, religion, bad poets, critics, and Paul McCartney’s wealth. Other examples of fantasies where the humor is tinged with satire include C. Collodi’s Pinocchio, Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and James Thurber’s “Walter Mitty.” Parodies are a form of satire in which a particular genre, author, or work is imitated and mocked. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a parody of both William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, Rosencrantz and Guildensterm are masters of the non-sequitur, philosophical illogical reasoning, and surrealistic reactions. Stoppard makes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern virtually indistinguishable; they even get their own names confused. The role of reviewers and critics The influence of Northrop Frye’s 1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays and Arthur Koestler’s 1964 The Act of Creation is strongly felt by humor scholars even though Frye and Koestler were not focusing specifically on humor. Influential books focusing on humor, although not necessarily restricted to literary humor, include Charles Praeger’s 1978 20th Century Humor, Louis D. Rubin, Jr.’s 1983 The Comic Imagination in American Literature, Neil Schmitz’s 1983 Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature, E. Galligan’s 1984 Comic Vision in Literature, Victor Raskin’s 1985 Semantic Mechanisms of Humor, Lawrence E. Mintz’s 1988 Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics, Lance Olsen’s 1990 Circus of the Mind in Motion: Postmodernism and the Comic Vision, Alleen and Don Nilsen’s 2000 Encyclopedia of 20th-Century American Humor, and James Wood’s 2004 The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. The most common writing activity of literary scholars is to judge and make recommendations about particular pieces of humor. Reviewers take on the task of helping readers choose where they can most profitably spend their reading time. They tell enough about particular books or plays to let readers know whether the topic will be of interest to them; they usually provide small

Literature and humor 

251

samples of the humor found in such books, and finally make a  judgment about the likelihood of readers enjoying the piece. A common assumption is that creative people who themselves are humorous will be the best ones to offer such judgments, hence many publications invite successful authors to serve as book reviewers. Critics do more than recommend what people should read. They make observations and lead readers to better understanding and appreciation. At least this is the implication in the title of the 1990 Oxford Book of Humorous Prose: From William Caxton to P. G. Wodehouse, a Conducted Tour by Frank Muir. Because readers want to be guided by someone whose intellect they admire, the people asked to put together humor anthologies and to write the introductory material are often respected members of literary circles. Russell Baker in the introduction to his 1993 Russell Baker’s Book of American Humor begins his “Introduction” by explaining why Mark Twain would have been rejected by The New Yorker just as James Thurber would have been rejected by the National Lampoon. He then goes on to explain three different cycles of humor that he observed while preparing his anthology and reading “everything funny published in America since Captain John Smith said that people who don’t work don’t deserve to eat.” Other well received anthologies that include critical commentary by the collectors include Stephen Leacock’s 1936 The Greatest Pages of American Humor, Bennett Cerf’s 1954 An Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor, Kenneth Lynn’s 1968 The Comic Tradition in America: An Anthology of American Humor, Mordecai Richler’s 1983 The Best of Modern Humor, Gene Shalit’s 1987 Laughing Matters: A Celebration of American Humor, Roy Blount’s 1994 Book of Southern Humor, and Regina Barreca’s 2002 The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing. Walter Blair, who taught English at the University of Chicago for 35 years, deserves considerable credit for bringing academic respect to collecting and studying humorous literature, especially from a  historical perspective. He was born in 1900 and when he died in 1992, obituary articles credited him with having taught five Pulitzer Prize winners, including Philip Roth, plus Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow. He wrote or edited more than 30 books, anthologies, and textbooks on various aspects of literary humor. With the noted dialectologist, Raven I. McDavid Jr., he edited The Mirth of a Nation: America’s Great Dialect Humor (1983), while with Hamlin Hill, he put together America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury (1978). Others of his books include Native American Humor 1800–1900 (1937), Horse Sense in American Humor From Benjamin Franklin to Ogden Nash (1942), and Davy

252 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

Crocket: Legendary Frontier Hero: His True Life Story and the Fabulous Tall Tales Told About Him (1986). Other examples of historical studies include C. L. Sonnichsen’s 1988 The Laughing West: Humorous Western Fiction, Past and Present, Elizabeth Ammons and Annette White-Parks’s 1994 Tricksterism in Turn-of-the Century American Literature, and Gregg Camfield’s 1997 Necessary Madness: The Humor of Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford University Press, 1997). B. A. Botkin’s 1944 A Treasury of American Folklore, Mody C. Boatright’s 1949 Folk Laughter on the American Frontier, and Carl Withers’s 1948 A Rocket in My Pocket: The Rhymes and Chants of Young Americans are all over fifty years old but still in active circulation. Willard Espy, until his death in 1998, was the best-known collector and commentator on word play. Among his books are An Almanac of Words at Play (1975); The Life and Works of Mr. Anonymous (1977); O Thou Improper, Thou Uncommon Noun (1978); Say It My Way (1980), Another Almanac of Words at Play (1980), and Have a Word on Me (1981). He viewed words as living organisms as shown by the advice he gave humor scholars when he visited Arizona State University in 1982, “If words frighten you, never let them know it....if they respect you, they will like you; there is nothing they will not do for you. For a few people, they will even walk on their hind legs. For an even tinier number, for the Homers and the Miltons and the Shakespeares, they soar up to Heaven and play angel, or even God.” Other well respected books dealing with word play include Stuart Berg Flexner’s 1976 I Hear America Talking: An Illustrated Treasury of American Words and Phrases, John Holmes McDowell’s 1979 Children’s Riddling, John S. Crosbie’s 1980 Dictionary of Riddles, Robert E. Drennan’s 1983 The Algonquin Wits: A Crackling Collection of Bon Mots, Wisecracks, Epigrams, and Gags, Walter Redfern’s 1984 Puns, Jonathan Culler’s 1988 On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, and Don Hauptman’s Cruel and Unusual Puns, 1991. Peter Farb in his 1975 Word Play: What Happens When People Talk uses an expanded meaning of play to include much more than humor. Richard Carlson in his 1975 The Benign Humorists, also explores word play, but as part of mild satire in books by such writers as Beatrix Potter, A. A. Milne, P. G. Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Ian Fleming. He describes their out-of-power characters as careening and bumping “delightfully off each other.” Robert W. Corrigan’s 1981 Comedy: Meaning and Form is a good collection of modern writing about the genre of comedy from such critics as Christopher Fry, W. H. Auden, Susanne Langer, Northrop Frye, Benjamin

Literature and humor 

253

Lehmann, Arthur Koestler, Sigmund Freud, Eric Bentley, Al Capp, and L. C. Knight. The final chapter includes excerpts from four “classics” of comic theory including Molière’s preface to Tartuffe and essays by Charles Baudelaire, George Meredith, and Henri Bergson. Holman and Harmon describe the characteristics of the picaresque novel, and in so doing, allow readers to recognize the similarity in opportunities for humor surrounding picaros, who can be either alazons or eirons (depending on the situation), in such novels as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and John M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. While not all of the following characteristics hold true 100% of the time, they are true enough to lend insights about the possibilities for humor. 1. The first person account tells a part or the whole life of a rogue or picaro. 2. Rogues and picaros are drawn from a lower social level, are of loose character, and if employed, do menial labor and live by their wit and playful language. 3. Picaresque novels are episodic in nature. 4. Picaresque characters do not mature or develop. 5. The story is realistic. The language is plain (vernacular) and is filled with vivid detail. 6. Picaresque characters serve other higher class characters and learn their foibles and frailties; thus providing opportunities to satirize social castes, national types, and/or racial peculiarities. Readers like picaresque characters even though they are just short of being criminal. The line between being a criminal and a petty rascal is a hazy one, but readers are reassured because the rogue or picaro manages to stay just inside lines of legality. William J. Hynes and William G. Doty explore related kinds of characters in their 1993 Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Leonard Feinberg in his 1967 Introduction to Satire, says that people who write satire have a clear vision of what they want society to be. The purpose of their writing is to reform society by illustrating for readers the evils of particular ideas or actions. As science fiction writer Ray Bradbury has explained, “I don’t write to predict the future; I write to prevent it.” Critic Northrup Frye explains that satire requires at least a token fantasy, a content which the reader recognizes as grotesque, and at least an implicit moral standard. In the course

254 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

of developing their imagined utopias or dystopias, writers often use the same kinds of humor that are now considered characteristics of black humor. These include wit, sarcasm, irony, and cynicism. And although satires and black humor are grounded in reality, they have a degree of distortion, most often exaggeration. Feinberg says that what is exaggerated “is the bad, the foolish, the hypocritical,” while “the good, the sensible, the honest” are minimized. Another good book on satire is Mary Ellen Snodgrass’s the Encyclopedia of Satirical Literature, published in 1996 as an ABC-CLIO Literary Companion. She explains in the preface that her goals are to present a timeline of satire, a listing of primary sources, a bibliography of commentary and other references, and a comprehensive index of titles, authors, periods, literary styles and devices, etc. Other good sources on satire include Arthur Pollard’s 1970 Satire, Frederick Kiley and J. M. Shuttleworth’s 1971 Satire: From Aesop to Buchwald, John W. Tilton’s 1977 Cosmic Satire in the Contemporary Novel, and M. D. Fletcher’s 1987 Contemporary Political Satire: Narrative Strategies in the Post-Modern Context. In 1965, Bruce J. Friedman edited a book entitled Black Humor, which contained literary samples from his own writing as well as that of Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, J. P. Donleavy, Vladimir Nabokov, Edward Albee, Terry Southern, and James Purdy. Friedman said that while the authors whose works he included each has a private and unique vision, they all: –– Continue the strong tradition of storytelling in America. –– Play with the fading line between fantasy and reality. –– Have a nervousness, an upbeat tempo, a near hysteria or frenzy. He added that this same frenzy was also happening in music, talk, films, and theater. Matthew Winston described black humor as a tone rather than a genre, while Sanford Pinsker said that it provides an angle of vision for some authors and a comic technique for others. Related books include Charles B. Harris’s 1971 Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd; Max F. Schulz’s 1973 Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties; David Galloway’s 1981 The Absurd Hero in American Fiction: Updike, Styron, Bellow, Salinger; Alan R. Pratt’s 1993 Black Humor: Critical Essays; and Ronald Wallace’s No Harm in Smiling: Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” and The Last Laugh: Form and Affirmation in the Contemporary American Comic Novel, both published in 1979. Scholarly work on parodies is often done in connection with anthologies as in Robert Falk’s 1955 American Literature in Parody: A  Collection of Parody, Satire, and Literary Burlesque of American Writers Past and Present,

Literature and humor 

255

Dwight MacDonald’s 1960 Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm – And After, and Robert Wechsler’s 1993 Columbus à la Mode: Parodies of Contemporary American Writers. Works focusing more directly on theory and criticism include Linda Hutcheon’s 1985 A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms and Gao Yan’s 1996 The Art of Parody: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Use of Chinese Sources. Occasionally, books will be put together by scholars who think that a particular author is not receiving his or her fair share of attention. Examples include Tim Page’s 1994 Dawn Powell at Her Best and Maxwell Geismar’s 1972 Ring Lardner and the Portrait of Folly, but for the most part books are written about authors in the public eye. For example, both Carol Shloss and Ruthann Knechel Johansen have written books on the work of Flannery O’Connor, while Peter Scholl, Michael Fedo, and Judith Yaross Lee have each written books on Garrison Keillor’s storytelling. Theodore Khapertian and Thomas Schaub have written books on Thomas Pynchon; Fred C. Kelly, A. L. Lazarus, and Jean Shepherd have treated the works of George Ade, while Graham Flashner, Maurice Yacowar, and Annette Wernblad have each done books on Woody Allen. Thomas Pughe compared the works of Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, and Philip Roth, while Elaine Safer has compared the novels of John Barth, William Gaddis, Ken Kesey, and Thomas Pynchon. In her most recent book, Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth, Elaine Safer shows how Roth combines Jewish American humor with postmodern experimentation in his 2001 The Dying Animal, his 2000 The Human Stain, his 1998 I Married a Communist, and his 1997 American Pastoral. She discusses his playful use of details from his own life and ethnic background and how he complains about being accused of writing fiction when he is writing autobiography and of writing autobiography when he is, in fact, writing fiction. Roth has enraged Jewish readers with his hyperbolic portrayals of such offensive traits as materialism, sexual preoccupation, vitriolic quarreling, and scandalous philandering, but at the same time the Jewish Book Council of America presented him with the Daroff Award. Safer argues that this dual view of Roth by his own people is “an example of comic irony involving a novelist who can be seen as a combination of Kafka and Woody Allen.” A different kind of writing about humor consists of bibliographic work in which editors bring together and organize the work and the criticism of many other scholars. As with books already mentioned, the focus might be on a single author as with Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie’s 1976 Faulkner and Humor, Jerome Klinkowitz and Donald Lawler’s 1977 Vonnegut in

256 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

America, Louis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady’s 1987 On Mark Twain: The Best from American Literature, Sarah Eleanora Toombs’s 1987 James Thurber: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, Barbara Schaaf’s 1988 Mr. Dooley: Finley Peter Dunne, Steven H. Gale’s 1990 Critical Essays on Harold Pinter, J. R. LeMaster and James D. Wilson’s 1993 The Mark Twain Encyclopedia, and Gordon E. Ernst’s 1995 Robert Benchley: An Annotated Bibliography. One such book, Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald 1973 A Catch-22 Casebook focuses on a single book. But because relatively few authors and even fewer books have had enough research done on them to fill a book, such research guides more commonly focus on particular genres or time periods. The purpose of these books is to allow scholars to go to a single source to find out how much scholarly work has been done and where they can go to find the primary sources if they need more than the summaries or excerpts provided by the commentators. Good examples of such books include M. Thomas Inge’s 1975 The Frontier Humorists: Critical Views, his 1988 Handbook of American Popular Literature, and his 1994 Perspectives on American Culture: Essays on Humor, Literature, and the Popular Arts. One of the most useful reference sources is American Humorists, 1800–1950, edited by Stanley Trachtenberg. It is a two-volume set published in 1982 as Volume 11 in Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography series. Each of the nearly 100 entries is several pages in length and is usually illustrated by photos and/or drawings. Several of the authors who wrote the essays regularly contribute articles to humor-related journals. Besides Trachtenberg, they include St. George Tucker Arnold, Jr.; Pascal Covici, Jr.; Jane Curry; Zita Dresner; Terry Heller; Mark A. Keller; James C. McNutt; Sanford Pinsker; Richard Alan Schwartz; Clyde Wade, and many others. One of the contributors was Steven H. Gale, who later served as General Editor of the Garland Studies in Humor series and went on to edit the 1988 Encyclopedia of American Humorists and Volumes 1 and 2 of the 1996 Encyclopedia of British Humor: Geoffrey Chaucer to John Cleese. Gale described his task in the latter book as first deciding on which authors should be included as subjects, then finding good scholar/writers to prepare the entries, editing each essay for grammatical and factual details, and writing the introductory material. The completed book is 1,307 pages long and includes articles on 196 humorists written by 118 scholars from seven countries. He – and his family – remember the month of headaches when he had over 3,000 3x5 index cards spread over the living room floor while he noted and checked each page number. When Don Nilsen put together his 1992 ­research

Literature and humor 

257

guide, Humor in American Literature: A Selected Annotated Bibliography, followed by similar books on Irish and British literature, his biggest headaches came from trying to get permission for quoting more than 300 words from critics. To his surprise, charges were usually higher for books that were out of print and for the words of deceased critics whose literary rights were owned by descendants. Today computers and the internet make bibliographic research easier, but at the same time, scholars and publishers are discouraged from devoting their efforts to such projects because interested people can usually find some information, although it may not be reliable, on virtually any published author. Humor from different perspectives There is no end to the different kinds of humor that scholars decide to analyze and to the approaches they devise. One of the most recent books is the 2008 Laughing Matters: Humor and American Politics in the Media Age edited by Jody C. Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris. One section is devoted to humor beyond television. In 2005, Walter Hogan came out with a book Humor in Young Adult Literature: A Time to Laugh. Two years later, Don and Alleen Nilsen published a related book on Names and Naming in Young Adult Literature, which includes chapters showing how such authors as J. K. Rowling, Gary Paulsen, M. E. Kerr, and Daniel Handler (author of the Lemony Snicket books) use naming as a technique to bring smiles to young readers. Many literary scholars use humor as a zeitgeist, something to measure the “spirit of the times” either by or about specific groups. Although these scholars usually look at the whole spectrum of the popular culture, humorous literature is included, especially in historical studies, because literature is what has been written down and is therefore what can be found for study. Constance Rourke’s 1931 American Humor: A Study of the National Character and William Keough’s 1966 Punchlines: The Violence of American Humor are fairly early examples. While collectors may publish the humor they find mostly for the fun of it, they also add commentary as did Leo Rosten in his 1968 The Joys of Yiddish, Henry D. Spaulding in his 1969 Encyclopedia of Jewish Humor: From Biblical Times to the Modern Age and his 1985 Joys of Jewish Humor, and William Novak and Moshe Waldoks in their 1981 The Big Book of Jewish Humor and their 1990 The Big Book of New American Humor: The Best of the Past 25 Years. The emphasis in Sarah Blacher Cohen’s 1987 Jewish Wry: Essays

258 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

on Jewish Humor and Avner Ziv’s 1986 edited collection, Jewish Humor is on exploring and analyzeing the creation and uses of Jewish humor. In his 1988 The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. makes a  contribution to the study of humor by showing that when they were slaves African Americans were denied the use of normal and private communication. This forced them to develop double-entendre Trickster signifiers. Speakers would say something that meant one thing to whites and another to blacks. The humor comes from the realization that simultaneous messages are being communicated and that the authority figures (usually whites) understand only one message while the other participants comprehend both. Mel Watkins’s 1994 On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying extends the concept to the popular culture, including literature. Donna A. S. Harper looks from a  new perspective at some of the writings of Langston Hughes in her 1995 Not So Simple: The “Simple” Stories by Langston Hughes. As time goes on there will probably be increased attention given to Hispanic humor as shown by the formation in the late 1990s of an organization devoted to the study of Hispanic humor. In 1999, Paul W. Seaver, Jr. edited Selected Proceedings of the First International Conference on Hispanic Humor, which included seventeen lively articles, whose topics ranged from subjects as old as Juan Luis Vives’s 1528 De Anima and Vita and as new as the latest works of Isabel Allende. Scholars have also been looking through new lenses at Native American literature and culture. Vine Deloria, Jr. took the first part of his 1988 title Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto from a bumper sticker designed to tease missionaries on the Sioux reservation. One of Deloria’s observations that has been cited as a pan-Indian joke (many are meaningful only to tribal or family members) is that when the first missionaries came they had only the Bible while the Indians had all the land; now “they” have all the land and Indians have only the Bible. Deloria campaigns against the stereotype of the stoic Indian, a caricature that he says has made it difficult for whites to understand how humor permeates virtually every area of Native American life. Very little, he says, is accomplished in Indian national affairs without humor. Other books asking people to take a closer look at Native American humor include Kenneth Lincoln’s 1993 Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America, Andrew Wiget’s 1994 Dictionary of Native American Literature, Frank B. Linderman’s Indian Why Stories: Sparks from War Eagle’s LodgeFire and Indian Old-Man Stories: More Sparks from War Eagle’s Lodge-Fire,

Literature and humor 

259

both published in 1996. Scott B. Vickers published Native American Identities: From Stereotype to Archetype in Art and Literature in 1998. The stereotype that has been attacked with the most vigor is the old idea that women have no sense of humor. Regina Barreca has spent the last twenty years arguing against the idea that the creation and enjoyment of humor are masculine privileges. “Women’s lives have always been filled with humor,” she says. It emerged “as a tool for survival in the social and professional jungles” and works as a “weapon against the absurdities of injustice.” She goes on to say that “Women did not suddenly get funny in the 1990s any more than women suddenly got ambitious in the 1970s or sexually aware in the 1960s or intelligent in the 1980s.” She cites the perfectly aimed irony that Jane Austen used to make fun of what was viewed as congenital ignorance and adds to it Erma Bombeck’s assertion, “A lot of people think I write humor . . . As an observer of the human condition all I do is question it. I rarely find it funny.” Bombeck’s statement fits with what Pulitzer-prize winner Wendy Wasserstein said, “When I speak up, it’s not because I have any particular answers; rather, I have a desire to puncture the pretentiousness of those who seem so certain they do.” Besides Barreca’s books listed at the end of the chapter, several other writers have explored questions about gender and humor. Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner in 1988 wrote a landmark book Redressing the Balance: American Women’s Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s. Walker has also written The Tradition of Women’s Humor in America (1984), A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture (1988), Feminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary Novel by Women (1990), The Disobedient Writer: Women and Narrative Tradition (1995, and What’s So Funny? Humor in American Culture (1998). Marilyn Jurich wrote Scheherazade’s Sisters: Trickster Heroines and Their Stories in World Literature (1998), Gail Finney edited Look Who’s Laughing: Gender and Comedy (1994), and Barbara Bennett wrote Comic Visions, Female Voices: Contemporary Women Novelists and Southern Humor (1998). In her 2006 Wrangling Women: Humor and Gender in the American West, Kristin M. McAndrews illustrates how contemporary women working not only with cattle and horses, but also with “dude-ranch” tourists, are creating their own kinds of western “tall tales.” Paul H. Grawe and his wife, Robin Jaeckle Grawe, have devised a Humor Quotient Test (the HQT) in an attempt to measure what George Meredith called “Humor of the Mind.” Meredith suggests at least three humor structures: Gotcha humor, in which someone thinks he or she is talented but when

260 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

acting on the talent “is got”; Word Play, in which words or groups of words clash with each other’ and Incongruity, in which a  word, idea, concept or thing clashes with another idea, concept, or thing. To these three characteristics, the Grawes added Sympathetic Pain, which consists of laughing with someone’s pain rather than at the person. They are looking for correlations between the kinds of literary humor that individuals respond to and such archetypal personalities as Crusader, Advocate, Bridge-builder, Consoler, Reconciler, and Intellectual. D. G. Kehl has analyzed the humor written by many different American authors, but his most unusual study, “Varieties of Risible Experience: Grades of Laughter and Their Function in Modern American Literature,” was inspired by a comment from James Thurber who noticed that in literature there are a dozen different kinds of laughter “from the inner and inaudible to the guffaw,” but that no one had done a careful and extensive analysis of all the varieties. In starting his research, Kehl found a statement from writer James Agee who in relation to the language of screen comedians concluded “four of the main grades of laughter are the titter, the yowl, the belly laugh, and the boffo.” Kehl found examples in modern American literature of eighteen different grades of laughter, which he organized into six categories ranging from the incipient or “inner and inaudible” laugh (the simper and smirk) to the loud and unrestrained howl, yowl, shriek, and Olympian laugh. He discussed the origins of each example, drew distinctions, considered each in terms of tenor and intensity, and illustrated their significance. His study demonstrates an interesting crossover between literature and real-life because in a way it is measuring the care and the skill with which authors observe and record people’s actions. He was doing from a  literary standpoint what Robert R. Provine was doing with real people for his 2000 book Laugher: A Scientific Investigation. Daniel Royot, a  French scholar of American literature, sums up what he calls his “home-made” humor theory by explaining that comedians don masks and borrow voices, and it is the interplay of such conflicting masks and voices that results in open or subtle incongruities. With only masks, the effect would be simply parodic, grotesque humor as is unfortunately too much of Jerry Lewis’s stuff and that of other “phunny phellows.” On the other hand, if they use just voices without the masks, the result is merely satirical. He says that humorists relying on the innocent pose sometimes make little use of the comic mask. For example, compare the minimal visual indications of Woody Allen as opposed to Mel Brooks. Linguists have a similar interpretation with the signifier and the signified. Since in terms of humor analysis, Royot is

Literature and humor 

261

more interested in effects than in psychogenesis, he holds that a familiarity with masks and voices is a major factor in the appreciation of humorous discourse. Issues and challenges in the analysis of humor Practically any theory of humor can be tested and/or illustrated through literature. In this way the wealth of the world’s literature is a positive, but it is also a complication because it works against the development of what humor scholars wistfully refer to as “a unified theory.” D. G. Kehl uses a comment by Peter De Vries’s Joe Sandwich character from The Vale of Laughter to explain the problem, “No single theory has yet managed to explain all varieties of mirth. Nine tenths of what we laugh at answers to Bergson, another nine tenths to Freud, still another to Kant or Plato, and so on, leaving always that elusive tenth that makes each definition like a woman trying to pack more into a girdle than it will legitimately hold.” Another issue that humor scholars constantly face is the idea that tragedy or “serious” things are harder to study, or, at the least, are more important than is humor. This makes it hard to obtain funding for humor-related research and also to have humor research taken seriously by academic colleagues. Wherever humor scholars gather, there are jokes about everyone having tenure because only tenured faculty members dare to study something as frivolous as humor. Humorous poetry especially suffers from elitist values as shown by those who reserve the term poet for “serious” writers. Contradicting this attitude is Ronald Wallace’s 1984 God Be With the Clown: Humor in American Poetry, but even his title reflects a defense of the genre. The same kinds of critics who think Shakespeare’s tragedies deserve more attention than his comedies, refer to the works of such skilled poets as Ogden Nash and Richard Armour as light verse and to the work of less talented poets as doggerel. Both verse and doggerel can be written with either serious or humorous intentions, and with doggerel what a writer intends as serious may be interpreted as humorous. Julia Moore’s “death” poetry of the mid-1800s is an example. She wrote dedicatory poems to be read at funerals. In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain modeled his “Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d” on her work. According to Bradley Hayden, a Michigan scholar who has studied Julia Moore and her poetry, Twain described her as having a rare “organic talent” for humor. She could make “an intentionally humorous episode pathetic

262 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

and an intentionally pathetic one funny.” Because of the intensity of poetry, it makes a good target for parody. Parodists usually keep enough of the original rhyme scheme and the rhythm to be recognizable, but then they change the semantics so that the meaning clashes humorously with the original, which readers already have in their minds. In another example, Jessica Milner Davis points out that drama has its own hierarchy of comedy and that “farce, or knockabout, physical comedy, has always been at the bottom,” and as such has been “a neglected area of comment and critical attention.” Although it is getting a little easier now that oral traditions are receiving acceptance as part of the humanities, when in the 1970s she set out to study European farce, she found it difficult to obtain scripts and performance histories. This was true even for periods in which history shows farce flourishing both in theaters and in the work of traveling troupes. Related to the general suspicion of humor studies as a “serious” academic endeavor is a shortage of publication opportunities. In an attempt to help out the matter, the American Humor Studies Association was founded in 1975 and according to its long-time executive secretary, David E. E. Sloane, is dedicated to the study of American humor in all its forms, including books, comics, movies, popular culture, and “higher” forms of literature and graphic arts. The group sponsors an annual journal, Studies in American Humor, which publishes articles on subjects ranging from Will Rogers to Southwestern humor in the nineteenth century, and from colonial humor to the humor of immigrants and native Indian trickster stories, and from the films of Woody Allen to the writings of Mark Twain and other regional and genre writers. Meetings are held in conjunction with the Modern Language Association and the American Literature Association conferences, where the group sponsors special sessions. It also produces a semi-annual newsletter To Wit, which provides members and others with information about new publications, upcoming events, and on-going subjects of historical study. Since 1988, Humor: International Journal of Humor Research has appeared four times a  year. It is sponsored by the International Society for Humor Studies, which also sponsors annual conferences alternating between North America and foreign countries. At least one-third of the conference presentations as well as journal articles relate to literature. As interest in the formal study of humor has increased, so has the interest of scholarly publishers. Wayne State University Press in Detroit has a Humor in Life and Letters series under the editorship of Sarah Blacher Cohen. Among the dozen books currently in print are such literature studies as David M. Craig’s 1997 Tilting at Mortality: Narrative Strategies in Joseph Heller’s

Literature and humor 

263

Fiction, Morton Gurewitch’s 1994 The Ironic Temper and the Comic Imagination, and Cohen’s 1992 Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature. Gordon and Breach Publishers have a Studies in Humor and Gender series edited by Regina Barreca and Nancy Walker, which includes books on both literature and popular culture, for example, Barbara Levy’s 1997 Ladies Laughing: Wit as Control in Contemporary American Women Writers. University presses regularly publish humor-related titles. Many of the books published as part of the Studies in Popular Culture series for the University of Mississippi Press relate to humor. Gregg Camfield’s 1994 Sentimental Twain, Samuel Clemens in the Maze of Moral Philosophy was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, while Steven Weisenberger’s 1995 Fables of Subversion/Satire and the American Novel 1930–1980 was published by the University of Georgia Press, and Neil Grauer’s 1995 Remember Laughter, A Life of James Thurber was published by the University of Nebraska Press. In the study of humor there are obvious carryovers from controversies that are in the public eye, including the matter of censorship. For example, scholars who study scatological or pornographic writing, hate jokes, and to a lesser extent, any ethnic or gender-based humor must constantly remind critics that they are collecting and studying such humor rather than creating and disseminating it. While taxpayers grow nervous when they find professors talking about controversial writings in class, David E. E. Sloane has shown how censorship also works to encourage serious scholarship. He teaches at the University of New Haven and in 1995 when the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was banned from a New Haven classroom, he worked with the Mark Twain House in nearby Hartford to mount a summer teacher institute on the theme of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Race.” While the summer’s debate centered around Huck Finn, questions of caricature, parody, ethnocentrism, and reader-response all figured in the discussion of such writers as George Ade and Langston Hughes, American cartoon art, minstrel traditions, and stage caricatures. Discussions were not limited to race, but included studying Jewish, Irish, and various other immigrant groups of the 1800 and 1900s. Following the colloquium, Sloane compiled a set of classroom-oriented materials laying down a trail of Twain’s use of language and ideas related to his intent. One result is a 2001 Student Companion to Mark Twain, plus a 2002 CD-ROM produced as part of the Buffalo and Erie Country Library Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is Sloane’s opinion that genuine debate is likely to continue as shown by Jocelyn Chadwick’s The Jim Dilemma and Jonathan Arac’s Huck Finn as Idol and Target,” as well as Harry Wonham’s article

264 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

“‘I  Want a  Real Coon’: Mark Twain and Late-Nineteenth-Century Ethnic Caricature.” This latter piece is about Twain’s working in the highly ambiguous realm between the minstrel show and “coon caricature” in the 1870–1910 period. Sloane says that when we look at such historical documents as “coon songs” and at George Augustas Sala’s 1883 America Revisited, and the writings of Petroleum V. Nasby and others, “the question of what comic portraiture actually means becomes murkier, not clearer.” He thus predicts that many Twain specialists and American humor scholars will continue to devote significant attention to ethnic and racial humor and caricature. In her studies of farce, Jessica Milner Davis has looked at censorship from a different perspective. She says that “whether it be English, medieval Dutch, Spanish, French, Viennese, Russian, improvised commedia dell’arte, or even Japanese kyògen of the classical nò theatre,” farce is “both the most violent and physically shocking of dramatic forms of comedy,” and so she set out to see why it is not censored. She found that at the same time that it is the most violent, it is also the most innocent in that unlike satire or burlesque it does not offend either individuals or society. “Equally paradoxically, it is not particularly fantastic or unrealistic: indeed in terms of acting-style, actors assert that the truthfulness-to-life of their character is absolutely essential for the release of laughter by the audience.” But the violence is highly stylized with “precision of timing and intonation notoriously difficult to achieve.” She named a handful of archetypal patterns, which she says answer the question of how farce “gets away” with its outrages, without invoking either censorship or constraint. The historical cases in which a  so-called farce actually provoked formal censorship were helpful in defining the boundaries of the genre. The need for interdisciplinary scholarship Davis’s research convinced her that the psychological aspects of violence as entertainment need to be annexed to the literary and that the greatest insights into the nature and operations of humor are likely to be produced by combining insights from her own traditional academic discipline of drama with the methods of research and the insights gained from other “seemingly unrelated areas and their methodologies.” This is similar to what Paul Lewis found when he wrote his 1989 Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature. In his dissertation written in the mid 1970s, he studied the role of mystery in gothic nar-

Literature and humor 

265

ratives, stories in which characters are forced to deal with mind-boggling events. Although at the time such critics of the fantastic as Tzvetan Todorov and Eric S. Rabkin were insisting that the response to mystery is necessarily characterized by a 180° shift away from normalcy (Rabkin) or intellectual hesitation (Todorov), Lewis was struck by the range of possible responses including puzzlement, fear, and humor and by the relation between these responses and gothic sub-genres including didactic gothic, speculative or ambiguous gothic, and mock-gothic. He found himself arguing that “the eruption of fearful mysteries in a narrative is an essential generic element of the gothic,” and that the treatment of mystery must determine the kind of gothic story being told. He began by reading social science humor research and the theoretical studies by Freud, Bergson, and Koestler. Particularly useful was psychologist Mary K. Rothbart’s study of how children cope with sudden or discrepant stimulation. He also found that sociological studies of humor used within and between groups could illuminate people’s understanding of comedy, while studies of humor and child development would provide theoretical models for reading stories about young people growing up. After reading Seymour and Rhoda L. Fisher’s Pretend the World Is Funny and Forever: A Psychological Analysis of Comedians, Clowns, and Actors, he looked at Edgar Allan Poe in a new way and explored connections between humor and fear as responses to the incongruous that resonate throughout Poe’s horror fiction. Then in the early 1990s, following the rise of New Historicism, he began to think more about the cultural significance of joke clusters and cycles as related to popular killing jokes of the 1980s featuring Freddy Krueger, Joe Camel, Ronald Reagan, Blanche Knott, and The Joker. In hindsight, he says that with his “emphasis on the importance of humor research in psychology and sociology, my first forays into humor criticism paid too little attention to historical context.” Steven H. Gale tells how he had to cross disciplines when he prepared his 1987 S. J. Perelman: A Critical Study. He started with the typical literary approach of doing a word-by-word explication de texte to explain how Perelman achieved humor in his short stories. But when he came to the screenwriting, he had to abandon this approach. Perleman scripted the third and the fourth Marx Brothers films (Monkey Business and Horse Feathers) and also Around the World in Eighty Days, for which he won the New York Film Critics Award and an Oscar. In addition to doing historical research on Hollywood, the Marx Brothers, Jules Verne, and screenwriting, Gale did a frame-by-frame analysis of the films. He found that, “Timing is extremely important in humor, yet

266 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

in film there are often no words between which pauses can be used to elicit laughter a la Jack Benny. Thus, I had to look at a combination of dialogue, timing, sound, and especially the employment of visuals as illustrated by the unexpected, climactic action of Cantinflas as Passepartout.” The best part is when “He leans down from the hot air balloon and scoops a goblet-full of snow from the mountain top that he and his master Phineas Fogg have barely cleared.” Only through studying each shot individually, did Gale discover that Passepartout calmly uses the snow to cool the champagne. For Gale this crossing over into film criticism was a positive because it led to new insights and new things to watch for in written work. But crossing boundaries doesn’t always have such positive effects. Humor scholars are almost forced to have two fields because most have their own academic area to which they add the study of humor. Then when they extend themselves further to a third or fourth academic area they sometimes make naive assumptions, which adds to suspicions their colleagues may already have about a lack of rigor in humor studies. Among the questions that arise from these suspicions include asking whether professors of literature should get as much credit for presenting papers at meetings of the Popular Culture Association as at the Modern Language Association. Another is whether the kind of pop culture writings which Susan Sontag includes in her essay “Notes on Camp” should be considered literature? Are comic books “literature”? How about television sit coms? And how about the “little stories” that are told in commercials and the “big stories” that are told in extended video games. A new interdisciplinary book that Paul Grawe recommends is V. Ulea’s A Concept of Dramatic Genre and the Comedy of A New Type: Chess, Literature and the Film. As the study of literary humor continues, the most interesting results are probably going to come from scholars who are crossing boundaries both in the approaches they take and in the material they look at. A note on chapter contributors Regina Barreca is professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Ever since she surprised her dissertation committee by studying the humor of such writers as Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austin, she has focused critical attention on the creation and use of humor by women. Her books and articles appeal both to general and academic audiences. Her most popular book is They Used to Call Me Snow White. . . But I Drifted (Penguin, 1992), while her most scholarly is Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy (Gordon

Literature and humor 

267

and Breach, 1988). More recent books include “Don’t Tell Mama!” The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing (Penguin 2002) and A Sit Down with the Sopranos: Watching Italian American Culture on TV’s Most Talked-about Series (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Contact her through the English Department at the University of Connecticut. Jessica Milner Davis co-ordinates the Australasian Humour Scholars Network from the University of Sydney as Honorary Associate in its Faculty of Arts. Her latest book, Understanding Humor in Japan, won the 2008 AATH book-prize for humor research. She has twice been President of the International Society for Humor Studies (1996 and 2003) and is Associate Book Review Editor for Humor: International Journal of Humor Research. Contact her at [email protected]. Steven H. Gale holds a University Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Kentucky State University. Besides the books listed in the end-of-chapter bibliography, he has published articles on humor in the writings of Francis Beaumont, Miguel de Cervantes, John Gay, Simon Gray, Joel Chandler Harris, Ronald Harwood, Henry Livings, David Marmet, H. L. Mencken, Harold Pinter, Stephen Potter, Harry Secombe, H. Allen Smith, Peter Simple, and James Thurber. He has also worked with humor in film and in African folk tales, and was interviewed about S. J. Perelman for the PBS Think Tank program. He was the general editor of the Garland Studies in Humor series, and his 2003 Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter’s Screenplays and the Artistic Process was chosen as a 2003 Choice magazine “Outstanding Academic Title.” Contact him at [email protected] Paul H. Grawe is Professor emeritus of English at Winona State University in Minnesota. At Northwestern University, where he worked with Moody Prior and Gerald Graff, he wrote a dissertation defining sombre comedy as a specific sub-genre within comedy. In 1983, he published a general theory of comedy, Comedy in Space, Time, and the Imagination. In a forthcoming book with Robin Jaeckle Grawe, Paul and Robin draw on 17 years of empirical research to explore the humor textures of American film comedy. Contact him at [email protected]. D. G. Kehl is Professor Emeritus of English at Arizona State University, where he taught American Literature and worked with graduate students who wrote theses and dissertations on various aspects of literary humor.  In addition to the articles listed in the chapter bibliography, he has written “Thalia Meets Tithonus: Gerontological Wit and Humor in Literature” (The Gerontologist, Fall, 1985: 539–544), “All Gall Is Divided into Three Parts: American Literary Humor of Francophilophobia” (Thalia: Studies in American

268 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

Humor, Summer, 2000: 67–79), and “Humor in the Novels of Gish Jen:  From Confliction to Connection,” MELUS:  Journal of the Society of the MultiEthnic Literature of the U.S. (forthcoming). Topics he is currently working on include the ethics of humor, clerical humor in modern American novels, academic humor in modern fiction, and the dry humor of his home state of Arizona. Contact him at [email protected]. Paul Lewis, professor of English at Boston College, is the author of two books – Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature (S.U.N.Y. Press, 1989) and Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict (University of Chicago Press, 2006) – and of articles on gallows humor, Woody Allen, gothic fiction and American literature and culture: 1790–1860. A member of the editorial board of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and a columnist for Tikkun magazine, he has published op-ed and humor essays in such places as the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Globe and Mail, and Crazy Magazine. He is currently working on a  third book, tentatively titled Laughing Dangerously: Tact and Humor in America Today. Contact him at lewisp@ bc.edu. Don and Alleen Nilsen are professors of English at Arizona State University where Don works with students in linguistics and Alleen works with high school English teachers and librarians. They are founding members of the International Society of Humor Studies, and from 1987 through 2004 Don served as ISHS Executive Secretary. Their Encyclopedia of 20th-­Century American Humor was chosen by the American Library Association as one of the twenty best academic books of 2000. Contact them at Don.Nilsen@asu. edu and [email protected]. Daniel Royot is Professor Emeritus of American Literature and Civilization at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. His co-authored book Histoire et Civilization des Etats-Unis was published in six editions, while his Anthologie de la Littérature Américaine is in its third edition. He has been president of France’s American Humor Studies Association, and in addition to scholarly books and articles, writes and speaks about American humor in the French popular press where he makes use of Art Buchwald’s comment, “Why should the French like Americans, they already hate each other.” An extensive article on “Poe’s Humor,” was published in 2002 in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe edited by Kevin J. Hayes. Contact him at [email protected]. Elaine Safer is a professor of English at the University of Delaware. Her recent book, Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth, was published

Literature and humor 

269

by SUNY Press 2006. She also is known for The Contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis and Kesey, Wayne State University Press, 1988. She has published papers on such Jewish American writers as Jonathan Safran Foer, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow and on the comedic elements in the postmodern American works of writers including John Hawkes, Joseph Heller, William H. Gass, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon. She is currently writing The Comic Imagination in Recent Jewish American Fiction. Contact her at [email protected]. David E. E. Sloane is professor of English and education at the University of New Haven, where he has taught since 1976. In 1987, Greenwood Press published his American Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals as part of its Historical Guides to the World’s Periodicals and Newspapers. Several more recent books are listed at the end of the chapter. He was the Executive Director of the American Humor Studies Association from 1989 to 2002. Contact him at [email protected]. Critical works cited Ammons, Elizabeth, and Annette White-Park 1994 Tricksterism in Turn-of-the Century American Literature. Hanover, NH: Tufts University Press of New England. Baker, Russell 1993 Russell Baker’s Book of American Humor. New York: W. W. Norton. Barreca, Regina 1991 They Used to Call Me Snow White, But I  Drifted. New York: ­Viking. 1993 Perfect Husbands: And Other Fairy Tales. New York: Harmony Books. 1994 Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor in British Literature. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. 1996 The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor. New York: Penguin. Barreca, Regina (ed.) 1988 Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy. New York: Gordon and Breach. 1992 New Perspectives on Women and Comedy. Philadelphia, PA: Gordon and Breach. Baumgartner, Jody C., and Jonathan S. Morris (eds.) 2008 Laughing Matters: Humor and American Politics in the Media Age. New York: Routledge.

270 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

Bennett, Barbara 1998 Comic Visions, Female Voices: Contemporary Women Novelists and Southern Humor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Bier, Jesse 1968 The Rise and Fall of American Humor. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Blair, Walter 1937 Native American Humor 1800–1900. New York: American Book Company. 1942 Horse Sense in American Humor from Benjamin Franklin to Ogden Nash. New York: Russell and Russell. 1986 Davy Crocket: Legendary Frontier Hero: His True Life Story and the Fabulous Tall Tales Told About Him. Springfield, IL: LincolnHerndon Press. Blair, Walter, with Hamlin Hill 1978 America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury. New York: Oxford University Press. Blair, Walter, with Raven McDavid Jr. 1983 The Mirth of a  Nation: America’s Great Dialect Humor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Blount, Roy (ed.) 1994 Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor. New York: W. W. Norton. Boatright, Mody C. 1949 Folk Laughter on the American Frontier. New York: Macmillan. Botkin, B. A. 1944 A Treasury of American Folklore. New York: Crown Publishers. Budd, Louis J., and Edwin H. Cady (eds.) 1992 On Humor: The Best from American Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Camfield, Gregg 1997 Necessary Madness: The Humor of Domesticity in Nineteenth­century American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. 1994 Sentimental Twain, Samuel Clemens in the Maze of Moral Philosophy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Carlson, Richard S. 1975 The Benign Humorists. New York: Archon. Cerf, Bennet (ed.) 1954 An Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Chadwick-Joshua, Jocelyn 1998 The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Literature and humor 

271

Charney, Maurice (ed.) 2005 Comedy: A Geographic and Historical Guide, Vols. 1 and 2. Westport, CT: Praeger. Cohen, Sarah Blacher 1978 Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 1987 Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish Humor. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Corrigan, Robert W. (ed.) 1965 Comedy: Meaning and Form. San Francisco, CA: Chandler Publishing. Craig, David M. 1997 Tilting at Morality: Narrative Strategies in Joseph Heller’s Fiction. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Crosbie, John S. 1980 Dictionary of Riddles. New York: Harmony Books. Culler, Jonathan (ed.) 1988 On Puns: The Foundation of Letters. New York: Blackwell. Davis, Jessica Milner 1978 Farce. London: Methuen. (Repr. with new introduction 2005, New Brunswick/London: Transaction Publishers.) 2001 Farce: Rebellion, Revenge and Realpolitik. Piscataway, NJ: Trans­ action Books. Davis, Jessica Milner, with Marguerite Wells 2001 Kyògen as comic relief: The structure, style and comic typology of classical Kyògen plays from the Isumi and Òkura Schools. Australian Journal of Comedy 7 (1). Deloria, Vine, Jr. 1988 Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Drennan, Robert E. (ed.) 1983 The Algonquin Wits: A  Crackling Collection of Bon Mots, Wise­ cracks, Epigrams, and Gags. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press. Ernst, Gordon E. Jr. (ed.) 1995 Robert Benchley: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Espy, Willard 1975 An Almanac of Words at Play. New York: Potter. 1980 Another Almanac of Words at Play. New York: Potter. 1981 Have a Word on Me. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1977 The Life and Works of Mr. Anonymous. New York: Hawthorne. 1978 O Thou Improper, Thou Uncommon Noun. New York: Potter. 1980 Say It My Way. New York: Doubleday.

272 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

Falk, Robert 1955 Farb, Peter 1973

American Literature in Parody: A Collection of Parody, Satire, and Literary Burlesque of American Writers Past and Present. New York: Twayne. Word Play: What Happens When People Talk. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Fedo, Michael 1987 The Man from Lake Wobegon. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Feinberg, Leonard 1967 Introduction to Satire. Ames: The Iowa State University Press. 2nd ed. 2008, Santa Fe, NM: Pilgrims Process. 1964 The Satirist. Ames: The Iowa State University Press. Finney, Fail (ed.) 1994 Look Who’s Laughing: Gender and Comedy. Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach. Fisher, Seymour, and Rhoda L. Fisher 1981 Pretend the World Is Funny and Forever: A Psychological Analysis of Comedians, Clowns, and Actors. Lawrence Erlbaum. Flashner, Graham 1987 Fun with Woody: The Complete Woody Allen Quiz Book. New York: Holt. Fletcher, M. D. 1987 Contemporary Political Satire: Narrative Strategies in the PostModern Context. New York: University Press of America. Flexner, Stuart Berg 1976 I Hear America Talking: An Illustrated Treasure of American Words and Phrases. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Fowler, Dorreen, and Ann J. Abadie (eds.) 1986 Faulkner and Humor. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Friedman, Bruce J. (ed.) 1965 Black Humor. New York: Bantam. Frye, Northrop 1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gale, Steven H. 1990 Critical Essays on Harold Pinter. Boston: G. K. Hall. 1988 Encyclopedia of American Humorists. New York: Garland. 1994 Encyclopedia of British Humorists. New York: Garland. 1985 S. J. Perelman: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland. 1987 S. J. Perelman: A Critical Study. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 1992 S. J. Perelman: Critical Essays. New York: Garland.

Literature and humor  2003 Galligan, E. 1984

273

Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter’s Screenplays and the Artistic Process. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

The Comic Vision in Literature. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Galloway, David. 1981 The Absurd Hero in American Fiction: Updike, Styron, Bellow, Sallinger. 2nd ed. Austin: University of Texas Press. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988 The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Geismar, Maxwell 1972 Ring Lardner and the Portrait of Folly. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Grauer, Neil A. 1995 Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Grawe, Paul H. 1983 Comedy in Space, Time and the Imagination. Chicago, IL: NelsonHall. Gurewitch, Morton 1994 The Ironic Temper and the Comic Imagination. The Ironic Temper and the Comic Imagination. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Hall, Rich 1984 Sniglets (Snig’lit) – Any Word That Doesn’t Appear in the Dictionary, but Should. New York: Collier Books. Harper, Donna A. S. 1995 Not So Simple: The “Simple” Stories by Langston Hughes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Harris, Charles B. 1971 Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd. New Haven, CT: College and University Press. Hauptman, Don 1991 Cruel and Unusual Puns. New York: Bantam, Doubleday, Dell. Hayden, Bradley 1983 In Memoriam humor: Julia Moore and the Western Michigan poets. English Journal 72 (5): 22–28. Hogan, Walter 2005 Humor in Young Adult Literature: A Time to Laugh. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Holman, C. Hugh, and William Harmon 1992 A Handbook to Literature. 6th ed. New York: Macmillan.

274 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

Hutcheon, Linda 1985 A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-century Art Forms. New York: Methuen. Hynes, William J., and William G. Doty (eds.) 1993 Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Inge, M. Thomas 1975 The Frontier Humorists: Critical Views. New York: Archon. 1988 Handbook of American Popular Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 1994 Perspectives on American Culture: Essays on Humor, Literature, and the Popular Arts. Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press. Johansen, Ruthann Knechel 1994 The Narrative Secret of Flannery O’Connor: The Trickster as Interpreter. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame. Jurich, Marilyn 1998 Scheherazade’s Sisters: Trickster Heroines and Their Stories in World Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Kehl, D. G. 1983 Thalia pops her girdle: Humor in the novels of Peter De Vries. Studies in American Humor February: 184–189. 1989 Humor of the new Southwest in the fiction of Larry McMurtry. Southwestern American Literature, Spring: 20–32. 2000 Varieties of risible experience: Grades of laughter and their function in modern American Literature. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 13 (4): 379–394. 2003 Thalia does the Charleston: Humor in the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In: Jackson R. Bryer, Ruth Prigozy, and Milton R. Stern (eds.), F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Twenty-first Century, 202–222. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Kelly, Fred C. 1947 George Ade: Warmhearted Satirist. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merriall. Keough, William 1966 Punchlines: The Violence of American Humor. New York: Paragon House. Kharpertian, Theodore D. 1990 A Hand to Turn the Time: The Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon. London: Associated University Press. Kiley, Frederick, and J. M. Shuttleworth (eds.) 1971 Satire: From Aesop to Buchwald. New York: Odyssey/Bobbs-Merrill.

Literature and humor 

275

Kiley, Frederick, and Walter McDonald 1973 A Catch-22 Casebook. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Klinkowitz, Jerome, and Donald Lawler (eds.) 1977 Vonnegut in America. New York: Delta. Koestler, Arthur 1966 The Act of Creation. New York: Dell. Lazarus, A. L. (ed.) 1985 The Best of George Ade. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Leacock, Stephen (ed.) 1936 The Greatest Pages of American Humor. New York: Doubleday. 1938 Humor and Humanity. New York: Henry Holt. Lee, Judith Yaross 1991 Garrison Keillor: A Voice of America. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. LeMaster, J. R., and James D. Wilson (eds.) 1993 The Mark Twain Encyclopedia. New York: Garland. Levy, Barbara 1997 Ladies Laughing: Wit as Control in Contemporary American Women. New York: Gordon and Breach. Lewis, Paul 1989 Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press. 1997 The killing jokes of the American Eighties. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 10 (3): 251–183. 1981 Mysterious laughter: Humor and fear in Gothic fiction. Genre 14: 309–327. 1989 Poe’s humor: A psychological analysis. Studies in Short Fiction 27: 531–546. Lincoln, Kenneth 1993 Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America. New York: ­Oxford University Press. Linderman, Frank B. 1996 Indian Old-Man Stories: More Sparks from War Eagle’s Lodge-Fire. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1996 Indian Why Stories: Sparks from War Eagle’s Lodge-Fire. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Lynn, Kenneth (ed.) 1968 The Comic Tradition in America: An Anthology of American Humor. New York: Norton. MacDonald, Dwight (ed.) 1960 Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm – And After. New York: Random House.

276 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

McAndrews, Kristin M. 2006 Wrangling Women: Humor and Gender in the American West. Reno: University of Nevada Press. McDowell, John Holmes 1979 Children’s Riddling. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Meredith, George 1956 An essay on comedy. In: Wylie Sypher (ed.), Comedy, 3–60. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mintz, Lawrence E. (ed.) 1988 Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Muir, Frank 1990 Oxford Book of Humorous Prose: From William Caxton to P. G. Wode­house, a Conducted Tour by Frank Muir. New York: Oxford University Press. Nilsen, Alleen Pace, and Don L. F. Nilsen 2000 Encyclopedia of 20th-Century American Humor. Westport, CT: Greenwood. 2007 Names and Naming in Young Adult Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Nilsen, Don L. F. 1992 Humor in American Literature: A Selected Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland. 1997 Humor in British Literature, from the Middle Ages to the Restoration: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood. 1998 Humor in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century British Literature: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood. 1996 Humor in Irish Literature: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood. 2000 Humor in Twentieth-century British Literature: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood. 1993 Humor Scholarship: A Research Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Novak, William, and Moshe Waldoks (eds.) 1981 The Big Book of Jewish Humor. New York: Harper and Row. 1990 The Big Book of New American Humor: The Best of the Past 25 Years. New York: Harper Perennial. Olsen, Lance 1990 Circus of the Mind in Motion: Postmodernism and the Comic Vision. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Page, Tim (ed.) 1994 Dawn Powell at Her Best. New York: Steerforth.

Literature and humor 

277

Pinsker, Sanford 1972 The graying of black humor. Studies in the 20th Century 9: 15–33. Pollard, Arthur 1970 Satire. London: Methuen. Praeger, Charles 1978 20th-century Humor. New York: Viking Press. Pratt, Alan R. (ed.) 1993 Black Humor: Critical Essays. New York: Garland. Provine, Robert R. 2000 Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. New York: Viking. Pughe, Thomas. 1994 Comic Sense: Reading Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Philip Roth. Basel: BirkhauserVerlag. Raskin, Victor 1985 Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Redfern, Walter 1984 Puns. New York: Blackwell. Richler, Mordecai (ed.) 1983 The Best of Modern Humor. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Rosten, Leo 1968 The Joys of Yiddish. New York: McGraw-Hill. Rourke, Constance 1931 American Humor: A Study of the National Character. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press. Royot, Daniel 1980 L’Humour américain: Des Puritains aux Yankees. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon. Rubin, Louis D., Jr. (ed.) 1983 The Comic Imagination in American Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Safer, Elaine B. 1988 The Contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Kesey. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Schaaf, Barbara (ed.) 1988 Mr. Dooley: Finley Peter Dunne. Springfield, IL: Lincoln-Herndon. Schaub, Thomas H. 1981 Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Schmitz, Neil 1983 Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

278 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

Scholl, Peter A. 1993 Garrison Keillor. New York: Twayne. Seaver, Paul W. Jr. (ed.) 1999 Selected Proceedings of the First International Conference on Hispanic Humor. Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica. Shalit, Gene 1987 Laughing Matters: A Celebration of American Humor. New York: Doubleday. Schulz, Max F. 1973 Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties. Athens: Ohio University Press. Shepherd, Jean (ed.) 1961 The America of George Ade. New York: G. P. Putnam’s. Shloss, Carol 1980 Flannery O’Connor’s Dark Comedies. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press. Sloane, David E. E. 1988 “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”: American Comic Vision. Boston, MA: G. K. Hall. 1983 The Literary Humor of the Urban Northeast, 1830–1890. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1979 Mark Twain as a Literary Comedian. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press. 1993 Mark Twain’s Humor: Critical Essays. Hamden, CT: Garland. 1998 New Directions in American Humor. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 2001 A Student’s Companion to Mark Twain. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen 1996 The Encyclopedia of Satirical Literature. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. Sonnichsen, C. L. 1988 The Laughing West: Humorous Western Fiction, Past and Present. Athens: Ohio University Press. Sontag, Susan 1982 Notes on Camp. In: A  Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Spalding, Henry D. 1969 Encyclopedia of Jewish Humor: From Biblical Times to the Modern Age. New York: Jonathan David. 1985 Joys of Jewish Humor. New York: Jonathan David. Tilton, John W. 1977 Cosmic Satire in the Contemporary Novel. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.

Literature and humor 

279

Toombs, Sarah Eleanor 1987 James Thurber: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticsm. New York: Garland. Trachtenberg, Stanley (ed.) 1982 Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 11: American Humorists, 1800–1950, Part 1: A–L and Part 2: M–Z. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark/ Gale Research. Ulea, V. 2002 A Concept of Dramatic Genre and the Comedy of New Type: Chess, Literature, and the Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Vickers, Scott B. 1998 Native American Identities: From Stereotype to Archetype in Art and Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Wagner, Jane 1986 Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. New York: Harper & Row. Walker, Nancy A. 1995 The Disobedient Writer: Women and Narrative Tradition. Austin: University of Texas Press. Walker, Nancy, and Zita Dresner 1988 Redressing the Balance: American Women’s Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Wallace, Ronald 1979 No Harm in Smiling: Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Watkins, Mel 1994 On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying. New York: Simon and Schuster. Weisenberger, Steven 1995 Fables of Subversion/Satire and the American Novel 1930–1980. Athens, University of Georgia Press. Wernblad, Annette 1992 Brooklyn Is Not Expanding: Woody Allen’s Comic Universe. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses. Wechsler, Robert 1993 Columbus à la Mode: Parodies of Contemporary American Writers. North Haven, CT: Catbird Press. White, E. B., and Katherine S. White 1941 A Subtreasury of American Humor. New York: Coward-McCann. Wiget, Andrew (ed.) 1994 Dictionary of Native American Literature. New York: Garland.

280 

Alleen and Don Nilsen

Winston, Mathew 1972 “Humour noir” and “Black humor”. In: Harry Levin (ed.), Veins of Humor, 269–284. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Withers, Carl 1948 A Rocket in My Pocket: The Rhymes and Chants of Young Americans (illustr. by Susanne Suba). New York: Henry Holt. Wonham, Harry 2000 “I want a real coon”: Mark Twain and late-nineteenth-century ethnic caricature. American Literature 72 (1): 117–152. Wood, James 2004 The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Yacowar, Maurice 1982 Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen. New York: Frederick Ungar. Yan, Gao 1996 The Art of Parody: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Use of Chinese Sources. New York: Peter Lang. Ziv, Avner (ed.) 1986 Jewish Humor. Tel Aviv: Papyrus.

Humor and popular culture Lawrence E. Mintz

Humor is a central feature of popular culture and everyday life in virtually every society in the world, past, present, and no doubt future. While it differs significantly from culture to culture, of course, there are some common features and frequent phenomena that are both interesting and significant. The first and biggest problem faced in writing an overview of humor and popular culture is trying to define it. Broad definitions, favored by many European social and cultural historians, see popular culture as an umbrella term for just about all aspects of everyday experience, including commonplace material culture such as food-ways, vernacular architecture, industrial design of familiar products, clothing styles, toys and games, personal grooming, and just about anything else that people use as they go about their lives. Narrower definitions often found in American studies and in popular culture studies in various disciplines in academic circles in the United States often tend to limit the definition to the popular arts and entertainments, such as popular literature, journalism, graphic arts, performance, and the mass media. The other areas that might be included as popular culture are left for folklore/folk life studies, material culture studies, and social history per se. This essay will employ the narrower definition, though humor can certainly be studied in every aspect of everyday life. There will be more than enough to deal with discussing humor in the popular arts and entertainments. Moreover there will be only a few references to pre-American and non-American popular culture. This is by no means intended to slight the popular culture produced elsewhere. This writer just does not know enough about it to include it in the essay. Quite a bit of American popular culture is significant worldwide anyway. American comedy films for instance, can be found wherever cinema is available, and many of our television situation comedies are familiar to audiences around the world. The comic strip, usually considered to be an American invention, at least in its newspaper feature format, will be relevant to readers interested in popular culture and humor abroad, even if some of the specific strips are unfamiliar. In any case, it is to be hoped that the examples from American popular culture will be interesting and instructive for purposes of comparison and contrasting.

282 

Lawrence E. Mintz

Another definitional issue offers a problem that must be addressed if not resolved. In one sense of the definition of terms, popular culture is a contradiction, an oxymoron. If we define culture in the old-fashioned sense of the term – as ‘cultivated’ or refined products of civilization, as say Matthew Arnold and other defenders of sophisticated and elite expression have done – most of what we include in our study of popular culture simply does not qualify. The need for the term popular culture arises from a  perceived necessity to distinguish “high” or elite cultural expression from the “low” or commonplace. Indeed a very familiar classification system goes one step further, attempting to distinguish among “high, “low,” and ”middle,” sometimes termed “highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow.” Trying to pin down just what is meant by these designations is the first, and perhaps the funniest, exercise in popular culture humor! “High” culture is defined sometimes extrinsically according to its exclusive production, distribution, and consumption by elites, the wealthy and/or the educated classes. Often it is tagged with an intrinsic burden as well, supposedly more complex, sophisticated, difficult to produce and appreciate, and sometimes with a high moral or social purpose as well. “Low” culture is said to belong to “the masses (whomever they might be), and to be “mere entertainment,” i.e. devoid of meaningful social value (to paraphrase a legal distinction used for a now-defunct definition of pornography), “Low” culture is tarred as carrying all sorts of negative functions from provided harmful perspectives on sex and violence, to encouraging voyeurism and a spectator culture, to retarding cultural progress, to upholding the status quo and popular opinion, to diverting its audiences from understanding, and rising up against its dismal condition, to – shudder – making a profit for those who make and sell it. “Middle” culture is seen as pretending to “high” culture status but not quite making it, either for intrinsic limitations in the text or performance itself or for extrinsic reasons such as familiarity, ease of access and appreciation (thus a ballet such as “The Nutcracker” might have a claim to being high culture because of its genre, ballet, and its classical music, but it must be taken down a notch because it is performed widely as a part of the Christmas season entertainment rituals, and therefore it is familiar, accessible and beloved by all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons). There are so many problems, complications, contradictions, and inadequacies connected with this classification scheme that it would take the rest of this essay to address them all. The system simply does not work. The body of elite culture product and experience often fails to meet so many of the criteria defining it as such as to render the concept meaningless. There is no mass audience, except for perhaps the televised Super Bowl football game, in

Humor and popular culture 

283

any useful sense of the term. The range of entertainment product considered “low” or popular culture is so broad, so varied as to shred any generalizations about its motives, functions, and cultural significance. “Middlebrow” seems to work to define the Broadway musical comedy, and “The Nutcracker.” Other than that, the category is largely worthless. Clearly we should abandon the entire distinction between popular and any other kind of culture, and simply discuss culture – the learned pattern of belief and/or behavior shared by a group, or more narrowly defined the arts and entertainments available in a given society. But alas we cannot do this. For one thing, the distinction is widely accepted in its basic outline, if not its specifics, and the designation of “good” versus less respectable cultural product and experience is so solidly entrenched that no call for abandoning it would have the desired effect. For another, the academic disciplines that govern the serious study of culture leave us no choice but to look at “popular culture” as separate from the tip of the iceberg they deem worthy of attention. So if we want to look at popular novels and short fiction, for instance, we will not get much help from “English” departments and scholars who study “literature.” There may be the odd course in feature writing in a school of journalism, but the very important genre of the humor column in newspapers and the humorous short pieces in magazines are simply not studied except as popular culture. Similarly there are now “performance studies” programs, and serious studies of film, or “cinema,” and even television studies can sometimes sneak into a communications department’s curriculum. But if you want to study standup comedy, movie farces and romps, television situation comedy and talk show humor, you really do need to retain the category and the concept of popular culture. There isn’t much of a literature that addresses humor and popular culture per se. There is no book length study of the topic, and the only essay that focuses specifically on it is my own “Humor and Popular Culture” in the Handbook of Humor Research, Volume II, edited by Paul McGhee and Jeffrey Goldstein in 1983. The histories of American humor such as Jesse Bier’s The Rise and Fall of American Humor (1968) and Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill’s America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury (1978) cover a lot of the territory, and thought they emphasize literary examples, they are indispensable. Collections of critical essays such as Arthur Dudden’s American Humor (1987), Nancy Walker’s What’s So Funny?: Humor in American Culture (1998), and Joe Boskin’s The Humor Prism in 20th Century America (1997) are invaluable, addressing comics, standup comedy, film and tele­ vision humor as well as the more frequently visited territory.

284 

Lawrence E. Mintz

There is also, of course, a very large literature devoted to the particular sub-topics that will be addressed in this essay. Studies of humor in American literature, such as Louis Rubin, Jr.’s edited collection, The Comic Imagination in American Literature and Sarah Blacher Cohen’s Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature (1978) include discussions of popular writing, though they emphasize belles letters. There are a few survey books devoted to film comedy, most notably by Raymond Durgnat and by Gerald Mast, books on comic strips and cartoons, and even a few devoted to studying television comedy. There are many books that examine particular sub-topics in all of these genres, for instance the many books by Wes ­Gehring that explore the film comedy of such figures as Charlie Chaplin, Groucho Marx, W.  C. Fields, et al. Books such as Mel Watkins’s On the Real Side take on humor in popular culture as a  part of a  differently focused study, in his case, African–American humor. A point of entry is the bibliographic collection I  edited in 1988 for Greenwood Press, Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics. While this volume, still in print amazingly, is obviously not up-to-date, useful chapters on literary, comic strip, periodical, film, broadcast, standup, women’s, racial and ethnic, political, and folk humor cannot be overlooked. As for the enormous article and book chapter literature on specific topics, figures, and issues pertinent to the study of humor in popular culture, it is better to check the reasonably, relatively current bibliographic work compiled by Jason Rutter and by Willi Ruch, available on line, and Don Nilsen’s Encyclopedia and up-dated handouts so graciously made available on request. Any attempt here at singling out particular works would be dangerously, misleadingly eccentric and limited. My answer to requests that I get several times a week for bibliographic suggestions on topics in popular culture humor is always “check the bibliographies, both for humor studies and in the particular genres or subject areas you wish to research.” The overwhelming issue for the study of humor in popular culture is the relative weight of textual studies versus those investigating the circumstances of production and distribution and the actualities of reception or consumption. By far most research in the field is devoted to discussion of texts, be they print sources, graphic arts, performances, or media productions. There is some work in communications studies that deals with the people who create popular culture humor, and at least as importantly, with the people who are responsible for its production and distribution. One can find some biographies of and interviews with artists and authors, and a very few examinations of the industries that support or more accurately that allow the creation

Humor and popular culture 

285

of popular culture humor exist. But for the most part, we are ignorant of the roles of the publishers of books, editors of magazines, newspaper feature sections, cartoon and comic strip pages, producers and managers of performance opportunities, and the powers-that-be for film and television humor. Who decides what humor will be available? How is it promoted? What input besides that of the identified author affects content? What is the role of the critic in engineering its reception? The commercial factors alone are enormously important, and whether Robin Williams performs at the Met in New York or a small club in Peoria may be as significant as the content of his comedy. Recently I directed a Ph.D. dissertation, by David Zurawik, that studied the appearance of Jewish characters in prime-time television from its earliest years to the present. What made Zurawik’s dissertation virtually unique as well as tremendously valuable is that, as television critic for the Baltimore Sun newspaper, he had access to decision makers in the industry who were willing and able to give him insights that could never be gleaned from examining the texts themselves, no matter how diligently it was performed. For instance Zurawik was able to track down a claim that CBS had research that indicated that audiences did not want to see Jews (and people with moustaches, and divorced characters) in shows, “research” that turned out to be non-existent and alleged as part of a conspiracy that could be traced to the predilections of one particularly powerful television mogul. Unless we train more researchers to employ the techniques of social science research and oral history, the crucial elements of the story of who is responsible for what themes encoded in the texts and what texts are made available to the public will continue to be ignored. Similarly, there is very little study of audience reception. Communications studies and sociology do some survey work, and some raw data exists that helps us form a sketchy picture of who is laughing at what. Looking at the text by itself does not tell us if the audience is male or female, young or old, rich or poor, black or white, rural or urban, educated or not, and so forth. Moreover we have no idea how something is received much less why it is received as it is. There are almost no accounts, even for live performance, that explore how audiences related to a text, what they laugh at, of what they approve or disapprove, and what it means to them, ultimately. Ethnographic research promises to address this need, but there is precious little to show for it thus far, applied to humor in popular culture, even as a model for new research. The majority of us study the texts themselves, and thus are limited to our own reading, decoding, and assessment. We make what are often rather flimsy guesses as to what appeals to whom, why, but the bottom line is that

286 

Lawrence E. Mintz

we do not know and are entirely ill equipped to find out. Humor, as readers of this essay surely know, is illusive and complicated. Trying to discuss its social and cultural significance from isolated textual reading is like trying to analyze the phenomenon of baseball from trading cards. It is neither possible nor useful to attempt a definitive survey of humor in popular culture. Even a basic listing of significant sources in the genres that make up the core of our arts and entertainments would be exhausting, and it would not be particularly interesting or insightful. Rather, the remainder of this essay will single out a few sources for mention to help describe the genres and topics, and one or two for discussion as an example of where examining popular culture humor texts might go. The selections are of some things that interest me; they are no more prominent or significant than many others one might choose. The earliest example of popular culture using humor for an important, interesting purpose is the exploration, for the most part in journalism, of “native” American character or identity and through it, the viability of democracy itself. Almanacs, newspapers, and early magazines were loaded with brief anecdotes, humorous proverbs and sayings, character sketches, and witticisms comprising a sort of pseudo-folklore introducing the common man as citizen. Humor directed at the common man as rude, barbaric, ill-mannered, and foolish came from English and European observers, but it was also not rare from the pens of concerned educated, more sophisticated, snobbish, or politically conservative Americans. Yankee Doodle was originally intended to be derisive, directing ridicule at the silly and ignorant American. But the portrait soon became much more ambiguous, ambivalent, and even positive. Brother Jonathan was an important comic character whose name, from a character in Royall Tyler’s 1789 play, “The Contrast,” became virtually generic. Jonathan could be painted in negative term, laughed at for his ignorance, bumbling ways, lack of sophisticated manners and understanding. But perhaps influenced by a  very old, perhaps even universal cultural tradition of the Wise Fool, he was at least as often the naïf, still ignorant and in a sense unintelligent as well, but innocent, good hearted, and following in the tradition, an accidental purveyor of truth and wisdom. Taken a step further, he could be the common sense philosopher – Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard Saunders for instance – dispensing sound, solid, down to earth advice from the perspective of experiential rather than academic or intellectual knowledge. There are many fine examples of this brand of popular humor. One good one is Seba Smith’s character, Jack Downing. Smith originally intended using the character to mock the ignorant Jacksonian supporter, and to be sure, when

Humor and popular culture 

287

Jack wanders into the state legislature (“Jack Goes to Portland”) his misunderstanding of the proceedings (he wonders why there is a fight over who deserves a seat in the legislature when clearly there are enough chairs to go around. He thinks the members of the body should follow their leaders as militia members would their captain. However many of his innocent observations expose the politicians as much as they do the voter. When he concludes that he has little use for people who let a crop of hay spoil in the field while arguing politics, the common sense redeems him. James Russell Lowell was perhaps the most educated American at mid19th century. He was a Dean at Harvard, spoke several languages, and was as socially and politically sophisticated as anyone around. When he wanted to write against the Mexican War, and later against slavery and southern defection from the union, he knew better than to write in his own voice. He created a wise fool character, Hosea Biglow, whose observations such as “what’s the use of meetin’ goin’/every Sabbath wet or dry/if its right to go a-mowin’/­ fellow men like oats and rye” put the anti-war sentiment in terms that could be associated with popular attitudes rather than direction from above. Lowell created another character, Birdofreedum Sawin, a more humorous invention, to represent popular thought gone awry, but even Birdofreedum returns from service in the Mexican War with important lessons learned from his wounds and inadequate reward or compensation (“at any rate, I’m so used up I can’t do no more fightin’/The only chance thet’s left to me is politics or writin’.”) Other characters like Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s Sam Slick employed the Yankee as con man to expose the vulnerabilities of the middle class and the dangers of “putting on airs,” and wise fools of every stripe became a staple of our national popular humor. On the western frontier, wise fools, con men, and tricksters like Johnson J. Hooper’s Simon Suggs and George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood were employed to portray the rough and unsophisticated American as an ironic hero. Suggs was lazy and dishonest, but he knew it was “good to be shifty in a new country,” and his victims were more often the targets of the humor than the wise-guy that preyed upon them. Sut Lovingood expressed a rude racism and sexism, but his “pints” on the meaning of life that emphasized drinking, sex, roughhousing, and a deep mistrust of preachers, widows, and other guardians of civilization were exemplary of a freedom, joy of life, and cynicism that popular culture supported at least as a necessary counter-culture or brake on the relentless demands of the growing respectability. The device of the wise fool was used to deal with topical concerns, particularly the issues surrounding the civil war, and they fed the popular theater,

288 

Lawrence E. Mintz

comic lecture circuit, and even graphic arts as well as journalism. The motif was taken to its height, of course, by the genius of Mark Twain. Twain’s persona was the common sense philosopher and good old boy personified. He used the tall tale for the same humorous effects achieved by his peers (see Thorpe’s “Big Bear of Arkansas” for perhaps the best example), but he also took the genre a step further. In a story such as “Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn,” for instance, we are amused by the comic futility of the bird trying to store acorns by dropping them down a chimney, but Twain sets us up to make the allegorical connection between the bird’s dogged but misguided labor and capitalism, the work ethic, and perhaps the ultimate futility of life itself. In this way his light, amusing, popular humor anticipates some of the deepest, darkest, and most powerful humor of post WWII literature. Another interesting example of humor in popular culture is the newspaper comic strip. Histories of the genre usually begin with a “pre-history” that traces the comic strip back to cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphics, the ­Bayeux Tapestry, and various graphic arts including illustrations and cartoons. For our purposes, the newspaper comic strip begins in the late 1890s when Sunday color comics supplements were used to help sell cheap, mass market oriented papers. The early strips such as “The Yellow Kid” for instance were curious combinations of down-to-earth slapstick, topical joking, and rather abstract referencing. In the hands of a Windsor McCay (“Little Nemo in Slumberland,” “The Adventures of the Rare-bit Fiend,”) they were creative indeed, and could border on the surreal and handle social satire at the same time. The genre was clearly aimed at a popular audience, but it also flirted with serious art and expression. Soon the dictates of pop culture won out, however, and while some strips, e.g. George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat”, could hold up the experimental art end, most settled for a domestic humor involving marital conflict and bratty kids. The themes fit in perfectly with the era known as “the golden age of humor” (sometimes rendered as the 1920s but more properly roughly from the end of WWI to the early 30s). The “little man” Casper Milquetoast, Andy Gump, Jiggs, A. Mutt, et al. battled various mild threats to their serenity, and more significantly their sense of importance and power, in the face of stronger, more focused women and “naughty” youngsters (e.g. “The Katzenjammer Kids”). A later example, “Blondie,” was transformed from a satire on “the roaring twenties” into a consummate ‘little man strip’ in which the vulnerable Dagwood loses battles to the illogic of his wife, Blondie, his kids, the dog, his boss, and the neighborhood bridge club (intruding on his bath). His defense is napping as often as he can, eating everything in sight, knocking down

Humor and popular culture 

289

the mailman as he rushes off to work in the morning, and in his refusal to be thrown by his failures and the disasters that constantly befall him. This sort of fare dominated the strips until the mid-1930s when it was overshadowed, but not replaced entirely, by adventure and soap opera strips. Its significance is not in its artistic merit. In fact it represents a failure of sorts, a backsliding from an art form that had much more promise in its earlier manifestations. But its cultural significance is large. Along with silent film, it helped establish the humorous answer to more inflated, ambitious portraits of the American citizen and his world. It was a comic counter-balance to American arrogance, self-confidence, and unrealistic self-understanding. Humorous strips were revived after the Second World War. Earlier comics strips, particularly Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” and Al Capp’s “Little Abner” proved that the popular culture audience could receive comic strip art that was both accessible and containing a second, deeper level of communicative significance. Kelly’s swamp fables were allegorical “swamps” themselves, loaded with social and political commentary lurking behind the antics and interactions of the familiar cast of animal characters. He experimented with creative artistic technique such as using typescripts to suggest tone of voice, and more significantly perhaps, he produced a rich text of various meanings. Capp, too, hid a lot of communication in a relatively simple fable. His “hillbillies” were interesting and amusing by themselves, but readers who cared to think about the strips for more than a few seconds had access to Capp’s views on topical events, government, and American values. Perhaps the most important breakthrough in the humorous comic strip was Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts.” This strip gained enormous worldwide popularity by using kids to reflect adult neuroses. Every character has his or her angst or method of coping with harsh reality. Lucy uses her meanness to compensate for the unrequited love she has for Schroeder (who keeps trying to play Beethoven on a toy piano with painted on black keys), Linus has his blanket to comfort him when his childhood fears and fantasy gets in the way of his intellect, and the dog, Snoopy, deals with the limitations of his “dogness” by pretending to be the Red Baron, or a lawyer, writer, hockey player, detective and resident of a deluxe doghouse complete with a pool table and rare paintings. His fantasies allow him to escape his dependency on his owner for the meals that are really his only interest, and the boredom of being a dog. Charlie Brown, the consummate loser, little man character, reflects all the fears, weaknesses, and failures of modern man. He is constantly bemoaning his fate and circumstance. Yet he never gives up. He knows that Lucy will pull the football away from him when he tries to kick it, yet every year he

290 

Lawrence E. Mintz

tries again, kind of like Sisyphus rolling the stone up to the top of the hill again and again, because it is, after all, his (and our) destiny to do so. This strip is simple, yet profound. It has provoked as much analytic commentary as much serious literature, but unlike belles lettress, it doesn’t seem to require it. Readers usually understand and appreciate the strip without the aid of the critics. A  look at the contemporary comic section of a  major newspaper such as The Washington Post (exception being The New York Times where all the news is printed to fit) shows how incredibly healthy the genre is today. There are dozens of humorous comic strips ranging from simple domestic humor such as “The Family Circus” to the sophisticated social and political satire of Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” and Aaron McGruder’s “The Boondocks.” Strips like “Cathy” take on the problems of single professional women, “Tank McNamara” goes after big time sports in America, and strips like “BC,” “The Wizard of Id,” “Broom Hilda,” “Zippy” and many more offer the combination of simple amusement and allegorical meaning that the genre has allowed for more than a century now. Stand up comedy performance can also be traced to a “pre-history” that establishes its universality and importance. Surely clowns, fools and jesters, and various social shamans are the progenitors of today’s professional comics. In American popular culture, the genre should be connected with roots in the medicine shows, tent shows, and the early popular theater such as minstrel shows, vaudeville, burlesque and the Broadway variety show. These entertainments featured stand up comedy mixed with skits, magic acts, juggling, and other performance, and helped shape acts that were more complex than mere joke telling or comic antics. The more modern history of stand up begins with performers in resorts in the Catskill Mountain region of New York State. This so-called “Borscht Belt” is notable for providing venues for numerous Jewish comedians and entertainers who went on to form a sort of core for the popular entertainment community of the twentieth century, influencing movies, radio, theater and television, particularly in comedy. These comedians became polished professional joke-tellers in nightclubs, other resorts, and at the top of their game, in concert performances all around the U.S. Most of them employed gag writers. Comedians like Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, and Alan King exemplify a pure form of stand up comedy. while others lean more toward the theatrical traditions using costumes, props, and stage personas. In the late 1950s, a  brand of stand up comedy, sometimes called “new wave” stand up comedy, emerged. This comedy is called ‘new’ because it

Humor and popular culture 

291

featured a  relaxed, informal style and more developed anecdotes, stories, or multi-joke commentary built around particular themes. A comedian like Shelly Berman, Bob Newhart or a team like Mike Nicholls and Elaine May might work a particular theme such as dealing with telephone hassles for several minutes as opposed to moving from one unrelated joke to another. There are two common mistakes concerning “new wave” comedy. For one thing, it was not unprecedented. It has analogues in the comic “lectures” as far back as Mark Twain and Artemus Ward, among others, in the 19th century and traditional stand up comics sometimes were able to work concert venues in a manner not at all different from the “new wave” comedians. Buddy Hackett, for instance, a pure pro of the traditional school, worked concert venues mixing in reading his romantic poetry and talking about his experiences in show business, with jokes and comic “shtick” involving working with the audience in teasing banter. “New Wave” comedians are reputed to be more topical, satiric, and pertinent than the traditional pros, and often they were. Mort Sahl, to cite the best example, worked from the daily newspaper, and his sarcastic political observations were a fine example of how the genre might be used for serious, significant satire. The famed Lenny Bruce was not as overtly political as Sahl, but his comments on race and religion, at the height of his career, were indeed more “relevant” than the sort of stuff one might expect of the nightclub professionals. Other “new wave” comics, often connected with improvisational comedy troupes like Second City, The Committee, and others also served up a product that might be more “edgy” in its social commentary. But fond memory tends to exaggerate the pertinence of “new wave” comedy. More often than not, it was aimed at entertaining the audience by provoking laughter rather than enlightening it with socially constructive ridicule and observation. One thing it surely did was open up the genre to many new comedians. Comedy clubs such as Budd Friedman’s Improv, coffee houses and night clubs such as The Bitter End and The Hungry I and a growing circuit of college auditoriums and other concert venues made it possible for a tour of comedians comparable to the vaudeville circuit decades earlier to bring stand up comedy to a large and enthusiastic audience. Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Bill Cosby, Robin Williams, George Carlin, and literally dozens of other excellent stand up comedians made the genre prominent and significant for the entire second half of the twentieth century. The growth of stand up also fed a related genre of “performance comedy.” The line between performance comedy and stand up is almost impossible to draw precisely, but the former is more theatrical, more scripted, more elaborate, and more fully

292 

Lawrence E. Mintz

developed. Performers such as John Leguizamo, Danny Hoch, Rob Becker, Bill Irwin, Whoopie Goldberg, and shows such as “Greater Tuna” have one foot in stand up comedy performance and another in comedy drama. Perhaps the best example of this genre is Lily Tomlin’s one-woman show, “The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe.” This show, written primarily by Jane Wagner, can be considered to be a play, but it is also in a sense a very fully developed set of comedy routines built around a premise and a central character, Trudy the Bag Lady, and her consulting gig for extra-terrestrials bent on understanding human behavior on our very weird planet. Venues for performance comedy in our major cities, like New York’s P.S. 128 (P.S. now standing for “performance space” instead of the “public school” housed originally in the building) offer highly sophisticated, intellectually challenging, but at the same time very funny and entertaining stand up and performance comedy. The heart of modern popular culture is, of course, the mass media. Film, radio, and television comedy reach the largest audiences and are at the center of American humor. The earliest motion pictures included very simple comic sight gags. When the medium became more technically advanced, comedians from vaudeville, burlesque, and the comic theater were employed to do physical comedy. Filmmakers learned how to use the properties of the camera to enhance the pratfalls, and to construct more elaborate sets and devices that allowed the comedy to go beyond what it could achieve in live performance. Comedies of the Mack Sennett-Keystone Cops school concentrated on generating big laughs, but a school of comedians, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Harold Lloyd and of course the brilliant Charlie Chaplin emerged to take film comedy to a different, more admirable level. Keaton, Langdon, Lloyd, and Chaplin were masters of physical comedy, and their films contain sight gags both overt and covert that amuse and delight. But they also constructed personas that audiences could relate to and sympathize with, and their films had story lines that provided structural comedy to go along with the comic “shtick.” At its best, Chaplin’s features like “City Lights,” “The Kid,” and “Modern Times” for instance, silent film comedy was arguably as filled with meaning, insight, and comic satisfaction as any form of comedy ever ­created. Even before the sound era, film comedy was developing in another direction as well. In order to get a wider audience – i.e. to add women and to appeal to an audience beyond the urban, blue-collar crown that formed the core audience for earlier cinema – romantic comedy was serving up a different fare. When the comic business that typified the orientation of the early come-

Humor and popular culture 

293

dians and directors was married to the romantic plots and themes, “screwball comedy” was able to satisfy just about everyone. The formula developed in the 1930s was strong enough to become the staple of film comedy through the 1950s (with an influence on films continuing to the present), and other strains of comedy such as those provided by the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Mae West, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, and Bob Hope ensured that there would be plenty of comedy in the popular culture during the years of the Great Depression and Second World War. Since the mid-1960s, “serious” social comedies have competed with farces loaded with sight gags and sure-fire laughs. Comedies like “Dr. Strangelove,” “Catch-22,” “ M*A*S*H,” Robert Altman films such as “Nashville” and Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” provide social and political satire. Wildly funny movies such as “Airplane,” “Police Academy,” “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” the Pink Panther films, and the offerings of Mel Brooks are there to entertain. Together, comedies comprise one third of the Hollywood films produced in an average year. Successful directors like John Hughes, creator of teen comedies like “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “Pretty in Pink,” Spike Lee (“She’s gotta have It,” “School Daze”), John Waters (“Hairspray,” “Polyester”), Barry Levinson (“Tin Man,” “Diner”), Susan Seidelman (“Desperately Seeking Susan,” and of course the above mentioned Mel Brooks and Woody Allen develop formulas that carry their unmistakable stamps. Comic stars, often veterans of television or standup comedy, also build a corps of significant film humor around their personae. Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and John Belushi are just some of the alumni of Saturday Night Live who scored numerous successes. Robin Williams, to single out another important comedy star, has moved from standup and television success to a very considerable canon of more than a dozen films including “Good Morning, Vietnam,” “Mrs. Doubtfire,” and “Patch Adams” among them. Of course the farces are not without social and cultural commentary, and the more ambitious films are often very funny. Parodies and farces go for the big laughs, but often the gags reference significant social issues. To cite just one case, sight gags in “Airplane” and “Police Academy” offer humorous takes on oral sex, defying a public taboo on mentioning that controversial and divisive topic. Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” is an important look at modern relationships. It turns the romance comedy formula upside down, tracing the devolution of a  relationship from “love at first sight” to untenable rather than the course of a  troubled pairing to a  somehow inevitable happy ending. Is “Annie Hall” then a comedy? It can be argued that the film

294 

Lawrence E. Mintz

ends happily, despite the breakup of Annie and Alvy Singer, since both are where they want and need to be – she in LA to pursue her career and he in New York where he can protect his neuroses. The comedic message is that sometimes a “happy ending” or comic resolution can require the breakup of a romance rather than the expected, often forced uniting of a couple. It is an important statement for contemporary male–female relationships in modern society. “Annie Hall” is also a very funny film with good sight gags and verbal humor. Interestingly, another film was produced at about the same time, “The Goodbye Girl,” in which the conventional romance formula holds up just fine. Boy meets girl, their relationship is instantly troubled and contentious, growing worse as misunderstanding is added to their obvious differences. But in the end, they commit to marriage and family, and their bicoastal separation at the end is promised to be merely temporary. These films, and still more recent comedies, affirm that the basic formulas for film comedy have held up into the 21st century. Radio, and then television, provided a repository for just about all humor in popular culture that went before it. Broadcast programming has become the most powerful and significant base for American humor. In contemporary television, humor rules from the banter of the anchors and news, weather reporters on the early morning shows to the late night talk shows. In addition to shows more definitively labeled as humor or comedy, humor can be found on news and talk shows and other “reality” programming, in advertising, sports coverage, game and quiz shows, televised movies, and just about everywhere else. In the early years of radio and television, variety show formats borrowed from vaudeville and the popular theater, mixing standup comedy with skits and other types of humorous performance. Stars like Fred Allen, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton, and Jerry Lewis were crucial in establishing broadcasting as the dominant form of popular culture. The variety show lasted well into the twentieth century, with later performers such as Carol Burnett, Flip Wilson, Richard Pryor, and the Smothers Brothers proving that the format was resilient long after the theater comedy that established it was forgotten. The variety show also strongly influenced madefor-TV comedy such as provided by Ernie Kovacs, originally, and later by shows like “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” “That was the Week that Was,” and “Saturday Night Live,” among others. However the core of television comedy has always been the situation comedy. Sit-com started in radio, but it starred on television as early as the late1940s and early 1950s adapting the ethnic comedy of Molly Goldberg and

Humor and popular culture 

295

“Amos and Andy.” Sit com uses comedy and humor in many ways to generate laughter and entertainment, and to carry social and cultural messages. Its basic format is important. Shows begin with a situation of “normality,” i.e. a familiar cast of characters in their expected setting. From week to week, with only gradual changes that are usually necessitated by cast turnover or other challenges, the basic unit faces new challenges and opportunities. Regardless of the nature of these challenges and opportunities, at the end of the episode, everything and everyone is back in its “normal” and proper place, with no significant change having resulted. The comic ending, resolution of the problem or dissolution of the opportunity for change, suggests that true happiness is in stability, continuity, and contentment with the status quo. It is an interesting counter to the other American Dream of growth, change, success, achievement, and mobility. This version of the Dream, closer to Jefferson’s vision of “forty acres and a mule” for every citizen, pitches acceptance of middle class values and status and the omni-powerful appeal of “family.” Family may defined in many creative ways that are alternative to the nuclear, biological unit (single parent families often including an employee of one sort or another, groups of friends and neighbors who function like family members, and even work-place communities with family-like ties), but the message is always that everything is ok as long as the stability of the group is not threatened. Within the over-arching family structure, many premises can be accommodated. In addition to shows that are essentially about family activities and situations, there are military sitcoms, school based shows, comedies that feature aliens from abroad as far as Mars and Ork, to ethnic shows, urban and rural settings, and work-place comedies. All the familiar character types of American humor from the wise fools of the colonial and early national literature to the “little men” of comic strips, silent film, and journalism, to con men and tricksters are featured in sitcom. These premises allow for some variety within the basic format, but they cluster around familiar motifs, always respect the basic structure, and rarely if ever seek uniqueness. In addition to the premises, the plots of particular episodes can also carry messages and meanings. For instance, an episode of “Mork and Mindy” involved Mork aging himself considerably to teach Mindy’s grandmother the lesson that growing old is not necessarily a bad thing as long as one thinks young and remains cheerful and lively. An episode of “Different Strokes,” hardly a cutting edge vehicle for social teaching, involved a teen-aged girl who thought she might be pregnant. After plot twists that hinted at the possibility of abortion, the show settled into promoting its main theme, the necessity

296 

Lawrence E. Mintz

for teens to involve their parents in their crises and the necessity for parents to be understanding, gentle, and sympathetic to guarantee that they will be kept informed of what is going on in their kids’ lives. The young lady turns out not to be pregnant after all, thanks to the intervention of the writers, and the overt message masks some covert ones including the lack of criticism of the sexual activity that led to the possibility of the crisis in the first place, and a  more interesting double entendre possibly directed at a  then current government policy initiative aimed at restricting abortion for teenagers (as her friend suggests to the troubled teen considering abortion, “you’d better do it while you still can.” In the 1970s, a number of shows made more overt efforts at social commentary. Norman Lear’s “All in the Family” led the way, and his other shows, mostly spin-offs, shows like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “MASH,” and many others dealt with race, ethnic conflict, infidelity, drug use, sexism, and just about every other social and cultural concern. Humor was injected through the antics of the characters, physical and verbal gags, and other devices, but in some cases, “The Bill Cosby Show” for one, comedy was often decidedly secondary to the moral message delivery. Later shows like “Friends,” “Frazier,” “Cheers,” and of course the celebrated show about “nothing,” “Seinfeld,” in a way reverse this process. Deceptively mundane, they focus on well-written comic scenarios and shtick, but their view of the contemporary reality is often a  humorous interpretation of significant tendencies in our common culture. It is impossible, in an overview chapter such as this one, to cover all of televised comedy, even as a  survey. Shows like “The Daily Show” and “South Park,” developed for the Comedy Central network or Fox’s popular hit “The Simpsons” have had important impact on the genre. Late night talk show hosts, particularly Jay Leno and David Letterman, are considered by some critics to be the bellwethers of the state of comedy in the country, so that after the events of September 11, 2001 they were watched closely to see when and if it was safe to laugh again and whether the tragic events and the circumstances surrounding them such as the war against terrorism and anthrax attacks might be the subject of comedy. There can be disagreement over the state of television comedy, its quality and centrality, but there can be no dispute that it is very much an omnipresent, omnipotent part of the popular culture and a major source of our humor. There are a few more areas of humor in the popular culture that remain to be mentioned and discussed briefly, if not really explored. As I suggested at the beginning of this essay, some definitions of popular culture are nar-

Humor and popular culture 

297

row, limiting it to the arts and entertainment media. Others are broader and include what might be designated as folk or material culture. This essay will not consider jokes in public discourse to be a part of popular culture. Jokes are rightfully left to the study of folklore. Of course they are collected into popular, best-selling paperback books and transmitted to internet subscribers, and that is surely a spillover. Nevertheless, we will leave them for another chapter. Bumper stickers, tee shirts with humorous messages, comical posters and stickers, funny products, toys and games like pet rocks and Garfield tails to stick in car doors are also at a cross-roads of popular, commercial culture, material culture, and folk life. The bumper sticker debates – “my kid is an honor student” vs. “my kid beat up your honor student” or “Jesus saves” vs. “Moses Invests,” or the fish with legs and the legend “Darwin” in response to the religious fish icon – are part of the popular culture for certain, but the turf battles of academic study allow me to leave them for another investigator. The broad field of the internet as popular culture also demands at least a  comment. As an interactive endeavor, a  lot of the humorous activity on the web can be considered to be folklore. But there are also many humorous web sites, not a  few of them commercially oriented that must be considered to be a major source of popular humor today. As a judge for the annual Webby awards given by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (that I am a member is a humorous reality that can only be appreciated by those who know of my internet illiteracy), I  view dozens of humorous sites every year. Some like The Onion, which has won the award for the past three years in a row (www.theonion.com) or the National Lampoon site (www.nationallampoon.com) among others are spin-offs from humor magazines. Others like FuckedCompany.com are devoted to a particular topic, in this case referentially to dot.coms that have crashed. Still others are maintained by individuals with a particular humorous axe to grind, for instance www.landoverbaptist.com, an hilarious attack on organized religion. Humor in advertising might also be a part of popular culture, but it is simply too broad a topic to be handled adequately in an essay of this scope. In the broader definition described above, popular culture is just about everything in our daily lives. Humor is everywhere in our daily lives from the morning talk show banter to the newspaper columns and comic strips we read on the way to work to the funny web site our colleagues at work e-mail us to check out, to the magazine we read on the way home, the sitcom we watch in the evening and Leno’s monologue at 11:35 pm. It is available to us in the theater and nightclubs, at the movies, on the radio, in CDs, and everywhere we look or

298 

Lawrence E. Mintz

listen. It mediates our thinking about and discourse concerning every aspect of our lives in profoundly important ways. Isn’t it funny that both humor and popular culture are often considered to be trivial, light, or insignificant? American humor: Suggestions for further study The study of humor and comedy is at least as old as Plato and Aristotle. Modern scholarship includes the perspectives of the social sciences – anthropology, sociology, communications, and psychology – as well as those of the humanities – history, literary and artistic criticism, rhetoric and linguistics. The literature includes theoretical discussion of what humor is and how it functions, historical and cultural analysis of what is funny for whom, when and where, and aesthetic appreciation of the art of comic communication. In recent years there have been professional associations, national and international conferences, journals and newsletters, and numerous publications, both books and scholarly articles, devoted to humor studies. These suggestions for further study are by no means advertised as definitive. Rather they are starting points, bibliographies, basic studies which frame various genres, topics, and approaches, and works which contain good summary of scholarship to-date and current thinking. Modern scholarship grows so geometrically that printed bibliographies are almost obsolete, at least as definitive accounts of the literature, as soon as they are printed. Indeed even the traditional index sources for periodical literature strain at serving their intended, original function. Computer databases for humor studies are attempting to address this problem by providing on-going collection of pertinent sources (so far with limited success, since even keeping up the data base is a slow and imperfect process). The International Society for Humor Studies, Humor: International Journal for Humor ­Research, and the Art Gliner Center for Humor Studies maintain web sites with bibliographic and other information helpful to the student. They can be accessed through links from: amst.umd.edu/humorcenter. Don Nilsen has also published a bibliography, Humor Scholarship: A Research Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. There are two journals of humor research, Humor: International Journal of Humor Research (associated with the International Society for Humor Studies) and Studies in American Humor (associated with the American Humor Studies Association), and two newsletters, one published in Humor and the other, edited by Cameron Nickels, separately published and available with a subscription to

Humor and popular culture 

299

Studies in American Humor. A basic volume of bibliographic essays covering American humor (literature, film, television, stand up comedy, comic strips, magazines, women, racial and ethnic humor, folklore, and political humor) is Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics, edited by Lawrence E. Mintz, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988. There are at least two encyclopedias of American humor, confined principally to literature, one published in the Dictionary of Literary Biography series, a two volume set edited by Stanley Trachtenberg, American Humorists: 1800–1950. Detroit: Gale Press, 1982, and the other, Encyclopedia of American Humorists, edited by Steven Gale for Garland Press, 1988. Alleen Nilsen and Don Nilsen have published their useful Encylopedia of 20th Century American Humor in 2000. There is a plethora of books dealing with humor theory, the majority of which are based in linguistics and/or psychology. Most of them, e.g. the books of John Morreall, Warren Shibles, and Jerry Palmer, begin with useful summaries of humor theory from Aristotle through Bergson and Hobbes to Freud and contemporary theorists. Perhaps the best place to begin looking at what humor is and how it has been studied is to use the two volume Handbook of Humor Research edited by Paul McGhee and Jeffrey Goldstein, published by Springer Verlag (New York) in 1983. There have been several books of humor theory published since the McGhee–Goldstein project, but none of them are really groundbreaking or revolutionary. The best overview of American humor is Hamlin Hill and Walter Blair’s America’s Humor: from Poor Richard to Doonesbury, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. One might also want to review Jesse Bier’s The Rise and Fall of American Humor. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968 and the essays collected by Arthur Dudden in American Humor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Another useful collection is by William Bedford Clark and W. Craig Turner, Critical Essays on American Humor. Boston, G. K. Hall, 1984. A good bibliographic essay is M. Thomas Inge’s “One Universal Priceless Trait: American Humor,” published in American Studies International, 25: 1 (1987), 28–45. A  very useful collection of essays on American humor, What’s So Funny?: Humor in American Culture is edited by Nancy Walker and published by SRI Press, 1997. Also see David E. E. Sloane, ed., New Directions in American Humor U. of Alabama, 1998, and Joe Boskin, The Humor Prism in 20th Century America, 1998. Humor in American literature is discussed thoroughly in all of the overviews, and, for that matter, in most studies of American literature itself. Don L. F. Nilsen’s bibliography, Humor in American Literature, New York: ­Garland Press, 1992, is indispensable. An excellent source is edited by Louis

300 

Lawrence E. Mintz

Rubin, Jr., The Comic Imagination in American Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983, and another is Sarah Blacher Cohen, ed., Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature. Urbana: U. of Illinois Press, 1978. Humor in American periodicals and magazines is chronicled by David E. E. Sloane in American Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987. The best scholarship on American comedy in film is by Gerald Mast, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Also of interest is Raymond Durgnat, The Crazy Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American Image. New York: Dell, 1972, and the collection of comedy film reviews edited by Stuart Byron and Elizabeth Weiss, Movie Comedy, New York: Penguin, 1977. Wes D. Gehring has given us a library shelf of books on film comedy, including a fine study of screwball comedy films and individual books on Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and several other important figures in the genre (published by Greenwood Press and Ball State University for the most part). There have been a number of encyclopedias and coffee table collections on the American comic strip, but the foremost American scholar who has written on the subject is M. Thomas Inge, in Comics as Culture, Oxford, Ms., and U. of Mississippi Press, 1990. There are, unfortunately, few books of value dealing with stand-up comedy. A few popular encyclopedias and biographical sketches are available, but the only book-length study of the art form is the limited and out of date (even in its updated edition) The Last Laugh by Phil Berger. New York: Limelight, 1977. John Limon, Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or Abjection in America. Also see Laurie Stone’s Laughing in the Dark, 1997. For television scholarship, a  popular survey history by Rick Mitz, The Great TV Sitcom Book, (New York: Perigee Books, 1983) is helpful, and a remarkable aid is Joel Eisner and David Krinsky, eds., Television Comedy Series: An Episode Guide to 153 TV Sitcoms in Syndication, Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 1984. David Marc’s two books on television comedy, Demographic Vistas (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania, 1984) and Comic Visions (Boston: Unwin and Hyman, 1989) are worth reading. Lots of new stuff out in articles. Folklore and Jokelore is the domain of several collections by Alan Dundes, see among others Cracking Jokes. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1987 and the collections of folk humor from the “paperwork empire.” Elliott Oring has produced several good studies of humor in folklore, including Jokes and Their Relations, Lexington, University of Kentucky, 1992.

Humor and popular culture 

301

Topical approaches to American humor include several important studies of women humorists including an anthology edited by Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner, Redressing the Balance: American Women’s Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s, Oxford, Ms., U. of Mississippi Press, 1988, Nancy Walker’s The Tradition of Women’s Humor in America, Huntington Beach, CA., American Studies Publishing Co., 1984, and A  Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture, Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1988. Also interesting are books by Regina Barreca including her edited collection, Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy, New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988 and her They Used to Call Me Snow White but I Drifted, New York: Viking, 1991. A recent bibliographic study is Linda Morris, American Women Humorists: Critical Essays, published in New York by Garland in 1994. On ethnic humor see the invaluable checklist and bibliographic essay by John Lowe, Theories of Ethnic Humor: How to enter Laughing, in American Quarterly, 38: 3, 1986 and Christie Davies’s book, Ethnic Humor Around the World: A Comparative Analysis, Bloomington, U. of ­Indiana Press, 1990. The best historical study of African American humor is by Mel Watkins, On the Real Side, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Joseph Boskin’s Humor and Social Change in Twentieth Century America, Boston: Trustees of the Boston Public Library, 1979, is an important work, and Arthur Dudden has contributed an important book on political humor, Pardon Us Mr. President: American Humor on Politics, New York: A. S. Barnes, 1988; Stephen Kercher, Revel With a Cause, 2008. Since the first international humor conference in 1976, a community of scholars studying humor from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, topical approaches, and genre examinations has flourished. The International Society for Humor Studies sponsors conferences every year, generally in the U.S. during odd years and abroad during the even years. Many of the conferences publish abstract volumes and maintain websites with program information. There is a bulletin board for members of the society to discuss research questions, and the above-mentioned web site with its links to its journal, and the American Humor Studies Association. Humor is being taken very ­seriously indeed!

Historical views of humor Amy Carrell

Throughout history, from the ancient philosophers and the Bible, from the earliest scribes to contemporary writers, from folk medicine to modern medicine, humor and laughter have elicited discussion. Viewed alternatively and sometimes simultaneously as healthy and devilish, humor and its physical manifestation laughter have long been the subject of discourse and debate, of business and pleasure, of entertainment and scorn. Recently, however, humor and laughter have become a focus of the health fields, both physical and psychological. This chapter traces the conceptualizations of humor and laughter from their early references in antiquity through the present day, highlighting and underscoring the importance of the social facets and functions of humor and laughter. So let us look first at the social nature of humor and then at some of the approaches to humor, from its earliest mentions to the present time, including an examination of some of the major theories of humor and inquiry into the universal human phenomenon we know as humor. Humor as a social activity As a social activity, humor has been examined by a number of theorists including, among others, Raskin, Apte, Freud, Greig, Viktoroff, Bergson, and Fry. Raskin, a linguist, acknowledges that “the scope and degree of mutual understanding in humor varies directly with the degree to which the participants share their social backgrounds” (1985: 16). Mahadev L. Apte, an anthropologist, discusses “joking relationships” (1985: 29–66), which he calls “patterned playful behavior that occurs between two individuals who recognize special kinship or other types of social bonds between them” (30–31). Apte’s description of the joke teller and the audience is much more interactional than Raskin’s as Apte’s emphasis is on “joking relationships.” According to Apte, “joking relationships [can] mark group identity and signal the inclusion or exclusion of a new individual” (1985: 56), and, consequently, that “joking relationships ... manifest a consciousness of group identity or solidarity” (1985: 66). Clearly, for Apte, then, it is upon recognition and

304 

Amy Carrell

acknowledgement by both the joke teller and the audience of the common ground between them (the “special kinship or other types of social bonds”) that the joke teller and his or her audience build their joking relationship. Apte’s discussion both illustrates and demonstrates the social nature of joking relationships from pre-literate to industrialized societies. Sigmund Freud describes the social nature of humor by enumerating six aspects that contribute to and accompany the humor event: (a) The most favorable condition of the production of comic pleasure is a generally cheerful mood in which one is “inclined to laugh.” ... (b) A similarly favorable effect is produced by an expectation of the comic, by being attuned to comic pleasure. (c) Unfavorable conditions for the comic arise from the kind of mental activity with which a particular person is occupied at the moment. (d) The opportunity for the release of comic pleasure disappears, too, if the attention is focused precisely on the comparison from which the comic may emerge. ... (e) The comic is greatly interfered with if the situation from which it ought to develop gives rise at the same time to a release of strong affect. ... (f) ... the generating of comic pleasure can be encouraged by any other accompanying circumstance. (1976 [1905], 282–285) In essence, Freud has, with his first five conditions, provided a  checklist, a sort of laundry list, for the humor event. The last of Freud’s conditions is virtually a wastebasket or catch-all category intended to account for everyand anything for which his preceding conditions do not or cannot account. John Y. T. Greig observes, “Nothing is laughable in itself: the laughable borrows its special quality from some persons or group of persons who happen to laugh at it” (1923: 71) and notes that the joke teller must “know a good deal about this person or group” (71) in order to make them laugh. Clearly, Greig’s contention about the social aspect of humor comes very close to my own theory, that a joke text is not inherently funny, that a joke text is not successful unless and until an audience finds it amusing. It is in this way that Greig underscores the integral nature of the role of the audience to the humor event, to humor itself. Like Greig, David Viktoroff acknowledges the importance of membership in social groups to the existence of humor. Viktoroff avers, “One never laughs alone – laughter is always the laughter of a particular social group” (1953: 14). For Viktoroff, then, one must be a member of a social group in order to laugh, to laugh within that group, or to elicit laughter from within that group.

Historical views of humor 

305

Viktoroff’s assertion of laughter, and therefore humor, as a communal, social event underscores the notion that humor is a  social activity, a  social phenomenon. Viktoroff seemingly views laughter as the end result of the humor event, proof positive that humor has been elicited in the audience, presumably by a joke or jokes put forth by a teller. So why, then, does he claim that laughing alone, or solitary laughter, is an impossibility? Certainly the joke teller can be part of the audience and frequently is the only or the original audience for a joke, as has been demonstrated above. Perhaps for Viktoroff, group membership supersedes humor. Henri Bergson dourly calls laughter and, therefore, humor a social “corrective...intended to humiliate” (1899: 187); directed against someone, laughter or humor “would fail ... if it bore the stamp of sympathy or kindness” (188). Thus, Bergson’s view of humor is very narrow and puritanical and falls squarely within the group of humor theories that view humor as based on aggression or malice, as we will see shortly. There is no interaction for Bergson; humor is one-sided: those who laugh and those who are laughed at, and it must be assumed that, for Bergson, those who are laughed at constitute the joke. In this way, Bergson is describing in-groups deriding someone or group outside that in-group. In this discussion, Bergson does not consider the relationship of the joke teller, he or she who has first noticed and noted the defect that needs to be corrected in the object of the laughter, to the others who find humor in the laughed at. Presumably, however, those who laugh – together at the object of the laughter – must share some sort of “social bonds,” to use Apte’s term, or “social backgrounds,” to use Raskin’s term, or be part of a “particular social group,” to use Viktoroff’s term, in order to laugh together at whom the humor is directed. William F. Fry has surveyed some of the views on the relationships between and among people involved in humor and touches upon several of these views: It has been suggested that humor embodies an attack by one individual on another. Laughter is then variously explained as resulting from feelings of superiority in attack or ... as representing a compensatory reaction to feelings of inferiority in battle. ... Some state that people can only smile and laugh together if they are feeling a deep love or affection for each other. Humor then seems to become a reaffirmation of “warm,” “positive” emotions. It is also presented that persons mutually involved in humor are covertly indulging in some illicit, forbidden behavior. This behavior is usually represented as being of a sexual nature. And there are other ideas about this interpersonal relationship, none of which have been demonstrated to be conclusive.  (1963: 31)

306 

Amy Carrell

Here Fry has provided a brief summary of some of the early research into the social nature of humor. In the first part, Fry echoes Bergson’s assertion that humor is based on aggression or malice. Fry then presents the anthropological view on joking relationships developed later by, among others, Apte. While these theorists do acknowledge, in one way or another, that humor is a social activity, they do not delve deep enough to show how or why. Historical views of humor Humor is a universal human phenomenon, bearing upon all aspects of human life, relationships, and interactions. But humor, as a term, is not easy to define. Harvey Mindess calls humor “a frame of mind, a manner of perceiving and experiencing life...a kind of outlook, a peculiar point of view, and one which has great therapeutic power” (1971: 21). Fry, a psychiatrist and humor researcher as well as a firm believer in the therapeutic power of humor (Fry and Savin 1988), calls humor “play” (1963: 138). While the definitions of humor abound and circle, like a wagon train, around the term, there is still no precise agreement on exactly what is meant by humor, and there may well never be. For some, humor is its physical manifestation, laughter; for others, humor is the comic, the funny, or the ludicrous. For still others, humor is synonymous with wit or comedy. And so the terminological fog abounds. Yet in spite of this lack of a precise definition, humor research has become serious business, attracting a diverse and growing corps of researchers and scholars who are nevertheless certain of the phenomenon which they investigate, the phenomenon of humor. So how has humor been perceived through the ages? Plato held that people laugh at others’ misfortunes (1975 [-4th], 45–49), and Aristotle, who used the term comedy, said that humor was “an imitation of men worse than the average; worse ... as regards ... the Ridiculous [“a mistake or deformity”], which is a  species of the Ugly” (1954 [-4th], 229). In addition, Aristotle called “people like satirists and writers of comedy ... a kind of evil speakers and tell-tales” (1975 [-4th], 109). Cicero concurred, restricting humor to the “unseemly or ugly” (1942 [-55], 373). Thomas Hobbes followed in these ancient footsteps by claiming, The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly: for men laugh at the follies

Historical views of humor 

307

of themselves past, when they come suddenly to remembrance, except they bring with them any present dishonour.  (1650: 46, emphasis in original; see also Hobbes, 1651: 45)

Nineteenth-century scholars and theorists were no less dour in their views of humor. Georg W. F. Hegel, for instance, called laughter “an expression of self-satisfied shrewdness” (1920 [1835], 302), and Alexander Bain held that “... in everything where a man can achieve a stroke of superiority, in surpassing or discomifiting a rival, is the disposition to laughter apparent” (1859: 153). Moreover, added Bain, “the occasion of the ludicrous is the degradation of some person or interest possessing dignity in circumstances that excite no other strong emotion” (1859: 248). Bergson also falls easily into this collection of humor theorists and theories, noting that “it is the trifling faults of our fellow-men that make us laugh” (1899: 149). In the twentieth century, this view of humor as rooted in disparagement, aggression, and malice has continued to thrive with William Hazlitt’s assertion that “[w]e laugh at absurdity ... at deformity... at mischief ... at what we do not believe ... to show our satisfaction with ourselves, or our contempt for those about us, or to conceal our envy or our ignorance. We laugh at fools, and at those who pretend to be wise – at extreme simplicity, awkwardness, hypocrisy, and affectation” (1903: 8–9), in other words, Cicero’s “unseemly or ugly.” Anthony M. Ludovici put forth an evolutionist’s claim that “all laughter is the expression of superior adaptation” (1932: 74). Commenting on Ludovici, Patricia Keith-Spiegel observes that for Ludovici, “[t]he greater the dignity of the victim, the greater the resulting amusement” (1972: 7). Albert Rapp (1951), also following in an evolutionary vein, posited a theory, based on hostility, of the evolution of humor. Dolf Zillmann and Joanne R. Cantor summarize this view of humor well when they assert, “[a]ppreciation [or humor] should be maximal when our friends humiliate our enemies and minimal when our enemies manage to get the upper hand over our friends” (1976: 100–101). Today, the Ancients’ grim views of humor and laughter can be seen in teasing. Verbal attacks, even if punctuated with “I was just joking” or “Can’t you take a  joke?” still deride, still hurt. According to psychologist Susan Forward, humor can frequently be used as a mask for verbal abuse, and if the abused, the audience, “complains, the abuser invariably accuses him or her of lacking a sense of humor. ‘She knows I’m only kidding,’ he’ll say, as if the victim of his abuse were a co-conspirator” (1989: 97).

308 

Amy Carrell

Also recall Fry’s observation that some claim that humor “embodies an attack by one individual on another” (1963: 31). When play mimics or takes on an aggressive or hostile nature, for instance, it is easily viewed as an evolution of that which had been described by the Ancients. Not everyone throughout history viewed humor and laughter so negatively. Some took a different approach to the subject of humor and laughter. In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant called wit “the play of thought” (1790: 176, emphasis in original). He asserted that laughter follows from something absurd and “is an affection arising from sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing” (1790: 177, emphasis in original). Kant continued, “the jest must contain something that is capable of deceiving for a moment” (1790: 179). In short, Kant located humor and laughter in incongruity. The key to Kant’s definition of laughter and wit, and therefore humor, is the word sudden. Were the transformation not sudden, but rather slowly built, and deceptive, there would be far less – and perhaps no – incongruity as the incongruity would have been resolved during the construction of the joke text or jest. After all, a joke “gotten,” that is, one which has “fired” for the audience, is generally far more enjoyable to an audience than a joke explained, though it is possible for an audience to judge humorous a joke that has been explained. A typical manifestation of Kant’s “sudden transformation” is the punch line of a joke text. According to Fry, the punch line is “a highly specialized article ... [which] presents a seemingly irrelevant idea, or it may seem incongruous with respect to the main body of the joke. Or it may seem to open up an entirely new trend of thought. Or the punch line may be an unexpectedly rational statement” (1963: 33–34). James C. Humes draws an analogy between joke texts and their punch lines and balloons: “you pump [a joke text] up with details and then puncture it with a punch line” (1975: 5). For Elliott Oring, the punch line “... triggers the perception of an appropriate incongruity ... [and] must bring about an abrupt cognitive reorganization in the listener” (1989: 351). And for Attardo and Raskin, the punch line is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the scripts necessary to interpret the joke text (1991: 308). For Arthur Schopenhauer, the cause of laughter and, therefore, humor is “simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through in some relation,” and the ensuing laughter is consequently “the expression of this incongruity” (1957 [1819], 76). James Beattie, writing more than two hundred years ago, ­observed,

Historical views of humor 

309

laughter [or humor] arises from the view of two or more inconsistent, unsuitable, or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as united in complex object or assemblage, or as acquiring a sort of mutual relation from the peculiar manner in which the mind takes notice of them.  (1776: 602)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, humor and laughter began to be seen as a  form of release or relief. Freud spoke of “the release of comic pleasure” (1976 [1905], 282) and believed that it was the release and the relief as well as the pleasure derived from them that were characteristic of and characterized all humor. Freud even went so far as to classify, or categorize, humor based on the particular kind of relief it elicited: “The pleasure in jokes has seemed...to arise from an economy in expenditure upon inhibition, the pleasure in the comic from an economy in expenditure upon ideation...and the pleasure of humor from an economy of expenditure upon feeling” (1976 [1905], 302, emphasis in original). For J. C. Gregory, writing two decades after Freud, relief was at the core of all humor: Relief...is written on the physical act of laughing and on the physiological accompaniments. It is written on the occasions of laughter and, more or less, plainly, on each of its varieties. A laughter of sheer relief may be the original source of all other laughters, which have spread from it like a sheaf. ... Relief is not the whole of laughter, though it is its root and fundamental plan. The discovery of sudden interruption through relaxation of effort merely begins the inquiry into laughter. But it does begin it, and no discussion of laughter that ignores relief or makes it of little account can hope to prosper.  (1924: 40)

A half-century after Freud, Martin Grotjahn, in the introduction to his book, Beyond Laughter (1957), asserts that laughter and, therefore, humor ... can be used to express an unending variety of emotions. It is based on guilt-free release of aggression, and any release makes us perhaps a little better and more capable of understanding one another, ourselves, and life. What is learned with laughter is learned well. Laughter gives freedom, and freedom gives laughter.  (1957, viii–ix)

Following in these footsteps is any discussion of the healthful and/or healing effects of humor, that is, therapeutic humor. Perhaps the most notable, and certainly one of the more prolific, proponents of the therapeutic uses of humor is Fry (1990; Fry and Stoft 1971; Fry and Allen 1975; Fry and Rader 1977; Fry and Salameh 1987; Fry and Savin 1988), who notes that accompa-

310 

Amy Carrell

nying what he calls “mirthful laughter” are “increases in arterial blood pressure” which are then “followed by pressure decreases below resting pressure levels” (Fry and Savin 1988: 49). Hence, Fry and Savin suggest “that this phenomenon contributes to physiologic survival by its enhancement of circulatory efficiency” (1988: 49). Humor research and major theories Having looked at historical perspectives of humor, it becomes easy to see that while theories of humor date back to the Ancients, including, as we have seen, Plato and Aristotle, and have been posited, examined, and developed throughout the intervening centuries (by, among others, Hobbes 1650, 1651; Schopenhauer 1819; Bain 1859; Bergson 1899; Freud 1905; Apte 1985, 1988; and Raskin 1985), humor theories and humor research have generally fallen into three main categories or classes of theories: cognitive/ perceptual or incongruity, social/ behavioral or disparagement, and psychoanalytical or release/relief. Keith-Spiegel lists eight categories – biological, instinct, and evolution; superiority; incongruity; surprise; ambivalence; release and relief; configurational; and psychoanalytic (1972: 4–13) – and includes an excellent, albeit brief, historical bibliography of humor research and theories, but her categories essentially conflate to these three major groups. Neutral to these theories and groups of theories are a  number of relatively recent theories: Raskin’s script-based semantic theory of humor (1985), Salvatore Attardo’s five-level model for the analysis of joke texts (1989), Attardo and Raskin’s General Theory of Verbal Humor (1991), Ruch, Attardo, and Raskin’s empirical support of the General Theory of Verbal Humor (1993), and my own Audience-Based Theory of Verbal Humor (1993; 1997a; 1997b). There are, of course, other types of research into humor which cannot be as easily taxonomized. Some of the more notable ventures include the empirical research into the physiological and psychological responses to humor (see, for instance, Ruch 1993b, a guest-edited special issue of HUMOR devoted to psychological humor research, and see below). Still other areas of humor research include examinations of gender differences in the appreciation of humor (see, for example, McGhee 1976b; Brodzinsky, Barnet, and Aiello 1981; Mundorf et al., 1988; Cox, Read, and Van Auken 1990; Van Giffen 1990; Lundell 1993; Derks, Kalland, and Etgen 1995; Ehrenberg 1995), humor in the workplace (see, for instance, Duncan 1982; Consalvo

Historical views of humor 

311

1989; Ramani and Varma 1989; Kushner 1990; Morreall 1991; Franzini and Haggerty 1994; Gibson 1994; Ehrenberg 1995; Unger 1996), children’s humor and children’s uses of humor (see, for example, McGhee 1974, 1976a, 1976b; McGhee and Chapman 1980; Masten 1986, 1989; Sherman 1988; McGhee and Panoutsopoulou 1990; Mowrer and D’Zamko 1990; Mowrer 1994; Holt and Willard-Holt 1995; Alves 1997), the therapeutic and healthful/healing powers of humor (see, for instance, Cousins 1979; Fry and Salameh 1987; Fry and Savin 1988; Haig 1988; Klein 1989; White and Camarena 1989; Lefcourt, Davidson-Katz, and Kueneman 1990; McGhee 1991; Martin et al., 1993; Gelkopf and Sigal 1995; Derks, et al., 1997; Ryan 1997), ethnic humor (see, for example, Bermant 1986; Ziv 1986, 1988, 1991; Bier 1988; Schutz 1989; Spencer 1989; Davies 1990a, 1990b, 1997; Epskamp 1993; Mbangwana 1993; Draitser 1994; Kazanevsky 1995; Fry 1997), cross-national and bilingual humor (see, for instance, Ruch 1991; Ruch, et al., 1991; Leeds 1992; Ruch and Forabosco 1996), and women’s humor (see, for example, Barreca 1988, 1991; Walker 1988; Walker and Dresner 1988; Kaufman 1991; Warren 1991; Radday 1995; Thorson and Powell 1996). Incongruity theories Incongruity-based theories, which virtually dominate contemporary psychological research into humor (Raskin 1985: 32–33), envision humor as the “linking of disparates” (Monro 1951: 248), “incorporating into one situation what belongs to another” (Monro 1951: 45). For Oring, “[h]umor depends upon the discernment of an appropriate incongruity” (1989: 349). According to John Morreall, the enjoyment of incongruity is uniquely human and sets human beings apart from other animals, who process incongruities as potential threats, which is, in Morreall’s words, “cognitively limiting” (1989: 12). Morreall claims that because human beings can both perceive and enjoy incongruity, humans have been able to view the world in “nonpractical ways” and therefore have been able to develop not only science but art (1989: 12). Perceiving and enjoying incongruity thus have facilitated, according to Morreall, the development of rational thinking, objectivity, and humor. Apte, whose approach to humor is, again, anthropological, anchors humor to culture, asserting that humor “is primarily the result of cultural perceptions, both individual and collective, of incongruity, exaggeration, distortion, and any unusual combinations of the cultural elements in external events” (1985: 16).

312 

Amy Carrell

Also included in incongruity-based theories of humor can be some of the theories about play, which Fry defines as “behavior which depends on the mutual recognition ... that that behavior (play) does not mean the same thing as does that behavior (fighting, etc.) which play represents” (1963: 125–126). Part of the incongruity in play, then, is that the behavior that play represents, as Fry points out, is clearly not the same behavior as that in which the participants are engaged; rather, it is simply an image of that particular behavior. Thomas R. Shultz (1976) claims two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution. Shultz’s stages constitute a traditional view of incongruity, for it is only after the incongruity is perceived by an observer that it can be resolved, and it is in the resolution of the incongruity that the perceiver, according to those who, like Shultz, subscribe to incongruity-based theories, finds the humor. For Shultz, then, humor is inherent in the incongruity – or, at least, in the resolution of the incongruity. Mary K. Rothbart and Diana Pien put forth the results of combining what they call “two categories of incongruity and two categories of resolution” (1977: 37). What can happen, they claim, are impossible or possible incongruity and complete or incomplete resolution. Given this taxonomy, Rothbart and Pien assert, cognitive aspects of humour would be seen as a function of (a) the number of resolved incongruous elements, (b) the number of incongruity elements remaining unresolved, (c) the degree of incongruity of each element, (d) the difficulty of resolution, and (e) the degree of resolution. Increases in the first three factors should lead to increases in humor appreciation, while the difficulty of resolution may be … related to humour (McGhee 1974).  (Rothbart and Pien, 1977: 38)

Incongruity-based theories thus concern themselves with the stimulus, that which the joke text is about. Essentially, incongruity-based theories of humor and those researchers, theorists, and scholars who espouse them locate the humor in the incongruity itself and then leave it to the audience to identify, perceive, and resolve the incongruity and find, as a result, the humor inherent in the incongruity. For the proponents of incongruity-based theories of humor, humor exists, irrespective of an audience, and failed joke texts, then, must be failures on the part of the audience to “get” the joke, to find the humor which must, according to these theories and those who espouse them, exist in the incongruity. This view of humor clearly places the burden of humor very definitely on the text of a joke. The audience exists only to identify, perceive, and resolve the incongruity that is already present in the text of the joke.

Historical views of humor 

313

Disparagement theories A  second class of humor theories, whose roots lie in classical Greek and Roman rhetorical theory, includes those theories of humor based on malice, hostility, derision, aggression, disparagement, and/or superiority. Included in this group are ethnic, racial, and “dumb” jokes. Scholars, theorists, and researchers who espouse theories of humor based on hostility or malice frequently cite the similarities in bodily positions between aggressive behavior, such as fighting, and laughter to substantiate their claims (Kallen 1911; Crile 1916; Ludovici 1932; Rapp 1947, 1949, 1951). Jerry M. Suls defines this group of humor theories as “based on the observation that we laugh at other people’s infirmities, particularly those of our enemies” (1977: 41) and easily include the views of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, Hegel, Bain, and Bergson cited above. Disparagement-, malice-, hostility-, derision-, aggression-, or superiority-based theories characterize the attitudes between the joke teller (or the joke’s persona) and the target of the joke text, which may or may not be the audience. But, cautions Keith-Spiegel, “[n]ot all theorists who include the element of superiority as part of humor believe that laughter is always contemptuous or scornful. Sympathy, congeniality, empathy, and geniality may be combined with the laughter of superiority” (1972: 7; also see Hunt 1846; Bain 1859; Carpenter 1922; McDougall 1922; Rapp 1949). In this way, those scholars, theorists, and researchers who espouse theories of humor based on superiority, aggression, or malice, for instance, may view or employ humor and laughter as the means by which to temper the aggression and aggressive behavior they examine. But the superiority, aggression, and malice nevertheless remain. Release/relief theories The third group of humor theories is comprised of the release/relief theories which perceive humor and laughter as a release of the tensions and inhibitions generated by societal constraints. Mindess, for instance, finds humor liberating and a source of vicarious living (1971: 38). Clearly, the text of the joke has to bear the burden of being the catalyst for the release and/or relief. Humor, then, must again be inherent in the text of the joke and thus presented to the audience. If the audience experiences any release or relief, the joke has been successful. If not, the joke has failed to fire.

314 

Amy Carrell

What is integral is the effect the joke text has on the audience. In this way, a non-firing joke is a failure on the part of the audience to interpret or perceive successfully or correctly the humor inherent in the text of a joke and, hence, to reap the benefit of successful joke interpretation, which is the release and/ or the relief. Script-based semantic theory of humor Neutral to these conceptualizations of humor is Raskin’s script-based semantic theory of humor (1985), which was the first linguistic-based theory of humor. Raskin’s theory posits that the text of a joke is always fully or in part compatible with two distinct scripts and that the two scripts are opposed to each other in a special way. ... The punchline triggers the switch from the one script to the other by making the hearer backtrack and realize that a different interpretation [of the joke] was possible from the very beginning.  (Attardo and Raskin, 1991: 308)

General theory of verbal humor In the revision of Raskin’s script-based semantic theory of humor, Attardo and Raskin collaborate to put forth a “General Theory of Verbal Humor” (GTVH) based on six knowledge resources, or KRs, “which inform the joke”: script opposition, logical mechanism, situation (which includes the audience), target, narrative strategy, and language. According to Attardo and Raskin, “each KR is a list or set of lists from which choices need to be made [by the joke teller] for use in the joke” (1991: 313). This new theory “incorporates, subsumes, and revises” (329) Raskin’s script-based semantic theory and Attardo’s five-level model but still concentrates virtually exclusively on the text of the joke. Audience-based theory of verbal humor The Audience-Based Theory of Verbal Humor is my own (1993) and posits, in short, that humor resides with the audience; and thus, nothing is inherently humorous, or funny. Some joke texts will succeed for one audience and fail

Historical views of humor 

315

to fire for another. Humor does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, it has four necessary constituents which make up the humor event: the joke teller, the joke text, and the audience all existing within a particular situation which contributes to each of the other three constituents in the humor event. It is important to note that the joke teller and audience can, in fact, be the same person or, in the case of two – or more – people, can alternate roles. No single constituent of the humor event is any more or less necessary – or important – than any other, and each is related to and dependent on the other three constituents. Because of the pervasive nature of the situation, however, and the significance of its contribution to each of the other constituents of the humor event, it is impossible to discuss situation as a discrete component of the humor event. In other words, the situation encompasses everything that occurs in, or is a part of, the humor event – including the individuals involved – by establishing the context for joking or, at least, for attempts at joking. Psychological inquiry into humor Humor has also been approached empirically by psychologists and physiologists, among others, through its physical manifestations. Willibald Ruch (1990) has verified smiling as the most frequent facial response to humor, and Mark Frank and Paul Ekman have empirically examined Ruch’s finding in terms of what they call enjoyment and nonenjoyment smiles by looking at a number of “markers of the enjoyment smile” (1993: 22). Mark Winkel (1993) has looked at humor through changes in pupil diameter, skin conductance, and heart rate, while Lambert Deckers, falling clearly in the incongruity camp, has developed a weight-judging paradigm (WJP) “to investigate the conditions necessary for incongruity, degree of incongruity, ... and detection of incongruity” (1993: 43). Peter Derks and Sanjay Arora have looked at the effect of the sequencing of cartoons in the perception of humor; that is, following the results of a study by Jeffrey Goldstein, Jerry Suls, and Susan Anthony (1972) who, according to Ruch, “demonstrated that the repetition of a joke theme makes this theme salient and that subsequent jokes are found funnier when the same theme is continued rather than alternated” (Ruch 1993a: 4), Derks and Arora have mixed what they have identified as sexual and innocent cartoons and have hypothesized that “by priming ­participants [in their study] with certain kinds of humor, it should be possible to pit various theories of humor appreciation against each other” (1993: 58).

316 

Amy Carrell

In Israel, Ofra Nevo and her colleagues have examined the relationship between humor and pain tolerance and found a positive relationship “between tolerance of pain and sense of humor, especially with the capacity to produce humor” (1993: 71). They also posit, based on the results of their study, that those subjects who perceived the film presented by the researchers as humorous tolerated more pain induced by the cold pressor test administered by the researchers, which suggests to the authors “that humor helps [in tolerating pain] only when perceived as such” (71). In Canada, Rod A. Martin and his colleagues have investigated the relationship between, as their title suggests, “humor, self-concept, coping with stress, and positive affect” (1993: 89). Their findings indicate that humor “may also play an important role in enhancing the enjoyment of positive life experiences” (89). Essentially, Martin and his colleagues confirm their hypothesis that humor does help to reduce stress and that humor has a positive effect on an individual’s outlook and health (see also Fry and Savin 1988; Cousins 1979; Lefcourt and Martin 1986; Martin 1989; Martin and Dobbin 1988; Martin and Lefcourt 1983; Kuiper and Martin 1993). Humorology, international conferences, the International Society for Humor Studies, and humor as big business In the lead article of the first issue of the only academic journal devoted entirely to humor scholarship, HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research), Apte observes, “[n]ot only does humor occur in all human cultures, it also pervades all aspects of human behavior, thinking, and sociocultural reality; it occurs in an infinite variety of forms and uses varied modalities” (1988: 7). It is because of this “infinite variety of forms and ... varied modalities” that the study of humor must be and is a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry. Its boundaries are indistinct and blurred by the many researchers and scholars who investigate and have investigated humor from a variety of different perspectives, many looking for and at very different aspects of the same subject. Most, if not all, humor scholars, theorists, and researchers come to and at the subject from different backgrounds, angles, and perspectives. Some seek to explicate the humor in particular works of literature (for instance, Ross 1989; Risden 1990; Greenfeld 1993; Takahashi 1994; Hopkins 1997) or the humor of a particular author or artist (for example, Meyerhofer 1988; Scott 1989; Tanner 1989; Barrett 1991; Batts 1992; Hallett 1992; Holcomb

Historical views of humor 

317

1992; Gehring 1993; Fisher 1995; Olson 1996). Others investigate humor by attempting to explain what is meant by a sense of humor and/or how to measure it (for instance, Mindess, et al., 1985; Raskin 1992; Ruch and Rath 1993; Ruch 1994; Craik, Lampert, and Nelson 1996; Köhler and Ruch 1996; Martin 1996; Ruch 1996; Ruch, Köhler, and van Thriel 1996; Svebak 1996), and still others look more broadly at the psychology of humor (see below). There are, of course, other areas of inquiry into humor research, some of which will be discussed and/or referenced below. The important point here, however, is that research into humor provides an enormous, fertile field of inquiry for scholars, theorists, and researchers. In the article cited above, Apte calls for the establishment of humorology as a discrete and distinct academic discipline and then looks at and suggests possible disciplinary boundaries in an effort to streamline and codify the field he calls humorology. Apte (1988) also examines the schizophrenic nature of research into humor and defines humorology, a term he claims to have coined in 1984, as “the study of the causes, nature – that is, form and substance – and functions of the phenomenon labeled humor” (1988: 9). It is no wonder, then, that this phenomenon – and attempts to define, classify, and explain it – has fascinated scholars since ancient times. In the past few decades, research into humor has become recognized as a valid area of inquiry, though the preponderance of humorologists, to use Apte’s term, have come to the field of humor research both through and from other disciplines. (Apte himself, for instance, is a linguist-turned-anthropologist-turned-humorologist.) In other words, humor research, as an organized field of inquiry, is still in its infancy. To date, but one degree has been granted in humor in the United States, and that at the undergraduate level. A decade ago, however, the University of Reading (England) instituted a Master of Arts degree under the direction of sociologist and humorologist Christie Davies (Nilsen 1990: 463–465). One early attempt to bring together humor scholars, theorists, and researchers as well as their work, which predates Apte’s (1988) article, was the commencement of the International Conferences on Humor, the first of which was held in Cardiff, Wales, in 1976 and was hosted by Antony Chapman and Hugh Foot. Three years later, Mindess hosted the Second International Conference on Humor in Los Angeles, and in 1982, Rufus Browning hosted the Third International Conference on Humor in Washington, D.C.; the Workshop Library World Humor (WLWH) and the American Humor ­Studies ­Association cohosted the Third Conference. Other International Conferences on Humor were held in Tel Aviv, Israel (1984, Avner Ziv), Cork, Ireland

318 

Amy Carrell

(1985, Des MacHale), and Tempe, Arizona (1987, Don L. F. Nilsen). (The International Conferences on Humor have since merged with the conferences of the International Society for Humor Studies.) In 1982, Don L. F. Nilsen organized a humor conference at Arizona State University as part of the Western Humor and Irony Movement (WHIM), an organization founded by Nilsen as an affiliate of the WLWH. Nilsen and his wife, Alleen Pace Nilsen, hosted annual WHIM conferences at Arizona State University from 1982 until 1987. The following year, in 1988, WHIM VII, the last of the WHIM conferences, was held at Purdue University and was hosted by Victor Raskin (Mintz 1988: 91–92). At the Seventh International Conference on Humor in Laie, Hawaii, in 1989, an organization called the International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS) was formed as an evolution, or perhaps mutation, of WHIM and has joined forces with the International Conferences on Humor. Since the inception of the organization, annual ISHS conferences have been held in Sheffield, England (1990), St. Catharines, Ontario (1991), Paris (1992, in conjunction with CORHUM, l’Association francais pour le developpement des researches sur le Comique, le Rire et l’Humour), Luxembourg (1993), Ithaca, New York (1994), Birmingham, England (1995), Sydney, Australia (1996), Edmond, Oklahoma (1997), Bergen, Norway (1998), Oakland, California (1999), and Osaka, Japan (2000). The 2001 conference will be held at the University of Maryland. Humor has also become big business. As the theoretical interest in humor has grown, so, too, has interest in the practical value of humor (Morreall 1991). Morreall has examined the veritable explosion of research into humor and the applications of that research to the workplace. He cites the fact that “[t]here are...dozens of humor consultants working with corporations, government agencies, hospitals, and schools” (1991: 359). Morreall also cites the successes of Joel Goodman and John Cleese (of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers fame); the former has presented programs on the importance of humor in the workplace to more than a quarter million people, and the latter has produced ninety training films (359). Most important, observes Morreall, is the fact that “[a]ll this interest in the value of humor in the workplace represents an important swing away from the traditional assessment of humor as frivolous and unproductive” (359). According to Morreall, humor belongs in the workplace because it promotes “health, mental flexibility, and smooth social relations” (359). Apparently, corporate executives and administrators agree. Clearly, the field of humor research is taking on a shape of its own. Membership in the ISHS is growing, and its conferences are well attended by

Historical views of humor 

319

humor scholars and researchers as well as humor practitioners and other “just interested” individuals. Submissions to HUMOR, distributed to every ISHS member as a benefit of membership in the organization, are growing, humor specialists are being sought out and hired by major corporations, hospitals, and schools all over the world, and Apte’s call for disciplinary boundaries is, at long last, being heard and heeded. Summary Since Apte’s (1988) call for legitimizing the field of humor research, forays into the area have expanded and multiplied. Humor research is being conducted all over the world, from the United States and Canada to Europe (for instance, Attardo and Chabanne 1992, and references there; Ruch 1990, 1991, 1993a, 1993b; Ruch, Ott, Accoce, and Bariaud 1991) to the Commonwealth of Independent States (for example, Zelvys 1990) to Israel (for instance, Rosenheim, Tecucianu, and Dimitrovsky 1989; Ziv 1986, 1988, 1991, and references there; Ziv and Gadish 1990; Tsur 1989; Elitzur 1990a, 1990b; Zajdman 1991; Nevo, Keinan, and Teshimovsky-Arditi 1993) to Australia (for example, Deren 1989) to Turkey (for instance, Karabas 1990) to Japan to Poland. Students of and researchers into humor are writing not only articles and books but dissertations (for instance, Attardo 1991; Carrell 1993) on various aspects of humor. Moreover, in addition to the ISHS, the Modern Language Association and the Speech Communication Association are devoting colloquia, symposia, and workshops to the phenomenon of humor, and new organizations are being formed, including, for instance, the Japan Society for Laughter and Humor Studies and the American Association for Therapeutic Humor.

Works cited Alves, Julio 1997

The thin end of the wedge: Jokes and the political socialization of children. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 10 (3): 301–331. Apte, Mahadev L. 1985 Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach. ­Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

320 

Amy Carrell

Apte, Mahadev L. 1988 Disciplinary boundaries in humorology: An anthropologist’s ruminations. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 1 (1): 5–25. Aristotle 4th c. De arte poetica. English translation: “Poetics.” In: Aristotle, Rhetoric. Poetics. New York: Random House, 1954, 219–266. Attardo, Salvatore 1989 A multiple-level analysis of jokes. Contributed section in Newsletter, HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 2 (4): 438–439. 1991 From linguistics to humor research and back: Applications of linguistics to humor and their implications for linguistic theory and methodology. Ph.D. dissertation, Purdue University. Attardo, Salvatore, and Jean-Charles Chabanne (eds.) 1992 Humor research east of the Atlantic. Special issue of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 5 (1/2). Attardo, Salvatore, and Victor Raskin 1991 Script theory revis(it)ed: Joke similarity and joke representation model. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 4 (3/4): 293–347. Bain, Alexander 1859 The Emotions and the Will. London: J. W. Parker. Barreca, Regina (ed.) 1988 Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy. New York: Gordon and Breach. Barreca, Regina 1991 They Used to Call Me Snow White ... But I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor. New York: Viking Penguin. Barrett, Tracy 1991 Cecco Angiolieri: A  medieval Italian humorist. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 4 (3/4): 349–358. Batts, John S. 1992 Amis abroad: American occasions for English humor. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 5 (3): 251–266. Beattie James 1776 An essay on laughter, and ludicrous composition. In his Essays, 583–​705. Edinburgh: William Creech. Reprinted: New York: Garland, 1971. Bergson, Henri 1899 Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique. Revue de Paris, February 1, February 15, and March 1 issues. English translation: “Laughter,” in: Wylie Sypher (ed.), Comedy, 59–190. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956.

Historical views of humor 

321

Bermant, Chaim 1986 What’s the Joke: A Study of Jewish Humor Through the Ages. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Bier, Jesse 1988 The problem of the Polish joke in derogatory American humor. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 1 (2): 135–​141. Brodzinsky, D. M., K. Barnet, and J. R. Aiello 1981 Sex of subject and gender identity as factors in humor appreciation. Sex Roles 7: 561–573. Carpenter, R. 1922 Laughter, a  glory in sanity. American Journal of Psychology 33: 419–422. Carrell, Amy Thomas 1993 Audience/community, situation, and language: A linguistic/rhetorical theory of verbal humor. Ph.D. dissertation, Purdue University. 1997a Humor communities. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 10 (1): 11–24. 1997b Joke competence and humor competence. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 10 (2): 173–185. Cicero 1942 De Oratore. English translation: On the Orator, Vol. 1, by E. W. Sutton & H. Rackham. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Books I & II. Consalvo, Carmine 1989 Humor in management: No laughing matter. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 2 (3): 285–297. Cousins, Norman 1979 Anatomy of an Illness. New York: Norton. 1989 Proving the power of laughter. Psychology Today 23: 22–25. Cox, Joe A., Raymond L. Read, and Philip M. Van Auken 1990 Male-female differences in communicating job-related humor: An exploratory study. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 3 (3): 287–295. Craik, Kenneth H., Martin D. Lampert, and Arvalea J. Nelson 1996 Sense of humor and styles of everyday humorous conduct. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 9 (3/4): 273–302. Crile, J. W. 1916 Man an Adaptive Mechanism. New York: Macmillan. Davies, Christie 1990 Ethnic Humor Around the World: A Comparative Analysis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1990b An explanation of Jewish jokes about Jewish women. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 3 (4): 363–378.

322 

Amy Carrell

Davies, Christie 1997 The Newfoundland joke: A Canadian phenomenon viewed in a comparative international perspective. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 10 (2): 137–164. Deckers, Lambert 1993 On the validity of a weight-judging paradigm for the study of humor. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (1): 43–56. Deren, Veronica 1989 Funny to some, not to others. An analysis of some adolescent responses to Australian humor. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 2 (1): 55–72. Derks, Peter, and Sanjay Arora 1993 Sex and salience in the appreciation of cartoon humor. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (1): 57–69. Derks, Peter, Lynn S. Gillikin, Debbie S. Bartholome-Rull, and Edward H. Bogart 1997 Laughter and electroencephalographic activity. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 10 (3): 285–300. Derks, Peter, Steve Kalland, and Mike Etgen 1995 The effect of joke type and audience response on the reaction to a joker: Replication and extension. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 8 (4): 327–227. Draitser, Emil 1994 Sociological aspects of the Russian Jewish jokes of the exodus. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 7 (3): 245–268. Duncan, Jack W. 1982 Humor in management: Prospects for administrative practice and research. Academy of Management Review 7: 136–142. Ehrenberg, Tamar 1995 Female differences in creation of humor relating to work. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 8 (4): 349–362. Elitzur, Avshalom C. 1990a Humor, play, and neurosis: The paradoxical power of confinement. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 3 (1): 17–35. 1990b Biomemesis: Humor, play, and neurosis as life mimicries. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 3 (2): 159–175. Epskamp, Kees P. 1993 The political exploitation of the clown figure in traditional and popular theater in Asia. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (3): 271–284. Fisher, Rhoda L. 1995 Leonardo da Vinci: Comic and practical joker. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 8 (1): 29–37.

Historical views of humor 

323

Forward, Susan 1989 Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life. New York: Bantam Books. Frank, Mark G., and Paul Ekman 1993 Not all smiles are created equal: The differences between enjoyment and nonenjoyment smiles. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (1): 9–26. Franzini, Louis R., and Susan Haggerty 1994 Humor assessment of corporate managers and humor seminar and personality students. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 7 (4): 341–350. Freud, Sigmund 1905 Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten. Leipzig/Vienna: Dueticke. English translation: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. New York: Penguin Books, 1976. Fry, William F., Jr. 1963 Sweet Madness: A Study of Humor. Palo Alto, CA: Pacific Books. 1990 The anatomy of mirth. Presented at “The Medicinal Muses,” conference sponsored by the National Library of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health, and the Research Center for Arts and Humanities. University of Maryland. April 23–24. 1997 Spanish humor: A  hypotheory, a  report on initiation of research. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 10 (2): 165–172. Fry, William F., Jr., and M. Allen 1975 Make ’Em Laugh. Palo Alto, CA: Science and Behavior Books. Fry, William F., Jr., and C. Rader 1977 The respiratory components of mirthful laughter. Journal of Biological Psychology 19: 39–50. Fry, William F., and Waleed A. Salameh (eds.) 1987 Handbook of Humor and Psychotherapy: Advances in the Clinical Use of Humor. Sarasota, FL: Professional Resource Exchange. Fry, William F., Jr., and William Savin 1988 Mirthful laughter and blood pressure. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 1 (1): 49–62. Fry, William F., Jr., and P. E. Stoft 1971 Mirth and oxygen saturation levels of peripheral blood. Psychotherapy, Psychosomatics 19: 76–84. Gehring, Wes 1993 ’Oh, why couldn’t it have been Robert?’ HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (3): 285–298.

324 

Amy Carrell

Gelkopf, Marc, and Marcia Sigal 1995 It is not enough to have them laugh: Hostility, anger, and humorcoping in schizophrenic patients. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 8 (3): 273–284. Gibson, Donald E. 1994 Humor consulting: Laughs for power and profit in organizations. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 7 (4): 403–428. Goldstein, Jeffrey, Jerry Suls, and Susan Anthony 1972 Enjoyment of specific types of humor content: Motivation or salience? In: Jeffrey H. Goldstein and Paul E. McGhee (eds.), The Psychology of Humor, 159–171. New York: Academic Press. Greenfeld, Anne 1993 Laughter and humor in Camus’s The Stranger, The Fall, and The renegade. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (4): 403–414. Gregory, J. C. 1924 The Nature of Laughter. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Greig, J. Y. T. 1923 The Psychology of Laughter and Comedy. New York: Dodd, Mead. Reprinted: New York: Cooper Square, 1969. Grotjahn, Martin 1957 Beyond Laughter. New York: McGraw-Hill. Gruner, Charles 1978 Understanding Laughter: The Workings of Wit and Humor. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Haig, Robin Andrew 1988 The Anatomy of Humor: Biopsychological and Therapeutic Perspectives. Springfield, IL: Charles Thomas. Hallett, Ronald A. 1992 Is the Parisian lady funny? Sexism and comique technique in Rabe­ lais. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 5 (4): 331–342. Hazlitt, William 1903 Letters on the English comic writers, Lecture I. “On wit and humour.” In: his Collected Works, Vol. 8, 5–30. London: Dent. Hegel, Georg W. F. 1835 Vorlesungen uber die Asthetik. Berlin: H. Glockner. English translation: The Philosophy of Fine Art. London: G. Bell, 1920, Vol. 4. Hobbes, Thomas 1650 Human Nature. Oxford: Fra: Bowman. Reprinted in: The English Works of Thomas Hobbes. London: John Bohn, 1840 4: 1–76.

Historical views of humor  1651

325

Leviathan. London: Crooke. Facsimile edition: Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909. Holcomb, Christopher 1992 Nodal humor in comic narrative: A semantic analysis of two stories by Twain and Wodehouse. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 5 (3): 233–250. Holt, Dan G., and Colleen Willard-Holt 1995 An exploration of the relationship between humor and giftedness in students. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 8 (3): 257–271. Hopkins, Chris 1997 Comic flexibility and the flux of modernity in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 10 (2): 207–218. Humes, James C. 1975 Podium Humor. New York: Harper and Row. Hunt, L. 1846 Wit and Humour. London: Smith, Elder and Co. Kallen, H. M. 1911 The aesthetic principle in comedy. American Journal of Psychology 22: 137–157. Kant, Immanuel 1790 Kritik der Urtreilskraft. Berlin: Lagarde. English translation: Critique of Judgment. New York: Hafner, 1951. Karabas, Seyfi 1990 Hairy Turkish cartoons. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 3 (2): 193–215. Kaufman, Gloria (ed.) 1991 In Stitches: A Patchwork of Feminist Humor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kazanevsky, Vladimir 1995 The history of the cartoon in the USSR. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 8 (2): 167–176. Keith-Spiegel, Patricia 1972 Early conceptions of humor: Varieties and issues. In: Jeffrey H. Goldstein and Paul E. McGhee (eds.), The Psychology of Humor, 3–39. New York: Academic Press. Klein, Allen 1989 The Healing Power of Humor: Techniques for Getting Through Loss, Setbacks, Upsets, Disappointments, Difficulties, Trials, Tribulations, and All That Not-So-Funny Stuff. Los Angeles: Tarcher.

326 

Amy Carrell

Köhler, Gabriele, and Willibald Ruch 1996 Sources of variance in current sense of humor inventories: How much substance, how much method variance? HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 9 (3/4): 363–397. Kuiper, Nicholas A., and Rod A. Martin 1993 Humor and self-concept. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (3): 251–270. Kushner, Malcolm 1990 The Light Touch: How to Use Humor for Business Success. New York: Simon and Schuster. Leeds, Christopher 1992 Bilingual Anglo-French humor: An analysis of the potential for humor based on the interlocking of the two languages. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 5 (1/2): 129–148. Lefcourt, Herbert M., Karina Davidson-Katz, and Karen Kueneman 1990 Humor and immune system functioning. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 3 (3): 305–321. Lefcourt, Herbert M., and Rod A. Martin 1986 Humor and Life Stress: Antidote to Adversity. New York: Springer Verlag. Ludovici, Anthony M. 1932 The Secret of Laughter. London: Constable Press. Lundell, Torborg 1993 An experiential exploration of why men and women laugh. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (3): 299–317. Martin, Rod A. 1989 Humor and the mastery of living: Using humor to cope with the daily stresses of growing up. In: Paul E. McGhee (ed.), Humor and Children’s Development: A Guide to Practical Applications, 135–154. New York: Haworth Press. 1996 The Situational Humor Response Questionnaire (SHRQ) and Coping Humor Scale (CHS): A decade of research findings. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 9 (3/4): 251–272. Martin, Rod A., and James P. Dobbin 1988 Sense of humor, hassles, and immunoglobin A: Evidence for a stress moderating effect of humor. International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine 18 (2): 93–105. Martin, Rod A., and Herbert M. Lefcourt 1983 Sense of humor as a moderator of the relation between stressors and moods. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45: 1313–​ 1324. Martin, Rod A., Nicholas A. Kuiper, L. Joan Olinger, and Kathryn A. Dance 1993 Humor, coping with stress, self-concept, and psychological well-

Historical views of humor 

327

being. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (1): 89–104.

Masten, Ann S. 1986 Humor and competence in school-aged children. Child Development 57: 461–473. 1989 Humor appreciation in children: Individual differences and response sets. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 2 (4): 365–384. Mbangwana, Paul 1993 Some instances of linguistic and literary resource in certain humorous Cameroonianisms. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (2): 195–222. McDougall, W. 1922 Why do we laugh? Scribners 71: 359–363. McGhee, Paul E. 1974 Cognitive mastery and children’s humor. Psychological Bulletin 81: 721–730. 1976a Children’s appreciation of humor: A test of the cognitive congruency principle. Child Development 47: 420–426. 1976b Sex differences in children’s humor. Journal of Communication 26: 176–189. 1991 The Laughter Remedy: Health, Healing, and the Amuse System. Self-published. McGhee, Paul E., and Antony J. Chapman (eds.) 1980 Children’s Humour. Chichester: Wiley. McGhee, Paul E., and Theodora Panoutsopoulou 1990 The role of cognitive factors in children’s metaphor and humor comprehension. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 3 (4): 379–402. Meyerhofer, Nicholas J. 1988 To laugh or not to laugh: Humor in the works of Thomas Bernhard. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 1 (3): 269–277. Mindess, Harvey 1971 Laughter and Liberation. Los Angeles: Nash. Mindess, Harvey, Carolyn Miller, Joy Turek, Amanda Bender, and Suzanne Corbin 1985 The Antioch Humor Test: Making Sense of Humor. New York: Avon. Mintz, Lawrence E. 1988 Newsletter. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 1 (1): 89–98. Monro, D. H. 1951 Argument of Laughter. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

328 

Amy Carrell

Morreall, John 1983 Taking Laughter Seriously. Albany: State University of New York Press. 1989 Enjoying incongruity. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 2 (1): 1–18. 1991 Humor and work. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 4 (3/4): 359–373. Morreall, John (ed.) 1987 The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Albany: State University of New York Press. Mowrer, Donald E. 1994 A case study of perceptual and acoustic features of an infant’s first laugh utterances. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 7 (2): 139–155. Mowrer, Donald, and Mary Elizabeth D’Zamko 1990 A comparison of humor and directive language in Head Start classrooms. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 3 (3): 297–304. Mundorf, Norbert, Azra Bhatia, Dolf Zillmann, Paul Lester, and Susan Robertson 1988 Gender differences in humor appreciation. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 1 (3): 231–243. Nevo, Ofra, Giora Keinan, and Mina Teshimovsky-Arditi 1993 Humor and pain tolerance. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (1): 71–88. Nilsen, Don L. F. (ed.) 1990 Newsletter. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 3 (4): 455–465. Olson, Kirby 1996 Bertie and Jeeves at the end of history: P. G. Wodehouse as political scientist. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 9 (1): 73–88. Oring, Elliott 1989 Between jokes and tales: On the nature of punch lines. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 2 (4): 349–364. Plato 1975 Philebus. English translation: Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1956 Phaedrus. English translation: W. C. Helmbold and W. G. Rabinowitz. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Radday, Yehuda 1995 Sex and women in Biblical narrative humor. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 8 (4): 363–384.

Historical views of humor 

329

Ramani, S., and V. S. R. D. Varma (eds.) 1989 Humour and Productivity: Effective Use of Humour for Higher Productivity in All Walks of Life. 2 vols. Pune, India: Vijaya and Venkat. Rapp, Albert 1947 Toward an eclectic and multilateral theory of laughter and humor. Journal of General Psychology 36: 207–219. 1949 A phylogenetic theory of wit and humor. Journal of Social Psychology 30: 81–96. 1951 The Origins of Wit and Humor. New York: Dutton. Raskin, Victor 1985 Semantic Mechanisms of Humor (Synthese Language Library 24). Dordrecht: Reidel. 1992 Meaning, truth, and the sense of humor. Presented at the 1992 annual meeting of the Speech Communication Association, Chicago. Risden, E. L. 1990 The Owl and the Nightingale: Post-modernist play and medieval stand-up comedy. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 3 (4): 403–413. Rosenheim, Eliyahu, Frederique Tecucianu, and Lilly Dimitrovsky 1989 Schizophrenics’ appreciation of humorous therapeutic interventions. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 2 (2): 141–152. Ross, Charles 1989 The grim humor of Spenser’s Faerie Queene: Women and laughter in a  Renaissance epic. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 2 (2): 153–164. Rothbart, Mary K., and Diana Pien 1977 Elephants and marshmallows: A theoretical synthesis of incongruity resolution and arousal theories. In: Antony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (eds.), It’s a Funny Thing, Humour, 37–40. Oxford: Pergamon. Ruch, Willibald 1990 Exhilaration: The emotional response to humor. Presented at the Eighth International Conference on Humor, Sheffield. Ruch, Willibald 1991 An appeal for a cross-cultural approach to a taxonomy of humour. Presented at the Ninth International Conference on Humour and Laughter, St. Catharines, Ontario. 1993a Current issues in psychological humor research: Introduction. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (1): 1–7. 1994 Temperament, Eysenck’s PEN system, and humor-related traits. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 7 (3): 209–​244.

330 

Amy Carrell

1996

Measurement approaches to the sense of humor: Introduction and overview. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 9 (3/4): 239–250. Ruch, Willibald (ed.) 1993b Current issues in psychological humor research. Special issue of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (1). Ruch, Willibald, Salvatore Attardo, and Victor Raskin 1993 Toward an empirical verification of the General Theory of Verbal Humor. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (2): 123–136. Ruch, Willibald, and Giovannantonio Forabosco 1996 A  cross-cultural study of humor appreciation: Italy and Germany. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 9 (1): 1–18. Ruch, Willibald, Gabriele Köhler, and Christoph van Thriel 1996 Assessing the ‘humorous temperament’: Construction of the facet and standard trait forms of the State-Trait-Cheerfulness-Inventory – STCI. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 9 (3/4): 303–339. Ruch, Willibald, Christiane Ott, Jeannine Accoce, and Françoise Bariaud 1991 Cross-national comparison of humor categories: France and Germany. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 4 (3/4): 391–414. Ruch, Willibald, and Sigrid Rath 1993 The nature of humor appreciation: Toward an integration of perception of stimulus properties and affective experience. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (4): 363–384. Ryan, Cynthia A. 1997 Reclaiming the body: The subversive possibilities of breast cancer humor. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 10 (2): 187–205. Schaeffer, Neil 1981 The Art of Laughter. New York: Columbia University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur 1819 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Vol. 1. Leipzig: Brockhaus. English translation: The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957. Schutz, Charles E. 1989 The sociability of ethnic jokes. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 2 (2): 165–177. Scott, Nina M. 1989 Rosario Castellanos: Demythification through laughter. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 2 (1): 19–30.

Historical views of humor 

331

Sherman, Lawrence W. 1988 Humor and social distance in elementary school children. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 1 (4): 389–404. Shultz, Thomas R. 1976 A cognitive-developmental analysis of humour. In: Tony Chapman and Hugh Foot (eds.), Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research, and Applications, 11–36. London: Wiley. Spencer, Gary 1989 An analysis of JAP-baiting humor on the college campus. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 2 (4): 329–348. Suls, Jerry M. 1977 Social Comparison Processes: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives. Washington: Hemisphere. Svebak, Sven 1996 The development of the Sense of Humor Questionnaire: From SHQ to SHQ-6. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research, Vol. 9: 3–4, pp. 341–361, Takahashi, Yumiko 1994 Mechanisms of the comic in Johannes Pauli’s Schimpf exempla. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 7 (3): 269–280. Tanner, Stephen L. 1989 E. B. White and the theory of humor. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 2 (1): 43–53. Thorson, James A., and F. C. Powell 1996 Women, aging, and sense of humor. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 9 (2): 169–186. Tsur, Reuven 1989 Horror jokes, black humor, and cognitive poetics. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 2 (3): 243–255. Unger, Lynette S. 1996 The potential for using humor in global advertising. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 9 (2): 143–168. Van Giffen, Katherine 1990 Influence of professor gender and perceived use of humor on course evaluations. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 3 (1): 65–73. Viktoroff, David 1953 Introduction a la psycho-sociologie du rire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Walker, Nancy 1988 A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

332 

Amy Carrell

Walker, Nancy, and Zita Dresner (eds.) 1988 Redressing the Balance: American Women’s Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Warren, Rosalind (ed.) 1991 Women’s Glib: A Collection of Women’s Humor. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press. White, Sabina, and Phame Camarena 1989 Laughter as a stress reducer in small groups. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 2 (1): 73–79. Winkel, Mark 1993 Autonomic differentiation of temporal components of sexist humor. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (1): 27–42. Zajdman, Anat 1991 Contextualization of canned jokes in discourse. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 4 (1): 23–40. Zelvys, V. I. 1990 Obscene humor: What the hell? HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 3 (3): 323–332. Zillmann, Dolf, and Joanne R. Cantor 1976 A disposition theory of humour and mirth. In: Tony Chapman and Hugh Foot (eds.), Humour and Laughter:Theory, Research and Applications, 93–115. London: Wiley. Ziv, Avner (ed.) 1986 Jewish Humor. Tel Aviv: Papyrus Publishing House. 1988 National Styles of Humor. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 1991 Jewish humor. Special issue of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 4 (2). Ziv, Avner, and Orit Gadish 1990 The disinhibiting effects of humor: Aggressive and affective responses. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 3 (3): 347–357.

Computational humor: Beyond the pun?1 Christian F. Hempelmann Introduction When Apple introduced OS 9 in 1999, it included many pioneering features, among them a speech recognition and generation system that could tell jokes. A child of its time, it is a very basic system that reacts to the recognition of the spoken command “computer, tell me a joke.” Whenever it does recognize the command – and as often in natural language processing (NLP) systems, the user almost has to relearn language to adapt to the computer’s menial abilities – it starts a punning knock-knock joke, guiding you through a simple dialogue. The following example from Apple’s joke teller is characteristic of most existing efforts at computational humor: It is strongly template-based, forces the user into very narrowly prescribed interaction, and uses punning wordplay as the spurious connector between two meanings, the main characteristic for a text to be a joke. (1)

You: Computer, tell me a joke. Computer: Knock, knock. You: Who’s there. Computer: Thistle. You: Thistle who? Computer: Thistle [This will] be my last knock knock joke.

Apple knew why they invested in this feature based on speech recognition, a classic NLP field: First and foremost, it gave their system a human touch, because when humans interact, they use humor for a  variety of important functions. Second, humor is a  more narrowly and easily circumscribable function than human language use at large, thus providing a more tractable engineering task: Teach the computer to create humor and it will be a step towards teaching it language use in general, and a step towards full languagebased human-computer interaction. Finally, an additional benefit of studying computational humor can be reaped for those interested in humor, as it requires formalization of humor’s key components in order to make them

334 

Christian F. Hempelmann

p­ alatable to the dumb machine: Teach the computer to create humor and it will be a step towards our understanding of humor. Computational linguistics Computational linguistics is the home discipline contributing to computational humor research, but psychology, linguistics, and humor research, oddly in that order, also furnish theories and methodologies. Computational linguistics, despite its name, is not linguistics applied with the help of computers. Despite its name, computational linguistics is often expressly antilinguistic in disciplinary background. When natural language is processed by computers, the systems to do so can be categorized with the help of two dimensions. The first of these, linguisticality, accounts for a general disciplinary split among the group of researchers working on human language with computer programs: On the one hand are those who use linguistic theories and formalize them sufficiently to be able to use them in programs, an approach sometimes called Computational Linguistics (CL) to distinguish it from the other approach of Natural Language Processing (NLP). This second, and until recently dominant, approach treats natural language like any other non-random collection of data and processes it with the help of statistical methods, as well as formalisms that work well on artificial languages. The first approach, based on linguistic theories, is commonly deemed not feasible by language statisticians and formalists, because of the multitude and irregularity of linguistic phenomena. Capturing these sufficiently, it is argued, would require too much effort. Their statistical and formalism-driven approach is the attempt to not have to do that work. Because of this rationale, their approach is fatally flawed by the necessary correlation of their performance with the degree to which natural language output is regular. This regularity is lower than the acceptance level of users of NLP systems. The irregular part of language output can only be captured when the underlying production and comprehension systems are modeled into an NLP system based on linguistic theories. A  second dimension, theoretically orthogonal to the first, but correlating to it because of similar psychological and disciplinary-philosophical issues, is the degree to which an NLP system is really (intended to be) doing something useful. Because statistical systems hit a  ceiling of performance below levels of user acceptability, they cannot be employed for a real task. Seemingly easy, they are stop-gap measures that don’t scale up2 and the non-

Computational humor: Beyond the pun? 

335

s­ calability is usually overlooked, because the systems are not implemented. So they are models of systems that would not be feasible to be built at a real scale, because the feeble materials they are built from could not bear the necessary loads. From this stems the prevalent culture in NLP of creating proofs-of-concept and toy applications in limited domains, as well as comparing these proofs-of-concept and toy applications. While they are comparable among each other, the performance data derived in that way have no meaning, because they don’t reflect performance in relation to an implementation. Humor can be a field for implementation of NLP systems, which need to be based on linguistic theories to perform at an acceptable level, but also on linguistic and other humor theories. When done in fully implemented fashion, it sits on a complete NLP system, but plays a role centrally at the following two interfaces between man and the machine: The computer may have to detect and analyze the humor in its input, produced by the human, and the computer may be required to create humor in its output for human consumption. Both types of computational humor should be based on humor theory and a model of humor, namely on theories of the humor competence that underlies both the interpretation and creation of humor performance.3 Ideally, one interdisciplinary theory or group of complementary theories brought into relation can serve as the fundaments for humor analysis as well as humor generation. Since Apple’s joke teller, progress has been achieved in computational humor, both in humor analysis and humor generation, but mostly in generation. The reason is that even an unsophisticated intelligence, human or artificial, can parrot a  dumb joke, because it doesn’t even have to understand it. But understanding humor is far harder, not least because it is often not signaled in interaction that a certain part of an exchange was intended to be humorous. Understanding is of course what analysis is based on, and the computer might be faced with quite clever humor when it interacts with a human without being able to dictate the course of the dialogue as much as in the knock-knock jokes introduced above. And this is a general principle in NLP: If your system can’t do natural language, force the user to use your version of an artificial language and make it feel like natural language as much as necessary. To introduce the field of computational humor in NLP, this chapter will first outline the general motivation for and provide an overview of existing humor generators and attempts at humor analysis systems. In the course of this I will discuss in some detail the humor-linguistics of the pun and related

336 

Christian F. Hempelmann

­ ordplay as the most frequent type of humor used in humor generation. Fiw nally, I will briefly propose an improved system based on ontological semantics and i­ntegrated into a full natural language generation system. Motivations for computational humor The rationale for and usefulness of the introduction of humor into NLP in general and into human–computer interface (HCI) design in particular has been argued for by Binsted (1995), Mulder and Nijholt (2002: 15–16), Nij­ holt (2002: 102), Raskin (1996: 12–14), Raskin (2002: 33–34), Raskin and Attardo (1994), and Stock and Strapparava (2002). Binsted claims that humor can help “make clarification queries [...] less repetitive, statements of ignorance more acceptable, and error messages less patronising” (Binsted 1995: n.p.), and, overall, make a computational agent seem more human. General ‘humanization’ of NL interfaces through adding humor capabilities to the computer side have been identified as the main field of application for computational humor. Morkes et al. show that users consider computer systems with humor “more likable and competent” (1999: 215), which leads to an enhancement of customer acceptance for such systems, for example in information assurance and security systems (Raskin 2002: 33–34). At a more general theoretical level, emotive – or affective – computing integrates theories of emotion into models of embodied computational agents (ECAs; Cassell et al. 2000, Luck et al. 2004) that interact with humans (Nijholt 2002, Nijholt et al. 2003, Nijholt 2005). Humor not only covers specific stimulus properties that are discussed in the majority of this chapter on the basis of linguistic theory (see also chapter 3). It also covers a range of emotional responses to such stimuli, as well as states and traits usually described with the concept of “sense of humor” (cf. chapter 2, Ruch 1998) that fall into the purview of psychological theories. Several research groups provide their HCI programs with such emotive components, aimed at both detecting emotions in human users and expressing emotions in a theory-based fashion in their computational interfaces. These interfaces started purely text-based in the good old ELIZA4 fashion, added spoken output and/or input, gave the agent a face, and, finally, full embodiment. Again the general rationale is to help computers interact with humans in a fashion resembling that of humans interacting with humans, namely through these anthropomorphic agents that are now given humorous capabilities.

Computational humor: Beyond the pun? 

337

Multimodal symbolic interaction between humans is modeled for the computers at two main levels: First, textual expressions will be the focus of the remainder of this chapter, and, second, facial expressions, including as of recently also gestural bodily expressions in general. Facial movements are best describable with the Facial Action Coding System (FACS; Ekman and Friesen 1978; Ekman 2002), although it has not generally been accepted in ECAs, where the face is often modeled as a  three-dimensional surface object, ignoring the underlying muscular structure that is the basis of FACS. The movie industry, on the other hand, has realized its potential and used it, e.g., in Shrek and Toy Story. This is a common issue: Theory-based (in this case anatomical) models are available, but cheaper existing models that inevitably will not scale up are used on an ad-hoc basis. Based on an anatomical analysis of facial action, FACS describes facial expressions and movements and in a second step relates them to emotions. FACS therefore is an ideal tool for research of the emotional responses to humor since it allows a  distinction among different smiles and laughs and to score basic parameters such as frequency, intensity, duration, or symmetry. It has been successfully applied to study the human emotional responses to humor before (see Ruch and Ekman 2001). On the generation side of computational linguistics, it can also be used to model the facial responses of embodied agents on the other end of the user-agent interaction (Bailly et al. 2003). Facial actions cannot strictly be distinguished from movements of the upper torso and tilting of the head. Such actions are common in laughter, as are other bodily gestures. Equally fine-grained systems as FACS are not available yet for bodily expressions, but under development (see, e.g., Pantic et al. 2006). Existing computational humor systems Two much-quoted first-generation systems of computational humor generation are LIBJOG (Raskin and Attardo 1994) and JAPE (Binsted and Ritchie 1994, 1997), implemented by Loehr (1996). JAPE’s joke analysis and production engine is merely a  punning riddle generator, as it is not based on a theory that would provide a basis for generation in the mathematical sense intended by Chomsky (1965), neutral to and possibly forming the basis for both perception and production. It is a  good example of a  limited-range application described above, based largely on ad-hoc decisions during its ­creation.

338 



Christian F. Hempelmann

For example, the JAPE-1 system uses the knowledge that

(2) (i) “cereal” IS-A “breakfast food” (ii) “murderer” IS-A “killer” (iii) “cereal” SOUNDS-LIKE “serial” (iv) “serial killer” is a meaningful phrase to produce the pun: (3)

Q: What do you get when you cross breakfast food with a murderer? A: A cereal killer.

LIBJOG is a  light-bulb joke generator based on a  template that explicitly associates a target group with a stereotypic trait and selects the appropriate modification of the same light-bulb-changing situation. LIBJOG was the first toy system of computational humor, loosely inspired by the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH; Attardo and Raskin 1991), which in turn is based on the Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH; Raskin 1985), but its authors were aware of its zero intelligence. The following is a template on which LIBJOG’s pseudogenerative power is based: 5 (4)

Polish Americans DUMB (activity_1 hold light bulb) (number_1 5) (activity_2 turn table) (number_2 4)

Raskin’s assessment that “each such lexicon entry is already a ready-made joke” (1996: 14) is a criticism that holds just as much for JAPE, and largely also for STANDUP, as we will see below, whose components are hardwired into “templates” and “schemas” so that the “generator” has no freedom or intelligence to make any choices, because, as Ritchie himself observes, “[t]he JAPE program has very little in the way of a theory underpinning it” (2001: 126). In fact, the main thrust of LIBJOG was to expose the inadequacy of such systems and to emphasize the need to integrate fully formalized large-scale knowledge resources in a scalable model of computational humor. The subsequent widespread emulation of LIBJOG’s lack of intelligence or insight with similar systems, such as JAPE or AUTEUR,6 developed by computer

Computational humor: Beyond the pun? 

339

scientists with little expertise or interest in either NLP or humor research, was a totally unexpected and unintended effect. Specific purposes for humor in HCI have been addressed by McDonough’s (2001) system for easier memorization of random passwords by associating them with a  funny jingle. The main problem with passwords is that users want passwords that are easy to remember, and passwords that are easy to remember are easy to guess by people other than their owners, also known as ‘the bad guys.’ Passwords that are existing words or names in any language can easily be remembered, but also be cracked by simply trying all words from a  machine-readable dictionary or by going through a  list of names. McDonough argues that in order for users to accept the safer passwords, like WDhpuD53, these should be made easier to remember. His method for that hinges on the assumption that humor facilitates memory and transforms passwords by assigning to each letter and number words that form a syntactically well-formed and funny jingle. For example, the password “WDhpuD53” might result in the mnemonic sentence, “Walesa Desired heston’s pole, while ulster Doubted FISCHER’s TEST.”7 Humor is attempted to be in the system based on contrasting, potentially incongruous, verb classes, one being positive and one negative, and the use of politicians’ names. Another system loosely based on the SSTH and designed towards an implementation is the HAHAcronym generator (Stock and Strapparava 2002). Using WordNet8 Domains, like Medicine or Linguistics, antonymy relations between the Domains, like Religion vs. Technology, as well as some several other supporting resources, they create funny interpretations for acronyms: MIT becomes “Mythical Institute of Theology.” Typically, WordNet is augmented for this project to the degree that its own contribution to the system becomes marginal, while the domain and antonymy relations created for HAHAcronym are the crucial components. Exploring largely the phonological component of a pun generation system, Hempelmann (2003) presents a formalized model for the complex phenomenon of punning, and heterophonic punning, at all levels of linguistic and humor-theoretical relevance. It started from the assumption of Optimality Theory (OT), but discards it largely in the process of setting up its own system, capturing the phonological component with a classic edit-distance model. The phonological analysis of possible puns for a given target – in most circumstances, “dime” can pun on the target “damn,” but not on the target “dune” – is automatized and refined as part of a generator. This method to evaluate and select phonologically possible and better imperfect puns can thus be integrated into larger natural language processing projects as a module to

340 

Christian F. Hempelmann

generate imperfect puns. A more detailed description of its next incarnation is part of the next two sections below. A similar, but deeper, meaning-based approach supported by humor-theoretic underpinnings is described by Taylor and Mazlack (2005), but is still in the conceptual stage. Further work on punning joke recognition by Taylor and Mazlack (2007a, b), based in part on Hempelmann (2003), takes that approach further toward implementation in the vein of a full-fledged semantic NLP system, similar to the one described below. Another recent system with a  specific purpose is the STANDUP 9 generator by Ritchie and colleagues (Binsted et al. 2006, Ritchie et al. 2006). It is based on JAPE and intended to interact with children who have complex communication needs. The idea is to improve their language abilities by having them use STANDUP to construct jokes, that is, work with language. Humor serves as a motivator intended to keep the users at the task. STANDUP is an improvement over JAPE because it has an application and increased resource size, but in terms of computational humor it is at the same level of sophistication. Further recent developments in computational humor have aimed to improve humor analysis, not generation, and are often limited-range implementations of general stochastic algorithms, typical for NLP. Mihalcea and Pulman (2007), continuing in the vein of Mihalcea and Strapparava (2005), exemplify this common approach in NLP as applied to humor: Find recurring patterns in the surface structure of a  text that correlate with underlying text properties, in order to classify texts as humorous or non-humorous on the basis of these patterns. In particular, Mihalcea and Pulman postulate that humorous texts frequently show words from classes that signify human-centric vocabulary (e.g., pronouns), use negations and negative polarity words (“wrong,” “error”), mention professional communities (lawyers, programmers) and negative human traits (“ignorance,” “lying”). Grouping these classes under Human Centeredness and Polarity Orientation, Mihalcea and Pulman then show that they can distinguish certain humorous texts from non-humorous texts on the basis of the occurrence of words from these classes. As usual in NLP research of this kind, no clear application is given, not least because the performance of the algorithms is too poorly to support an ­application. Tinholt and Nijholt (2007) present a more promising theory-based system that is a useful contribution to computational humor research. They focus on anaphoric ambiguity, where it is unclear which previously mentioned person a pronoun refers to, e.g. “The cops arrested the demonstrators because they

Computational humor: Beyond the pun? 

341

were violent.” Were the cops or the demonstrators violent? The problem they focus on is the distinction between humorous and non-humorous instances of anaphoric ambiguity. They based this distinction on the SSTH and find possible antecedents that are in a relation of opposition using the ConceptNet database. Here “demonstrators” are linked to the concept “rowdy” which is marked as an antonym to “orderly,” which in turn is a property of “cop.” While this is a theory-based scalable system, it suffers from low performance because it uses low-performing external components for anaphora resolution and concept analysis. Finally, while it is not computational humor in the sense discussed here, JESTER (Gupta and Goldberg. 1999), the application of the collaborative filtering system, EIGENTASTE (Goldberg et al. 2001), to humor should briefly be mentioned. Here, humor serves as a field of application for an algorithm that establishes preferences of users on the basis of their ratings of jokes from a  large database and the ratings of previous users (see http://shadow.ieor. berkeley.edu/humor/). For real results relevant to humor researchers, the accumulated data of the project should provide a gold mine, both for work on stimulus properties and on responses in relation to humor as trait dimensions. Puns in computational humor In almost all these applications introduced so far, humor was realized through verbal play, in particular punning. In verbal play, a text surface element carries the humor-relevant elements (not a logical, implied, etc., element). Puns are assumed to represent jokes and humor prototypically and provide a field of application for all subdisciplines of linguistics and are apparently a conveniently simple type to provide a paradigm analysis for humorous texts. But for puns as well, meaningful research is only possible with a sophisticated model, such as the one of the GTVH (see chapter 3), not least because puns are a very condensed type of textual humor. That is, while they have all necessary elements for a text to be funny – after all they’re considered humorous – these elements are carried by few textual units. So the seeming advantage can easily become a disadvantage, because many essential elements and mechanisms overlap in punning and are prone to be confused. Let’s highlight the relevant issues right away: The parts of the model most crucial for the present discussion are the two knowledge resources highest in the hierarchy of the GTVH, namely script opposition (SO) and logical mechanism (LM), maybe more appropriately called pseudo-logical mechanisms,

342 

Christian F. Hempelmann

since it is often not logical at all. In the following discussion, punning will be explained mainly in terms of these two parameters, which, in turn, will receive a more exact definition. One central and controversial assumption of the GTVH is that the LM can be conceptualized as a function of SO. I intend to show how this is indeed fruitful for puns, and very possibly for humorous texts in general. For this purpose it needs to be emphasized that the main hypothesis of the SSTH about SO encompasses both script overlap (SOv) and script oppositeness (SOp) as the necessary and sufficient requirement for a text to be a joke (cf. Raskin 1985: 99). But when the theory is quoted, exclusive attention is usually paid to script opposition, while overlap is, at the most, quietly understood to be involved. This dangerously shifted focus away from SOp, to the degree that it can easily be overlooked. According to the SSTH, the text itself must contain overlap, as part of it is compatible with both scripts, that is, they “coexist.” And in the GTHV, the LM is the (optional) function that playfully motivates this overlap, in the words of Attardo and Raskin (1991: 309): “SSTH would view them [LMs] essentially as a mere implementation of the script opposition,” or, more pointedly, “we can treat LM as the tool for SO” (1991: 324). In puns, SOv includes the punning word that triggers the LM, the dynamic cognitive process (cf. Attardo 1997: 409), which, in turn, playfully resolves the SOp. This, I claim here, is the sense in which the LM is the tool of the SO in puns, verbal humor in general, and possibly other humorous text. On the basis of this brief outline, let us now turn to the analysis of punning, where the crucial part of SOv is realized in an easily identifiable element of the text and for which the LM will be outlined and found to be less straightforward than usually assumed. The particular focus is on imperfect puns, where the relevant issues are more apparent than in perfect puns. Imperfect puns In imperfect punning, the target is a word, often only paradigmatically present in the text, while the pun is the actual or first occurring word that aims at this target. In the following example the target is “insane” and the pun “in Seine.” (5)

Those who jump off a Paris bridge are in Seine. (www.punoftheday.com)

Computational humor: Beyond the pun? 

343

Perfect punning is understood as the special case of the pun-target relation where the pun and the target surface as identical units. This represents one end of the spectrum from homophony (sound identity) to the highest tolerable heterophony (sound difference). As an illustration, the same example can be used, when we assume a speaker who does not attempt a French pronunciation of “Seine,” so that it sounds identical to “sane.” A straightforward observation is that a pun and the target it is punning on are similar in sound, thus creating an overlap. But the multiple purpose of this sound similarity and its interaction with the requirements of the text to be a joke, as well as the faulty reasoning that underlies it, are far from simple. This section will briefly outline the relevant results of Hempelmann (2003) as an attempt to address the former two of these issues, while the following section will address the faulty reasoning, that is, the LM, before we can return to the theoretical discussion in the final section. The following hypothesis claims two closely related functions for the sound similarity in imperfect punning: (6) A target and its pun cannot be arbitrarily different in sound because their similarity has two functions, namely a. the phonological support for recovering the target from the pun, and b. representing a crucial part of the overlap (SOv) that also plays a role in the LM of cratylistic logic (see (9) below). My original study focused centrally on the complicating phonological issue (6a) and how it interacts with other factors that facilitate the recovery of the target. In the following example, with respect to hypothesis (6a) the target “pearly” is sufficiently similar in sound to be recoverably from the pun “curly” to evoke the latter, while the idiomatic force of the collocation “Pearly Gates” aids this recovery substantially. (7)

Labia majora: the curly gates. pun: curly → target: pearly (Crosbie 1977: 60)

Further down, we will briefly introduce the important cratylism LM (9) in order to focus on the antagonistic relation of the factors in (6) and another necessary element of puns, imperfect as well as perfect ones, taken straight from the SSTH:

344 

Christian F. Hempelmann

(8) For puns to be humorous texts, puns must have script opposition (SOp), such that the pun is compatible with one script that is in an opposition relation to the other compatible with – and often triggered by – the target. Before we can illustrate the interaction of SOp/SOv, and LM on the example of its partial failure in bad puns, let us now turn to the double analogy of the cratylism LM (9). The LM of punning: Cratylistic syllogism In a much-quoted passage, Coleridge identified the two key elements of poetry as “a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (1907 (1817): 169; my emphasis). Accordingly, I would like to suggest that for a text to be a joke as a specific type of poetry, i.e., aesthetic text, we need not only specific types of oppositeness, which may well be what makes it of human interest for us (cf. Raskin 1985: 113). But to reconcile this incongruity at least playfully, make it spuriously appropriate (Oring 2003), so as to facilitate the suspension Coleridge speaks of for poetic text in general, as well as to accept a relation between the incongruous concepts, the joke needs the LM that seemingly bridges that unbridgeable gap between them. And it needs this dynamic cognitive process in addition to and, at least in the case of puns, triggered by the static SOv that is part of the text. The local logic of punning functions on the basis of obviously erroneous reasoning in two steps: first, sound symbolism as a motivated relationship between a word’s meaning and its sound, and second, the assumption that this motivated relationship works across sound similarity between two words. The following paralinguistic syllogism summarizes the faulty logic: (9)

Major premise: If meaning motivates sound [cratylism],10 Minor premise: and in two words the sound is identical (similar), Conclusion: then the meaning of the two words must be related (identical/similar).

This syllogism based on cratylism clearly requires a “momentary suspension of disbelief,” that is, faulty logic, albeit of such pervasive power that

Computational humor: Beyond the pun? 

345

we encounter it in many contexts that are not at all perceived to be playful or humorous, but in which statements implicitly involving this kind of reasoning are taken at face value. This includes religion (e.g., Exodus 20: 7)11 and magic, prominently name taboos, but also kabalistic and similar exegetic exercises, folk etymology and the etymological fallacy, as well as, more straightforwardly, onomatopoeia (for references, see Hempelmann 2003, Attardo 1994: ch. 4). Of course, the exact opposite position, the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign in which the signifier (sound sequence) is related to the signified (mental concept) not through cratylistic motivation, but systematically and conventionally only within the structure of a particular language, is the canonical assumption, most famously treated in Saussure (1983 (1916): 67–69). Pseudopunning Wordplay: de dicto without de re? On the basis of the discussion in the previous sections, we are now in a position to reconsider the feebleness – and often plain non-humorousness – of what is called a “bad pun” in general non-technical use. This application will serve to illustrate and clarify the relation of SO and LM, in particular SOv and LM (see also Attardo et al. 2002), as well as the difference between verbal and referential humor. Raskin claims that the script overlap of these bad jokes is triggered by the quasi-ambiguity based “on purely phonetical and not semantical relations between words” (1985: 116). I agree that in bad puns – in German called Kalauer, and in French calembour – the incongruity (SOp) is achieved through the phonological overlap in the text (SOv). Yet, crucially, this sound similarity alone cannot create the LM required by non-absurd, non-nonsensical humor, so that a  text lacking the playful resolution of the SOp created by the LM will be mere wordplay rather than humor. In short, the phonological overlap in punning (part of the SOv) can initiate the cratylistic reasoning (LM), but without the appropriate constellation (SOp), no scripts that may be overlapping can be identified, so that the text remains too weak to constitute a joke, as in the following example: (10) Knock Knock. Who’s there? Cantaloupe. Cantaloupe who? Can’t elope tonight – Dad’s got the car. (from Pepicello and Weisberg 1983: 67) cantaloupe → can’t elope

346 

Christian F. Hempelmann

The only SOp that this text could be conceived of carrying is that of a metajoke (cf. Attardo 2001), not local antonymy of cantaloupe and the inability to elope can be found. In sum, if a pun in a text is too different in sound from the target to fulfill function (6a), the punning joke fails completely, no humor is created, the text is not a joke, and, if the attempt to joke has been detected, the teller will probably be prompted to supply additional explanations to make the target recoverable. But if the pun and target are sufficiently similar in sound for the latter to be recovered, the text may be perceived as a joke. But more crucially, two scripts triggered by the pun-target pair (SOv) may still lack opposition, so that the SOp requirement (8) is not fulfilled, and the cratylistic analogy will not function. Accordingly, in humorous punning, in addition to the overlap in sound of the pun-target segment, there needs to be semantic opposition, if of the feeblest kind imaginable, to support the cratylistic LM. Otherwise the punning text will not be a joke. For those who fail to see the overlap, it indeed isn’t a joke, but merely wordplay.12 And given that humans are desperately good disambiguators with vast semantic networks available to them, as well as excellent pragmatic interpreters, we seek any kind of semantic overlap to be able to handle the phonological (quasi-)ambiguity as humor, even if mere wordplay was intended. What adds to the confusion is that non-humorous wordplay, like rhyming, can be enjoyed aesthetically, and this enjoyment can be confused with the enjoyment derived from humor. In sum, punning includes “word play,” but play with words cannot work at the sound level alone as mere “Klangspiel” (play with sounds), if it strives to be humor as well. But it must be accompanied by “Sinnspiel” (play with meaning; cf. Hausmann 1974: 20) in order for the pun’s weak cratylistic LM to support the opposite overlapping script constellation that would make it a joke. The near failure of this latter requirement, that is, the belief on the part of a joker that he or she can get away with pure “Klangspiel” is what earns bad puns a pariah status in the family of jokes. Summary This section has presented a formal model for the complex phenomenon of punning, in particular imperfect punning, on all levels of linguistic and humortheoretical relevance for the discussion of script opposition, script overlap, logical mechanism, and, on that basis, the distinction of verbal and referen-

Computational humor: Beyond the pun? 

347

tial humor. I hope to have been able to show that the punning LM, employed for its seeming simplicity in most approaches to computational humor, is not as simple as is often assumed. This holds, in particular, for its relation to the crucial requirements of the script overlap and opposition. While my task was relatively straightforward for puns, I hope it can be a start for extrapolation of the results for other types of verbal humor, which will thus become usable in computational humor, because we have formalized our understanding of them on a theoretical basis. Implementing computational humor in a full-fledged NLP system Ontological semantics In this last section, I will outline a semantic approach to NLP, already integrated into humor research in its first large application, fully taking the use of punning in computational humor to the next level, that of meaning. Meaning has a sad history of having scared researchers in NLP into declaring it an impossibly difficult problem. A  major problem, first pointed out by Bar-Hillel (1960) in his assessment of the first generation of machinetranslation systems, is that humans use their massive knowledge of how the world works, when they make sense of language, and machines don’t have such knowledge. The two clauses in example (11) make no sense, unless we know at least the following: that for humans to go bowling means that they have to rent shoes and shoes are what humans wear on their feet and feet is also where fungal diseases can take a foothold and such pedal fungal diseases can be transmitted through shared footwear. (11) I don’t like bowling, because I’m afraid of athlete’s foot. Humans also use their knowledge of the specific circumstances under which language is used, who is talking to whom, what knowledge they share, what has been talked about just before, etc. But the main resource that a machine lacks for understanding natural language is a  model of the world. Such a model is called an ontology, and to formalize all that knowledge as it is used in language is indeed a daring task. Ontological semantics, the continuation of script-based semantics, the theory Raskin illustrated by applying it to humor in the SSTH (1985), has accepted that challenge. Developed from the early 1980s as a  school of

348 

Christian F. Hempelmann

c­ omputational semantics, ontological semantics (Nirenburg and Raskin 2004) has developed the following resources, all of which are currently being expanded: • a 6000-concept language-independent ontology; • several ontology-based lexicons, including a 60,000-entry English lexicon with 100,000 senses; • a bunch of onomastica, dictionaries of proper names for a number of languages; • a text-meaning representation (TMR) language, an ontology-based knowledge-representation language for natural language meaning; • a fact repository, containing the growing number of implemented and remembered TMRs; • a preprocessor analyzing the pre-semantic information; • an analyzer transforming text into TMRs; • a generator translating TMRs into text. An ontological semantic NLP system represents input text as a  complex TMR – initially, one for each clause. Thus, starting to analyze a sentence, the system uses morphological information, syntactic information, and lexical entries based on ontological concepts to arrive finally at a (much simplified) TMR (see Fig. 1). Meaning representation in TMRs is sufficiently rich for the purposes of computational humor (see Nirenburg and Raskin 2004: ch. 6). For the purpose of humor analysis and generation, the ontology centrally has to be augmented by lexicon enhancement to include humorous stereotypes. as used in Attardo and Raskin (1994) and suggested by Raskin (1996). A complementary approach is the effort to develop the possibility to include complex concepts into the ontology (cf. Raskin et al. 2003), in order to finally be able to make full use of the semantic theory of humor based on scripts, as described in Raskin (1985). In the following subsection, we will explain on a full example how this integration is achieved. The necessary components of the integrated system will be described and it will be pointed out, which ones have already been developed and which are desiderata. On the basis of the humor theory adopted, the focus here will be the role of scripts and the oppositeness relations between them. The general semantic/pragmatic framework for a  computational humor system, including its status as part of a general NLP system able to detect humor and switch to its appropriate non-bona fide mode of communication, and accounting for humor analysis as well as generation have been formulated by Raskin and Attardo (1994). Raskin (2002) reports the progress in this

Computational humor: Beyond the pun? 

349

direction. The rationale is still “that only the most complex linguistic structures can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well” (Raskin 1996: 17). Toy systems don’t produce useful output. Semantic enablement of computer humor understanding The legacy implementation of ontological semantics automatically produces the Text-Meaning-Representation in (12) for the joke in Figure 1. (12) request-info-1 agent gender has-social-role beneficiary gender age attraction-attribute marital-status beneficiary theme theme gender

value human-1 value male value patient value human-2 value female value <.5 value >.5 value married value human-3 value location-of value human-3 value male

A text can be characterized as a single-joke-carrying text if both of the conditions are satisfied: (i) the text is compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts [overlap]; (ii) the two scripts are opposite [oppositeness]. The old example: “Is the doctor at home?” the patient asked in his bronchioal whisper . “No”, the doctor’s young and pretty wife whispered whispered in reply. “Come right in.” Figure 1.  Joke sample and main hypothesis (cf. Raskin 1985)

Script 1 PATIENT

Script 2 LOVER

350 

Christian F. Hempelmann

marital-status value married beneficiary value human-2 has-social-role value doctor instrument value natural-language loudness value <.3 time-begin unknown time-end < deny-1.time-begin deny-1 agent beneficiary theme theme time-begin time-end invite-1 agent beneficiary location owned-by time-begin time-end set-1 element-type elements

value human-2 value human-1 value location-of value human-3 > request-info-1.time-end < invite-1.time-begin value human-2 value human-1 value dwelling-1 value set-1 > deny-1.time-end unknown human (human-2, human-3)

The current implementations of ontological semantics no longer ignore the property of effect, which was largely redundant in machine translations. It will, therefore, note that the patient’s cue has the effect given in (13), while the doctor’s wife’s cue will not. (13) examine   agent doctor   beneficiary patient Thus, the first half of the joke, the setup, puts forward a doctor script, specifying the typical events and objects involved in the training and career of a medical professional, while the second part, the punchline, disconfirms it.

Computational humor: Beyond the pun? 

351

This will alert the system to the need to search for an alternative script that will, like the first script, embrace part of the text and will have some compatibility with the other part. The second script will be adultery given in (14): (14) adultery is-a value sex-event agent value set-1 has-parts value sex-event agent value human-1 marital-status value married beneficiary not human-2 human-2 marital-status value unmarried married beneficiary not human-1 set-1 element-type value human elements value (human-1, human-2) which includes the subscript sex, and a  sex/no-sex opposition will be recorded. This opposition is recognized as part of the set of oppositions with humorous potential, first proposed by Raskin as the “few binary categories which are essential to human life” (1985: 113f, see (15)) and included into the ontology as relations under the property grouping: (15)

real good live sex money high stature

vs. unreal vs. bad vs. death vs. no sex vs. no money vs. low stature

These oppositeness relations have as daughter nodes a number of more specific relations, e.g., under good/bad we find feces/no feces, while high stature/low stature subsumes religion/no religion (see below) and authority/no authority. A  previous implementation (Hempelmann 2004a) focused on the integration of a phonological punning component into an ontological semantic

352 

Christian F. Hempelmann

humor system. Taken from this approach, the following reverse-engineered example (16) illustrates the further integration of these components towards a humor generation system. (16) What did the egg say in the monastery? Out of the frying pan, into the friar. As we have shown above, the two central elements of a joke are the script opposition (SO) and the related logical mechanism (LM), masking the tenuousness of the necessary script overlap’s false logic (Hempelmann 2004b, Hempelmann and Attardo, forthcoming). To generate a text with these necessary and sufficient qualities for it to be a joke, we have to describe how those two elements are arrived at by the computational humor system in the way described above. The script-switch trigger in our example of an imperfect pun is “friar” and the similar sounding target “fire.” Beyond the sound similarity of these two, the recovery of the target is, of course, aided by the proverb “out of the frying pan, into the fire.” The identification of this similarity will be the task of a phonological component (“Ynperfect Pun Selector,” YPS) described in (Hempelmann 2004a). The SO of this text is that between one script monastery involving the concept monk that is selected as a in a high-stature – low stature (religion – no religion) relation to the other script food-preparation, including the concept fire. If we assume the system has detected the target word “fire” in an input text produced by a human, it is able to produce the output in example (16). Following the outlined mechanism it will have to work as shown in Figure 2. First, the target “fire” will be identified as the lexical entry fire that is mapped onto the concept labeled fire. Among other scripts, fire will be found to be part of the script food-preparation, or, more specifically, one of its possible instruments. From its set of humorous oppositeness relations, the system will choose, inter alia, high/low stature for which it finds that food-preparation is in this relation to monastery, a relation that both concepts have inherited from parent nodes. For the latter the system will select all its slot-filler concepts, including pray, monk, preach. As the final task for the ontological semantic component of the system, all words in the lexicon of the target language are mapped onto all the concepts of all scripts that have to be marked to be in one of the relations described in the previous section. This is the candidate set P that is passed on to the phonological module. This will now evaluate the sound similarity of the

Computational humor: Beyond the pun? 

353

Figure 2.  Flow chart for pun generation based on ontological semantics

phonological representation of all candidates from P against the phonological representation of the target “fire.” The selected optimal candidate will be the output of the system, given as the lexical entry “friar.” This will form the basis of the full joke text generation. Summary This section showed how ontological semantics computes TMRs, full and close to human understanding. This understanding is directly usable in humor comprehension. Independently of computational humor, ontological semantics has moved to keeping tab of effects and goals as well as to the use of complex events, or scripts. Detecting a script opposition is also necessary for various other current implementations, including semantic forensics (Raskin et al. 2004). So, just as the SSTH predicted back in 1985, the only uniquely humor-related extension of ontological semantics is the addition of a tiny new resource – the list of standard script oppositions. Further improvements of generative and analytical power will be achieved by integrating the current research on the more complex issue of LMs besides the straightforward cratylistic analogy of punning described here.

354 

Christian F. Hempelmann

With this fully integratable, knowledge-based approach, we are in a position to analyze and generate humor, one example of this also having been outlined in the previous section, not just as built into a limited number of templates, but on the basis of the substantial resources that ontological semantics has accumulated. This enables us to create humor that is not only intended, but also appropriate to the current topic of human-computer interaction, more sophisticated, and thus perceived to be funnier than that attainable by previous systems. It certainly brings us closer to modeling the human capacity for generating situational humor by detecting any two of the three necessary elements, viz., two scripts which have to be in an opposition relation, and the trigger (punchline) and providing the third (Raskin 1985: 114). Conclusion Much of the material that I  have based this introduction to computational humor on has been elicited by and presented at a small number of influential events, namely two Twente Workshops on Language Technology (Hulstijn and Nijholt 1996; Stock et al. 2002), and a workshop on humor modeling in the interface at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems at the meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery (Nijholt et al. 2003). A more recent collection of articles with little new content was published in IEEE (Binsted et al. 2006). It presents updates of the short-range non-scalable implementations and types of applications surveyed above, as well as notational variants of the knowledge-based systems introduced in the last section of this chapter, both without or only limited resources. This, as well as the restricted number of researchers cited in this chapter, shows that the field of computational humor is small and underdeveloped. All the more encouraging are the interdisciplinary efforts that show promise in bringing together fields of research towards applications of humor theory. Computational implementations of theories for real applications are an excellent test bed for the maturity and usefulness of these theories. As mentioned above, if you have to formalize an issue, while maintaining descriptive adequacy, that is, doing justice to the complexity of the issue and not forcing it into the corset of your pet methodology, you must have a good understanding of the issue: a  theory. Symptomatically, much of what statistics-based NLP has produced in terms of systems does not meet these criteria and is, not surprisingly, not used for any real purpose. Computational humor has suf-

Computational humor: Beyond the pun? 

355

fered from this when it was approached with these methods. But as a young field, computational humor is not yet dominated by this parochial approach to NLP. It is thus at liberty to become a rich field for the application of theories from all disciplines that contribute to humor research, including meaningbased NLP. After all, humor is very meaningful. Notes 1. Part of this chapter is based on earlier work by the author as well as joint work with Katrina E. Triezenberg and Victor Raskin. 2. “Scalability” is an important issue in software design: Solutions need to be designed in such a way that they do apply to an instance of the problem at hand, but also to other types of that issue, as well as to the general issue of which the problem may be an instance. To ensure this, the larger issue must be understood and the solution designed on the basis of a theory that accounts for that larger issue. For example, if I need to design and build a retrofitted exhaust control system for a Ford Galaxie 500, it would make economic sense to make it work on other vintage cars as well. And to do that I need a theory of car engines in general, and one of vintage car exhaust systems embedded into that larger theory. 3. This distinction between competence and performance is central in linguistic theories and should not be confused with non-technical use of the terms or the use of the terms in other disciplines (see ch. 3). This focus on a specific type of application of theories makes this chapter strongly connected to many of the other fields contributing to humor research and brought together in this book, but in particular those on the linguistics (ch. 3) and the psychology of humor (ch. 2). References to these chapters will be given where appropriate. 4. ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966) is a simple program that imitates dialogue behavior through analysis of user input and reaction to that input based on templates, as well as part of the input where possible. Written in 1966 by Weizenbaum to emulate a psychoanalyst, a typical dialogue looks like this: Eliza: Let’s talk. My name’s Eliza. Tell me about yourself. Guest: I’m a computational linguist. Eliza: Do you believe it’s OK to be a computational linguist? Guest: No, my work will accelerate the destruction of the human race. Eliza: Why not? Guest: I just told you. Eliza: Are you sure I? Guest: Very much so. Eliza: Can you elaborate on that? Guest: Have you seen the movie “Terminator”? Eliza: Let’s talk about me some other time. I’d rather hear about you.

356 

Christian F. Hempelmann

5. The joke itself is, of course, the first light-bulb joke: How many Polacks does it take to change a light bulb? Five. One to hold the bulb and four to turn the table he is standing on. 6. Auteur (Nack 1996), a system to generate humor for film, claims to integrate humor theory, but ultimately relies on insufficiently motivated, ad-hoc templates (“strategies”) as well. 7. “Fischer” begins with “F” as does “five” and “Test” with “T” as does “three.” 8. WordNet (Fellbaum 1998) is a tool used in NLP for many purposes it shouldn’t be used for. It’s a thesaurus that lists words with similar senses in groups, as well as their hyponomy relations, e.g., one sense of ‘chair’ is a subconcept of ‘seat,’ which is a subconcept of ‘furniture,’ etc. WordNet is often confused with and used as an ontology, but an ontology deserves this name only when it has a much richer set of semantic properties for its concepts (see below). 9. The project ran until March 2007. More information can be found at http://www. csd.abdn.ac.uk/research/standup/ 10. This line of paralinguistic reasoning is named after Kratylos, a participant in the eponymous Platonic dialogue (Plato 1961 (4th c. bc)), who argues for the natural, motivated, non-arbitrary relationship between sound and meaning (cf. Attardo 1994: 152ff) 11. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. 12. The situation is, of course, different for those who do identify the semantic overlap, but find it too feeble. They will be able to identify the pun as a joke (joke competence), but won’t enjoy it (humor competence; cf. Carrell 1997).

References Attardo, Salvatore 1994 Linguistic Theories of Humor. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1997 The semantic foundations of cognitive theories of humor. HUMOR 10 (4): 395–420. 2001 Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Attardo, Salvatore, and Victor Raskin 1991 Script theory revis(it)ed: Joke similarity and joke representation model. HUMOR 4 (3–4): 293–347. Attardo, Salvatore, Christian F. Hempelmann, and Sara Di Maio 2002 Script oppositions and logical mechanisms: Modeling incongruities and their resolutions. HUMOR 15 (1): 3–46. Bailly, G., M. Bérar, F. Elisei, and M. Odisio 2003 Audiovisual speech synthesis. Journal of Speech Technology 6 (4): 331–346.

Computational humor: Beyond the pun? 

357

Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua 1960 The present status of automatic translation of languages. Advances in Computers 1: 91–163. Binsted, Kim 1995 Using humour to make natural language interfaces more friendly. Ms., University of Edinburgh. Binsted, Kim, and Graeme Ritchie 1994 An implemented model of punning riddles. In: Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-94), 633–638. Seattle, WA. 1997 Computational rules for generating punning riddles. HUMOR 10 (1): 25–76. Binsted, Kim, Benjamin Bergen, Seana Coulson, Anton Nijholt, Oliviero Stock, Carlo Strapparava, Graeme Ritchie, Ruli Manurung, Helen Pain, Annalu Waller, and Dave O’Mara 2006 Computational humor. IEEE Intelligent Systems 21 (2): 59–69. Carrell, Amy 1997 Joke competence and humor competence. HUMOR 10 (2): 173–​ 185. Cassell, Justine, Joseph Sullivan, Scott Prevost, and Elizabeth Churchill (eds.) 2000 Embodied Conversational Agents. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1907 Biographia Literaria. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crosbie, John S. 1977 Crosbie’s Dictionary of Puns. New York: Harmony. Ekman, Paul, and Wallace V. Friesen 1978 The Facial Action Coding System (FACS): A Technique for the Measurement of Facial Action. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. Ekman, Paul, and Erika L. Rosenberg (eds.) 2005 What the Face Reveals. Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fellbaum, Christiane D. (ed.) 1998 WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Goldberg, Ken, Theresa Roeder, Dhruv Gupta, and Chris Perkins 2001 Eigentaste: A constant time collaborative filtering algorithm. Information Retrieval 4 (2): 133–151.

358 

Christian F. Hempelmann

Gupta, Dhruv, Mark Digiovanni, Hiro Narita, and Ken Goldberg 1999 Jester 2.0: Evaluation fo a new linear time collaborative filtering algorithm. In: Proceedings of the SIGIR. New York: ACM. 291–292. Hausmann, Franz Josef 1974 Studien zur Linguistik des Wortspiels. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Hempelmann, Christian F 2003 Paronomasic Puns: Target Recoverability towards Automatic Generation. Ph.D. Dissertation. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University. 2004a An ynperfect pun selector for computational humor. In: Damir Cavar and Paul Rodriguez (eds.) Proceedings of the First Annual Midwest Colloquium in Computational Linguistics, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, June 25–26, 2004. 2004b Script opposition and logical mechanism in punning. HUMOR 17 (4): 381–392. Hempelmann, Christian F., and Salvatore Attardo in press Resolutions and their incongruities: Further thoughts on logical mechanisms. HUMOR. Hulstijn, Joris, and Anton Nijholt (eds.) 1996 Automatic Interpretation and Generation of Humor. Proceedings Twente Workshop on Language Technology 12. Enschede: Universiteit Twente. Loehr, Dan 1996 An attempt at natural humor from a natural language robot. In: Hulstijn and Nijholt (eds.): 161–171. Luck, Michael, Peter McBurney, and Chris Preist 2004 A manifesto for agent technology: towards next generation computing. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 9 (3): 203–252. McDonough, Craig J. 2001 Mnemonic string generator: Software to aid memory of random passwords. CERIAS Technical Report. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University. Mihalcea, Rada, and Stephen Pulman 2007 Characterizing humour: An exploration of features in humorous texts. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4394: 337–347. Mihalcea, Rada, and Carlo Strapparava 2005 Computational laughing: Automatic recognition of humorous oneliners. Proceedings of the XXVII Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Stresa, Italy. 1513–1518. Morkes, John, Hadyn K. Kernal, and Clifford Nass 1999 Humor in task-oriented human-computer interaction and computermediated communication. Human-Computer Interaction 14 (4): 394–435.

Computational humor: Beyond the pun? 

359

Mulder, Matthijs P., and Anton Nijholt 2002 Humour Research: State of the Art. Technical Report. Enschede: Universiteit Twente. Nack, Frank 1996 AUTEUR: The application of video semantics and theme representation for automated film editing. Ph.D. dissertation, Lancaster University. Nijholt, Anton 2002 Embodied agents: A new impetus to humor research. In: Stock, Strapparava, and Nijholt (eds.): 101–111. 2005 Conversational agents, humorous act construction, and social intelligence. In: Dautenhahn, K. (ed.). Proceedings AISB 2005: Social Intelligence and Interaction in Animals, Robots and Agents. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire: 1–8. Nijholt, Anton, Oliviero Stock, Alan Dix, and John Morkes 2003 Humor modeling in the interface. In: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Ford Lauderdale, Florida: ACM. 1050–​ 1051. Nirenburg, Sergei, and Victor Raskin 2004 Ontological Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Oring, Elliott 2003 Engaging Humor. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Pantic, Maja, Alex Pentland, Anton Nijholt, and Thomas Huang 2006 Human computing and machine understanding of human behavior: A survey. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces. Banff, Alberta, Canada. New York: ACM: 239–​248. Plato 1961 Collected Dialogues. Hamilton, Edith, and Huntington Cairns (eds). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Raskin, Victor 1985 Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Dordrecht: Reidel. 1996 Computer implementation of the General Theory of Verbal Humor. In: Hulstijn and Nijholt (eds.): 9–19. 2002 Quo vadis computational humor? In: Stock, Strapparava, and Nijholt (eds.): 31–46. Raskin, Victor, and Salvatore Attardo 1994 Non-literalness and non-bona-fide in language: An approach to formal and computational treatments of humor. Pragmatics and Cognition 2 (1): 31–69. Raskin, Victor, Christian F. Hempelmann, and Katrina E. Triezenberg 2004 Semantic forensics: An application of ontological semantics to information assurance. Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Text Meaning and Interpretation at the ACL Conference 2004. Barcelona: ACL. 105–112.

360 

Christian F. Hempelmann

Raskin, Victor, Sergei Nirenburg, Christian F. Hempelmann, Inna Nirenburg, and Katrina E. Triezenberg 2003 The genesis of a script for bankruptcy in ontological semantics. Proceedings of HLT-NAACL 2003. Edmonton, Canada. New York: ACM. 30–37. Ritchie, Graeme 2001 Current directions in computational humour. Artificial Intelligence Review 16: 119–135. Ritchie, Graeme, Ruli Manurung, Helen Pain, Annalu Waller, and Dave O’Mara 2006 The STANDUP interactive riddle builder. IEEE Intelligent Systems 21 (2): 67–69. Ruch, Willibald (ed.) 1998 The Sense of Humor. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ruch, Willibald, and Paul Ekman 2001 The expressive pattern of laughter. In: Alfred Kaszniak (ed.). Emotions, Qualia, and Consciousness. Tokyo: Word Scientific Publisher. 426–443. Stock, Oliviero, and Carlo Strapparava 2002 HAHAcronym: Humorous agents for humorous acronyms. In: Stock, Strapparava, and Nijholt (eds.): 125–135. Stock, Oliviero, Carlo Strapparava, and Anton Nijholt (eds.) 2002 TWLT20: The April Fools’ Day Workshop on Computational Humor. Enschede: Universiteit Twente. Taylor, Julia, and Lawrence J. Mazlack 2005 Toward computational recognition of humorous intent. Proceedings of the XXVII Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Stresa, Italy: 2166–2171. 2007a Multiple component computational recognition of children’s jokes. Proceedings of International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics Proceedings (IEEE-SMC). Montreal, Canada: 1194–1199. 2007b Reverse engineering humor. Proceedings of the XXIX Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Nashville, TN: 1866. Tinholt, Hans Wim, and Anton Nijholt 2007 Computational humour: Utilizing cross-reference ambiguity for conversational jokes. In: F. Masulli, S. Mitra, and G. Pasi (eds.). 7th International Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Applications (WILF 2007): Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Berlin: Springer Verlag. 477–483. Weizenbaum, Joseph 1966 ELIZA: A computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Communications of the ACM 9 (1): 36–45.

The sociology of humor Giselinde Kuipers 1.  Introduction Humor is a quintessentially social phenomenon. Jokes and other humorous utterances are a form of communication that is usually shared in social interaction. These humorous utterances are socially and culturally shaped, and often quite particular to a specific time and place. And the topics and themes people joke about are generally central to the social, cultural and moral order of a society or a social group. Despite the social character of humor, sociology, the discipline that studies society and social relations, has not concerned itself much with humor. When sociology emerged in the nineteenth century, it focused mainly on the great structural transformations of the modern times: modernization, industrialization, urbanization, secularization, etc. It was not very interested in the “unserious” business of everyday life: interactions, emotions, play, leisure, private life, and other things not directly related to great developments on the macro-level of society – such as humor. In the course of the twentieth century, sociology became more diverse and increasingly concerned with the micro-reality of everyday life, but it still remained overwhelmingly devoted to the study of social problems, great transformations, and other serious matters. As a result, humor came into focus mainly when it seemed problematic in itself, or was concerned with important social issues: race and ethnicity, political conflict, social resistance, gender inequalities. Meanwhile, questions about the social nature of humor were addressed by many other disciplines. Many of the classical humor theoreticians (Morreall 1983) touch on social aspects of humor. However, these questions were mostly answered from a  more philosophical or psychological perspective. Anthropologists and folklorists were much ahead of the sociologists in paying serious and systematic attention to the social meanings and functions of humor (see Apte 1985; Oring this volume). Only after the 1970s can we speak of a serious emergence of a sociological interest in humor (Fine 1983; Paton 1988; Zijderveld 1983).

362 

Giselinde Kuipers

In this chapter, I  will give an overview of sociological thought about humor. Sociological thought is defined here broadly (and somewhat imperialistically) as any scholarship concerned with the social functions or social shaping of humor. Since the authors discussed here have used very different conceptualizations and definitions of humor, I  will simply adopt the various notions of humor used by the authors discussed, and leave the matter of the definition of humor to other authors in this volume. First, I will discuss a  number of theoretical perspectives on humor, roughly in chronological order: the functionalist, conflict, symbolic interactionist, phenomenological, and comparative-historical approach. After that, I will discuss a number of issues central to today’s sociological thought about humor: the relation between humor, hostility and transgression; humor and laughter; and the social shaping of humorous media and genres. 2.  Sociological perspectives on humor 2.1.  Pre-disciplinary history Superiority theory, relief theory, and incongruity are usually described as the three “classical” approaches to humor and laughter. These approaches predate academic disciplinary specialization, so most of the classical formulations are subsumed today under the heading of philosophy (Morreall 1983; 1987). The earliest sociologist who discussed humor was the British philosopher/sociologist/political theorist Herbert Spencer. His discussion of laughter can be placed in the tradition of relief theory: laughter, to Spencer, is “the discharge of arrested feelings into the muscular system . . . in the absence of other adequate channels.” (Spencer 1861/1987: 108–109) However, Spencer connected this energy release with the experience of incongruity: “laughter naturally results only when consciousness is unawares transferred from great things to small – only when there is what we may call a descending incongruity.” (ibid. 110, italics in original) The discharge of tension is still one of the main functions humor is believed to fulfill, and as such the relief theory has had great influence on modern humor scholarship, mostly via the work of Sigmund Freud (1905/1976). However, “pure” relief theorists, explaining all humor and laughter as release of tension or “safety valve”, cannot be found anymore in humor scholarship these days. Of the three “classical” approaches, superiority theory is the most obviously connected with social relations. This tradition can be traced back to

The sociology of humor 

363

Plato and Aristotle, and has most famously been formulated by Thomas Hobbes: “Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.” (Hobbes 1650/1987: 20) Superiority theorists state that humor and laughter are expressions of superiority, which of course reflects a social relationship. However, on close consideration the classical theorists describe superiority as an individual experience: the communicative or relational aspect of the joking and laughing is generally not examined in these theories. In other words: while addressing a social event, superiority theories of humor are not very sociological. As will become clear in this article, the relation between humor and superiority – although referred to in other terms, such as power, conflict, or hierarchy – is still central to social scientific studies of humor. Incongruity theory – the theory that states that all humor is based on the perception or recognition of incongruity – is not as obviously related to sociological questions, since it is mainly concerned with the nature of humorous texts or other stimuli, or with the mental operations involved in processing these texts. However, as incongruity theory, in several varieties (Attardo and Raskin 1991; Oring 1992; 2003; Raskin 1985; Ruch 1998), became the dominant perspective in humor scholarship, it has been incorporated in sociological thought in various waysì The first full-fledged theory of humor was developed by Sigmund Freud. In his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) he integrated elements of relief and incongruity theory, and combined them with his psychoanalytic theory. While Freud’s theories on humor (and other topics) are much disputed, he was the first to systematically address what I have called here sociological questions about humor, and his influence on the sociology of humor has been immense. Without attempting to explain Freud’s entire humor theory (see Martin 2006: 33–42; Palmer 1994: 79–92), let me note two important themes. First, Freud discussed the importance of social relationships between the teller of the joke, his audience, and (when applicable) the butt of the joke. In other words: he introduced the social relationship into the analysis of humor. Second, Freud paid attention to the relationship between humor and – socially constructed – taboos. Jokes, according to Freud, were a way to avoid the “censor”, or the internalized social restrictions, thus enabling the expression (and enjoyment) of drives otherwise inhibited by society. To Freud, these forbidden drives were mostly sex and aggression. Freud’s theory has been strongly criticized, especially for the claim that all humor in the end is based on sex and aggression, although, in all fairness,

364 

Giselinde Kuipers

Freud is more nuanced about this in his discussion of actual jokes than in the general statement of his theory. Another main point of criticism is the unfalsifiability of Freud’s theory: the references to underlying drives are, by necessity, “veiled” and therefore hard to disprove. However, the notion of jokes as related to, and attempting to circumvent, social taboos has become very central to humor scholarship.1 The other early theorist of humor with sociological insight was Henri Bergson. Like Freud’s theory, Bergson’s Laughter (1900/1999) contains a  number of rather untenable and untestable generalizations (for instance, that all laughter is a  response to “something mechanical encrusted on the living”), alongside insightful contributions. For sociologists, his most relevant observations have to do with the social character of laughter. Bergson described humor and laughter as essentially social and shared. Laughing at someone, on the other hand, functions as a means of exclusion, and hence as a social corrective and form of social control. After Freud and Bergson, the various disciplines of humor studies branched out, and in the course of the twentieth century, a  number of approaches emerged that are more or less specific to the social sciences: the functionalist approach; the conflict approach; the symbolic interactionist approach; the phenomenological approach; and the comparative-historical ­approach. 2.2.  Functionalist approach The functionalist approach interprets humor in terms of the social functions it fulfills for a society or social group. Especially in older studies of humor, functionalist interpretations tended to stress how humor (and other social phenomena) maintain and support the social order. Functionalist studies of humor are often ethnographic studies, but humorous texts, events, and corpora have also been analyzed from a functionalist perspective. The earliest functionalist explanations can be found in the work of anthropologists on so-called joking relationships, a “a  relationship between two persons in which one is by custom permitted and in some instances required to tease or make fun of the other” (Radcliffe-Brown 1940: 195). RadcliffeBrown interpreted such relationships, which exist in various non-Western ­societies, as a  way to manage the strain inherent in specific relationships. They are “modes of organizing a definite and stable system of social behaviour in which conjunctive and disjunctive components . . . are maintained and combined” (Radcliffe Brown 1940: 200). This obligatory joking is a way to

The sociology of humor 

365

relieve tension in possibly strained relationships, thus maintaining the social order. Later, a number of studies were done of non-obligatory joking relationships in industrialized societies, with similar interpretations about the tension-relieving function of joking in situations that contained some sort of structural conflict or contradiction (Bradney 1957; Sykes 1966). Other ritualized forms of humor, such as rituals of reversal (like carnival), and ritual clowning (Apte 1985) were similarly explained as a safety valve to “blow off” social tension. Another function ascribed to humor is social control. Stephenson (1951), in an analysis of American jokes about stratification, concluded that these jokes make fun of transgressions of the social order, and in that way “reveal an adherence to a set of values regarded as the traditional American creed” (Stephenson 1951: 574). This reasoning is reminiscent of Bergson’s interpretation of humor and laughter as a social corrective: by laughing at something, it is defined as outside of the normal. A more sophisticated version of this corrective function of humor was developed by Powell (1988), who placed humor among other possible responses to things out of the ordinary, and defined it as one of the milder forms of social corrective (stronger forms being, for instance, declaring someone crazy). Very recently, social control theory has been revived by Billig, who in Laughter and Ridicule (2005) puts forward a theory of humor as a social corrective, closely linked with embarrassment, arguing that “ridicule, far from being a detachable negative, lies at the heart of humor.” (Billig 2005: 190; see also Billig 2001b) From a very different angle, Coser also noted the social control functions of humor. In one of her two influential and oft-cited microsociological studies of humor in a hospital ward, she looked at the patterns of laughter during the staff meetings (Coser 1960). This study showed how the amount and direction of joking reflected the social hierarchy. By counting the number of laughs, she discovered that doctors got significantly more laughs than residents, who got more laughs than the nurses. Moreover, everybody tended to “joke down”: doctors tended to joke about residents, residents joked about the nurses or themselves, and the nurses joked about themselves, or about the patients and their families. According to Coser, this joking helps to maintain the social order: it keeps people “in their place”. The hierarchy-building ­function of humor, with the associated correlation between status and ­successful humor production, has been noted in various other studies (Pizzini 1991; Robinson and Smith-Lovin 2001; Sayre 2001). In her second paper on humor, on the use of joking by patients in the hospital ward, Coser explored another function of humor, which also contributes

366 

Giselinde Kuipers

to the social order: social cohesion. In the more egalitarian and less formally structured life of the ward’s patients, humor served to create solidarity, share experiences, and build an identity within the group. This cohesive function may seem at odds with the hierarchy-maintaining function. However, hierarchical groups need cohesion too. Joking apparently manages, more than most other forms of communication, to combine the seemingly contradictory functions of hierarchy-building and bringing about solidarity (e.g. at work, in the military, cf. Koller 1988: 233–260). Moreover, Coser describes the use of humor in two very different contexts: a formally structured situation among people who know each other versus a more disorganized and egalitarian situation, which is likely to affect the functions humor can, and needs to, fulfill. In her article on the cohesive functions of laughter, Coser wrote that “to laugh, or to occasion laughter through humor and wit, is to invite those present to come closer. Laughter and humor are indeed like an invitation, be it an invitation for dinner, or an invitation to start a conversation: it aims at decreasing social distance.” (Coser 1959: 172) One of the reasons for humor’s cohesive function is that a  joke is “an invitation” the acceptance of which is immediately apparent: a laugh or a smile. There are very few forms of interaction that are connected as closely with social acceptance and approval as laughter (Provine 2000). Also, collective joking takes people outside of everyday life into a more playful “non-serious” atmosphere, creating what the anthropologist Victor Turner called communitas (Fine 1983). Hence, humor not only is a sign of closeness among friends, it is also an effective way of forging social bonds, even in situations not very conducive to closeness: it “breaks the ice” between strangers, unites people in different hierarchical positions, and creates a sense of shared “conspiracy” in the context of illicit activities like gossiping or joking about superiors. The flip side of this inclusive function of humor is exclusion. Those who do not join in the laughter, because they do not get the joke, or even worse, because the joke targets them, will feel left out, shamed, or ridiculed. The excluding function of humor is often mentioned as the basis for the corrective function described above (Powell 1988; Billig 2005) What these three functions – relief, control, cohesion – have in common is their focus on humor and joking as contribution to the maintenance of social order. The insistence that all social phenomena maintain the social structure has become the focus of much criticism leveled at the (structural-) functionalism of the 1950s and 1960s: it makes functionalist explanations circular and basically untestable. Social phenomena do not necessarily have the same

The sociology of humor 

367

function for all concerned, and they may well be dysfunctional, at least from some people’s perspective. Despite the demise of functionalism as a  theoretical framework after the 1960s, functionalist explanations of humor still are common in humor studies. Since the 1970s, sociologists have not employed functionalism as a complete theory or comprehensive framework, but instead have attempted to combine functional analysis of humor with analysis of content and context. Humor obviously fulfills important social functions, but more recent studies tend to stress the multiple functions of humor, which can be a threat as well as a  contribution to the social order: cohesion, control, relief, but also the expression of conflict, inciting resistance, insulting, ridiculing or satirizing others (Holmes 2000; Martin 2006; Mulkay 1988; Palmer 1994). Martineau (1972), in an early attempt to move away from one-dimensional functionalism, constructed a model connecting the functions of humor with specific social relations. He distinguished esteeming and disparaging jokes, within and outside a  group, targeting people within or outside the group. Depending on the conditions, he expected humor to solidify social bonds, demoralize, increase internal or external hostility, foster consensus or redefine relationships. Powell and Paton (1988) edited a  volume concentrating mainly on the complex interplay between resistance and control functions of humor, summarized under the heading of “tension management”, but illustrating a variety of other, positive and negative, functions along the way. The functions humor fulfills can be psychological as well as social. Black or sick humor, for instance in disaster jokes, has often been explained as a way to cope with unpleasant experiences, both individually and collectively, and more generally to distance oneself from negative emotions such as fear, grief, or shame (Dundes 1987; Morrow 1987. For a critique, see Oring 1987). Sociologist Peter Berger (1997) stressed the psychological effects of humor, describing (some forms of) humor as consolation, liberation, and transcendence. Thomas Scheff described humor and laughter as catharsis (Scheff 1980) and “anti-shame” (1990). As in the social functions stressed by humor scholars, psychological functions ascribed to humor tend to be beneficial. Scholars focusing on the “dark” side of humor will be discussed below. Robinson and Smith-Lovin (2001), in an excellent recent paper, attempted to test functionalist explanations by looking at the use of various types of humor in task-oriented groups in slightly differing social constellations. They discern four main social functions of humor: meaning making (derived from the symbolic interactionist perspective described below), hierarchy building, cohesion building, and tension relief. In their study, which looked at groups

368 

Giselinde Kuipers

consisting of strangers in task-oriented interaction, they found most support for the hierarchical and (slightly less so) cohesive functions. They replicated Coser’s finding that high status group members get more laughs and make more jokes. The cohesive functions of humor were shown to depend both on the type of humor (cohesive versus differentiating, outward vs. inwarddirected), on the status of the joker, and on the composition of the group. In other words, the functions of humor are not fixed, but very much dependent on type of relation, social context, and on the content of the joke. 2.3.  Conflict approach Conflict theories see humor as an expression of conflict, struggle, or antagonism. In contrast with the functionalist theories described above, humor is interpreted not as venting off – and hence avoidance or reduction – but as an expression or correlate of social conflict: humor as a weapon, a form of attack, a means of defense (Speier 1998). Conflict theories of humor have been used especially in the analysis of ethnic and political humor, both cases where the use of humor has a clear target, and tends to be correlated with conflict and group antagonism.2 This approach is clearly indebted to the Hobbesian tradition of humor as “sudden glory”. However, the literature about humor and conflict suffers somewhat from conceptual unclarity: in writings about the use of humor as a “weapon” hostility, aggression, superiority, and rivalry are often used interchangibly, and are not clearly distinguished or delineated. Superiority implies the (experience of) a higher position, a form of social ranking which is not necessarily related to the urge to hurt someone, which forms the basis of hostility and aggression. As Coser’s findings in the psychiatric ward suggest, there can be superiority without conflict – although some conflict sociologists would contest this, claiming that all inequality entails conflict.3 Conflict, on the other hand, typically implies hostility. However, superiority (power, hierarchy) is an important moderator of how a conflict plays out. In 1942, Obrdlik published a paper on the “gallows humor” in Czechoslovakia under the Nazi regime (in place at the time of publication). He interpreted this form of anti-Nazi joking in two ways: as resistance and “morale booster” for the Czech (which resembles the relief theory), but also as having a “disintegrating influence” on the Germans occupiers. Moreover, Obrdlik pointed out that such humor was an index of the strength of the oppressors: “if they an afford to ignore it, they are strong; if they react wildly, with

The sociology of humor 

369

anger. . . they are not sure of themselves, no matter how much they display their might on the surface” (Obrdlik 1942: 716). Thus, humor has positive reinforcing functions for the ingroup, but in the context of intergroup relations humor was more like a weapon: an expression of aggression and resistance. The jokes described by Obrdlik are reminiscent of political humor in many oppressive regimes, such as the Nazi regime (Stokker 1995) or the former Communist regimes (Benton 1988; Davies 2007). Typically, the direct voicing of dissent in such regimes is impossible or very dangerous, and even joking may be a risky enterprise, as was memorably (though unscholarly) described in Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s The Joke (1967). While this form of humor is clearly correlated with conflict and antagonism, there has been considerable disagreement about the effects of such humor. Humor in repressive circumstances is usually clandestine – they were called Flüsterwitze or “whispered jokes” in Nazi Germany (Speier 1998). This would imply that the internal “morale-boosting” functions are more important than the effects on the powerful “outgroup” that the jokes target. Because such humor “from below” remains backstage or anonymous, many humor scholars conclude that the effects of such humor are relatively marginal. The 1988 collection of Powell and Paton on humor as “resistance and control” is organized around the interplay of these resistance and control functions of humor. Most of the authors in this volume adhere to some version of the conflict theory of humor, focusing on conflictive or unequal situations that range from political humor under Communist rule to the much less dramatic example of humor in the workplace. Generally, the authors conclude that the control function is the more important, and that resistance through joking provides mostly temporary relief but stabilizes potentially conflictive situations. As Benton states in his contribution on jokes under communist rule: “… the political joke will change nothing. It’s the relentless enemy of greed, injustice, cruelty and oppression – but it could never do without them. It is not a form of active resistance. It reflects no political programme. It will mobilize no one. Like the Jewish joke in its time, it is important for keeping society sane and stable. It cushions the blows of cruel governments and creates sweet illusions. . . . its impact is as fleeting as the laughter it produces.” (Benton 1988: 54). Or, as Speier (1998: 1395) succinctly put it: “Accommodation, however much one peppers it with scorn, remains accommodation.” However, other authors have more faith in the subversive potential of humor, and have argued that such “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985) may be important in making people reflect critically on their situation, allow them to express hostility against those in power, create an alternative space of

370 

Giselinde Kuipers

r­ esistance, or even give people the courage to take up more concrete actions (Gouin 2004; Hiller 1983; Jenkins 1994; Stokker 1995). Goldstein, in her provocative ethnography of poor women in a Brazilian shantytown, which she organized around the subjects and places of these women’s laughter, argued that “While the humor of the poor may not necessarily lead directly to rebellions and political revolutions, it does open up a discursive space within which is becomes possible to speak about matters that are otherwise naturalized, unquestioned, or silenced.” (Goldstein 2003: 10). This debate on the subversive or conservative nature of humor is partly the result of underlying theoretical disagreements that cannot be resolved by empirical considerations. However, the dynamics of humor in conditions of conflict, and hence humor’s revolutionary potential, strongly depends on the power division and status relations between jokers and their targets. To illustrate this using the case of political humor: in very repressive or unequal conditions, the humor of those without power tends to be clandestine and relatively toothless. “Downward” humor by those in power in such situations easily becomes aggressive to the point of cruel. A recent example, described by Paul Lewis (2006) is the cruel joking by American prison guards in Baghdad. Such humor by the mighty has received relatively little scholarly attention, but as Speier remarked in his essay on “wit and politics”: “Jests ‘from above’, from those of higher status, rather than those ‘from below’, that is, jokes born of triumph instead of resistance, may be the prototypical political jokes.” (Speier 1998: 1353). In more open societies and conditions power differences tend to be less marked, and the dynamics of humor and conflict is quite different: there are fewer restrictions on humor, and joking is more likely to transcend boundaries or mobilize people. Open societies generally have a wide range of institutions, persons, genres and publications devoted (in part) to satire and political humor (Lockyer 2006; Shiffman, Coleman and Ward 2007; Speier 1998). Such institutionalized humorous genres are “free spaces” where those in power can be mocked and ridiculed: within their assigned spaces and clear limitations, much is allowed, and politics can be criticized or addressed quite clearly (Palmer 2005). On the other hand, political humor in the private sphere tends to have much less of an edge than political humor in repressive regimes – a familiar complaint in former Communist countries is that, while everything else has become better, humor has worsened since the “fall of the Wall”. In open societies, the morale-boosting and resistance functions of political humor can be played out more openly. Many political organizations,

The sociology of humor 

371

factions and social movements have used humor to manifest themselves and make their point, at times forcing politicians to seriously address topics raised humorously. Political humor in such conditions becomes part of the political landscape: it highlights social rifts and disagreements because political conflicts are performed and dramatized in the humorous realm. And in such cases, humor can sometimes “spill over” into serious political discourse (Lewis 2006, esp. chapter 3; Lockyer and Pickering 2005b; Wagg 1996). Finally, humor also can play a more direct role in politics when it is used within political conflict and debate, for instance to criticize or ridicule political opponents. This form of humor seems increasingly important in today’s media democracies, and has again different dynamics: unlike the professional comic genres, it is not played out in a “free space”, and the connection with actual, serious antagonisms and disagreements can be very real (Morreall 2005). Although the way such humor is used varies strongly, such humor between political adversaries may contain very visible forms of “aggressive” and “defensive” joking – while at the same time, politicians using such humor play to the public with their wit (Speier 1998). Besides political humor, the other type of humor frequently analyzed from a  conflict perspective is ethnic humor, which is by far the most contested form of humor in modern Western societies (Lockyer and Pickering 2005a). The earliest studies of ethnic humor were done in the United States in the context of racial segregation, which highlighted the relationship between jokes and acute racial conflict and inequality. Burma (1946), in an article on “the use of humor as a technique in race conflict”, concluded from his analysis of jokes Whites told about Blacks, and vice versa: “From the huge welter of humor, wit and satire which is current today, both written and oral, it is possible to isolate and examine a not inconsequential amount of humor which has as its primary purpose the continuation of race conflict. Even more common is the borderline type: its chief purpose is humor, but it has secondary aspects which definitely can be related to racial competition and conflict and the social and cultural patterns which have arisen from them.” (714) This quotation aptly illustrates the problem of ethnic humor. While some of it may be geared to the continuation of ethnic conflict, the complicated aspect is the “not inconsequential amount” of humor that is primarily intended as humorous, but it is concerned with groups that have a hostile or antagonistic relation – such as Whites and Blacks in the highly segregated United States of the 1940s. Burma interprets ethnic humor, even when primarily for fun, as a “technique”, and hence a weapon in racial conflict.

372 

Giselinde Kuipers

After Burma, there have been many studies in which corpora of ethnic jokes, the repertoire of comedians, or other “standardized” forms of humor were linked with ethnic conflict, hostility, or some other problematic social relationship (Draitser 1998; Dundes 1987; Dundes and Hauschild 1983; Gundelach 2000; Kuipers 2000; Oshima 2000). Generally, these studies attempt to link the existence of ethnic humor, as well as the particular “ethnic scripts” (Raskin 1985) about these groups to the – conflictive or strained – relationship between joke-tellers and their targets. However, not all cases are as obviously related to conflict and inequality as the jokes described by Burma. As Davies (1990, 1993, 2002) has pointed out, there are many ethnic joke cycles that are not related to conflict or hostility, whereas there are other very conflictive relationships that are not reflected in jokes. Moreover, there are several reported cases of groups who very often joke about themselves, the most famous example of course being Jewish humor. This complicates the notion that ethnic humor is necessarily the result of inter-ethnic conflict or hostility. Another approach to the relationship between ethnic humor and ethnic conflict is by looking at people’s appreciation of ethnic humor, and the way this is related to their ethnic background or their opinion of the ethnic group targeted. Middleton (1959) found that, while (as expected) Blacks have higher appreciation of anti-White jokes than Whites, these groups didn’t differ significantly in their appreciation of jokes targeting Blacks. This led him to conclude that identification with a superior group (or the social order as a whole) is more important than ethnic affiliation in the appreciation of humor. A line of research inspired by Middleton’s findings explores the role between the appreciation of ethnic humor and identification. The studies conducted by LaFave (1972) show that people tend to appreciate jokes more when they target a group that people do not identify with. Such “identification classes” do not have to correspond to one’s own background, and especially low status groups may prefer jokes targeting their own group. For instance, some studies have reported that women prefer jokes targeting women to jokes targeting men, or that ethnic minorities tend to prefer jokes targeting their own group to jokes targeting the dominant ethnic group (LaFave, Haddad and Marshall 1974; Nevo 1985). In a related line of research, Zillmann (1983; Zillmann and Stocking 1976) explored “disparagement humor”, concluding that people generally most enjoy humor that disparages groups they dislike or do not identify with. However, the conclusion that people like jokes more in the context of conflict or hostility does not mean that humor is conflict or hostility. After all, the same studies also show that people can very well like jokes that target groups they like and identify with (just maybe not as much).

The sociology of humor 

373

The conflict approach is by far the most contested approach in sociological humor studies. It is used mainly to explain and analyze potentially offensive forms of humor, and thus is directly connected with societal controversies about ethnic, sexist, or political humor (Lockyer and Pickering 2005b). Moreover, debates about the relations between humor and conflict, both in Academia and the real world, address the very nature of humor: its non-seriousness, which makes every humorous utterance fundamentally ambiguous. The central criticism leveled at the conflict approach is that it takes humor too literally, ignoring humor’s basic ambiguity, which means that a joke can be enjoyed for many different reasons. Also, conflict theories generally cannot explain why and when people in situations of conflict decide to use humor rather than more serious expressions of antagonism. Since the matter of jokes at the expense of others is such a central issue in humor studies (and real life), the various perspectives on this matter will be addressed further below. The question why and when people use unserious modes of communication rather than straightforward serious talk has been taken up by the next two theoretical traditions: symbolic interactionism and phenomenology. 2.4.  Symbolic interactionist approach The symbolic interactionist approach to humor focuses on the role of humor in the construction of meanings and social relations in social interaction.4 Symbolic interactionist studies generally are detailed studies of specific social interactions, using ethnographic data or detailed transcripts of conversations. In this approach, social relations and meanings, and more generally “social reality” are not seen as fixed and given, but as constructed and negotiated in the course of social interaction. Humor, while not very central to big social structures and processes, plays an important role in everyday interaction, and its ambiguity makes it well-suited to negotiations and manipulations of selves and relationships. Within humor studies, the micro-interactionist approach gave a strong impetus to small-scale ethnographic studies of humor, as an alternative to the analysis of standardized forms of humor, joke ratings from questionnaires. In this approach, whether something is defined as humorous or serious is not a given, but something constructed in the course of interactions. The shift from serious to joking conversation becomes an act of conversational cooperation, which can succeed, be withheld, or fail, and this shift creates opportunities for specific types of communication. For instance, people who say

374 

Giselinde Kuipers

something in jest usually have more freedom to transgress norms and bring up taboo topics (something also noted in functionalist analyses of humor). Emerson (1969) analyzed how this shift to joking and the consequent freedom to transgress norms is accepted, or challenged. She described this process as “negotiating the serious import of humor.” Goffman (1974) used the notion of “framing” to describe this process of shifting from one type of interactional logic to another. Humor is one of the most common forms of framing used in everyday conversation. A humorous “frame” redefines everything someone says: it is not supposed to be taken “seriously” anymore. As many conversation analysts have shown, this shift to serious conversation if often marked by laughter, which often occurs at the beginning of a humorous utterance. Similarly, listeners may laugh as a sign of acceptance of this shift of frames (Jefferson 1979; Sachs 1974). This perspective has made laughter a central theme in sociological humor studies, not only as an automatic response to a humorous stimulus, but as a form of communication on its own. Recently, Hay (2001), a sociolinguist, has given a sophisticated account of this process, describing it as the garnering of “humor support” in the course of social interaction. Symbolic interactionist studies have not only looked at the negotiating, but also at the conversational effects and uses of this ambiguity or “nonseriousness” of humor. Humor and joking are important in negotiations over the meaning of things: the construction of norms, the debate about what is “going on” in a particular situation (Robinson and Smith-Lovin 2001). As Emerson noted, humor is used to bring up themes and topics that are taboo; or to “feel out” other persons (Mulkay 1988). Both Sachs (1974) and Fine (1983; 1984) noted how among teenagers humor is employed to bring up sexual topics, and can get to function as some sort of test of sexual knowledge. Among adults, too, sexual humor is very common in flirtation, which also is a form of “testing” (Fine 1983; Walle 1976). Humor always provides a way out: both the joker and the audience can ignore any potential serious import of the joke. Similarly, humor can also be used to bring up and negotiate the meaning of a wide variety of other possibly sensitive topics, such as political opinions, money matters, or complaints about bosses or colleagues (Paton and Filby 1988). Moreover, conversational joking plays a role in the construction of social relationships. Fine (1983) described how humor can be used to create and define a “group culture” – not only by providing social solidarity in the functionalist sense, but by the use of ingroup humor, repeat jokes, and specific humorous styles and tastes that literally get to define a group, and be used to

The sociology of humor 

375

demarcate its identity. However, this creation of a group culture also provides a strong outside boundary: humor includes and excludes at the same time. Many micro-interactionist studies have highlighted the ambiguous role of humor in social relationships (Holmes 2000; Kothoff 2000; 2006; Mulkay 1988; Robinson and Smith-Lovin 2001). On the one hand, joking creates closeness and solidarity and is important marker of “being on the same wavelength”. On the other hand, humor has a strong power dimension, resulting in a relation between social status and humor initiation, as well an oft-reported tendency for people to joke “down” rather than “up”. Norrick (1993) has pointed out some of the mechanisms at work in the relationship between conversational humor and power. He calls humor a form of “conversational aggression”, because it disrupts the regular turn-taking pattern of conversation, and because the shift from serious to joking conversation means a drastic shift in the mode of conversation. Thus, any attempt at a joke implies a conversational “coup” on the part of the joker, who breaks both the serious frame and the turn-taking pattern. The relation between humor and gender has emerged as a central theme in micro-interactionist studies of humor: how are masculinity and femininity formed and performed in the course of interaction? Until recently, most studies found that men joked more and initiated more humor, which confirms older findings, such as Coser’s, that those in high status tend to joke more. More generally, initiating humor seemed to be associated with masculinity, whereas women were expected to laugh at men’s jokes (Crawford 1995; 2003; Hay 2000; Holmes 2006; Kothoff 2006; Kuipers 2006a). Many studies in the symbolic interactionist tradition have analyzed the way people “perform gender”, thereby creating and reinforcing gender roles as well as power divisions. These studies on gender and conversational joking also illustrate the larger implication of small-scale interactions: showing how social differences on a macro-level are created and perpetuated in interaction. Also, changes in society at large manifest themselves in small-scale interactions: as Kothoff (2006: 13) observes, recent studies increasingly show women initiating jokes, which “marks historical changes in the cultural role of humor in communication” (cf. Holmes 2006). In the small-scale studies of symbolic interactionists, humor, joking, and laughter are no longer marginal and frivolous. Rather, they are at the heart of social analysis, crucial to the shaping of meanings, situations, selves, and relationships. Critics of this approach have pointed out that symbolic interactionist studies tend to be overly descriptive and particular, and hence hard to generalize. In sociology, symbolic interactionism appears to have gone out

376 

Giselinde Kuipers

of fashion after the 1980s. Since then, this line of humor research has been very successfully explored by sociolinguists (many of whom are cited here). Within sociology, symbolic interactionist understandings of humor have been incorporated in phenomenological studies of humor, described below, and in the sociology of emotions, which will be discussed in the section on ­laughter. 2.5.  Phenomenological approach The phenomenological approach to humor conceptualizes humor as a specific “outlook” or “worldview” or “mode” of perceiving and constructing the social world. This humorous outlook is generally considered to be one option among several in the “social construction of reality”. This approach to humor emerged after the 1970s, and is eclectic in terms of methodology, combining textual analysis, historical data, and micro-interactionist studies to show how humor constructs and at the same time entails a particular worldview. The phenomenological approach to humor builds on a much older philosophical tradition about humor and laughter, which never made it into the canon of “three classical theories”. However, the notion of a humorous outlook on the world, or “laughing at the world”, dates back to irreverent ancient philosophers like Diogenes, and can also be discerned in the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche or in the postmodern embrace of irony and ­ambiguity. The sociologist Zijderveld (1982; 1983) defined humor as “playing with meanings” in various domains of social life. To Zijderveld, such playing with meanings is not trivial, but essential to the construction of meaning and everyday life, because it enables social experimentation and negotiation. Moreover, it allows people to become aware of the constructedness of social life itself: humor is a “looking glass” allowing us to look at the world and ourselves in a slightly distorted, and hence revealing, way. He likens humor to sociology: both “debunk” and denaturalize the world, showing us the relativity and sometimes even the ridiculousness of what we do. Davis (1993), taking this argumentation a step further, sees in this capacity of humor to expose the underlying structure of reality a strong subversive potential, concluding that humor can be “an assault” on reality. In his 1982 book Reality in a Looking Glass Zijderveld applies his perspective to a particular form of humor: the traditional folly of carnivals and court jesters. According to Zijderveld, this folly was not just a humorous style or institution, but a full-fledged worldview, seen in many cultures around the

The sociology of humor 

377

world, based on turning upside down the rules and conventions of life. In the early modern era, it functioned as a counterpoint to the process of rationalization, but eventually, traditional folly was fully eclipsed by this process. Bakhtin (1984, but writing in 1930s Communist Russia) also looked at the thriving humorous traditions of the early modern period to understand humor as an alternative conception of the world that exists alongside everyday modes of interpretation (and behavior). Taking as his point of departure the raucous humor of early modern France, exemplified in the work of Francois Rabelais (c. 1490–1553), Bakhtin analyzed “the carnivalesque” as a space of freedom, community, and equality, denoted by laughter, humor, and more generally by corporeality, physicality, and the “grotesque”. In Bakthin’s view, carnival can function as an alternative sphere of freedom and resistance. Theorist of the public sphere Habermas (1992) acknowledged Bakhtin’s carnavalesque as possible alternative to the bourgeois public sphere, allowing for a different mode of “popular” civic participation. Phenomenological approaches diverge from functionalist and conflict theories: because they see humor as a separate sphere or perspective, they see more potential for humor as an agent of social resistance and change (see also Goldstein 2003). The most complete and sophisticated exposition of the social functions and consequences of the humorous worldview is Mulkay’s On Humour (1988). In what he calls the humorous mode “the rules of logic, the expectations of common sense, the laws of science and the demands of propriety are all potentially in abeyance. Consequently, when recipients are faced with a joke, they do not apply the information-processing procedures appropriate to serious discourse” (Mulkay 1988: 37) According to Mulkay, this enables people to communicate about the many incongruous experiences that make up (social) life, and to convey meanings and messages that are as ambiguous as most of everyday life. As a result, humor can be used to expose and express the contradictory aspects of life, and to communicate and share this experience with others. However, in contrast with Bakhtin and Davis, Mulkay concludes that in the end, humor mostly serves to maintain social equilibrium and consolidate the social order. For instance, in an extended discussion of sexual joking (drawing on Spradley and Mann 1976), Mulkay relates sexual humor to the contradictory expectations and norms governing gender and sexual relations. In his view, the content and the strongly gendered usage patterns of sexual humor reconcile and neutralize these contradictory expectations and norms. The phenomenological approach generally contrasts the humorous worldview with the “serious” worldview. Berger (1997) set out to ­compare

378 

Giselinde Kuipers

humor with another competing perspective on life, the religious. He starts out with an understanding of the comic very much resembling that of Zij­ derveld and Mulkay: “the comic conjures up a  separate world, different from the world of ordinary reality, operating by different rules.” (Berger 1997: x; Italics in original) But in Berger’s view, there is a  transcendental element to this separate world: “The experience of the comic is, finally, a  promise of redemption. Religious faith is the intuition . . . that the promise will be kept.” (ibid.: x) Berger’s humor theory, while starting out from a constructivist premise similar to Zijderveld’s and Mulkay’s, ends up resembling something more like the psychological relief theory of humor, with a  theological twist. While Berger’s perspective on humor resonates with fashionable views on “healing humor” (Lewis 2006), its reliance on the liberating, redeeming aspects of humor and laughter makes for a rather one-sided theory of humor. Critics have pointed out that phenomenological approaches to humor (much like conflict theory, but on a  more positive note) tend to essentialize humor: by focusing on humor as “worldview”, they neglect other meanings of humor, including negative or dysfunctional effects, and overstate the importance of humor. Also, phenomenological sociology is said to be hard to operationalize: it provides inspiring insights but it is not clear how its notions and concepts are to be used in actual empirical research. However, unlike many other studies, phenomenological sociology takes into account the peculiarities of humor: its ambiguity and non-seriousness are central to the theories described above. The accounts of Zijderveld, Davis and Mulkay are quite successful in tying together various functions and characteristics of humor. For instance, they explain the relation with laughter, manage to combine micro- and macroperspectives of humor, and offer reasons why people would use humor rather than more straightforward communication. 2.6.  Historical-comparative approach The historical-comparative approach attempts to understand the social role of humor through comparisons in time and place. Comparative-historical studies of humor are conducted in various scholarly fields, and draw on different theoretical traditions: there is no central theory or school of thought in comparative-historical humor studies. Still, most sociological work on humor done since the 1990s is probably best captured by this rather vague umbrella term.

The sociology of humor 

379

Comparisons across time and space generally show great variations as well as some universalities. Constants in humor across cultures are primarily the preferred topics for joking: sexuality, gender relations, bodily functions, stupidity, and strangers (Apte 1985). In other words: people joke about taboo topics and deviance. This underlines the relationship between humor and the drawing of boundaries between “the normal” and “the abnormal” (Powell 1988). Other constants are the existence of specific delineated humorous roles and domains; humorous forms and techniques such as reversal, imitation, slapstick, wordplay; and the existence of rituals and ritual performances associated with humor – which suggests a more or less universal separation of “serious” and “non-serious” domains, although the nature of this boundary may differ. But even within these constants, there are great variations: in humorous forms, genres and techniques as well as in humorous content. Each culture, nation, community and era is supposed to have specific humorous styles and forms. This “local” sense of humor is widely believed to a sort of index for the deepest nature of a group, place, or age. Sociology has generally relegated studies of the humorous Zeitgeist of a place or age to folklore, history, or the humanities; when sociologists have made qualifications about a culture’s sense of humor, this is usually in the context of a wider theory of societal dynamics. The book on folly by Zijderveld (1982), discussed above, is an example of this approach: he connected the rise and demise of a  particular humorous style with the much wider development of rationalization and “disenchantment of the world”. Similarly, in the edited volume by Paton, Powell and Wagg (1996) many articles bring up the theme of “postmodern” humor: reflexive and intertextual styles of humor that mirror a wider societal turn towards reflexive modernity or post-modernity (cf. Gray 2006). In such studies, humor is not the index of an essential group culture, but a particular manifestation of a wider social phenomenon. Implicit in this approach is a comparison: between humor and other phenomena manifesting the same trend. The most explicit comparative research program in humor studies is the work of Davies on jokes (1990; 1998a; 1998b; 2003). In his 1990 book, Davies compared patterns of ethnic joking around the world. Although ethnic humor is probably universal, who is targeted, and how, varies significantly, as Davies shows by looking both at the groups who are targeted, and the humorous “scripts” about these groups. Davies convincingly establishes that the same jokes are told in many parts of the world. The most common humorous script worldwide is stupidity, but there are also transnational corpora

380 

Giselinde Kuipers

of jokes about such themes as dirtiness, stinginess, cowardliness, or eating habits. Davies’s comparative approach makes visible a  cross-cultural pattern: stupidity jokes are generally told about slightly “backward” versions of one’s own group, such as recent migrant groups (the Poles and the Irish in the US) or peripheral, often rural, communities in or close to one’s own country (the Belgians for the French and the Dutch, Ostfriesen in Germany). Jokes about canny and stingy groups, on the other hand, are told about groups that are successful, notably in trade or the money business, and that have more central and dominant position: the Scots, the Jews, the Genovese in Italy, and the Dutch in Belgium. Davies points out that these jokes not only reflect ethnic relationships, but also central moral categories, such as rationality, courage, or cleanliness. The stupid–canny dichotomy not only mirrors status relations, but also of the importance of rationality in the modern era: the “stupid” people exhibit a lack of rationality, whereas the canny are overly rationalized. Thus, Davies summarizes the globally popular genres of the stupidity and canniness jokes as “jokes from the iron cage” (1998a: 63), referring to Max Weber’s classical description of modern rationality as an “iron cage”. This analysis of ethnic humor has been extended to jokes about other categories, such as blonde jokes or political jokes (Davies 1998a; 2003), always showing how transnational joke genres, with mostly transnational moral themes, get applied to local conditions. Central to this comparative analysis is the question which genres and scripts do not diffuse or have a more limited regional spread (such as dirtiness jokes, which are popular in North-West Europe but not in Anglo-Saxon countries), since such divergent patterns enable the isolation of variables determining the viability of a joke genre or script in a specific country (Davies 1998b). As Davies’s work illustrates, a cross-comparison of humor often ends up telling us as much, or maybe more, about the groups being compared as it tells us about humor. Whom people joke about tells us something about the relationship between the jokers and their butt – although comparative sociologists usually tend to interpret these relations more broadly than conflict scholars, and often in terms of status or inequality rather than conflict or hostility (Kuipers 2000; Oring 1992; 2003). And what people joke about reflects what they find important and what is a source of concern to them. Sometimes these concerns are similar across cultures: Davies’s global comparisons uncover worldwide preoccupations with modernization and rationality. In their analysis of the blonde joke, another transnational genre, both Davies (1998) and Oring (2003) have argued that the rise of these jokes in

The sociology of humor 

381

many Western countries are related to changing gender relations. Some local color is often added to such global jokes: in the UK, blonde jokes are told about Essex girls, adding a working-class connotation these jokes don’t have elsewhere. The preoccupations reflected in humor may be more specific, and sometimes quite local. For instance, lawyer jokes are a typical American phenomenon, which is an index of the strong position of lawyers and the centrality of the legal system to American politics and society (Galanter 2004). Folklorist Oring (2003: 97–115) argues there is a particular brand of humor specific to frontier societies: Australian, American and Israeli humor all show a  fondness of tall tales and practical joking, and mock sophistication. According to Oring, such “colonizing humor” expresses the frontier experience of starting anew, away from civilization, and helps to forge a new identity based in this experience. A more detailed case study of this type of humor by Shiffman and Katz (2005) analyzed the Israeli jokes told in the 1930s by Eastern European old-timers at the expense of the formality, rigidity, and general maladaptedness of well-bred German Jews (“Yekkes”), arguing that these jokes reflect a very particular episode in Jewish migration history: the ethnic superiority in these jokes turns the tables on earlier migration episodes in Germany and the US, in which Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were denigrated by German Jewish immigrants. Not only who, and what people joke about; but also how they joke about this differs between cultures, as Kuipers (2006a) has demonstrated in her study of humor styles in the Netherlands and the US. Starting out from the appreciation of one particular humorous genre, the joke, she showed how humor styles in both countries demarcate salient social boundaries. In the Netherlands, joke telling is most popular among working or lower middle class men, corresponding to a  humor style that favors sociability, exuberance, and performance skills. The college-educated upper middle classes generally dislike jokes, since for this group, a good sense of humor shows intellectual originality, deadpan restraint, and sharpness – qualities they do not see in joke-telling. In the United States, humor styles are not as strongly connected to class background, but gender differences tend to be stronger, and Americans evaluate humor less in terms of intellect or sociability, more in moral terms. This study shows that different social groups have different criteria for good and bad humor, which means that they joke not only about different subjects, but also in different ways. These standards are related more to style than to content, and they are linked with broader communication styles, taste cultures, and notions of personhood.

382 

Giselinde Kuipers

A  final comparative question, brought up by historians such as Dekker (2001) and Wickberg (1998) deals with the social standing and meaning of humor in different societies. Dekker intriguigingly suggests there are “conjunctural” fluctuations in humor, with some eras and cultures being more friendly to humor than others. He described the Dutch Golden Age, in the seventeenth century, as a very humor-friendly period, and the eighteenth and nineteenth century as more hostile to humor, noting the rise of Calvinism, a religious affiliation notoriously suspicious of non-seriousness and play, as one of the factors in his shift. As Wickberg (1998) shows in his book The Senses of Humor, having a sense of humor became increasingly central to the American understanding of the self in the course of the twentieth century. The high social standing of humor has caused a veritable industry of humor promotion and development, especially in the US, discussed critically and hilariously by Lewis (2006). Billig (2005) has written a scathing criticism of the positive view of humor in current society as well as humor studies. These recent studies, while not explicitly comparative in their approach, give rise to intriguing comparative questions about social and cultural conditions conducive or prohibitive to humor. 3.  Issues In the next section, I will discuss some issues which have recently been the topic of special interest in humor sociology: the interpretation of humor at the expense of others and more generally the “dark side of humor”; the relation between humor and laughter; and the study of humorous forms and genres, including mediatized forms of humor. 3.1.  The “dark side” of humor: Humor, aggression, and transgression After many centuries in which humor and laughter had a  bad reputation, modern humor studies have tended to stress the beneficial character of humor, both for society and for the psyche. However, within humor studies there has been a consistent concern with the transgressive, aggressive, and conflictive functions humor can have. This matter ties in to the more general question of the “dark side” of humor. Much humor is based on the transgression of societal boundaries, and such transgression can cause offense as well as amusement. And while not

The sociology of humor 

383

all humor has a butt, many jokes have some sort of target: groups, persons, objects, ideas, or the world at large. The various theoretical traditions have suggested different interpretations of transgressive or deprecating humor: conflict theories stress its relation with conflict and hostility; functionalist analyses interpret it as safety valve or social corrective; phenomenological and symbolic interactionist stress its ambiguous and manifold meanings, and its role in negotiating meanings and worldviews; and comparative-historical studies tend to stress its connection with larger social and cultural concerns. The present-day descendents of superiority theory take the dark side of humor most seriously. Gruner (1978) and more recently Billig (2005) have taken the position that humor and laughter are correlates of social superiority: every joke is basically a putdown or an act of social exclusion. Gruner has expounded the view that humor is a game with “winners” and “losers”, and Billig (2005) argues, in his “social critique of humor” that humor and laughter are social control mechanisms, based in ridicule and embarrassment. Other authors have argued that humor, while not intrinsically connected with hostility, aggression, or transgression, often overlaps with negative emotions: people often joke about what they dislike or feel superior to, and dislike or superiority adds to the liking of humor (see above). Oring (2003: 41–57) and Billig (2001a) have shown that groups that are openly racist tend to underline and express this both with serious and joking expression of ethnic hostility and stereotyping. Ford and Ferguson (2004) showed that humor, because of its non-seriousness and playfulness, can diminish barriers to the expression of negative emotions, and thus facilitate hostility. Recently, Lewis (2006), looking at American humor from talk radio to horror movie jokes, has argued convincingly that humor (while not necessarily a force of darkness) reflects the darker tendencies in American society: it highlights social rifts, exposes shared cultural fears, and is an outlet for hostility, for instance in the rather vicious humor of some “talk radio” hosts. The meaning of transgressive humor is not only debated in Academia, but a source of concern in everyday life as well. Transgressive humor is generally controlled by the “unwritten rules” of informal regimes (Kuipers 2006b; Palmer 2005), and also – less frequently – by formal censorship (Davies 1988). Both in Academia and in society at large, the most heated debates have been around ethnic and sexist humor, the most contested forms of humor in modern Western societies. This issue has been the subject of various debates in the HUMOR journal (Davies 1991; Lewis 1997; 2008; Oring 1991) and of a 2005 book by Lockyer and Pickering (2005a), all revolving around the same question: When, why, and under what conditions is humor targeting persons

384 

Giselinde Kuipers

or groups “just a joke”, and when does it have a more serious meaning or consequences? With the exception of some die-hard superiority theorists, humor scholars generally concede they cannot solve the issue of ethnic and sexist humor by simply pinning down the one true meaning of jokes. Rather, they stress how the meaning of a joke is created within a specific context: whether it is a private conversation or a public situation; what the position and background of the joke-teller is; what the relationship is between the joker and his audience (and the butt); whether it is mediated or conversational humor (Lewis 1997; Lockyer and Pickering 2005a; Palmer 1994). Theorists of ethnic humor Davies (1990; 1991) and Oring (2003) have stressed the inherent ambiguity of humor. Davies, especially, tends to downplay the seriousness of humor, stating that humor is merely “playing with aggression”, although he notes that in some cases ethnic joke scripts overlap with actual ethnic hostility, which considerably changes these jokes’ serious implications. Oring (2003: 65) argued: “Joke cycles are not really about particular groups who are ostenstibly their targets. These groups serve merely as signifiers that hold together a discourse on certain ideas and values that are of current concern. Polish jokes, Italian jokes, and JAP jokes are less comments about real Poles, Italians, or Jewish women than they are about a particular set of values attributed to these groups. These attributions, while not entirely arbitrary, are, for the most part not seriously entertained.” The contributors in Lockyer and Pickering’s volume take a more critical view. Howitt and Owusu-Bempa (2005: 62), in the most explicitly critical contribution, conclude that “no only [do] racist jokes provide ready opportunities to give expression to ideas of ‘racial’ superiority. . . they continually reinforce the use of race categories”, leading them to denounce even jokes mocking racism on the grounds that they reinforce racial thinking. However, most other contributions attempt to carefully balance what the editors call “the self-defeating, regulatory, left-wing arguments associated with political correctness, and the opportunistic, unreflexive, right-wing denunciations of its practice” (Lockyer and Pickering 2005b: 24). In the insightful introduction to their book, Lockyer and Pickering, discussing what they call the “ethics” of humor, portray joking as a  process of “negotiation” about the line between funny and offensive. Billig (2005) coined the concept of “unlaughter” – the pointed non-acceptance of an attempt at humor – to make a similar point about humor’s processual nature and uncertain outcome. This perspective on humor as the negotiation of boundaries allows the authors to bring out the power dimension of humor. However,

The sociology of humor 

385

it also illustrates how joking, when the negotiations are completed successfully, is about the creation of community. As Lockyer and Pickering put it: joking is about the construction of a “we”, which implies inclusion as well as ­exclusion. 3.2.  Humor and laughter In humor studies, there has been a tendency to exclude laughter from the analysis, because there is no necessary one-on-one relationship between humor and laughter. There are other possible responses to successful attempts at humor (smiling, another joke, a  verbal acknowledgment, groaning in response to a lame pun); and laughter can be related to several other moods and emotions, ranging from friendliness and play to nervousness and ridicule (Provine 2000; Ruch 1998). As we saw earlier, symbolic interactionists and phenomenologists brought laughter to the center of sociological humor studies, describing laughter as a marker of the shift to the humorous mode and of the acceptance of a joke, an important signal of social acceptance, the expression of a humorous worldview (Bakhtin), and as “the language of humor” (Zijderveld 1983). Recently, several authors have argued for inclusion of laughter in the sociology of humor. Billig (2005) made laughter central to his theory of humor and embarrassment, seeing laughter basically as derision. On a more positive note, Kuipers (2006a: 7) defined humor as the “successful exchange of jokes and laughter”, arguing that while laughter may not be a necessary corollary of humor, it is the ideal and most sought-after response to any attempt at humor, and hence essential to the understanding of the social meanings of humor. Outside of humor studies, sociologists have increasingly been paying attention to the role of emotions in social life. This has led several of them to take up the theme of laughter, generally without much awareness of the insights from humor scholarship; while on the other hand, insights from the sociology of emotion have not yet has much impact in humor research. One of the challenges for sociological humor scholarship is to integrate developments in the sociology of emotions into humor studies (and, reversely, to “sell” humor studies to the sociology of emotions). Scheff, in his sociological theory of emotions, sees shame and pride as the basic emotions of social life. In his work on catharsis, he described laughter as form of relief from social pressure (Scheff 1980). In later work on the

386 

Giselinde Kuipers

e­ motional foundations of social life (1990) he described laughter more specifically as the absence of shame, or “anti-shame”. Billig (2001a; 2005), in his work on ridicule and embarrassment, is influenced by Scheff’s work on shame in social life. However, he sees laughter not as the freedom of embarassment in the self, but rather as causing embarrassment – and hence conformity to norms – in others. Another sociologist of emotion, Katz (1996), did a highly innovative study of laughter in a Parisian funhouse. He examines the “metamorphosis” from a  sober disposition to laughter, followed by a  second transformation from “doing laughter” to what Katz calls “being done by” – giving oneself over to – laughter. This metamorphosis is brought about by the shared watching, generally with family members, of the incongruous images in the funny mirrors, tying family groups together in a strongly embodied bond of laughter and playfulness. Katz’ study pays great attention to the bodily aspect of laughter and the way this contributes to the forging of social bonds, making his study an interesting corrective to the rather instrumentalist and very verbal image of social life emerging from conversational analysis, which locates the creation of relationships primarily in talk. Also, Katz pays careful attention to the nature of the humor provoking all this laughter: he analyzes in detail the way the distorted (incongruous) image in the mirror is collectively constructed as funny by the family group. Finally, Collins’s theory on interaction ritual chains (2004), a  widely praised integration of Durkheimian theory and Goffmanian micro-sociology, is probably the first sociological theory to give a central place to laughter. According to Collins, social life is built on “emotional energy”, emerging in small-scale interactions, but “congealing” in larger networks and cultural symbols with a strong emotional content. Emotional energy emerges in interaction, through the physical co-presence with other people in so-called interaction rituals (to Collins, all interactions are rituals). All interactions, but especially successful, high-energy interactions, lead to the mostly unconscious rhythmical coordination or actions, movements and speech that Collins calls “attunement”. Laughter is a  clear example of the rhythmically attunement of a successful high-energy interaction, and hence, the generation of laughter, typically through humor, becomes one of the central signs of closeness and social understanding. However, while laughter is central to Collins’s theory, he hardly addresses humor. Extrapolating his reasoning, we can assume that in Collins’s view, humor is a culturally specific form of bringing about successful high-energy interactions and attunement – and as such: a central ­dimension of social life.

The sociology of humor 

387

3.3.  The social shaping of humor: Genres and mediated forms of humor Most sociological humor scholarship has been concerned with a  limited number of humorous forms: conversational humor, and most notably jokes, the “fruit flies” of humor scholarship. The joke has been the favorite genre of humor scholars because jokes are easily available, very clearly intended to be humorous, and it is clear where the humor is located: in the punchline. However, as Martin and Kuiper (1999) have shown, canned jokes make up a very small percentage of the humor people enjoy on a day-to-day basis. Moreover, genre is likely to affect the meaning and the appreciation of a humorous utterance. Kuipers (2006a) has shown that the joke, as a  genre, does not have the same connotation to different social groups: it is considered a male genre (cf. Crawford 1995), and in the Netherlands (and probably other Western-European countries) it also class-coded. Also, as Davies (2003) has illustrated, the joke is not a universal genre, and some cultures do not have jokes. The study of humorous forms and their consequences has been relatively marginal in humor sociology – as usual, the folklorists are way ahead. But sociologists are becoming increasingly aware of this, especially because of the growing importance of the media in the creation and dissemination of humor. People increasingly enjoy humor not in face-to-face interaction but through a variety of media: print, television, the Internet. This “mediatization” of humor has the potential to affect the interpretation of humor, and has resulted in the emergence of new, mediated, humorous forms. New media have always given birth to new humorous forms: Dekker (2001) argued that the short humorous anecdote received an important boost in the seventeenth century as a result of the increased possibility of cheap printing. Wickberg (1998) argues that the joke is essentially a nineteenth century genre, reflecting processes of industrialization and commodification during this period. Also, older genres can incorporate elements from new genres: Oring (1987) suggested that disaster jokes are a response to media discourse on disaster, noting that this oral genre incorporated many references and fragments of media culture. More recently, television created several new humorous genres (incorporating of course fragments of older genres), most notably the sitcom. Mills (2005), in his excellent recent study of this genre, has been the first to look specifically at the humor of sitcom. The rare studies of the genre so far have investigated the sitcom mainly in terms of its politics, and especially its politics of stereotyping and representation. Finally, in the past decade, the Internet has led to the proliferation of a wide variety of humorous

388 

Giselinde Kuipers

genres, many of which are derived from earlier folk genres and office lore with a strong do-it-yourself flavor (Kuipers 2005; Shifman 2007). The consequences of genre and form for the interpretation and appreciation of humor is another understudied field in humor scholarship. Reception studies of mediated humor are few and far between. Despite the centrality of humor to popular media, media and communication studies have paid little attention to humorous forms such as comedy, cartoons or humorous advertising. The scarce reception studies of comedy mainly focus on racial issues (Coleman 2000); there are two full monographs dedicated to the reception of 1980s hit The Cosby Show (Fuller 1992; Jhally and Lewis 1992). These studies seem more concerned with issues of race and representation than with the humorous aspect of comedy shows. In his recent book on The Simpsons, Gray (2006) presents a small reception study as part of a longer and perceptive study of this highly intertextual and media-savvy cartoon/sitcom hybrid, interpreting the humorous aspect of this show mostly as parody. Finally, the increasing prominence of mediated humor also sheds new light on old questions about the meaning of humor. Lockyer and Pickering (2005a) note that mediated humor seriously complicates negotiations over the meaning of a joke, because mediated humor is not firmly located in one context anymore, making mediated jokes even more polysemic and ambiguous. The 2005–2006 controversy surrounding the Muhammad cartoons, originally published in a Danish newspaper but leading to worldwide protests, is a dramatic illustration of how an attempt at humor can lead to different responses in different contexts (Lewis 2008). 4.  Conclusion Sociology is a discipline with weak boundaries and a contested core: there is no central framework, theoretical perspective, or methodological approach that all sociologists adhere to. Many central ideas in sociology have been borrowed from other disciplines, and many ideas from sociology have diffused to other disciplines. This is especially visible in the small and interdisciplinary field of humor studies: there has been much “boundary traffic” between sociology and related disciplines. For this reason, this overview of sociological humor studies has featured many anthropologists, folklorists, linguists, and psychologists. To some, this may reek of sociological imperialism. As I hope to have shown in this contribution, this openness often is the strength of sociological contributions to humor research. If done well, sociol-

The sociology of humor 

389

ogy provides the tools to connect small-scale interactions with larger societal developments; cultural conditions with individual amusement; and the social functions of humor with its form and content. However, sociology’s weak boundaries and its eclecticism also entail considerable risks: undertheorized empiricism and overgeneralization from a  single case or limited findings; a proclivity to the “scavenging” of loose concepts, fragments of theories, and isolated findings from other disciplines; the tendency to reduce all humor to a single function or meaning; or more generally lack of theoretical or methodological rigor. However, in the past decades, sociological humor scholarship appears to have matured. Recent studies are generally more sophisticated and rigorous: when theoretical, their claims are notably less brash, and when empirical, the findings have a clear connection with wider theories. Having reviewed the various sociological approaches to humor, it is clear there is no one sociological theory of humor. The scholars and theorists discussed have very different perspectives on humor, generally derived from a more general social theory. Hence, despite its openness to other disciplines, the development of humor sociology looks a lot like the development of sociology as a whole; while insofar as it resembles the development of humor studies, this is mainly in its increasing rigor and sophistication. The connection between humor sociology and general humor theories, such as the various versions of incongruity theory, and (with notable exceptions) superiority theory, is still quite weak. So far, sociologists have not joined in the attempts by linguists and psychologists to integrate their findings into a general theory of humor. In my view, this is not a bad thing. The best sociology of humor, both theoretical and empirical, has been firmly rooted in sociological theory: incorporating insights from humor scholarship at large, with a sensitivity to the ambiguities and specificities of humor, but basing its interpretive framework and methodological approach in the author’s social theory of choice.

Notes 1.. Oring (1994), in a  highly original variation on psychoanalytic humor theory, transferred Freudian theory to the present, suggesting that humor in modern day America is used to vent and express sentiment, an emotion increasingly tabooed and suppressed in modern Western societies. 2. Too late for extended discussion, but just in time for favourable mention in a footnote, the International Review of Social History published a special issue on humor and social protest (’t Hart and Bos 2007), containing many insightful

390 

Giselinde Kuipers

contributions and interesting case studies that directly address the issues discussed in this section. 3. This conceptual unclarity is partly caused by the theoretical background of many conflict scholars of humor. Sociologists using this approach often adhere to Marxist or Marxist-inspired traditions where society is conceptualized as a struggle, which means that all forms of inequality necessarily imply conflict and superiority and conflict are very much the same thing. Moreover, in humor studies there has been a strong Freudian influence, which also leads to interpretations of “unconscious” drives and motives in humor. Both Marxist and Freudian theories, while very insightful at times, tend to facilitate interpretations of humor in terms of conflict or aggression even when the concerned parties do not agree with this interpretation and even disagree vehemently (blaming it on “false consciousness” or “denial”, respectively). 4. I am using “symbolic interactionism” as an umbrella term for a variety for sometimes antagonistic schools in social research focusing on the construction of meaning in everyday interaction, from the work of Erving Goffman (who refused to be called symbolic interactionist) and ethnomethodologists (who also refused to be called symbolic interactionists) to more recent work in sociology and sociolinguistics by scholars who are not as particular about these labels anymore.

References Apte, Mahadev L. 1985 Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Attardo, Salvatore, and Victor Raskin 1991 Script Theory revis(it)ed: Joke Similarity and Joke Representation Model. HUMOR 4 (3): 293–347. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich 1984 Rabelais and his World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (Original Russian ed. 1965.) Benton, Gregor 1988 The origins of the political joke. In Powell and Paton (eds.), 33–55. Berger, Peter 1997 Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Bergson, Henri 1999 Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Los Angeles: Green Integer. (Original French ed. Paris: Presse Universitaire de France, 1900.)

The sociology of humor 

391

Billig, Michael 2001a Humour and hatred: The racist jokes of the Ku Klux Clan. Discourse & Society 12 (3): 267–289. 2001b Humour and embarrassment: Limits of ‘nice guy’ theories of social life. Theory, Culture & Society 18 (5): 23–43. 2005 Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humor. London: Sage. Bradney, Pamela 1957 The joking relationship in industry. Human Relations 9 (2): 179–​187. Burma, John 1946 Humor as a technique in race conflict. American Sociological Review 11 (6): 710–715. Coleman, Robin 2000 African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor. New York: Garland Collins, Randall 2004 Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coser, Rose 1959 Some social functions of laughter: A study of humor in a hospital setting. Human Relations 12 (2): 171–182. 1960 Laughter among colleagues: A study of the social functions of humor among the staff of a mental hospital. Psychiatry 23 (1): 81–95 Crawford, Mary 1995 Talking Difference: On Gender and Language. Sage: London. 2003 Gender and humor in conversational context. Journal of Pragmatics 35 (9): 1413–1430. Davies, Christie 1982 Ethnic jokes, moral values, and social boundaries. British Journal of Sociology 33 (3): 383–403. 1990 Ethnic Humor around the World: A Comparative Analysis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1991 Ethnic humor, hostility and aggression: A  reply to Eliott Oring. Humor 4 (4): 415–422 1996 Puritanical and politically correct? A  critical historical account of changes in the censorship of comedy by the BBC. In: Powell, Paton and Wagg (eds.), 29–62. 1998a Jokes and their Relations to Society. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1998b The Dog that Didn’t Bark in the Night: A new sociological approach to the cross-cultural study of humor. In Ruch (ed.), 293–308. 2002 The Mirth of Nations. New Brunswick: Transaction. 2007 Humour and protest: Jokes under communism. International Review of Social History 52: 291–305.

392 

Giselinde Kuipers

Davis, Murray 1993 What’s so Funny? The Comic Conception of Culture and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dekker, Rudolf 2001 Humour in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Douglas, Mary 1975 Jokes. In: Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology, 90–114. London: Routledge. Draitser, Emil 1998 Taking Penguins to the Movies: Ethnic Humor in Russia. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Dundes, Alan 1987 Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Humor Cycles and Stereotypes. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press. Dundes, Alan, and Thomas Hauschild 1983 Auschwitz jokes. Western Folklore 42 (4), 249–260. Emerson, Joan 1969 Negotiating the serious import of humor. Sociometry 32 (2): 169–​ 181. Fine, Gary Alan 1983 Sociological aspects of humor. In Goldstein and McGhee (eds.), Handbook of Humor Research, 159–182. New York: Springer. 1984 Humorous interactions and the social construction of meaning: Making sense in a  jocular vein. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 5 (5): 83–101. Ford, Thomas, and Ferguson, Mark 2004 Social consequences of disparagement humor: A  prejudiced norm theory. Personality and Social Psychology Review 8 (1): 79–94. Freud, Sigmund 1976 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Original German ed. Leipzig: Deuticke, 1905.) Fuller, Linda 1992 The Cosby Show: Audiences, Impact, and Implications. Westwood, CT: Greenwood Press. Galanter, Marc 2004 Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Goffman, Erving 1974 Frame Analysis: An Essay in the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

The sociology of humor 

393

Goldstein, Donna 2003 Laughter out of Place: Race, Class, Violence and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gouin, Rachel 2003 What’s so funny? Humor in women’s accounts of their involvement of social action. Qualitative Research 4 (1): 25–44. Gray, Jonathan 2006 Watching with the Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality. London: Routledge. Gruner, Charles 1978 Understanding Laughter: The Working of Wit and Humor. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Gundelach, Peter 2000 Joking relationships and national identity in Scandinavia. Acta Sociologica 43 (2): 113–122. Habermas, Jürgen 1992 Further reflections on the public sphere. In Craig Calhoun (ed), Habermas and the Public Sphere, 421–461. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ’t Hart, Marjolein, and Dennis Bos 2007 Humour and Social Protest. Special issue of International Review of Social History 52, supplement S15. Hay, Jennifer 2000 Functions of humor in the conversations of men and women. Journal of Pragmatics 32 (6): 709–742. 2001 The pragmatics of humor support. HUMOR 14 (1): 55–82. Hiller, Harry 1983 Humor and hostility: A neglected aspect of social movement analysis. Qualitative Sociology 6 (3): 255–265. Hobbes, Thomas 1660/1987 Thomas Hobbes. In John Morreall (ed.), Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, 19–20. Holmes, Janet 2000 Politeness, power and provocation: How humor functions in the workplace. Discourse Studies 2 (2): 159–185. 2006 Sharing a laugh: Pragmatic aspects of humor and gender in the workplace. Journal of Pragmatics 38 (1): 26–50. Howitt, Dennis, and Kwame Owusu-Bempah 2005 Race and ethnicity in popular humour. In Lockyer and Pickering (eds.), 45–62. Jefferson, Gail 1979 A technique for inviting laughter and its subsequent acceptance/declination. In G. Psathas (ed.), Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology, 79–96. New York: Irvington.

394 

Giselinde Kuipers

Jenkins, Ron 1994

Subversive Laughter: The Liberating Power of Humor. New York: Free Press. Jhally, Sut, and Justin Lewis 1992 Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Katz, Jack 1996 Families and funny mirrors: A study of the social construction and personal embodiment of humor. American Journal of Sociology 101 (5): 1194–1237. Koller, Marvin 1988 Humor and Society: Explorations in the Sociology of Humor. Houston: Cap and Gown Press. Kotthoff, Helga 2000 Gender and joking: On the complexities of women’s image politics in humorous narratives. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 55–80. 2006 Gender and humor: The state of the art. Journal of Pragmatics 38 (1): 4–25. Kuipers, Giselinde 2000 The Difference between a Surinamese and a Turk: Ethnic Jokes and the Position of Ethnic Minorities in the Netherlands. HUMOR 12 (2): 141–175. 2005 Where was King Kong when we needed him? Public discourse, digital disaster jokes, and the functions of laughter after 9/11. Journal of American Culture 28 (1): 70–84. 2006a Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 2006b The social construction of digital danger: Debating, defusing, and inflating the moral dangers of online humor and pornography in the Netherlands and the United States. New Media & Society 8 (3): 379–400. LaFave, Lawrence 1972 Humor judgments as a function of reference groups and identification classes. In Jeffrey Goldstein and Paul McGhee (eds), The Psychology of Humor, 195–210. New York: Academic Press. LaFave, Lawrence, Jay Haddad, and William Maesen 1976 Superiority, enhanced self-esteem and perceived incongruity humor theory. In Anthony Chapman and Hugh Foot (eds.), Humor and Laughter, 63–92. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Lewis, Paul 2006 Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The sociology of humor 

395

Lewis, Paul (ed.) 1997 Debate: Humor and political correctness. HUMOR 10 (4): 453–​513. 2008 The Muhammad cartoons and humor research: A  collection of essays. HUMOR 21 (1): 1–46. Lockyer, Sharon 2006 A two-pronged attack? Private Eye’s satirical humour and investigative reporting. Journalism Studies 7 (5): 765–781. Lockyer, Sharon, and Michael Pickering 2005a The ethics and aesthetics of humour and comedy. In: Lockyer and Pickering (eds), 1–24. 2005b Beyond the Joke: The Limits of Humour. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Martin, Rod 2006 The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach. Burlington: ­Elsevier Academic Press. Martin, Rod & Nicholas Kuiper 1999 Daily occurrence of laughter: Relationship with age, gender and type a personality. HUMOR 12: 355–384. Martineau, William 1972 A model of the social functions of humor. In: Jeffrey Goldstein and Paul McGhee (eds.), The Psychology of Humor, 101–128. New York: Academic Press. Middleton, Russell 1959 Negro and white reactions to racial humor. Sociometry 22 (2): 175–​ 183. Mills, Brett 2005 Television Sitcom. Berkeley: University of California Press. Morreall, John 1983 Taking Laughter Seriously. Albany: SUNY Press. 2005 Humour and the conduct of politics. In Lockyer and Pickering (eds.), 63–78. Morreall, John (ed.) 1987 The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Albany: SUNY Press. Morrow, P. D. 1987 Those sick Challenger jokes.  Journal of Popular Culture  20  (4): 175–​184. Mulkay, Michael 1988 On Humour: Its Nature and Place in Modern Society. Oxford: Polity Press. Nevo, Ofra 1985 Similarities between humor responses of men and women in Israeli Jews and Arabs. In Marylin Safir, M. T. Mednick, D. Israeli, and J. Bernard (eds.), Women’s Worlds, 135–141. New York: Prager.

396 

Giselinde Kuipers

Norrick, Neill 1993 Conversational Joking: Humor in Everyday Talk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Obdrlik, Antonin 1942 Gallows humor: A sociological phenomenon. American Journal of Sociology 45 (5): 709–716. Oring, Elliott 1987 Jokes and the discourse on disaster: The Challenger shuttle explosion and its joke cycle. Journal of American Folklore 100  (397): 276–286. 1991 Review of “Ethnic Humor around the World”. HUMOR 4 (1): 109–​ 114. 1992 Jokes and their Relations. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 1994 Humor and the suppression of sentiment. HUMOR 7: 7–26. 2003 Engaging Humor. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Oshima, Kimie 2000 Ethnic jokes and social function in Hawai’i. HUMOR 13 (1): 41–​ 57. Palmer, Jerry 1994 Taking Humour Seriously. London: Routledge. 2005 Parody and decorum: Permission to mock. In Lockyer and Pickering (eds.), 79–97. Paton, George 1988 In search of literature on the sociology of humour: A sociobibliographical afterword. In Powell and Paton (eds.), 260–271, Paton, George, and Ivan Filby 1996 Humour at work and the work of humour. In Powell, Paton, and Wagg (eds.), 105–138. Pizzini, Franca 1991 Communication hierarchies in humor: Gender differences in the obstetrical/gynaecological setting. Discourse & Society 2: 477–488. Powell, Chris 1988 A phenomenological analysis of humour in society. In Powell and Paton (eds.), 86–105. Powell, Chris, and George Paton (eds.) 1988 Humour in Society: Resistance and Control. Basingstoke: MacMillan. Powell, Chris, George Paton, and Stephen Wagg (eds.) 1996 The Social Faces of Humour: Practices and Issues. Aldershot: Arena.

The sociology of humor 

397

Provine, Robert 2000 Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. New York: Viking. Raskin, Victor 1985 Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Dordrecht: Reidel. Robinson, Dawn, and Lynn Smith-Lovin 2001 Getting a laugh: Gender, status, and humor in task discussions. Social Forces 80 (1): 123–158. Ruch, Willibald (ed.) 1998 The Sense of Humor. Explorations of a Personality Characteristic. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Sayre, Joan 2001 The use of aberrant medical humor by psychiatric unit staff. Issues in Mental Health Nursing 22 (7): 669–689. Scheff, Thomas 1980 Catharsis in Healing, Ritual, and Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1990 Microsociology: Discourse, Emotion, and Social Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scott, James 1985 Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Yale: Yale University Press. Shiffman, Limor 2007 Humor in the age of digital reproduction: Continuity and change in internet-based comic texts. International Journal of Communication 1: 187–209. Shiffman, Limor, Stephen Coleman, and Stephen Ward 2007 Only joking? Online humour in the 2005 UK general election. Information, Communication & Society 10 (4): 465–487. Shiffman, Limor, and Elihu Katz 2007 “Just call me Adonai”: A case study of ethnic humor and immigrant assimilation. American Sociological Review 70 (5): 843–859. Spencer, Herbert 1981/1987 Herbert Spencer. In John Morreall (ed.), 99–110. Speier, Hans 1998 Wit and politics: An essay on laughter and power. American Journal of Sociology 103 (5): 1352–1401. Spradley, James, Brenda Mann 1975 The Cocktail Waitress. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Stephenson, Richard 1951 Conflict and control functions of humor. The American Journal of Sociology 56 (6): 569–574.

398 

Giselinde Kuipers

Stokker, Kathleen 1995 Folklore Fights the Nazis: Humor in Occupied Norway 1940–1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Sykes, A. J. M. 1966 Joking relationships in an industrial setting. American Anthropologist 68:188–193. Wagg, Stephen 1996 Everything else is propaganda: The politics of alternative comedy. In Powell, Paton and Wagg (eds.), 297–320. Walle, Alf 1976 Getting picked up without being put down: Jokes and the bar rush. Journal of the Folklore Institute 13: 201–217 Wickberg, Daniel 1998 The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Zijderveld, Anton 1982 Reality in a Looking-glass: Rationality through an Analysis of Traditional Folly. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1983 Trend report on the sociology of humour and laughter. Current Sociology 31 (3). Zillmann, Dolf 1983 Disparagement humor. In Paul McGhee and Jeffrey Goldstein (eds.), Handbook of Humor Research. Vol. 1, 85–108. New York: ­Springer. Zillmann, Dolf, and Holly Stocking 1976 Putdown humor. Journal of Communication 26 (3): 154–163.

Beyond “Wit and Persuasion”: Rhetoric, composition, and humor studies Tarez Samra Graban

1.  Introduction To comprehensively locate the study of humor in rhetoric and composition is beyond the scope of this chapter, which merely tries to identify – and direct scholars towards – key intersections between humor studies and the discipline. By treating the topic “rhetoric and composition” as more than “rhetoric” plus “composition,” invariably, some voices will get left out, some complexities will be glossed, some historicizations will seem woefully incomplete. Like many areas of its focus, rhetoric and composition is a dynamic field existing at the convergence of ancient traditions with contemporary issues. Its principal emphases include histories and theories of rhetoric as they come to bear on composition studies; public and professional practices in writing; and questions of gender, culture, race, identity, language, and technology in the teaching and learning of writing. Broadly conceived, “rhetoric and composition” is that domain which deals with how the evolving rhetorical tradition (Graff 2; Gross 31) comes to bear on the teaching, learning, and performing of writing and written discourse in academic and real-world contexts. This chapter discusses the role that humor has played – and continues to play – in the formation of our discipline, focusing primarily on verbal humor and on rhetoric in the western tradition. Though it is not the first documented mention of humor in western rhetorical treatises, the earliest discussion of comedy as a mode of production may possibly be Plato’s 360 BCE Philebus in which three characters – Protarchus, Socrates, and Philebus – consider one interlocutor’s affective superiority of understanding the pleasurable at the expense of another, though it isn’t until Aristotle’s Rhetoric that the conditions for humor are considered to have a reproducible effect. Thus, rhetorical studies of humor typically get attributed to an Aris­totelian notion of superiority (Gruner 1978; cf. Morreall; Machline) that comes of using it as a “gentlemanly ornament” in the ­epilogos or conclusion of a speech (Rhetoric III.19.5; Kennedy 281), which was one

400 

Tarez Samra Graban

mark of an orator’s good breeding and intellect over another. Aristotle began for us what we might today call a serious study of “wit” and what would reappear in treatises on stylistics and discourse through the twentieth century as linked principally to concerns of ethos (the nature and character of the rhetor as portrayed in the speech) and pathos (an appeal made to alter the judgment of an audience). But beyond the study of historicized “wit,” humor has invited – no, enticed – a growing number of rhetoric and composition scholars to consider its bearing on cultural production and inquiry. In investigating how these scholars draw on humor studies, I  have seen three dominant topic areas emerge, which I attempt to explicate in this chapter: 1. the role of humor in historical studies of rhetoric, especially rhetorical studies of irony, parody and satire in the texts of women writers; 2. the place of humor in composition pedagogy, both as a mode of instruction and as a form of enculturation into the first-year course, including its use in writing textbooks; and 3. the role of humor as cultural production in contemporary (mostly political) written discourse. It makes sense, then, that rhetoric and composition’s interfaces with humor would overlap with areas already covered by this book, including linguistics, communication studies, history, philosophy, and education. I don’t mean to suggest that no projects can be called distinctly “rhetoric and composition,” merely to explain why the scholarship I discuss in this chapter will consider humor as genre and methodology, intention and outcome, and linguistic and cultural phenomenon. 1.1.  The role of humor in historical studies of rhetoric Tracing the role of humor in the development of rhetorical study reveals much about how our tradition has evolved around changing notions of ethos, pathos, logos (an appeal to logic or to discourses of reasoning), inventio (the systematic discovery of argument), and techne (the learned art or craft-like knowledge of oratory). With his delineation of rhetorical canons and his taxonomy of logical structures and persuasive modes, Aristotle’s system of rhetoric became known as reproducible and representative of the more practical arts. Aristotle’s skilled rhetor showed a mastery of the full subject of oratory; knew the different types of speech occasions and how to choose suitably for

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

401

the occasion (e.g., judicial, deliberative, or epideictic); knew the different topics relevant for particular audiences; and had the ability to adjust the speech to the audience’s needs, knowledge, and desires (Rhetoric II.22.10; Rhetoric II.1.2). This includes his treatment of wit, stemming from the practice of “dissimulating,” “understating,” or “hiding” a rhetor’s underlying intentions (called eironeia). Like Plato, Aristotle suggested using humor to draw the audience’s attention to aspects of the speaker’s or subject’s character. But where Plato saw humor occurring somewhat uncomfortably in the mixed pleasure and pain that came from responding to comical situations, Aristotle believed that the educated wit could draw attention to that failing or a piece of ugliness without producing pain, for the young audience are “fond of laughter” (Rhetoric II.12.15) and of a certain “good taste” in playful social behavior (Nicomachean Ethics IV.8.1), so long as it does not go to “excess in ridicule.” In Rhetoric and Irony, Swearingen specifically notes Plato’s inherent mistrust of irony because it was a “false discourse” (Swearingen, Rhetoric and Irony 73), while Aristotle’s rhetorical tradition counted on suasive discourse occurring in some part due to speaker, audience and situation, not solely based on ethical truth. He was, therefore, more tolerant of double meaning and humorous forms (Swearingen, Rhetoric and Irony 125). For Aristotle, the speaker’s reputation was enveloped in the truthful content of the speech and in the skillful way he established goodwill with the audience. Thus, he persisted in differentiating between eironeia – which was how a capable rhetor could ethically reveal the “ludicrous” by constructing audience that looked down on subjects of lesser virtue – and “comedy” as a mode of discourse appropriate for listeners “of a lower type” (Poetics I.5; Swearingen, Rhetoric and Irony 127). Although the Greek eironeia is the closest origin of the English word irony, Aristotle used it to describe a kind of intelligent “mock modesty” and juxtaposed it with more overt and ludicrous buffoonery (Swearingen, Rhetoric and Irony 127). A fuller treatment of Aristotle’s humorous discourse may have existed at one time. In Book III.18.7 of the Rhetoric, Aristotle refers to an earlier work on eironeia, which George Kennedy describes as existing “in the lost second book” (Kennedy 280). Though very little of the Rhetoric and the Poetics actually dealt with the employment and placement of humorous devices in the speech, Aristotle’s system did distinguish between causes of humor, including language embellishments such as ambiguity, synonyms, and diminutives; and topical subjects or actual events such as deception, violation of laws, irrational behaviors, and the “marvelous” (or the unexpected). While Aristotle’s rhetor could not control external events, he could control how he portrayed

402 

Tarez Samra Graban

himself in relationship to these events and he could control his language and manner of delivery. Aside from Aristotle’s references to understatement and mockery, Antiquity left us with two prominent treatments of humor in oratory situations – Marcus Tullius Cicero’s dialogical de Oratore (c. 46 BCE) and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (c. 95 CE). For Cicero, humor was one way that the speaker could undermine his opposition, revealing his opposition’s weaknesses while concealing his own (Volpe 322–323); thus, he advocated using humor selectively in various modes of oratory to create pleasantries for the audience and to reflect positively on the orator’s character when they carry a “concealed suspicion of ridicule” and when they are uttered by a person who is “not morose” (de Oratore II.69; Hughes). Cicero’s facetiae – a term used to denote the two classes of humor as they are introduced into his dialogue – relied on some shared presuppositions between the speaker and hearer, but could be principally considered an appeal to ethos (a reflection of the speaker’s character) and, if used carelessly, extravagantly, or indecently, it would more often function as a  kind of insincerity or deceit (de Oratore II.67). Ironical dissimulation is “an elegant kind of humor, satirical with a mixture of gravity, and adapted to oratory as well as to polite conversation” (de Oratore II.67). The purposes governing the successful use of facetiae were slightly more complex, and each is exemplified in another of Cicero’s texts, Pro Caelio (The Defense of Caelius). The Caelius is discussed in greater detail in Bowen, Graban (“Expecting the Unexpected”), Wisse, and in Chapters V and VI of Geffcken, but is worthwhile mentioning briefly here. In this speech, Cicero creates humor on a  number of levels, appealing immediately to the audience’s psychological needs, revealing Roman values “more profoundly than conventional political oratory” (Volpe 311), and constructing jests that represent political dissoi logoi, as described by Poulakos, in the way they reflect “an awareness at once cognizant of its own position and of those positions opposing it” (Poulakos 60). De Oratore offers us one of the first significant classifications of humor in the western rhetorical tradition, most likely as a  way of arguing for its teachability, although it isn’t until Quintilian’s responses to Cicero that the notion of teaching humor will be made explicit. To be clear, in de Oratore the character called “Caesar” demonstrates the difficulties of teaching humor as an art, in so much as it is difficult to grasp the notion of what it means to be funny (de Oratore II.54). However, Caesar also offers concrete ways of recognizing the witty, even if its production cannot be clearly mapped. To

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

403

better define it as an oratorical phenomenon, and in response to the character Antonius’s claim that there is no art involved in its inception (rather, that humor begets a  naturally talented orator), Caesar classifies “laughter” into five subjects of consideration (or causes): what [laughter] is; where it originates; whether it serves the orator’s ethos; to what degree it is; and kinds or notions of “ridiculous” (de Oratore II.58). Caesar further classifies the “ridiculous” into two types: joking in re (where excitement is raised by things or subject matter) and in verbo (where excitement is raised by words) (de Oratore II.59). By “things,” Caesar refers to extended examples of humor in longer narratives like anecdotes. As an illustration, in his popular “fig tree” example, a Sicilian requests some clippings from the fig tree of a friend whose wife recently hanged herself from it, implying that the Sicilian doesn’t care for his wife, and hopes he too could grow a  similar tree (de Oratore II.69). Though he attests to “infinite varieties” of jesting in re, Caesar reduces them to a few categories: “deceiving expectation,” “satirizing the tempers of others,” playing, “comparing a thing with something worse,” “dissembling,” “uttering apparent absurdities,” and “reproving folly” (de Oratore II.72). He leaves it up to the rhetor to appropriate them correctly and considers joking in re to be more challenging rhetorically since it may rely on upholding a lengthy narrative. By “words” Caesar indicates puns and witticisms, and classifies them into three main types with a  number of divisions therein. The first type to excite laughter originates either in thought or in language, or in both. If from both, the same topics can be used either seriously or jokingly. The difference lies beyond the topic of the joke, in the nature or character of the subject. For example, lameness earned by a nobleman in public service gives rise to seriousness, but earned of a disreputable man gives rise to ridicule. The second type of jest, ambiguity from play on words, elicits more surprise than laughter, and is “commended as jests of elegance and scholarship” (de Oratore II.72). Jests in verbo have many more categories than jests in re, thus it becomes important that the gifted orator appropriate the joke to suit the situation, rather than memorize all the different categories and forms. This practice of controlling and tempering humor does position Ciceronian “wit” as a  talent that is linked closely to the nature and character of the orator, its manifestation showing in “thought and expression” rather than in foolishness (de Oratore II.62). Yet when Antonius claims that a “jocose manner and strokes of wit” are merely “gifts of nature” rather than “taught by art” (de Oratore II.49), Caesar claims that such a manner can be taught (Wisse 199). Caesar advocates that the ultimate suasive purpose can be

404 

Tarez Samra Graban

achieved by a “good” orator learning to use humor selectively, i.e., to “excite laughter”; to “attract favor”; to encapsulate a clever attack; to “overthrow” or “refute” an adversary; to prove oneself to be a “man of taste, learning, or polish”; and ultimately to “mitigate and relax gravity and severity” by breaking the force of agonistic remarks (de Oratore II.58). A learned deftness of wit might satisfy the sophistic requirement of kairos, or the orator’s ability to respond spontaneously to the situation at hand (Poulakos 63). Therefore, while humor can be used to provoke laughter, it is not restricted to the domain of pathos in de Oratore. Hughes (“‘Dramatic’ Ethos”) takes up this discussion in more instructive detail. Approximately 150 years later in the Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian also treats facetiae as distinct from other pathetic appeals, though he places his long treatment on laughter in Book VI near his discussion of audience, perhaps because the practice of observing public oratory was becoming more common and Quintilian found himself writing for the self-studied pupil (Gwynn 133). This pupil had to learn new ways to “adapt his art to the requirements of the audience,” not just to persuade “but to please” (Gwynn 247–248). Where Quintilian’s predecessors linked laughter with other emotional acts, Quintilian made clear distinctions between comedy and tragedy (Institutio VI.2.20), separated truth value from the outcome of the oration, and offered instruction on which types of jests were situationally appropriate, including irony, metaphor, and allegory as types of argument (Institutio VI.3.65). He discouraged using jest as an overt attack or to create too much ambiguity, and above all he admonished the rhetor to practice so that he could learn to use it “elegantly” (Institutio VI.3.57). Throughout his twelve volumes, Quintilian classified wit as urbanitas (sophistication), venus (grace and charm), salsus (salt), and facetiae (Institutio VI.3.20). Quintilian’s orator might show any combination of these qualities and be considered witty. The practiced use of facetiae in oratory most likely responded to a “new rhetoric” well suited for humorous discourse in the way it allowed for an orator to effectively lie (by using ambiguity, presupposition, and irony) while still remaining vir bonus (with good character). While there is much in Quintilian’s Institutio to reflect Ciceronian ideals, including numerous direct references to wit and irony in Pro Caelio (Geffcken 1), his “new” system modeled a techne (learned art), most likely in order to compensate for Cicero’s lack of pragmatic or pedagogical advice, and insisted that rhetorical practice could be readily acquired given the proper character and mental capacity of the orator. Like all other aspects of practical arts, good wit is achieved through a  combination of nature and practice or “methodical training” (Institutio

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

405

I.prooemium.27). Laughter’s principal role is to dispel the “graver emotions of the judge” and divert “his attention from the facts of the case,” and even “refresh him” (Institutio VI.3.1). Thus, the orator must be allowed to picture for himself the facts he wants to convey, feel for himself the emotion he wants to convey, and be himself moved in order to move the judges. Contrary to Cicero’s intricate classification and divisions, Quintilian offers a more straightforward treatment of laughter in the Institutio: instigating laughter at the inappropriate time can be more detrimental to the outcome of the speech than failing to elicit pity (Institutio VI.1.41); and well-placed humor should optimally occur in the introductory remarks to dispel the judges’ pity towards “a consideration of the justice of the case” (Institutio VI.1.46). To illustrate failed humor, Quintilian cites one occasion of an advocate who, when speaking in a woman’s defense, procured a portrait of her husband hoping to sway the court’s emotions to pity but instead swayed them towards laughter precisely because it was shown at the wrong time, after the introductory remarks, and in hideous effect (Institutio VI.1.41). To illustrate persuasive humor, Quintilian recalls seeing the exaggerated actions of another counsel carrying his client’s opposition (a child) around the court, and drawing attention to that exaggerated behavior by exclaiming to his own physically robust client: “What am I to do? I can’t hump you around!” (Institutio VI.1.47). The difference between persuasive humor and mere theatrical effect is the orator’s eloquence, referred to in Little’s translation as “intelligence.” Obviously, Quintilian believes that, when used appropriately, humorous insults can get an orator out of a tight place. While aligning humorous devices with ethos helped it to gain importance in rhetorical systems prior to the Middle Ages, this same alignment may also explain why humor occupied a much narrower place in medieval and Renaissance treatises on rhetoric (circa 425 CE to 1550 CE). There is recurring evidence that it was employed as a literary device during these periods, yet rhetors were by and large cautioned against it given its detrimental effects on their character. Bishop and teacher Augustine’s emphasis on using rhetorical persuasion to teach and disseminate religious texts – in fact, his belief that rhetoric should serve the conveyance of scriptural truth – made clear distinctions in rhetoric between cooperative persuasion and “mendacity,” or a habitual deceitfulness that was imparted by formal training in rhetoric (Swearingen, Rhetoric and Irony 176). According to Augustine in his de Doctrina Cristiana (c. 426 CE), just as it was the author’s responsibility not to use language in order to deceive, it was also the reader’s responsibility not to enjoy deceit and instead to seek truth within it. For this reason, he would call

406 

Tarez Samra Graban

irony and other forms of linguistic diversion “didactic indirections,” or forms of moralizing misdirections (Swearingen, Rhetoric and Irony 202), and he would justify their use in the sermon only as a way of revealing one’s literal sense of scripture. Swearingen’s explication of “intent” in Augustine’s texts raises the key question of whether irony represented wisdom or eloquence, reminding us of a  quintessential and ongoing debate in rhetoric’s history. Double-minded discourse with any other intent could serve no purpose but to distract in this tradition, thus prohibiting humor from being seen as an authentic invention strategy. Only one of three influential treatises produced near the end of the Renaissance shed significant light on the persuasive value of humor in that new historical context. In his 1553 Arte of Rhetorike, Thomas Wilson included a  brief section on laughter under his discussion of invention in Book Two (Bowen 413). Although Wilson represented the Renaissance tendency to separate out invention strategies from rhetoric, he did suggest that rhetors could use humor (or “dry mocks”) to prove a point so long as they did so without compromising their manners (Wilson 168). This may have been in response to Leonard Cox in his 1530 Arte or Crafte of Rhetoryke and to Peter Ramus in his 1543 Dialecticae. Ramus, in an almost Aristotelian system of division and classification, authored a treatise representing the separation of rhetorical truth from logical probability or dialectic, aligning such concepts as inventio (invention) and dispositio (arrangement) with the latter, and such concepts as elocutio (style) and pronuntiatio (delivery) with the former. Excessive use of facetiae in this system would no doubt reflect its diminished status as a kind of buffoonery – aligned more with superficial eloquence than with substantive wisdom. Yet humor does play a role in Wilson’s rhetoric insofar as its textual representation (rather than its semantic or pragmatic significance) engages the audience. Wilson mentions Cicero’s five concerns of laughter as “pleasant talk” (Wilson 165), draws almost verbatim from Caesar’s treatise on laughter in Book II of de Oratore, and refers to several of Cicero’s anthologized jests and puns. In the following example, humor resembles Cicero’s in verbo, formed by the manipulation of words or by taking words at their literal meaning to derive an unexpected answer: “Sometimes it is delightful when a man’s word is taken and not his meaning. As when one had said to another, ‘I am sorry, sir, to put you to pains,’ the other answered: ‘I will ease you, sir, of that sorrow, for I will take no pains for you at all’” (Wilson 171). In fact, Wilson uses Cicero’s very distinction, though he relegates humor to appeals of emotion in his Book II by placing its discussion between “Moving Affections” and “The

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

407

Division of Pleasant Behavior” (Wilson 173). As with the other persuasive modes, the rhetor’s successful use of humor while speaking suggests his apt awareness of audience, even if it does not directly suggest an invention of his character (Wilson 164). Cautionary approaches to using humor are reflected into post-Enlightenment rhetorical treatises, though with a renewed attention to how humor classifications could inform a  still-evolving tradition. I  will discuss only one of them here. George Campbell’s 1776 Philosophy of Rhetoric advocated that if the rhetor must use wit, he limit himself to cool reasoning and he confine ridicule (i.e., mockery or exorbitant jest) to situations of much lesser importance in the sermon. According to Campbell, wit was a skillful rhetorical diversion that had a  limited place within the oration and church (Philosophy of Rhetoric 152; Holcomb, “Wit” 285). Holcomb shows us that, although Campbell’s ideas surrounding eloquence, wit, humor and ridicule weren’t new in themselves, these ideas helped him to complete a “new” system of rhetoric that still relied heavily on mechanical schemes (Campbell, “Of Wit”). Gleaned largely from notes and papers he had delivered while a  member of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society in the 1750s, Campbell’s act of matching separate functions of discourse with various operations of the mind was a significant contribution to rhetorical theory, in part because his development of familiar schemes again allowed a place for humor in rhetoric and renewed the importance of modes of discourse – serious and colloquial – whose respective ends were to “affect the different operations of the mind” (Holcomb, “Wit” 283). The four ends included “enlightening the understanding; pleasing the imagination; moving the passions; or influencing the will” (Holcomb, “Wit” 283). Naturally, the eloquent orator could adapt a discourse to its appropriate end. But by classifying rhetorical discourses according to the mental operations underlying them, Campbell made way for us to consider “eloquence” beyond mere style and delivery (Holcomb, “Wit” 288). Campbell’s further clarification of colloquial discourse into wit, humor, and ridicule represents another positive contribution to the rhetorical tradition and enables rhetoricians to consider humor’s effects on logos or the content and/or logical arrangement of the speech. In Campbell’s scheme wit is directed to the audience’s imagination by one of three ways – debasing pompous or “seemingly grave” things, aggrandizing frivolous things, or setting ordinary objects in an anomalous or uncommon point of view (Holcomb, “Wit” 286). According to Campbell: “Sublimity elevates, beauty charms, wit diverts” (Campbell 152).

408 

Tarez Samra Graban

1.2. Rhetorical studies of irony, parody, and satire in the texts of women writers As evidenced by Anderson and Zinsser, Theibaux, Glenn (Rhetoric Retold), Clarke, Elshtain, and a growing number of anthologies such as those compiled by Donawerth, Lunsford, Ritchie and Ronald, Sutherland and Sutcliffe, and Wertheimer, women’s participation in the western rhetorical tradition began long before the Scottish Enlightenment, and in fact long before the European Renaissance. However, the rise of the English vernacular with its ensuing movements such as Christian humanism, the Protestant Reformation, and English Imperialism, would notably affect the ways in which women participated in rhetoric’s formation as a discipline. It is also in this era that studies of how women employed specific humorous forms for personal or political gain seem to emerge. Perhaps this is because of rhetoric’s great reliance on Renaissance literature to engage the emotions and to model persuasion through figurative language, thereby becoming a powerful influence in cultural formation. But perhaps it is also because key texts like Quintilian’s Institutio were “rediscovered” and translated into the vernacular, thereby reintroducing both Ciceronian and Quintillion persuasion back into the public sphere. Bowen reminds us that Cicero’s facetiae theory would reappear in medical books on the physiology of laughter, notably Laurent Joubert’s on its causes and effects in France in 1579, and Nicolas Nancel’s on the difficulties of defining facetiae as a physiological phenomenon in France in 1587 (Bowen 417). Yet while de Oratore filtered into mainstream rhetorical instruction among Christian humanists and other prominent groups in the English Renaissance, there is still no clear evidence that their rhetorical training encouraged the conscious use of wit. If we take such socially vital texts such as Vives’s 1523 de Institutione Feminae Christianae (The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual) as any indication, then we know that even in the process of acquiring universal education for women resulted in their being guided away from wit (or eloquence or anything that distracts) in favor of “the study of wisdom” (IV.28), excepting Quintillion eloquence that can lead to pious understanding (IV.28); Vives references Poggio’s Facetiae among a list of forbidden titles (V.31). Thus, Bowen questions not only the humor value in Cicero’s original texts but also the solid success of its resurgence in the Renaissance (Bowen 427). Put purely as a question of kairos or timing, Bowen is probably right to question Cicero’s “modern” appeal, given that Renaissance sources make it

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

409

difficult to generalize on what was the acceptable nature of the comic (Bowen 428). She wonders why such adaptations of Ciceronian humor as jokes, riddles, or moral fables would remain so popular into the sixteenth century if Cicero didn’t have certain tropes in mind when he first discussed facetiae (Bowen 429)? I extend Bowen’s question to wonder why women would employ facetiae when their status as public rhetoricians hadn’t yet been firmly established? The answer may lie in its appropriation as a  kind of dissoi logoi (contrasting words or figures of opposition) by women in high-stakes situations, given irony’s noted complexity (Ritchie, “Frame-Shifting”; Sperber and Wilson, Relevance; Kaufer, “Understanding Irony”), specifically in their use of irony to simultaneously uphold while overturning discourse conventions that restricted them and to forward their critiques in a somewhat uncertain tradition. Beyond serving as a logical reasoning exercise, Walzer re-presents and recasts the dissoi logoi tradition as something that has historically provided rhetors with a way to “generat[e] a critique – all as a means to coming to the best decision in situations of uncertainty” (“Teaching” 122). Barreca examines British women’s literary humor as functioning differently than men’s – whereas male humor is reformist, female humor is strategist (to gain power, cause revolutions, and instigate change) (Untamed and Unabashed). Bilger notes that humor has historically served as a simultaneous psychological survival skill and emancipatory strategy for women in sexist societies (Laughing Feminism 10). Politically, women have used humor as a method for conservation of community principles and a  subversion of community expectations. While nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women were seen as “lacking” a sense of humor, twenty-first century women who use it must strike a particularly sensitive balance so as not to be seen as too cerebral, forward, frivolous, or antagonistic (“Laughing” 50). Sanborn’s 1885 The Wit of Women represents one of the earliest anthologies of U.S. women’s humor, linking their employment of humor to the formation of social attitudes, including understatement and “tact.” A   brief historical trace of rhetorical humor helps illustrate its various alignments with character, empathy, truth, and logic, but a closer look at what humorous devices recur in the writings of women helps explain why they may have persisted with inventive humor even when mainstream rhetorical instruction discouraged their use. Bilger says we should more systematically study women’s use of humor because, unless we recognize the efforts that were made to control their behavior, we are in danger of misunderstanding the specific forms their humor takes and of overlooking their most trenchant

410 

Tarez Samra Graban

social criticism (Laughing Feminism 16). Taking Bilger’s assumption one step further, we observe a growing interest in rhetoric and composition studying women’s irony and ironic devices to determine how they display that criticism, and whether their art extends beyond it. To this end, most scholarship has contributed two ways: recovering sophistication devices in women’s texts; and distinguishing between “feminine” and “feminist” humor. 1.2.1.  Recovering Sophistication in Women’s Texts It is not new or unusual that educated women have used parody to convey their messages to mixed audiences, such as in “Jane Anger’s” anonymous letter directed towards the better treatment of women (c. 1589), Bathsua Makin’s 1673 Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, and Maria Edgeworth’s 1795 An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification. And irony as a broader rhetorical and linguistic register has been noted in the writings of Hildegard, Christine de Pizan, Anne Askew, Anne Hutchinson, Maria Edgeworth, Margaret Cavendish, Sojourner Truth, Helen Gougar, and Mary Harris (Mother) Jones to name only a few prior to 1900. Yet although we have a long history of being interested in the workings of irony, we have a shorter history of understanding what it has offered women, beyond perpetuating stereotypes of self-deprecation, or why – in light of other possible understandings – the self-deprecation stereotype persists. I examine this issue here, briefly. Self-deprecation has become an acceptable script in women’s political humor because it mirrors stereotypical assumptions about women’s inferiority to men that are still prevalent in the political sphere, though more and more women politicians are learning to use it to their advantage (“Laughing” 53). In “Humor, Intellect, and Femininity,” Walker traces American women’s significant humorous writing from Sanborn’s 1885 Wit to Bruére and Beard’s 1934 Laughing Their Way to illustrate some of the earliest organized resistance to women’s public humor before examining the changing post-Freudian attitudes towards what makes a woman’s public sense of humor acceptable (A Very Serious Thing). Walker argues for women’s public sense of humor as intrinsically tied into cultural assumptions about her intelligence, competence, and role (A Very Serious Thing 98). What Walker calls women’s “double texts” represent the ways they use humor to manipulate these dominating stereotypes so as to appear to accept them while actually indicting their values.

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

411

Even in non-political contexts, rhetorical theorists studying irony have defined it in many ways regarding the nature of the speaker, audience, and situation; they have drawn and do draw on discourse theorists to understand irony as an instrument of deferral (Gans 66), a device that highlights the incongruity between what is expected and what is presented (Gibbs and Izzett 145), and “not a discrete linguistic phenomenon, but rather a family of attitudes” (Brown 111). Yet these definitions have done more to reinforce difficulties in distinguishing between “truth” and “deceit” as a way of classifying irony when women use it, particularly by enabling us to ask such historically relevant questions as What is the role of speaker characteristics and audience in interpreting the irony event? (Pexman 209; Gibbs and Izzett), Can we pinpoint some shared logical structure in ironic utterances? (Brown 112), and What more is required than literal oppositeness to determine whether something is ironic? (Kaufer “Understanding”). In other words, these definitions raise the possibility that women have used it knowingly, systematically, and possibly for non-­humorous ends. Other significant works also attend to the question of whether female irony and satire are effectively silence, subversion, or resistance (Glenn “Inscribed”; Walker). Most notably, Judith Drake’s anonymous 1696 An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex invents what Haskins calls an “early feminist discourse that borrows its stylistic and argumentative features from two conflicting traditions of writing: an age-old genre of the controversy over women and the egalitarian argument of seventeenth-century rationalism” (Haskins 289). In her Essay, Drake parodies a  debate about women’s character by portraying comic portraits of men, but moves beyond perpetuating gendered controversy by portraying men’s faults as universally human. Using satire as a primary form of attack, Drake aligns herself with seventeenth century rationalism by criticizing the genre’s main appeals (Haskins 291), and demonstrates what Haskins calls a “hybrid genre” that transcended the stylistic constraints of the tradition it mocked while also applying its principles to advocate a new line of reasoning for women (Haskins 298). Barreca, Bilger and others argue that highly incongruous forms, like irony and parody, have historically supplied women with enough linguistic power to reinvent themselves, or to become mediating subjects rather than mediated objects in their texts. It may be in this realization that our history of how women use it expands. Booth helpfully reviews the historical debate about whether irony is irony for itself, whether it should be a  means to an end, whether it can exist beyond instrumental aims (Booth 139). And he differentiates – in rhetorical terms – between whether something is ironic ­according

412 

Tarez Samra Graban

to its authorial intentions or the intentions constituting the act, and whether it seems ironic according to how much the author discerns the clues to that intention (Booth 91). In fact, its relationship to humor is complicated by shifting notions of intention (Lang 2–3) and truth (Lang 42), i.e., irony is determined based on primary and originary intention regardless of whether the audience “gets it,” while humor needs only to “diverg[e] from truth.” Attardo’s discussions of verbal irony as relevant inappropriateness (“Irony”) have provided a more nuanced understanding of irony beyond simply “saying the opposite of what one means” and as a linguistic phenomenon determined more by context than bound by the speaker’s (or writer’s) singular intent. Warnick reminds us that, in her signature work Le Comique du Discours, Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca offered a method for analyzing comedic discursive structures that Warnick identifies as “rhetorical” examination – particularly in knowing how such phenomena as irony, parody, and the burlesque make use of values, language, quasi-logical connections, and other aspects of “reality” (audience-adherence) in order to be effective (“Olbrechts-Tyteca’s Contribution” 72). Olbrechts-Tyteca’s multilayered discourse analysis, and OlbrechtsTyteca’s and Perelman’s positing of irony as a rhetorical device realizes the importance of audience in the successful outcome of ironic communication and explains how some ironic exchanges can be theorized as lying, or seen as more sophisticated devices for positioning and interaction even when they miss the mark of their intended audience. Perhaps because of its linguistic and cultural richness, women’s irony is ripe for examination as a  way of broadening the rhetorical tradition, beyond dissoi logoi. Graban (“Feminine Irony”) and Bilger (Laughing) argue that women’s employment of irony demonstrates their ability to participate in fairly sophisticated persuasive acts in religious and political spheres. Graban argues that the ways that Renaissance women rhetors have used irony in their oppositional discourse can shed light on the ways they have implicitly challenged established linguistic and rhetorical traditions, opening up new possibilities in gendered communication beyond “silence,” “resistance,” and rhetorical refusal (“Feminine Irony” 410). And Bilger suggests that the most successful women’s use of public or political humor has historically been demonstrated by those who knew how to play the strong-yet-properly-feminine persona (“Laughing” 51). Other theorists demonstrate how satirical irony has been put to pragmatic use by women, as a way of gaining them subversive power over a speaking or writing situation, especially in regards to equal rights in religion, suffrage, and abolitionism (Browne; Dresner; Wright). Browne examines the use of

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

413

satire as a mode of insinuation against women preachers by men in eighteenth-century England, due to cultural assumptions that women’s speech was “perverse,” “lacking in morality,” and “meaningless” (Browne 20). Though Browne’s argument deals squarely with oratory and, hence, speech communication, its ties to historical studies of women writers and the bearing of humor on their perceived roles as producers of public-sphere texts is still clear: he reveals an interesting double-standard in satire – when practiced by Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift it carries a moral tone; when practiced by women it “divests them of their characteristical softness and amiable delicacy” (The European Magazine and London Review, 1783, p. 272, as qtd. in Browne 25). Dresner illustrates the ways that African-American author Alice Childress used satire to disrupt “conventional wisdom” and overturn the racial and gendered expectations put on her and women like her (Dresner “Alice Childress”). And Wright pinpoints irony as nineteenth-century American newspaper columnist Fanny Fern’s principal strategy for upholding while eliding culturally dominant messages regarding suffrage and women’s equality. Responding to Jedediah Purdy’s lament that irony is “really used for protection from fear, betrayal, and humiliation” (Purdy; Wright 91), Wright re-examines Fern’s irony via Wayne Booth’s “normative function” and via Linda Hutcheon’s “signification” as a way of retrieving power from those who might not otherwise accept her words (Wright 92). Fern’s strategy creates a “doublevoiced discourse,” allowing her audience to interpret as ironic (or untrue) what they themselves don’t ascribe to; and literal (or true) what they assume she agrees with (Wright 96), both sophisticated acts. 1.2.2.  Distinguishing between “feminine” and “feminist” humor An interest in how women use humorous forms need not lead to essentializing women’s humor. While some scholars do posit that women’s irony, parody, and satire can either reverse sex roles or “act differently” than men’s (Barreca, Unashamed), it is important to note that role reversal and sex difference are not the only ways that women use these forms to disrupt social orders or create cultural subversion. Neither does an explication of what makes “woman’s humor” in writing necessarily undermine their desires for equality. In her introduction to Last Laughs, Barreca challenges what she views as “universal” standards for presencing and identifying humor, not to essentialize “feminine” forms of humor, but rather to argue that we should not

414 

Tarez Samra Graban

overlook humor produced by women when it doesn’t conform to established standards, a  sentiment that is echoed by Glenn (Rhetoric Retold), Clarke, and Elshtain about women’s written discourse in general. For Barreca, the absence of critical study on women’s humor – specifically comedy – prior to 1990 points more to our inability to deal critically with humor in women’s texts than it does to their lack of producing humorous texts (Barreca, Last Laughs 20). To fully understand women’s use of humor as cultural production, Barreca argues that we need new definitions for assessing their comic productions and for valuing their role as “de-centering, dis-locating, and destabilising” (Barreca, Last Laughs 15) cultural authority. For this reason, Barreca elides such taxonomical distinctions as are typically used. Gillooly finds this principle to be significant for describing what is amusing in women’s writing. That is, what occurs in women’s writing to amuse should be understood as intercategorical, complex, subtle, adversarial, and oppositional rather than referred to according to traditional functions such as “ironic,” “comic,” “witty,” or other formulations (Gillooly 477). Gillooly claims that to assume a woman’s text ironic under these formulations is to presume a traditional male perspective, to “affirm by negation prevailing cultural attitudes,” and thus overlook other purposes in her humor (­Gillooly 479). Similar preoccupations with the historical distinctions between “feminist” and “female” humor appear in the works of Walker, Finney, and Morris, inasmuch as they allow rhetorical scholars to consider how these labels apply to the vernacular as well as the formal (Morris), and inasmuch as they encourage us to consider the linguistic (perhaps embedded) manifestations of female humor when it occurs in unexpected forms (Finney). In her chapter on “Feminist Humor,” Walker categorically examines the differences that subtlety, overtness, decorum, motivation, and style have made and continue to make in public acceptance of women’s humorous practices (A Very Serious Thing). These realizations about textual humor as a kind of discursive and rhetorical empowerment for women serve other related areas of study, including historiographic readings of texts by marginalized writers (Gordon; Lowe) as a way of helping us to appreciate humor’s socially transformative effects (Ganter). Certainly when it comes to understanding (or re-understanding, or changing our notions about) how women and other marginalized groups have participated in what we know as the rhetorical tradition(s), we do well to heed Ward and others who encourage us to question what we mean by “participation” and “tradition” – that is, in what sense, with what frequency, on what pragmatic or idealistic basis, for whom, with what credentials, with

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

415

what effects, and how were their practices understood at the time (Ward 121). Because of its complexity as mode and manner of discourse, humor offers us just such a venue for this questioning. 2.  The place of humor in composition pedagogy In spite of its nascent history in the development of rhetorical practices, humor has a long history of being aligned with cultural traditions that can lead to discursive awareness and create a sense of belonging to an implied community. Humor has been linked with critical expression and argumentative writing since 18th-century social and political satire (Reeves). Research into the language of humor suggests that many comic forms are effective means of supporting risk-taking behavior (Tower), recognizing and reversing power structures (France), challenging social orders (Smith), allaying fear, and promoting dialogic resistance (Greenbaum). Furthermore, our ongoing testimonials about using humor in rhetorical pedagogy to promote critical thinking (Weber; Daiute), build community, and encourage intellectual play (Holcomb “Class of Clowns”) point to humor’s prevalence as a kind of invention strategy. For these and other reasons, humor persists in the composition classroom. It also persists in our enactment of the field. “Humor Night” at the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication has resulted in the edited collection by Guth, et al, entitled The Rhetoric of Laughter: The Best and Worst of Humor Night. Intermittently, our principal journals might feature something like a rire du jour. Our use of funny poems, funny titles, and humorous polylogs in publications like PRE/TEXT, WOE: Writing on the Edge, College Composition and Communication, College English, and Composition Studies points to humor’s prevalence as release tactic (Hansen; Lederer; Vitanza “Open Letter”) and disciplinary positioning. Furthermore, the way we often parody our own approaches to pivotal or dissonant topics, such as error (Williams), grammar (Hartwell), institutional assessment (Levy), and students’ right to their own language, points to a form of conscientization in our pedagogy. While Don Nilsen’s enumerative bibliographies help us to interpret humor’s role in writing instruction from Antiquity to the present (Nilsen “Humor Studies”; Nilsen “Humor Scholarship”), it may still be a worthy observation that we have done too little theorizing of humor explicitly for or about rhetoric and composition in rhetoric and composition itself, aside from

416 

Tarez Samra Graban

D. Diane Davis’s landmark work linking disruptive laughter to a  kind of rhetorical sophistication (Breaking Up (at) Totality), and Mary Ann Rishel’s comprehensive, analytical guide to comedy writing (Writing Humor). It is also worthwhile to note that, even while certain facets of humor have been used to illustrate argument and social critique in writing instruction, most explorations of textual humor have been conducted on literary genres such as poetry, prose, or drama (Frater). In spite of these facts, the range and scope of our interests in humor is vast, especially for challenging traditional notions of “writer,” “reader,” and “text,” and for promoting disciplinary enculturation. 2.1.  Humor as enculturation into first-year composition Postmodern challenges to traditional notions of authorship, audience, and genre notably turned composition studies to a renewed interest in how concepts such as kairos (Kinneavy), “voice” (Murray), authentic “self ” (France), social activity (Miller; LeFevre; Russell), collaboration (Lunsford and Ede), feminism (Worsham), the theory/practice binary (Bourdieu), and rhetorical motives (Burke) could reposition students as members of discourse communities by helping them to become more sophisticated users of language.1 Porter’s “intertextuality” illustrates one such concept that results from poststructuralist negotiations between discourse as “text” and discourse as écriture (i.e., an interdependent “web” of symbolic activity). Comprised of two types – iterability (or explicit references to discourse, i.e., quotations or citations) and presupposition (or referential assumptions) (35) – Porter’s intertextuality positions the student writer as discourse analyst, and proves to be a key concept in the development of writing instruction and rhetorical analysis for its contribution of “forum” knowledge, wherein a student writer interprets texts for their acceptability in a  disciplinary forum according to how deeply they reflect that community’s common interests (“Intertextuality” 39). Beyond superficial indicators of textual or generic acceptability, “forum” relies on the notion that audiences are conscious actors in or targets of certain exchanges, that readers are co-producers of the exchange, that writing is a multilinear movement, and that texts are written to produce change (40). Exposing classroom discourse to such rethought notions of language activity and participation may have contributed to humor’s prevalence as an enculturation tool in the writing classroom. At the post-secondary level, humorous instruction has been used as a non-adversarial tactic for encouraging

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

417

social critique and argumentative writing. Ross (Language of Humour) devises a linguistic construct to help students analyze literature and stand-up comedy, and Pepicello (“Pragmatics”) has studied grammatically based riddles and analytical joke structures as simultaneous exercises in formal logic and “rehearsal[s] of social norms and cultural categories” (34). Reeves further advocates for comic and satiric forms as vehicles for classroom-based social critique, by allowing students to “choose their own victims,” to employ a variety of forms of expression (that they may use inside and outside of the academy), and to engage in their own critical pursuits (“Students as Satirists” 15). Greenbaum (“Stand Up”) has identified a link between comic narratives and rhetorical argument in the genre of stand-up comedy as a Bakhtinian dialogical resistance, showing the relationship between linguistic play and cross-cultural situations. Beyond disciplinary critique, humorous instruction has also been linked with building disciplinary (rhetorical) knowledge for the novice writer, and equipping them to participate in argumentative traditions that are culturally bound (Cattani; Muller; Myers; Nilsen and Nilsen; Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz). Nilsen (“Implication”; “Wheat and Chaff”) posits instruction in interpreting verbal humor as a precursor to understanding metaphorical discourse and the categories of rhetorical argument, while Bete (“Humor Writing”) and Smith (“Humor as Rhetoric”) anecdotally suggest humor’s effects on learning fundamental argumentation skills. Smith positions humor as an “insulated means of argument to challenge the dominant view of the social order” (“Humor as Rhetoric” 51), while Berger (“Rhetoric of Laughter”; Art of Comedy Writing), Ross (Language of Humour), and Frater (“Humour and Satire”) provide something like rubrics for analyzing and constructing humorous genres, indicating the intrinsic pedagogical value of humor for developing as readers and writers. Greenbaum argues that comic narratives are consistent in their rhetorical design to “persuade audience members to adopt certain ideological positions” (“Stand Up” 33). Her findings raise several questions pertinent to the study of rhetoric: What or whose ethos (comic authority) is represented in these humor instances (37)? What agency is given a rhetorically effective comedian, and in what dialogic style is humor most effective (38)? How much of the comic act depends on ethos and how much on kairos (situational timing) (40)? Peterson and Strebeigh demonstrate that teaching students to construct parody and travesty is useful for helping them learn about placement of rhetorical elements within a text, understand social criticism, and uncover value terms (“Teaching” 206). Finally, Huffman promotes using humor as an

418 

Tarez Samra Graban

academic positioning strategy for at-risk students, while Jordan (“Humor”), Sherwood (“Humor”), and Hall (“Silliness”) all discuss humor’s potential as a powerful tool to break down barriers in peer response and to negotiate power in writing tutorials. Even when it is not explicitly theorized as enculturation, humor also represents a recurring trend in the learning environment of the pre-college writer. Tower (“Making Room”), Bradford (“Place of Humor”), McMahon (“Having Fun Yet?”), and Kyrston, et al (“Humor and Sarcasm”) anecdotally correlate classroom humor and humorous pedagogy with students’ sophistication in English studies. Tower suggests that humor is an affective experience, not merely a cognitive phenomenon, calling it a “means into a culture” (12), and demonstrating that humor as wordplay (i.e., manifested in the double meanings of riddles and puns) gives students enough of an appreciation of the sophistication of language that they can gain social competence (13). 2.1.1.  Parody as Sophisticated Social Critique Most significantly, humor has been linked with students’ successful manipulation of academic conventions and discourse through their deliberate attempts to reflect on and/or parody those conventions. Irony, in particular, allows student writers to experiment with forms that “highlight the difference between expectation and reality” (Gibbs and Izzett 132). Booth argues that teaching students to note and understand such stable forms as satire and parody would enable them to “discover how their embodied intentions lead us to go so far – and no farther – in seeing ironic meanings” (Booth 91), and in understanding how styles are imitated and distorted (Booth 123). For Booth, context describes the “range of inferences about what the author would most probably mean by each stroke, and to our range of possible genres” (Booth 99), thus it leads to sophisticated generic understandings. Furthermore, such reading of ir/relevant contexts in order to uncover evidence and unspoken assumptions has argumentative value, inasmuch as students being to more systematically recognize and cope with ironic deception (Booth 106). Purdy argues that ironic forms in general represent one way for Generation X to handle the postmodern condition of doubt and uncertainty, because they accommodate “initiating while questioning,” “enacting while overturning,” and “challenging while sublimating” (For Common Things). Parody, in particular, tends to perpetuate as a  kind of enculturation of students into the first-year composition course, the WID (Writing in the Dis-

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

419

ciplines) course, and the introduction to the discipline course because it relies on interpreting and functioning within multiple levels of meaning. For example, Rose and Kiniry construct a parody assignment to enhance the student writer’s movement through several of their six stages of critical thinking in the writing classroom (“What’s Funny?”), Peterson and Strebeigh teach parody as one of two critical methods for understanding stylistics and “verbal dress” (“Teaching” 210), and Bergmann examines first-year college papers for accidental humor, jokes and anecdotes that demonstrate how student writers position themselves as emerging participants in a social community (“Funny Papers” 21). Hutcheon advocates using parody as a way of popularizing the academic and questioning subject positions, i.e., “why does X appear now in this text?” or “what makes this funny to audience X by abominable to audience Y?” All of these practices reflect an understanding of levels of exaggeration and juxtaposition, where students may initially mimic textual forms but soon be called upon to determine how little or much and in what discursive capacity their texts will depart from the original (Peterson and Strebeigh 207). Bergmann likens the parodic classroom to Mary Louis Pratt’s notion of “contact zone” (or linguistic sites of “colonial encounters”) and Susan Miller’s “textual carnivals” to describe a place where students can demonstrate their ability to challenge and contend with several communities at once – that is, beyond just serving as academic socialization, Bergmann says humor has the potential to subvert values of complex academic communities (“Funny Papers” 25). Analyzing some of her own students’ progress in using humor deliberately, Bergmann discusses how, on one level, a “playful manipulation of discourse” can gain students confidence in writing within, from, and about certain “codes” (28). But it is also possible (and preferable) for them not to stop at figuring out and expertly utilizing a discursive code, but rather to find and generate humor beyond the code itself. Thus, on another level, parodying the actual discourse of a class or a discipline can help student writers more closely identify what they are opposing within that discourse community and why it should be opposed, and further positions them as critics who are working through inequalities (29). For example, the student creating an advertisement for The Gospel According to Bill (a Shakespearian rendition of the Bible) demonstrates a complex understanding of a number of levels of discourse: on a concrete level, this advertisement parodies the assignment by presenting a playful rendition of a  serious topic within a  visual framework more colorful than a  formal paper. On an intermediate level, the student pokes fun at both classical and

420 

Tarez Samra Graban

Renaissance discourse, representing the ideals of one in the voice of another. On an abstract level, it “interrogates the ‘Great Books’ approach” by implying a convenient and/or marginalized canon where the value of each text lay in its presentation and purpose. Such assignments embody “critical play,” where students become initiated into a community at the same time questioning its values and precepts (Bergmann 30). Thus, the progression from naïve to deliberate employment of humor reflects their coming into expert use of such discourse, their ability to make social commentary on discourse, and their critical capacity to subvert one discourse to another in Bakhtinian heteroglossia (“turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below … lay it bare and expose it”) (Bakhtin 23). 2.2. Language play, disruption, and empowerment (or power, performance, and play) While Bergmann offers an explanation of and argument for how “funny papers” can enhance this awareness through generic subversion on a number of levels, other scholars argue its potential to reveal or challenge logocentric (or truth-centered) discourse on a more fundamental basis. This seems to be the case especially with our understanding of humor as incipient to dialogical play, and of play as representative of how the writing classroom can embody broader cultural moments. Geoffrey Sirc writes extensively on the dissonant and paralogic use of humor in first-year composition to help students understand that knowledge of how to produce authentic texts can and does go deeper than genre. Influenced by Lyotard’s paralogy (or moving against established ways of reasoning), Sirc advocates for a “new academic urbanism” to replace the “simplistic, arbitrary, and constrictive” classroom situations and spaces that students are expected to design and invent in with an eye towards real-world applications of their work (Sirc, “Writing Classroom”). Sirc locates student writers’ verbal heritage largely in the physical objects they interact with day to day, like textile branding and logos (“Writing Classroom”). Though not a “humorist” in any strict sense, Sirc frequently draws on parody to relocate student composing in the more avant-garde “happenings” of American abstract painter Jackson Pollock and French-American artist Marcel Duchamp, rather than in more modernist textual practices of analysis and interpretation (“English Composition”), thus mirroring rethought notions of invention, authorship, and play.

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

421

The concept of dialogical or rhetorical play has evolved from theories of metaphysical play (from pre-Socratic to post-Hegelian understandings), and it continues to evolve as we revise our understandings of humankind’s linguistic and authorial involvement in the world. For rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke, humor was one of those linguistic forms of human activity that helped define man as a “symbol-using animal,” specifically because its appearance in such complex generic forms as puns and poems impels the literary critic towards symbolic interpretation, thus illuminating his deeper motivations for textual activity. The principal function of Burke’s comic perspective seems to be raising a consciousness of consciousness because of its ability to reflect incongruity and to “enable people to be observers of themselves” (Attitudes 171). His comic frame in general symbolizes a  rhetorical move towards the “good” life (Betts Van Dyk). In a similar argument, Johnson calls laughter “part of the pleasure of writing” and ascribes to it a kind of rhetorical power that can “penetrate or lay open or show the inroads into [monolithic] institutions” (“School Sucks” 637). And for D. Diane Davis, students doing rhetorical analysis are best empowered by considering how laughter can help deconstruct the logical binaries that have resulted from a long tradition of locating language in stable traditions. A deeper investigation into Chapters 3 and 4 of Davis’s project demonstrates how she links laughter – as a physical embodiment of relocation and anti-fixation – to an instructive, Foucauldian shattering of stable frameworks. It both promotes and proceeds Sophistical counter-traditions in discovering the “extra-logical” impulses of language, i.e., helps us to overturn neat linguistic categorizations so as to better grasp the temporality and contingency of rhetorical truths. For Davis, this disruption occurs not in learning to make the weaker side of the dialectic stronger (which is a common practice of dissoi logoi) but rather in locating alternatives to the dialectic altogether, and it occurs only in the “excesses” of incongruity, such as linguistic polysemy. With incongruity comes instability of authorial voice, of narrative history, and of rhetorical tradition in so much as authors realize they are made by the same histories they write and written by the same languages they employ. Davis draws on Michelle Ballif, Hélène Cixous, Judith Butler, Gregory Ulmer, and Victor Vitanza, as co-enactors of this rhetorical/philosophical tradition. Albert Rouzie would agree that English studies has historically enacted a  work–play bifurcation in the divisions between rhetoric and poetic, and between instrumental and literary writing. He argues that the synchronous computer conference can overcome this bifurcation by fostering conflict and

422 

Tarez Samra Graban

play together, and he theorizes “serio-ludic” discourse as a technologicallymotivated linguistic behavior that “combines or alternates between serious and playful purposes” (“Conversation” 255). By examining a series of student transcripts, Rouzie demonstrates how serio-ludic discourse provokes and mediates conflict by yielding productive moments of carnivalesque, through which students move to critique and negotiate power relations and gendered subject positioning. He further argues that the way in which composition instructors approach computer-mediated communication can either productively challenge or inadvertently reinforce this arhetorical work–play split. Not all such scholarship occurs exclusively in the context of higher or post-secondary education, though much of it is eventually appropriated to help rhetoric and composition studies consider its role in the college curriculum or work towards rhetorical sophistication. Focusing primarily on childcentered approaches to writing, Colleen Daiute advocates for pedagogical play in the form of collaborative projects, peer discussion, team story writing, and songwriting (“Play as Thought”). By studying a  number of transcripts of children’s dialogues and written texts, Daiute argues that “play is critical to a more complex and representative understanding” of how they learn because it hones and develops the diverse skills and strategies they already bring to the learning table (3). In response to the contemporary notion that children are “good players but bad thinkers” (1), Daiute argues that, if developed early on a form of thought for children, play will prove a more valuable critical heuristic for their intellectual maturation than will cognition models that are traditionally associated with adult thinking (3). Daiute has observed in pedagogical play such metacognitive behaviors as learning to negotiate the logical dimensions of a writing task, evaluating other children’s ideas, selfmonitoring, and modeling interpersonal communication (12). Alan Weber draws on Daiute’s work to better theorize methods for teaching humorous essays to pre-college writers, advocating for linguistic play as a critical tool somewhere between the “a-ha” of discovery and the “ha-ha” of laughter (“Playful Writing” 562). Weber argues that assignments which use playful topics as structure or context can heighten students’ awareness of divergent ways of thinking, encourage them to combine ideas not typically associated under usual norms and codes, and equip them to write in more demanding, formal structures later on. More specifically, the linguistic play in limericks, riddles, and puns can potentially help students to derive semantic value in such examples as the following: “What do trees and dogs have in common? – They both have barks” (Weber 563). Furthermore, the pragmatic

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

423

challenge of putting a serious topic to a playful form helps students become more sophisticated negotiators of genre by considering alternate modes of expression. Converting Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech into a rap song, for example, requires that they understand the central message of the original text, interpret the generic conventions of the transmitting text, and recognize the conflict or disparity that comes from communicating the original message via these new conventions (Weber 565). 2.2.1.  Use of humor in writing texts While each of the above dimensions I  discuss is understudied, undertheorized, and can hardly be called “complete,” two additional topic areas come to mind in need of at least as systematic an explanation of why and how humor persists in shaping our understanding of invention, authorship, or text. These include our use of humor in rhetorics, writing texts, and handbooks; and our use of humor as professional positioning in business, technical, and professional writing situations. Given humor’s potential for discursive enculturation and social critique, we might be tempted to assume that irony and parody – highly incongruent but targeted registers – show up more frequently in introductory-level writing handbooks where disciplinary ground is first being established than in upperlevel texts where disciplinary accuracy is being sought. While this seems to be the case, still too little is known about the place that humor occupies in the rhetoric of composition (if it does) to accept this as a representative trend or a logical assumption. As well, too little is known about the role these humorous texts play in successfully initiating writers into various communities of discourse. We see humor explicitly used in the narration and examples of books on argument and style, such as Paul Roberts’s Understanding English, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, Edward P. J. Corbett’s Elements of Reasoning, Richard Lanham’s Revising Prose, Joe Williams’s Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. We see it even more explicitly in popular handbooks such as Edward Goode’s A Grammar Book for You and I – Oops, Me!, David Williams’s Sin Boldly!, Constance Hale’s Sin and Syntax, and Lynn Truss’s Eats Shoots and Leaves, and in books celebrating the craft of writing, such as Ann Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Even in more mainstream composition “rhetorics” such as Ede and Lunsford’s Everything is an Argument, and Behrens and Rosen’s Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum, humor is mentioned as a mode of

424 

Tarez Samra Graban

a­ rgumentation in limited forms, often encouraging student writers with neophyte status to parody or mock a genre as they learn it, or to equip them to better read such public or literary ironic displays as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. We even capitalize on (for pedagogical demonstration) the gaffes that writers make inside and outside the classroom (Lederer Anguished English), and we employ irony in our own theorization of the field, often to traverse ideological divides regarding the role of grammar in writing instruction, conceptions of “error” in grammar, and the place of writing in the university (Connors, “Mechanical Correctness”; Hartwell, “Grammar, Grammars”; Williams, “Phenomenology”). However, in rhetoric and composition we haven’t looked enough at the outcome, at the equity and agency humor either prevents or provides (for writer and for reader), or at the kinds of institutional, disciplinary, ethnic or gendered identifications that might influence the use of humor in a particular texts. We know our understanding of what is “funny” and “acceptable” in the writing classroom has evolved, but more can be determined about how our textual practices have evolved with it – that is, how the number, nature, and type of humorous examples in these texts to help us discern appropriate cultural and discursive indicators over time. Such systematic study is certainly made possible by the articulation of key methodologies in rhetorical and discourse analysis, such as Selzer’s explication of textual and contextual analysis, Fahnestock and Secor’s rhetorical rubric of analytical characteristics, Barton’s analysis of linguistically “rich” features, and other paradigms generally made accessible in such collections as Bazerman and Prior’s What Writing Does and How it Does It (2004), and Barton and Stygall’s Discourse Studies in Composition (2002). As scholars interested in technical and science writing, Killingsworth, Steffens and Gross have further honed their methods for textual analysis as a kind of disciplinary knowledge building, for example, Killingsworth and Steffens demosntrate how policy statements can persuade through authentic audience construction (“Effectiveness”), and Gross (Starring the Text) and Fahnestock (“Rhetorical Life”) demonstrate the power of semantic shifts in revealing the popularization of scientific discourse. Scholars in linguistics and discourse studies have even traced the use of specific humorous examples in writing texts whose overall bent isn’t humorous, such as Hegelson’s explication of sexist and chauvinist tendencies in beginning writing instruction (“Prisoners of Texts”), and Macaulay and Brice’s examination of gender bias and cultural stereotyping in syntactical exercises in linguistics texts (“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”; “Don’t Touch My Projectile”).

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

425

Systematic study has also been made possible by recent developments in linguistic studies of verbal humor, especially Raskin and Attardo’s General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), which is already well covered in this volume, and Attardo’s ongoing theorization of irony as contextual inappropriateness (“Irony”; “On the Pragmatic”). Attardo’s application of GTVH to longer non-joke texts especially allows discourse analysts to demarcate humorous plots by punch lines, metanarrative disruption, and other central complications that help us to consider its pragmatic function beyond the most general categorizations and uses (Humorous Texts). Analytical modeling has also been done by Kaufer’s forensic discussions of the rhetorical nature of irony (“Understanding Ironic Communication”; “Irony”), Davis’s semanticsyntactic examination of farce (“Structure Approach”), and Crawford (“Gender and Humor”) and Michell’s (“Women and Lying”) analysis of understatement in gendered talk. These methods offer rhetorical analysts much in determining the richer range of purposes for humor in writing texts, not least of which includes determining where humor appears (i.e., in syntactical construction or stylistic devices), whom it addresses (i.e., the student, the “teacher,” the “reader”), and with what apparent purpose or frequency (i.e., to demonstrate fundamental discourse conventions or to call them into question). By way of a brief case study, I demonstrate how the GTVH and its applications have informed a verbal coding scheme that can be used by analysts like myself who are interested in the cultural and disciplinary implications of verbal humor in writing guides. I devised this coding scheme by drawing on rubrics already presented in Ross (1998) and Attardo’s marking protocol (2001), which includes a hierarchy of constructs that examine Script Opposition (SO), Logical Mechanism (LM), Situation (SI), Target (TA), Narrative Strategy (NS), and Language (LA) (Humorous Texts 22). I  have broadened these constructs to consider greater interactions with audience and context and devised the following coding scheme: 1. POS – humor’s position in the text (i.e., in the content narration, supporting examples, writing prompts, non-verbal illustration, pull-quotes, or other text elements); 2. PUR – the apparent purpose of the humor instance (i.e., to announce conventions, establish or challenge orders, elicit reader response, invite selfdisclosure of the author); 3. RD – the rhetorical device used to convey the humor (i.e., canned joke, anecdote, question and answer, rhetorical question, conversation, monologue);

426 

Tarez Samra Graban

4. LR – the linguistic register responsible for the humor (i.e., irony/sarcasm, ambiguity, paradox); 5. SUB – the subject matter of the humor (i.e., social/cultural, intellectual, psychological); 6. TAR – the identifiable target of the humor (i.e., teacher, student, course material, discipline, other power holder, other non-power holder). Because I am at the moment interested in preliminarily classifying a vast corpus, this coding scheme functions on a fairly superficial scale, designed to identify and categorize appearances and functions of humor in certain types of text. For the first pass, “Narrative Strategy” can become “Rhetorical Device” so as to include nonverbal forms, in the same way Ross defines “rhetorical device” as styles of writing, or different ways of balancing phrases (44). My use of “Linguistic Register” relies on broader notions of register as “a  linguistic variety defined by subject matter, social situations (of the speakers), and discursive functions (of the exchange)” (Attardo, Humorous Texts, 104). “Linguistic Register” also implies that humor is created in the realization of an unexpected element, which Ross (1998) positions alongside ambiguity, polysemy, contradiction, and allusion. Because both irony and sarcasm refer to forms of humor that communicate obliquely, I  make no clear distinction between them on the level of this verbal coding scheme, though elsewhere I argue vehemently for theorizing their difference in rhetorical terms. The nature of verbal coding schemes is that they can be construed so as to operate on finer levels of granularity; this one is intended to do a general “first pass.” Applying this verbal coding scheme to three brief examples from two different texts begins to show its potential for discerning how enculturating humor has shifted in rhetorics and writing guides over time. I focus on two writing guides, partly because of the insularity of this genre to academic writing in English, and partly because of the dated nature some of their humoring. Paul Roberts’s 1958 Understanding English represents his explicit goal of giving “practical advice on matters of concern to the freshman English course, whether these are touchable by the rigorous procedures of linguistic science or not, and many of them are not” (ix). His is a textbook in linguistic science, but one that offers the first-year college writer a series of principles and steps for approaching the academic paper – principles and steps which, by today’s standards, seem archaic and conveyed in highly racist and sexist language. Similarly, Richard Lanham’s Revising Prose represents a processoriented (circa 1980s) approach to elucidating the “­Official Style” of writing

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

427

without forcing upon students another college primer. It functions as a style manual that encourages decision-making tactics, reinforcing the “shoulds” and “should nots” of clear writing in a democratic fashion. To accomplish this task, Lanham revolutionizes what he calls his “paramedic method” to fixing writing, commonly opposing WRITING and MEDICINE as its semantic scripts (cf. Raskin 1994). Implicit in this method is every English teacher’s presumed desire to ambulance America’s current epidemic verbal ineptitude, although Lanham aims to do so by empowering the student towards “preventative” medicine. First, then, they must learn crisis intervention. Throughout their guides, Roberts and Lanham both employ humor in three common ways: they use sarcasm and self-reflexive irony early in their texts as a way of bringing the reader into confidence (example 1); they parody the syntactical awkwardness of their own “rules” (example 2); and they generally invite institutional critique of the curriculum, the teacher, or some other entity as a way of promoting conscientization in the writer (example 3). Example 1: Paul Roberts, Understanding English (1958) “One trouble commonly faced by students in a course in writing is the fact that they do not enjoy writing. Indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, they hate writing” (Roberts 1). POS – content narration PUR – establish orders, invite self-disclosure RD – monologue REG – irony/sarcasm SUB – social/cultural TAR – students, course Roberts’s third-person narrative strategy helps subjectify the “student” and the writing act in non-threatening ways, perhaps to compensate for the fairly prescriptive and critical tone of a number of his rules. In this example we see one way the narrative strategy particularly works in his favor to target not only the “student” (i.e., by making “student” the explicit subject), but also by targeting the way students expect teachers might stereotype them. By inviting self-disclosure about the fact that teachers know students “hate writing,” Roberts may succeed in actually establishing orders by reinforcing the need for such a text (especially a text that purports to understand the student’s psyche).

428 

Tarez Samra Graban

Example 2: Paul Roberts, Understanding English (1958) On not ending sentences with prepositions: “We may as well quote Sir Winston Churchill at once and get it over with” (Roberts 331). POS – content narration PUR – announce convention, challenge orders RD – monologue REG – paradox SUB – intellectual TAR – course, other power holder In this example, Roberts parodies the syntactical awkwardness of one of “their” rules, implicit in the way he positions himself with the student writer via “we”. In fact, by employing Churchill as both an authority and critical essayist who publicly defied the preposition rule, Roberts at once announces convention and challenges orders, targeting other public entities beyond the writing task. By drawing students into his confidence, Roberts also demonstrates that he expects them to share in the paradox, i.e., he positions them as co-intellectuals in interpreting the parody. Example 3: Richard Lanham, Revising Prose, 2nd Edition (1987) On various motivations for and methods of writing: “[P]ray for the muse, marshal our thoughts, find the willpower to glue backside to chair – these may be idiosyncratic, but revision belongs to the public domain” (Lanham vi). POS – content narration PUR – invite self-disclosure RD – monologue REG – irony/sarcasm SUB – social/cultural TAR – course In this example, Lanham mirrors several of Roberts’s tactics regarding audience construction and co-creation of the humor, especially by deferring institutional critique onto the course or the act of writing in a forced situation and by employing a  plural first-person. While this kind of self-disclosure and writing empathy obviously promotes co-identification, it also promotes a kind of conscientization in the writer, i.e., by positioning the writer to see him or herself as player of an idiosyncratic game.

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

429

It is unlikely that these particular texts and examples would act as relevant cultural influencers in contemporary rhetoric and composition pedagogy. However, there is still cultural and disciplinary value in understanding how we have used humor has promoted and represented what we consider to be rhetorically “acceptable” on the one hand and influential on the other, and how those understandings and representations shift over time. Understanding how we seek to commodify certain pedagogical aims, and then determining in what way humor reflects them (i.e., do we use it to demonstrate fixed principles or to negotiate unstable ideals?) helps us to more fully reflect on whether and how our use of humor actually promotes the pedagogical aims we think it does. Furthermore, attending to questions of who uses the humor, to what degree, in what contexts and forms, and at whose expense can tell us much about how our notions of discursive agency and disciplinary power act as shaping forces in the public sphere. 2.2.2.  Humor in business, technical, and professional writing I run the risk of presenting this section as a disciplinary “add-on” by mentioning it last, when in reality much of the vital theorizing in professional writing practices aligns with rhetorical scholarship some might consider more “mainstream,” especially inasmuch as rhetoric and composition encompasses the serious study of the visual and the technical. For some of the same reasons it persists in first-year and upper-level composition, the use of humor still persists – rhetorically, discursively, linguistically – in the business writing classroom, the seminar in visual literacy and document design, and even in extra-academic contexts such as the community writing class, the technical writing workshop, and the site-specific professional practices course that instructs a company team in the analysis and production of critical documents. Practically speaking, these may be the writing classes in large universities that draw the largest number of students from varying disciplinary, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In other venues these may be the classes that act as “contact zones” between academic and workplace preparation, or between academic and professional goals. They may occur in alternative forms and contexts, act as service-learning or “town-and-gown” bridge courses, or even serve as sites for “pure” rhetorical theory building inasmuch as that theorizing attends to how the public and the visual come to bear on historical traditions in academic contexts.

430 

Tarez Samra Graban

Though they are not all described in this way, a fair number of business, technical and professional communication guides are authored for disparate writing communities or created based on research into extra-academic contexts (Bridgeford, et al., Innovative Approaches; Cox, et al., “Male Female Differences”), while others are designed for the classroom but with an extraacademic focus (Berk, “Professors are from Mars”; Hurley, Humor and Technical Communication; Pieper, “The Scoop”). It may be this mixed – sometimes dissonant, typically extra-academic – trajectory that makes humorous practices persist in professional writing, and that invites us to broaden our understanding of humor in rhetoric and composition beyond insular notions of “writer,” “reader,” “text,” or even “situation,” and beyond fixed notions of how rhetoric functions in the public sphere. 3.  Current future directions: Humor as cultural production in ­contemporary (mostly political) written discourse In addition to considering how historical shifts in humor have changed our valuation of its practice in rhetoric, in addition to examining its pedagogical uses and implications for the writing classroom, and in addition to noting where its use in non-traditional contexts has contributed to opening up our pedagogy to postmodern considerations, another way humor has interfaced with rhetoric and composition is in heightening the distinction between cultural formation and cultural production. To explain this interface as I see it emerging, I  draw on three theorizations related to audience (Olsen and Olsen), invention (Atwill, “Introduction”; Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed), and performativity (Holcomb, “Anyone”) and beg forgiveness from these theorists if I have over-extended their work. There is no dearth of scholarship about humor as cultural formation, especially when it comes to considering humor in politics or in justifying humor as a  mode of persuasion in jokes (Hols; Stein). Much of this scholarship considers humor’s public role in these cultural genres – that is, how it contributes to identity formation, inquiry, and critique, whether that involves satirizing social injustice (Ganter, “He Made Us Laugh Some”; Lockyer and Pickering, “Dear Shit-Shovellers”) or understanding humor in the context of genteel rhetorical instruction (Holcomb, “Painted Garment”; Smith, Sydney Smith). Humor’s role has also been traced and valuated in the writings of major political figureheads and landmark addresses (Dahlberg, “Lincoln, the Wit”; Bendix and Bendix, “Politics and Gender”; Bostdorff, “Vice-Presiden-

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

431

tial Comedy”). We understand how politicians have used humor (Charland); how Aristotelian appeals can be applied to humor in American political culture (Rowland and Womack); and even how these same appeals illuminate verbal and visual political humor in other cultures (Feldman). Beyond funniness, this body of scholarship has proposed, examined, then re-proposed rhetorical characterizations of humor, offering explanations of how humor has shaped or challenged particular traditions in public discourse. For example, Ganter demonstrates Frederick Douglass’s “transgressive” ethos by explicating how he used irony and satire to exercise mastery over his opponents while at the same time promoting cultural formation of rhetorical attitudes (Ganter 547). In some of his public address aimed at critics of abolition, Douglass capitalized on juxtaposition and incongruity in order to undermine accepted notions of community, i.e., by laughing at the way he ironically distances himself from plantation humor, Douglass’s audience might rethink the funniness of that cultural genre. In Ganter’s analysis, Douglass often positioned his audience as cultural targets of the humor by inviting them to laugh at his mockery of it. He became the other and urged them towards social reform by reflecting on their treatment of “other.” Beyond treating humor as merely a subject of textual study, Ganter’s analysis allows us to consider how public and political humor can instigate change in the way of cultural re-formation. But cultural formation and cultural production are not synonymous – one relies on “of ” and “how” considerations, while the other may open up more active investigation of “whether” and “why.” And there is evidence that even as we analyze the former, we move towards the latter, towards a creation of cultural knowledge by way of what humor applications allow us to imagine differently. Consider it telling that we evolve from Booth’s 1974 A Rhetoric of Irony to Swearingen’s 1991 Rhetoric and Irony, implying that – in lieu of demarcating a  literary system with rhetorical indicators, as Booth does when he builds a series of tropes for rhetorical irony based on the principle of stable forms – we find it more relevant to understand irony’s place as a  cultural force alongside (and within) broader questions of ethics, intention, and literacy. For Booth, “rhetorical ironies” are those designed by one human being deliberately to be shared with at least one other human being (234), and operationally classified according to: (1) degree of openness or disguise (i.e., covert or overt); (2) degree of stability in the reconstruction; and (3) scope of the “truth revealed” (i.e., local or infinite) (234). While Booth has significantly introduced audience and authorial intention into his theorizing – moving

432 

Tarez Samra Graban

rhetorical theories of irony beyond the purely ideal or aesthetic – he has also succeeded in limiting irony’s linguistic and rhetorical context. But in revising rhetoric’s reliance on and evolution alongside irony, Swearingen asks, to what extent do beliefs about the nature of language shape how language is used? I extend this question here to ask: To what extent do beliefs about the nature of humor shape our beliefs about rhetorical culture? What is humor’s role (or set of roles) in rhetorical production, i.e., beyond a cultural phenomenon to which rhetorical analysis can be applied? One possibility is in how humor studies cause us to rethink audience as producer of the rhetorical culture, rather than as recipient or follower of it. For example, Olson and Olson argue for a more nuanced understanding of how readers bring significant extra-textual information to irony that allows us to consider irony’s purpose beyond authorial intention and beyond the practical/aesthetic binary. By paying more attention to what the reader brings to the ironic event, writers, rhetoricians, and rhetorical theorists are better poised to argue for contingencies as worthwhile aims (Olson and Olson 32). Another possibility is in understanding rhetorical invention as shaping or influencing – rather than being shaped or influenced by – the principles that govern public discourse, which in turn raises questions about shaping new rhetorical cultures, or new rhetorical questions about shaping culture. For example, in reclaiming classical notions of inventive art from the knowledge binaries that have traditionally limited them (i.e., theory vs. practice, aesthetic vs. utilitarian, subjective vs. empirical), Atwill invites us to rethink what it means that rhetorical invention is “concerned with practice, but … aim[ed] at creating arts that can inform practice across situations” (“Introduction” xvii). In other words, her theorizing urges us to understand invention not as creating static, normative, or even representative knowledge but as always redefining knowledge boundaries (Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed 48). We might extend this idea to imagine a rhetorical humor beyond purely productive or purely aesthetic aims by eliding simplistic classifications of humor in rhetoric and composition, or by reconceiving their categories of use. A third possibility is in considering the performative dimensions of rhetorical humor in the public sphere. For example, Holcomb’s study of how Stephen Colbert enacts a Bush-era “presidential discourse” on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show by using tricolon and anaphora, represents one way of using the analysis of political humor not merely to understand tricolon and anaphora as rhetorical devices, but rather to know the rhetoricity of such devices when employed in this ironic political context. This means knowing how they complicate our classifications and understandings of rhetorical device, just as

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

433

Gant would likely want us to interrogate certain notions of “oppression” and “comic imitation” as aspects of cultural production when Frederick Douglass employs them. According to Holcomb, such a complication occurs when Colbert “breaks frame,” or establishes critical distance between himself and the devices in order to model a stylistic analysis of what he is trying to mock (Holcomb, “Anyone” 94). What is complicated is how the devices convey power. In much the same way that Douglass imitated sermon discourse and plantation humor, Colbert employs two discursive forms that he didn’t originate but that, when employed together in an unexpected cultural context, yield the same kind of emotional result or cultural power as when they are used by the president (Holcomb, “Anyone” 74). This power occurs as a performative happening that Stewart is not able to successfully imitate when he tries using tricolon and anaphora himself (Holcomb, “Anyone” 75). This cultural power “creates and manages” two sets of relationships – Colbert to Stewart’s viewers, and Stewart to his own viewers. Recent advances in linguistic theories of humor, again, equip us to consider these possibilities. Giora and Fein underscore that irony works beyond a semiotic one-way interaction by positing graded salience as a fuller explanation of how audiences can process meaning. Attardo (2000) fortifies pragmatic understandings of irony as determined by contextual inappropriateness – both intentional and unintentional. Ritchie’s application of “frame-shifting” to irony interpretation underscores the possibility of subversion between initial and alternative frames (277). These are only a few and they focus on irony, but they represent richer definitions of register humor for rhetoric and composition that rely less on stark contrasts between what the audience expects and what the audience discerns, and even less on stable definitions of “audience” and “context.” Beyond new ways of questioning these concepts, we can aim to identify new concepts to question. Beyond the study of humor’s role in persuasion – as wit, as social critique, as pedagogical tool, as cultural formation – some of the most salient theorizing for rhetoric and composition may be that which extends the limits of our theorizing even as it adds to it, i.e., “breaking frame” with the principles that drive it. Notes 1. For a  more comprehensive understanding of landmarks and movements in the development of composition studies – including some identification of the nature

434 

Tarez Samra Graban

and kind of classroom pedagogies and texts – the reader might consult Berlin’s Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges, Lindemann and Tate’s An Introduction to Composition Studies, or Bloom, et al’s Composition Studies in the New Millennium. These are only three of several dozen worthwhile overviews.

References “Anger, Jane.” 1589 From Jane Anger her protection for women. In Randall Martin (ed.), Women Writers in Renaissance England. Longman 1997. Alcorn, Marshall W., Jr. 1994 Self-structure as a  rhetorical device: Modern ethos and the divisiveness of the self. In: James S. Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin (eds.), Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory, 3–35. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press Anderson, Bonnie P., and Judith P. Zinsser 1988 Traditions empowering women In: A History of Their Own Vol. 1. New York: Harper and Row. Aristotle 1962 Nichomachean Ethics. Trans. by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1994 On Rhetoric. Trans. George Kennedy. New York: Oxford University Press. Asp, Elissa D. 1995 Knowledge and laughter: An approach to socio-cognitive linguistics. In P. H. Fries and M. Gregory (eds.), Discourse in Society: Systematic Functional Perspectives, 141–158. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Attardo, Salvatore 2001 Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 2001 On the pragmatic nature of irony and its rhetorical aspects. In: Eniko Nemeth (ed.), Pragmatics in 2000, 52–66. Antwerp: International Pragmatics Association. 200 Irony as relevant inappropriateness. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 793–​ 826. Atwill, Janet M. 2005 Rhetoric and civic virtue. In: Richard Graff, Arthur E. Walzer, and Janet M. Atwill (eds.), The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition, 75–92. Albany: SUNY Press. 2002 Introduction. In: Janet M. Atwill and Janice M. Lauer (eds.), Per-

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

435

spectives on Rhetorical Invention, xi–xxi. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 1998 Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981 The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barreca, Regina 1988 Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy. Amsterdam: OPA. 1994 Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor in British Literature. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Behrens, Laurence, and Leonard J. Rosen 1988 Varieties of humor. Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum, 301–379. 3rd ed. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman. Bendix, John, and Regina Bendix 1992 Politics and gender in humor and satire: The cases of Elisabeth Kopp and Geraldine Ferraro. Schweiz Z Sociol / Rev. Suisse Sociol 2: 441–​ 460. Berger, Arthur Asa 1997 The Art of Comedy Writing. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press. 1995 The rhetoric of laughter: The techniques used in humor. Blind Men and Elephants: Perspectives on Humor, 51–64. New Brunswick, NJ/ London: Transaction Press. Bergmann, Linda S. 1995 Funny papers: Initiation and subversion in first-year writing. Journal of Teaching Writing 14: 21–39. Bergson, Henri 1899 Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique. Revue de Paris, February 1, February 15, and March 1. English trans. in Wylie Sypher (ed.), Comedy, 59–190. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956. Berk, Ronald A. 1998 Professors are from Mars, students are from Snickers: How to write and deliver humor in the classroom and in professional presentations. Madison, WI: Mendota Press. Bete, Tim 2005 Writing: Improve the quality of your writing by adjusting the density of humor. Writer’s Digest 85 (1): 56–57. Betts Van Dyk, Krista K. 2006 From the plaint to the comic: Kenneth Burke’s Towards a Better Lif. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 36 (1): 30–55. Bilger, Audrey 2005 Laughing all the way to the polls: Do female politicians need a new punch line? Bitch 30: 48–53.

436 

Tarez Samra Graban

Bilger, Audrey 2002 Laughing Feminism: Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Booth, Wayne C. 1974 A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bostdorff, D. M. 1991 Vice-presidential comedy and the traditional female role: An examination of the rhetorical characteristics of the vice presidency. Western Journal of Speech Communication 55 (1): 1–27. Bowen, Barbara C. 1998 Ciceronian wit and renaissance rhetoric. Rhetorica 16 (4): 409–​ 429. Bradford, Arthur L. 1964 The place of humor in teaching. Peabody Journal of Education 42 (2): 67–70. Bridgeford, Tracy, Karla Saari Kitalong, and Dickie Selfe (eds.) 2005 Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication. Logan: Utah State University Press. Brown, Robert L. 1976 The pragmatics of verbal irony. In: Roger W. Shuy and Anna Shnukal (eds.), Language Use and the Uses of Language, 111–127. Browne, Stephen H. 1992 Satirizing women’s speech in eighteenth-century England. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22 (3): 20–29. Burke, Kenneth 1984 Attitudes Toward History. 3rd edn. Berkeley: University of California Press. Campbell, George 1965 Of Wit, Humor, and Ridicule [reprint]. In Dudley Bailey (ed.), Essays on Rhetoric, 120–136. New York: Oxford University Press. 1990 Philosophy of Rhetoric. James L. Golden, Edward Press, and J. Corbett (eds.), The Rhetoric of Blair, Campbell, and Whately, 143–271. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Carrell, Amy T. 1993 Audience/Community, Situation, and Language: A Linguistic/Rhetorical Theory of Verbal Humor. Doctoral dissertation, Purdue University. Cattani, Adelino 1999 Bad reasoning, good humor. In: Frans H. van Eemeren, Rob Grootendorst, J. Anthony Blair, and Charles A. Willard (eds.), Proceedings of the fourth international conference of the International So-

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

437

ciety for the Study of Argumentation, 79–81. Amsterdam: Stichting Internationaal Centrum voor de Studie van Argumentatie en Taalbeheersing. Charland, Maurice 1994 Norms and laughter in rhetorical culture. Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (3): 339–342. Cicero 1949 De Inventione. Trans H. M. Hubbell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Loeb. 1970 De Oratore. Trans. J. S. Watson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Clarke, Danielle 2001 The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Harlow: Pearson Education. Connors, Robert J 1985 Mechanical correctness as a focus in composition. College Composition and Communication 36 (1): 61–72. Cox, Joe A., Raymond L. Reed, and Philip M. Van Auken 1985 Male-female differences in communicating job-related humor: An exploratory study. In Sam J. Bruno (ed.), Business Communication: From the Ideal to the Practicable: Association for Business Communication Southwest Division 1985 Proceedings (New Orleans, Louisiana, March 7–9, 1985); ERIC Document Reproduction Service, ED 261 186.103–110. Crawford, Mary 2003 Gender and humor in social context. Journal of Pragmatics 35: 1413–1430. Dahlberg, W. A. 1945 Lincoln, the Wit. Quarterly Journal of Speech 31: 424–427. Daiute, Collette 1989 Play as thought: Thinking strategies of young writers. Harvard Educational Review 59 (1): 1–23. Davis, D. Diane 2000 Breaking Up (at) Totality: A  Rhetoric of Laughter. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Davis, Jessica Milner 1977 A structural approach to humour in farce. In: Antony Chapman and Hugh Foot (eds.), It’s a Funny Thing, Humour, 391–394. New York: Pergamon. Donawerth, Jane, ed. 2002 Rhetorical Theory by Women Before 1900: An Anthology. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

438 

Tarez Samra Graban

Dresner, Zita 1994

Alice Childress’s Like One of the Family: Domestic and undomesticated humor. Gail Finney (ed.), Look Who’s Laughing: Gender and Comedy. Elshtain, Jean Bethke 1982 Feminist discourse and its discontents: Language, power, and meaning. Signs 7 (3): 603–621. Fahnestock, J. 1999 Rhetorical Figures in Science. New York: Oxford University Press Fahnestock, Jeanne, and Secor, Marie 2002 Rhetorical analysis. Ellen Barton and Gail Stygall (eds.), Discourse Studies in Composition, 177–200. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton. Felder, Julie E. 1992 Using humor in the writing classroom. Teaching English in the TwoYear College 19 (1): 39 Feldman, Ofer 2000 Non-oratorical discourse and political humor in Japan: Editorial cartoons, satire, and attitudes toward authority. In Christ’l De Landts­ heer and Ofer Feldman (eds.), Beyond Public Speech and Symbols: Explorations in the Rhetoric of Politicians and the Media, 165–​191. Westport, CT: Praeger. Finney, Gail 1994 Look Who’s Laughing: Gender and Comedy. Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach Science Publishers. France, A. 1993 Assigning places: The function of introductory composition as a cultural discourse. College English 55 (6): 593–609. Frater, J. 1977 Language of humour and satire. In Robert D. Eagleson (ed.), Wordswork: the language of literature and life, 22–37. Sydney: Methuen of Australia. Freud, Sigmund 1905 Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten. Leipzig: Deutke. Trans. as Jokes and their relation to the unconscious, ed. by James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1960 Gans, Eric 1997 On Irony. Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures, 64–74. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ganter, Granville 2003 He made us laugh some: Frederick Douglass’s humor. African American Review 37 (4): 535–552. Geffcken, Katherine A. 1995 Comedy in the Pro Caelio. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers.

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

439

Gibbs, Raymond W. Jr., and Christin D. Izzett 2005 Irony as persuasive communication. In: Katz and Colston (eds.), Figurative Language Comprehension: Social and Cultural Influences. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Gillooly, Eileen 1991 Review: Women and Humor. Feminist Studies 17 (3): 472–492. Glenn, Cheryl 1997 Inscribed in the margins: Renaissance women and rhetorical change. In: Rhetoric Retold, 118–172. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Goode, C. Edward 2002 A Grammar Book for You and I – Oops, Me: All the Grammar You Need to Succeed in Life. Sterling, VA: Capital Books. Gordon, Dexter B. 1998 Humor in African American discourse: Speaking of oppression. Journal of Black Studies 29 (2): 254–276. Graban, Tarez Samra Forthc. Expecting the unexpected: Ciceronian Facetiae as a  lesson in mores. 2007 Feminine irony and the art of linguistic cooperation in Anne Askew’s sixteenth-century Examinacyons. Rhetorica 25 (4): 385–413. Graff, Richard 2005 Introduction. In: Richard Graff, Arthur E. Walzer, and Janet M. Atwill (eds.), The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition, 1–8. Albany: SUNY Press. Grant, Mary 1924 The Ancient Rhetorical Theories of the Laughable. University of Wisconsin Studies in Lagnuage and Literature 21. Madison. Greenbaum, Andrea 1999 Stand-up comedy as rhetorical argument: An investigation of comic culture. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 12 (1), 33–46. Gross, Alan 2005 The rhetorical tradition. In Richard Graff, Arthur E. Walzer, and Janet M. Atwill (eds.), The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition, 31–45. Albany: SUNY Press. Gruner, Charles 1967 Effect of humor on speaker ethos and audience information gain. Journal of Communication, 17: 228–233. Gruner, Charles R. 1978 Understanding Laughter. Chicago: Nelson Hall. Guth, Hans P., Gabriele L. Rico, John Ruszkiewicz, and Bill Bridges 1996 The Rhetoric of Laughter: The Best and Worst of Humor Night. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

440 

Tarez Samra Graban

Hale, Constance 1999 Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose. New York: Broadway Books. Hall, Phil 1985 Giving silliness a chance. Writing Lab Newsletter 9 (9): 7–8. Hansen, Kristine 1983 The anals of history: Unintentional humor from freshman compositions. English Journal 72 (7): 44–48. Hartwell, Patrick 1985 Grammar, grammars, and the teaching of grammar. College English 47 (2): 105–127 Haskins, Ekaterina V. 1997 A woman’s inventive response to the seventeenth-century. Querelle des Femmes. Molly Meijer Wertheimer (ed.), Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women, 288–304. Columbia: University South Carolina Press. Hegelson, Candace 1976 The prisoners of texts: Male chauvinism in college handbooks and rhetorics. College English 38, 396–406. Holcomb, Chris 2000 “A man in a painted garment”: The social function of jesting in Elizabethan rhetoric and courtesy manuals. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 13 (4): 429–456. 2007 Anyone can be president: Figures of speech, cultural forms, and performance. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37 (1): 71–96 Holcomb, Christopher 1997 A class of clowns: Spontaneous joking in computer-assisted discussions. Computers and Composition 14 (1): 3–18. Holcomb, Kathleen 1987 Wit, humour and ridicule: George Campbell’s first discourse for the Aberdeen Philosophical Society. In: Jennifer J. Carter and Joan H. Pittock (eds.), Aberdeen and the Enlightenment, 282–290. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Hols, Edith J. 1979 A rhetoric of humor: One liners. In: Robert L. Brown and Martin Steinmann, Jr. (eds.), Rhetoric 78: Proceedings of the Theory of Rhetoric, an Interdisciplinary Conference, 191–200. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Center for Advanced Studies in Language, Style, and Literary Theory. Huffman, Lois E. 1993 Helping at-risk college students help themselves through humor: A reading and writing strategy. Forum for Reading 24: 32–42

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

441

Hughes, Joseph J. 1994 Dramatic ethos in Cicero’s later rhetorical works. In: James S. Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin (eds.), Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory, 211–227. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press. Hurley, Kathleen Ann 1996 Humor and technical communication: The culture, the texts, the implications. Ph.D. disseretation, Iowa State University. Hutcheon, Linda 2000 A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. James, Frederic 1991 Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Johnson, T. R. 2001 School sucks. CCC 52 (4): 620–650. Jordan, G. 1991 Humor in tutorials. The Writing Lab Newsletter 15 (9): 8, 10. Kaufer, David 1977 Irony and rhetorical strategy. Philosophy and Rhetoric 10 (2): 90–​ 110. 1981 Understanding ironic communication. Journal of Pragmatics 5: 495–510. Ketter, J., and Hunter, J. 2003 Creating a writer’s identity on the boundaries of two communities of practice. Writing Selves/Writing Societies: Research from Activity Perspectives. http://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies. Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, and Dean Steffens 1989 Effectiveness in the environmental impact statement: A study in public rhetoric. Written Communication 6: 155–180. Kolodny, Annette 1994 Inventing a feminist discourse: Rhetoric and resistance in Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the nineteenth century. New Literary History 25 (2): 355–382. Kyrston, Victor H., Mary R. Smith, Sharon M. Collins, and Marla G. Hamilton 1986 Facets: The place of humor and sarcasm in the English class. The English Journal 75 (4): 18–21. Lang, Candace 1988 Irony/Humor: Critical Paradigms. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lanham, Richard A. 1987 Revising Prose. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan.

442 

Tarez Samra Graban

Lederer, Richard 1989 Anguished English. New York: Dell. Levy, Jonathan 1995 Using HAC-guided responsive journal writing to assess problem solving abilities: Preliminary correlations. Research in the Teaching of English 29 (3): 355–359. Lockyer, Sharon, and Michael Pickering 2001 Dear shit-shovellers: Humour, censure and the discourse of complaint. Discourse and Society 12 (5): 633–651. Lowe, John 1986 Theories of ethnic humor: How to enter laughing. American Quarterly 38: 439–460. Lunsford, Andrea A. (ed.) 1995 Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Lunsford, Andrea A., and John J. Ruszkiewicz 1999 Humor in argument. Everything’s an Argument. 2nd ed. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s. Macaulay, M., and Brice, C. 1994 Gentlemen prefer blondes: A study of gender bias in example sentences. Cultural Peformances: Proceedings of the Third Berkeley Women and Language Conference. 1997 Don’t touch my projectile: Gender bias and stereotyping in syntactic examples. Language 73: 798–825. Machline, Vera Cecilia 1995 O Conceito: Aristotelico de Parodia. In: Amálio Pinheiro (ed.), Forma e Ciência, 11–49. São Paulo, Brazil: Editora da PUC-SP. McMahon, Maureen 1999 Are we having fun yet? Humor in the English class. The English Journal 88 (4): 70–72. Michell, Gillian 1990 Women and lying: A pragmatic and semantic analysis of ‘telling it slant. In: Azizah Y. al-Hibri and Margaret A. Simons (eds.), Hypatia Reborn: Essays in Feminist Philosophy, 175–191. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Miller, Nancy Weitz 1997 Ethos, Authority, and Virtue for Seventeenth-century Women Writers: The Case of Bathsua Makin’s An essay to revive the antient education of gentlewomen. In: Wertheimer (ed.), 272–287. Miller, Susan 1991 Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

443

Morris, Linda A. 1988 Women Vernacular Humorists in Nineteenth-century America: Ann Stephens, Frances Whitcher, and Marietta Holley. New York: Garland. Muller, William Edward 1991 The use of humor as a heuristic, liberatory tool in the composing process. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan. Myers, Greg 1990 The rhetoric of irony in academic writing. Written Communication 7 (4): 419–455. Nilsen, Aileen P., and Nilsen, Don L. F. 1999 The straw man meets his match: Six arguments for studying humor in English classes. The English Journal 88 (4), 34–42. Nilsen, Don L. F. 1974 The nature of implication: Or how to write between the lines. College Composition and Communication 25 (5): 417–421. 1991 Humor scholarship on rhetoric and discourse analysis. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 21 (2): 62–65. 1996 Humor studies related to composition, rhetoric, and discourse theory. English Leadership Quarterly 18 (3): 10–12. 1993 Language play and rhetorical devices. Humor Scholarship: A  Research Bibliography, 59–112. Westport, CT: Greenwood. 1987 The wheat and chaff approach to teaching composition: Nine steps to becoming the perfect writer. Arizona English Bulletin 30 (1): 32–36. Nussbaum, Felicity 1984 The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660–​1750. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie 1974 Le comique du discours. Brussels: Inst. de Sociologie. Olson, Kathryn M., and Clark D. Olson 2004 Beyond strategy: A reader-centered analysis of irony’s dual persuasive uses. Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (1): 24–52. Pepicello, William J. 1987 Pragmatics of humorous language. International Journal of the Society of Language 65: 27–35. Peterson, L., and Strebeigh, F. 1988 Teaching humorous writing. In S. J. Stang & R. Wiltenburg (eds.), Collective Wisdom: A Sourcebook of Lessons for Writing Teachers, 206–210. New York: Random House. Pexman, Penny M. 2005 Social factors in the interpretiation of verbal irony: The roles of speaker and listener characteristics. In: H. L. Colston and A. N. Katz (eds.), Figurative Language Comprehension: Social and Cultural Influences, 209–232. Mahwah, NJ.

444 

Tarez Samra Graban

Pieper, Gail W. 1987 The scoop on good humor. The Technical Writing Teacher 14 (2): 174–177. Porter, James 1986 Intertextuality and the discourse community. Rhetoric Review 5 (1): 34–47. Powell, J. P., and L. W. Andresen 1985 Humour and teaching in higher education. Studies in Higher Education 10 (1): 79–90. Purdy, Jedediah 1999 For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Quintilian 1951 Institutio Oratoria. Vol. 6. Trans. Charles E. Little. Nashville, TN: George Peabody College for Teachers. 2001 Institutio Oratoria. Trans. Donald A. Russell. The Loeb Classical Library. Vol. 3, books 6–8. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2001 Institutio Oratoria. Trans. Donald A. Russell. The Loeb Classical Library. Vol. 4, books 11–12. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reeves, C. 1996 Students as satirists: Encouraging critique and comic release. College Teaching 44: 15–18. Rishel, Mary Ann 2002 Writing Humor: Creativity and the Comic Mind. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Ritchie, David 2005 Frame-Shifting in Humor and Irony. Metaphor and Symbol 20: 275–294. Ritchie, Joy, and Kate Ronald 2001 Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetorics. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Roberts, Paul 1958 Understanding English. New York: Harper & Brothers. Rose, Mike, and Malcom Kiniry 1990 What’s Funny? Investigating the Comic. Critical Strategies for Academic Writing, 664–736. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s. Ross, Alison 1998 The Language of Humour. London: Routledge. Rouzie, Albert 2001 Conversation and Carrying-on: Play, Conflict, and Serio-Ludic Discourse in Synchronous Computer Conferencing. College Composition and Communication 53 (2): 251–299.

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies  

445

Rowland, Robert C., and Deanna F. Womack 1985 Aristotle’s View of Ethical Rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 15 (1/2): 13–31. Russell, David 1999 Activity theory and process approaches: Writing (power) in school and society. In T. Kent (ed.), Beyond the Writing-Process Paradigm, 80–95. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Sanborn, Kate 1885 The Wit of Women. New York: Funk & Wagnalis. Sattler, William 1947 Conceptions of Ethos in Ancient Rhetoric. Speech Monographs 14: 55–65. Selzer, Jack 2004 Rhetorical analysis: Understanding how texts persuade readers. In: Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior (eds.), What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices, 279–307. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Sherwood, Steve 1993 Humor and the serious tutor. The Writing Center Journal 13 (2): 3–12. Simpson, Paul 2003 On the Discourse of Satire: Towards a Stylistic Model of Satirical Humour. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sirc, Geoffrey 1993 Writing classrooms as A&P Parking lot. PRE/TEXT 14 (1/2): 27–70. 1994 English composition as a  happening II: Part one. PRE/TEXT 15 (3/4). Smith, Alden Clarke 1969 The Reverend Sydney Smith’s theory of wit and humor: Origin, elements, and applications to his rhetorical practice. Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Smith, Stephen A. 1993 Humor as rhetoric and cultural argument. Journal of American Culture 16 (2): 51–63. Sperber, D., and Wilson, D. 1986 Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stein, Mary Beth 1989 The politics of humor: The Berlin wall in jokes and graffiti. Western Folklore 48 (2): 85–108. Stewart, Donald 1975 Aesthetic distance and the composition teacher. Collect Composition and Communication 26 (3): 238–243.

446 

Tarez Samra Graban

Sutherland, Christine Mason, and Rebecca Sutcliffe (eds.) 1999 The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric. Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press. Swearingen, C. Jan 1991 Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies. New York: Oxford University Press. 1982 The rhetor as Eiron: Plato’s defense of dialogue. PRE/TEXT 3 (4). Tebeaux, Elizabeth, and Mary Lay 1995 The emergence of the feminine voice, 1526–1640: The earliest published books by English renaissance women. The Journal of Advanced Composition: 53–81. Theibaux, Marcelle 1994 The Writings of Medieval Women: An Anthology. New York: Garland. Tower, C. 1998 Making room for laughter: The use of humor in the writing classroom. The New England Reading Association Journal 34 (2): 11–16. Vitanza, Victor 1990 An open letter to my ‘colligs’: On paraethics, pararhetorics, and the hysterical turn. PRE/TEXT 11 (3/4): 237–287. Vives, Juan Luis 2000 The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-century ­Manual. Ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Volpe, Michael 1977 The persuasive force of humor: Cicero’s defense of Caelius. Quarterly Journal of Speech Communication 63: 311–323. Wagner, Joanne 1995 “Intelligent members or restless disturbers”: Women’s rhetorical styles, 1880–1920. In: Andrea A. Lunsford (ed.), Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, 185–202. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Walker, Nancy 1988 A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Walker, Nancy, and Zita Dresner (eds.) 1988 Redressing the Balance: American Women’s Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Walzer, Arthur 2005 Teaching “political wisdom.” In: Richard Graff, Arthur E. Walzer, and Janet M. Atwill (eds.), The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition, 113–124. Albany: SUNY Press.

Rhetoric,composition, and humor studies   Ward, John

447

Women and Latin rhetoric: From Hrotsvit to Hildegard. In: Sutherland and Sutcliffe (eds.), The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric. 121–132. Warnick, Barbara 1997 Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s contribution to The New Rhetoric. In: Molly Meijer Wertheimer (ed.), 69–85. Weber, Alan 2000 Playful writing for critical thinking: Four approaches to writing. Journal of adolescent & adult literacy, 43 (6): 562–568. Wertheimer, Molly Meijer (ed.) 1997 Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Williams, David 2000 Sin Boldly! Dr. Dave’s Guide to Writing the College Paper. New York: Perseus Publishing. Williams, Joseph M. 1981 The Phenomenology of Error. College Composition and Communication 32 (2): 152–168. Wilson, Thomas 1994 The Art of Rhetorike (1560). Ed. Peter Medine. State College: Penn State University Press. Wisse, Jakob 1989 Ethos and Pathos: From Aristotle to Cicero. Amsterdam: Hakkert. Wright, Elizabethada A. 2001 “Joking isn’t safe”: Fanny Fern, irony, and signifyin(g). Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31 (2): 91–110. Wycoff, E. B. 1999 Humor in academia: An international survey of humor instruction. Humor 12 (4): 437–456.

Applications of humor: Health, the workplace, and education John Morreall

Introduction Over the last three decades humor researchers, largely in psychology and the behavioral sciences, have found that humor has many benefits for individuals and groups. In the last twenty years, hundreds of people have been applying these findings in such fields as medicine, business, and education. A new profession has been created – the humor consultant. The most successful of them, Joel Goodman of the Humor Project, has done presentations for over one million people worldwide. A growing number of psychotherapists use humor with their patients. One bills himself as a “Mirthologist and Clinical Psychologist.” Organizations like the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor get larger with every convention. Hundreds of hospitals have created “comedy carts” with funny books, audiotapes, and videotapes, or whole “humor rooms” for their patients and their families. In New York City clowns from the Big Apple Circus have formed Clown Care Units to visit hundreds of patients and their families every day. Many nursing and healthcare conventions now feature lectures and workshops on humor. Before the untimely death of its editor, the Journal of Nursing Jocularity had over 30,000 subscribers. In the business world, companies like IBM and AT&T regularly hire humor consultants to conduct programs on how humor reduces stress, improves relations with customers, and promotes creativity. For five years IBM’s prestigious Advanced Business Institute, which conducts 3-day “colleges” for business leaders from outside IBM, has integrated presentations on humor and new styles of management into many of its programs. Sessions on humor can also be found throughout the world of education, from Head Start conferences, to school districts’ “in-service” days, to lectures in medical schools. A handful of those applying the benefits of humor to healthcare, business, and education have academic credentials in humor research. Dr. William Fry, M.D., the pioneer of both humor research and its applications, is emeritus at

450 

John Morreall

Stanford University’s medical school. Paul McGhee, now a full-time humor consultant, received his Ph.D. in developmental psychology and has published eleven books on humor. John Morreall, a professor with four books in the philosophy of humor, does humor seminars in North America and ­Europe. Unfortunately, such experts in humor research are a tiny minority among humor consultants, and so some claims coming from the speaker’s platform are not backed up by scientific research. For twenty years speakers have been saying that laughter stimulates the release of endorphins in the brain, for example, although this has not been demonstrated. Claims about laughter and the immune system often cite the research of Lee Berk and Stanley Tan, although critics like Rod Martin (2001) have argued that this research has methodological shortcomings. To compound the problem of amateurs talking about the nature of humor and its benefits, humor consulting is a business, not a branch of higher education. As consultants sell the benefits of humor, there is a natural tendency for them to exaggerate the value of their wares. Humor consultants routinely charge $2,500–$5,000 for a keynote talk, and so many of those who hire them want to hear that humor will solve a multitude of problems. Alternatively, many organizations hire a humor consultant merely as a motivational speaker to “pump up” their stressed-out, overworked employees. For them “humor consultant” is just an inflated title for “comedian.” As long as their employees enjoy the presentation, they do not care if the speaker’s claims about humor are exaggerated. In the competitive marketplace of public speaking, too, the popularity of the “humor movement” has encouraged speakers who used to just do funny talks to add a few comments about the benefits of humor to their funny talks and change their job title to “humor consultant.” All of these tendencies push humor consultants toward making exaggerated claims about the benefits of humor, and toward emphasizing the entertainment value of their presentations. Both reduce their credibility. I recently purchased an expensive video of a professionally trained psychologist with a Ph.D. addressing an audience of 500. She brought a woman from the audience onto the platform, and then spent five minutes laughing heartily to get the woman to laugh, and so to make the audience laugh. While mildly entertaining to watch, all this laughter made no point. A  recent internet search for “humor in the workplace” turned up over 96,000 items, many of them speakers’ web sites. A number of those feature pictures of consultants dressed in funny costumes. The signature “bit” of one consultant who gets $5,000 an hour is putting on a 22-inch crab hat and say-

Health, the workplace, and education  

451

ing, “I’m feeling a little crabby today. Does it show?” Many of these people distribute adhesive-backed red foam clown noses for the audience to put on. Some bring a basket of props and sight gags onto the platform and spend most of their presentation demonstrating them. A few of these consultants sell props as “humor supplies” on their web sites. When such people have a message, it is usually that being more playful and humorous will reduce stress. Their concluding advice is often “Keep this clown nose in your pocket or purse and put it on the next time you are feeling stressed-out.” Like the owners of old-fashioned “joke shops,” these consultants have a limited understanding of what humor is and how it can be beneficial. Adding to the lack of accountability among humor consultants is the fact that they are seldom a long-term part of the organizations they speak to, and they do not conduct follow-up studies with their clients. If they have recommended techniques to incorporate humor into the workplace, for example, no one checks to see if the techniques are put into practice or if anything improved. Review of the literature and the humor movement For all of the claims being made about the benefits of humor, there are remarkably few research studies. The vast majority of books published in this area, even the medical and management books, are more “self-help” than science, and include many more anecdotes and tips for using humor than reports of scientific data about humor. Even authors who know something about humor research tend to downplay it to avoid “turning off” the average reader. Despite decades of humor research, there is still a common assumption that a book about humor has to be a humorous book, and scientific data are not funny. Most books and articles on the benefits of humor fall into one, or occasionally two of these categories: Humor and Health, Humor in the Workplace, and Humor in Education. We can consider them one at a time. Humor and health The humor and health movement is often traced to the 1979 publication of Norman Cousins’ Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing and Regeneration, a  book in which Cousins tells of his recovery from a  life-threatening disease (ankylosing spondylitis) through

452 

John Morreall

regular doses of self-administered humor. Watching funny movies, Cousins laughed heartily. That brought him relief from pain, and so allowed him much-needed sleep. Soon the inflammation was going down, and eventually he recovered. A year before Cousins’ book, Raymond Moody, MD, had published Laugh after Laugh: the Healing Power of Humor. Moody gives a sketchy overview of the physiology, psychology, and social aspects of laughter, and a history of the idea that it has health benefits. He also argues that the medical profession needs to integrate humor into the treatment of patients. Early in the 20th century, James Sully had briefly mentioned some medical benefits of laughter in An Essay on Laughter. And in 1922 William McDougall, a one-time professor of psychology at Harvard, wrote “A New Theory of Laughter,” an article claiming that the biological function of laughter was to help maintain psychological health. William Fry, MD, began doing research on the physiology and psychology of laughter and humor in 1953. In 1968 he published Sweet Madness: A Study of Humor, taking a broad look at the psychology and physiology of laughter and humor. In 1971 he published “Laughter: Is It the Best Medicine?” in Stanford M.D., and “Mirth and Oxygen Saturation of Peripheral Blood” in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics. Since then he has published many more articles on humor and physical and mental health. In 1989 Norman Cousins, after working as an adjunct professor of medicine at UCLA Medical School for years, published Head First: The Biology of Hope. It included a chapter on “The Laughter Connection” which summarized many of the findings of the 1980s about the benefits of laughter. Among the physical benefits are that laughter reduces pain, raises the threshold of discomfort, and increases salivary immunogobulin-A, which fights off infections in the respiratory tract. Psychologically, the ability to summon humor on demand is correlated with the ability to counteract stress. Cousins also reported how his Anatomy book had inspired hospitals to create facilities to bring humor and entertainment to patients and their families. One is the “Living Room” at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Houston, another the Therapeutic Humor Room at DeKalb Hospital in Decatur, Georgia. In 1989 there were over two dozen such hospital facilities; now, according to Patty Wooten, R. N., of Jest for the Health of It, there are over two hundred. Dozens of hospitals have also created clown programs to serve not just children’s wards but the whole hospital population. In Clearwater, Florida, Leslie Gibson, R.N., started a clown school at Morton Plant Hospital which trained over 100 volunteer clowns.

Health, the workplace, and education  

453

Inspired by Norman Cousins, the medical community soon began to research the relation between laughter, emotions, and physiology, especially the immune system. Thus was born the new field of psychoneuroimmunology (psycho = mind, neuro = brain, immuno = immune system). The most famous work in this field on humor has been done by Lee Berk, DrPH and Stanley Tan, MD. In their experiments, subjects watching funny videos have shown an increase in immune system activity, including the number of activated T- lymphocytes, the number of natural killer cells and their activity, immunoglobulin-A, -G and -M, and gamma interferon. One day later, all these indicators were still elevated. The research of Berk and Tan has been reported in several journal articles and was summarized in 1996 by Barry Bittman, MD, of TouchStar Productions, in an audiotape and a  videotape, with accompanying slides and ­booklet. In the medical profession, nurses have embraced the benefits of humor more quickly than doctors, perhaps because they have more contact with patients and their families. In 1977 Vera Robinson, a professor of nursing, published Humor and the Health Professions: The Therapeutic Use of Humor in Health Care (2nd edition 1991). Besides presenting information on the physiological effects of laughter, Robinson suggests ways in which humor can help medical staff deal with patients: by allowing them socially acceptable ways to release their anger, by relieving anxiety and stress, and by facilitating their adjustment to the uncomfortable environment of a hospital. She also discusses ways in which humor can help in psychiatric settings, especially its ability to give patients emotional distance from their problems while supporting them at the same time. For nurses and doctors themselves, she shows, humor has similar psychological benefits in allowing them to cope with the blood and guts and suffering and death in hospitals. Robinson also gives tips on how different age groups and different ethnic groups – Southwest Indians, Latinos, and African Americans – respond differently to illness and to humor. A leader of the humor movement among nurses was the late Doug Fletcher with his Journal of Nursing Jocularity. This magazine served over 30,000 nurses as a forum in which they shared stories, jokes, and insights with their colleagues. One of the most respected names in the humor and health movement is Patty Wooten, R.N., who has done programs for over 200,000 people. She has published Compassionate Laughter: Jest for Your Health; Heart, Humor and Healing, a collections of funny and inspiring quotations; and The Hospital Clown, coauthored by the clown ShobiDobi.

454 

John Morreall

In Compassionate Laughter, Wooten describes the value of humor in health care and gives tips for incorporating it into hospitals. She explains the nature of stress and humor’s opposition to it, and discusses ways in which laughter enhances the immune system. She gives tips on how to find and create humor even in the most disastrous situations. About half the book is devoted to the history and function of clowns, with ideas about how to develop clown personalities for hospital work. Wooten herself does many presentations through three clown characters – Nancy Nurse, Nurse Kindheart, and Scruffy, an Emmett-Kelly-type character. Besides the general books on humor in health care, there are specialized books in such areas as geriatrics and hospice care. Therapeutic Humor with the Elderly, by Francis McGuire, Rosangela Boyd, and Ann James, reviews the literature in the psychology of humor and its physiological benefits. There is thorough coverage of the literature on therapeutic humor, especially with the elderly. It discusses the successful use of humor at the Andrus Gerontology Center of UCLA. A study done in connection with another gerontology center found that higher humor scores among participants were correlated with less worry about health and a general improvement in mood. Allen Klein’s The Healing Power of Humor and The Courage to Laugh are written less to present data or even practical tips than to edify and inspire. Both have lots of anecdotes about the power of humor in coping with serious illness and the prospect of death. As an example, a friend of Klein’s was the caregiver for his aging mother. As her Alzheimer’s disease advanced, he sat down with her to discuss her wishes for final arrangements. “Would you like to be buried, or cremated?” he asked. “Surprise me,” she said. While the humor movement has spread in the medical world generally, it has been accepted more slowly in psychotherapy. This might seem puzzling since Freud himself wrote an entire book on Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), and an important essay on “Humor” (1928), and he used humor in his therapy. Nonetheless, traditional psychiatry frowned on therapists using humor. Martin Grotjahn was the first psychoanalyst to advocate humor in therapy (in the late 1940s) and still retain his professional reputation. But in a  colloquium honoring Dr. Grotjahn in 1971, Lawrence Kubie presented the most widely cited paper on humor in this area – “The Destructive Potential of Humor in Psychotherapy,” subsequently published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. In the first two decades of the behavior therapy movement 1950–1970, there was not one mention of humor in that literature. And though the rise of humor in psychotherapy is generally traced to the humanistic tradition, the patriarch of that movement, Carl

Health, the workplace, and education  

455

­ ogers, never mentioned humor in his writings on client-centered therapy. R Harold Greenwald did recall participating in a panel discussion with Rogers in which Greenwald said that he thought psychotherapy was fun. “I saw the red start at his collar and spread up and go over his face,” Greenwald reported, “and finally he burst out, ‘I think it’s hard work, and if you think it’s fun, then to hell with you.’” In the last thirty years, as psychotherapy has become more eclectic, humor has been accepted more widely. Viktor Frankl gave it a push with his 1967 article “Paradoxical Intention: A Logotherapeutic Technique” An adolescent patient was so embarrassed by his stuttering in school over the letters ” b” and “p” that he refused to speak in class. Frankl told him to try to stutter at every letter instead of only “b” and “p.” The student did that, laughed, and stuttered no more. A woman came to Frankl because she was paralyzed with the irrational fear that she would have a heart attack. After none of his standard therapeutic methods worked, he called in the woman’s husband and told the couple to “Go downtown and pick out a nice coffin – what color should the lining be?” The woman laughed and was cured of her fear. In 1978 Allen Fay published Making Things Better by Making Them Worse, building on Frankl’s “paradoxical therapy,” For a  client with feelings of inadequacy, for example, the therapist might respond to the patient’s comments about being incompetent and undesirable by agreeing in an exaggerated way. “Of course, no one likes you – you have absolutely nothing to offer anybody!” As patients hear their own problems or complaints magnified to absurdity, they come to see them as funny. That allows them some emotional distance to see their problems more objectively, and thus to deal with them. An early book devoted solely to humor in therapy was Dan Keller’s Humor as Therapy. Written in a non-technical style, it argues for the value of humor in psychotherapy and gives many examples of how humor can help both client and therapist. Humor allows clients to express repressed feelings. It can also provide “a  welcome relief from the intense doses of transference and hostility to which the therapist is inevitably exposed.” The method may be as simple as asking the client to describe a moment of laughter from childhood. Keller describes some of his own techniques, such as sharing embarrassing moments, role-playing, writing ee-cummings-style verse, and fortune cookie therapy. A colleague of his has been successful with the technique of drawing cartoons of clients’ predicaments in a nonthreatening way. The end of Keller’s book is “In the Loose Ends of Myself,” in which he comically psychoanalyzes himself.

456 

John Morreall

Thomas Kuhlman’s Humor and Psychotherapy gives a  broad vision of what humor can accomplish in therapy. He discusses both therapist-initiated humor and client-initiated humor. In the short term, Kuhlman says, humor can reduce tension in the client and the therapist; in the long term, it can shape and change their relationship. It can produce insight into a problem or, as with sarcastic humor, avoidance of a problem. His explores Frankl’s paradoxical intention, using humor to overcome resistance, humor in systematic desensitization, and self-actualization through humor. The simplest summary of the value of humor in therapy is Gordon Allport’s comment that “the neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure.” In discussing the work of well-known therapists, Kuhlman covers gentle, sympathetic humor, such as the satirical impersonations of Harold Greenwald and the banter of Harvey Mindess, and also the aggressive putdowns of Albert Ellis in Rational Emotive Therapy. For many therapists, the client’s experience of humor is a  means to a  therapeutic goal such as insight. For therapists like Mindess and Walter O’Connell (Natural High Therapy), however, having patients see humor in their situations is an end in itself. Kuhlman also devotes a chapter to presenting the risks and dangers of using humor in therapy and explaining how to minimize them. At the end is a  chapter on humor in child therapy, family therapy, and group therapy. In 1987 and again in 1993 therapists William Fry and Waleed Salameh published collections of current essays. The first is Handbook of Humor and Psychotherapy. Besides its fourteen contributed chapters, it has an introduction, conclusion, and comprehensive bibliography. Each chapter is organized into six sections: theoretical perspectives, techniques, pertinent uses, clinical presentation, synthesis, and references. The lead contribution is by Jeffrey Goldstein, who with Paul McGhee published The Psychology of Humor: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues and the two-volume Handbook of Humor Research. Other chapters were contributed by Albert Ellis on humorous songs in Rational Emotive Therapy, Walter O’Connell on humor in Natural High Therapy, Frank Farrelly and Michael Lynch on humor in provocative therapy, Rhoda Lee Fisher and Seymour Fisher on therapeutic strategies with the comic child, W. Larry Ventis on humor in behavior therapy, Sidney Bloch on humor in group therapy, and Waleed Salameh on humor in integrative short-term psychotherapy. Fry and Salameh’s second anthology is Advances in Humor and Psychotherapy. The contributions, by less well-known names in the field, are struc-

Health, the workplace, and education  

457

tured in the same six sections as in the first volume. Echoing Allport’s comment quoted earlier, Paul Watzlawick says in the Foreword that “From our work we know that people are half over their emotional problems once they manage to laugh at their predicament.” Topics in the eleven chapters include humor in therapy with adolescents, using favorite jokes in child therapy, humor in substance abuse treatment, humor as a religious experience, humor in relation to obsessive compulsive disorders, humor in a  college mental health program, humor and spirituality, and the implications of Kierkegaard’s humor for indirect humorous communication in psychotherapy. The volume also has a 25-page Comprehensive Research and Clinical Bibliography on Humor and Psychotherapy (1964–1991) with abstracts of each item from the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Abstracts. A shorter, less well-known anthology is The Handbook of Humor:Clinical Applications in Psychotherapy by Elcha Shain Buckman. Along with a review of the literature, this book has nine chapters on such issues as humor in children’s and adolescents’ therapy, humor as communication facilitator in couples therapy, humor in family therapy, the use of absurd statements in therapy, humor in treatment of the elderly, and humor with cancer patients. Though the authors do not break much new ground, they often illustrate their points with good cases. As an example, one of the authors met with a potential client for an intake session in which he seemed suspicious and hesitant. The therapist told him what she saw as main problems, how she would proceed with therapy, and what the fees would be. He asked, “Do you really think you can help me?” ”No,” she said, “but I do want your money.” The man laughed, realizing that she had intuited his concerns, and he committed to therapy. Humor in the workplace In the early 1980s, as the medical community was getting interested in humor, business was too. This was a time of huge changes in the workplace. The Industrial Age had given way to the Information Age. Traditional approaches to management had grown out of the practices of factory managers in the early twentieth century. The classic text here was Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management, in which workers were presumed to be lazy and irresponsible. The manager’s job was to divide the work into small, repeated, easily monitored tasks. Taylor himself did time-motion studies at a  steel mill in Pittsburgh to determine exactly how many pounds of

458 

John Morreall

coal the workers should lift on their shovels and exactly how many times per minute they should toss the coal into the blast furnace. That style of management was also applied to office jobs. It created mechanical jobs and bored workers, but also made businesses profitable. In the 1980s, however, as simple mechanical tasks were taken over by robots, and the jobs left for humans required more judgment, decision-making, and cooperation with other workers, the old management techniques were not working. To add to managers’ headaches, increased foreign and domestic competition put pressure on companies to be more productive and innovative, to “do more with less.” They had to produce more varied products and services and change often to satisfy shifting markets. Quality control had to improve, too, and so workers had to be more involved in the work they were doing. New computer-driven technologies had to be implemented more quickly, so workers had to go through lots of training. All of these changes created anxiety in workers and managers. To make work even more stressful, companies started watching their bottom line more closely, and laying off workers in unprecedented numbers. Kodak, IBM, and other firms that had never before laid off workers, did so to increase quarterly profits. The workers left standing after waves of downsizing, had more work to do and wondered whether they would survive the next wave. In the 1980s health-claims prompted by stress increased 700% in California. By the end of the decade, the American Academy of Family Physicians estimated that 65% of visits to the family doctor were prompted by stress, and stress was estimated to cost American employers $200 billion per year. Business leaders saw the need to change traditional Taylor-style management practices in order to preserve the sanity and productivity of their workers and managers. Led by consultants like Tom Peters, the most successful business of the last two decades, they “flattened” their organizations, that is, reduced the number of levels of management. They empowered workers by giving them more discretion and more input into decisions affecting them. They also looked for ways to change employees’ attitudes towards their work, and even their emotions, not just to reduce workplace stress but also to make workers more adaptable to change and less risk-aversive. They wanted to boost morale and teamwork, too, and foster creative thinking. Because humor was linked to all of these goals, it began showing up in training strategies and even in company philosophies. A good example is the philosophy of New England Securities, rewritten by a new president who at his first meeting with employees read a Dr. Seuss story, Oh the Places You’ll Go. The philosophy has 13 points:

Health, the workplace, and education  

459

1. Take risks. Don’t play it safe. 2. Make mistakes. Don’t try to avoid them. 3. Take initiative. Don’t wait for instructions. 4. Spend energy on solutions, not on emotions. 5. Shoot for total quality. Don’t shave standards. 6. Break things. Welcome destruction. It’s the first step in the creative process. 7. Focus on opportunities, not problems. 8. Experiment. 9. Take personal responsibility for fixing things. Don’t blame others for what you don’t like. 10. Try easier, not harder. 11. Stay calm! 12. Smile! 13. Have fun! Except perhaps for the line about total quality, all of these directives would be easier to implement in an environment where humor was encouraged. Several studies showed that business leaders recognized the potential of humor to help in the management revolution of the 1980s. In the middle of the decade, Robert Half International conducted a survey of 100 of the largest American corporations and found that 84% of vice presidents and human resource directors thought that employees with a sense of humor are more effective than those with little or no sense of humor. The organization’s report concluded that “People with a sense of humor tend to be more creative, less rigid and more willing to consider and embrace new ideas and methods.” In a Hodge-Cronin survey polling 737 CEOs of major corporations, 98% of respondents said that humor was important in the conduct of business, that most executives did not have enough humor, and that in hiring they gave preference to people with a sense of humor. One director of human resources, Nancy Hauge, of Sun Microsystems, comments that in job interviews she notes how soon job candidates laugh. “How long does it take the interviewee to find something funny, tell me something funny, or share his or her sense of humor? Because humor is very important to our corporate culture.” A 1994 article in Human Resources magazine called for human resource managers to start programs to show employees how to lighten up. Soon humor consultants were doing workshops on humor as an antidote to stress. Companies around Chicago, and even the University of Chicago’s MBA ­program,

460 

John Morreall

hired instructors from the Second City comedy troupe to conduct improvisational comedy exercises with their people, to increase their creative thinking, ability to work in teams, and communication skills. Humor was also touted for its association with innovation and the ability to recover from mistakes. Tom Peters had this comment in his 1988 Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution: “Urgency and laughter go hand in glove. ‘Get going’ and ‘try something’ are among this book’s central tenets. To speed action-taking, we simply must learn to laugh at our own (personal, organizational) bureaucratic, action-delaying foibles; and we must learn to laugh at interesting and useful mistakes.” On the back cover of his 1994 book The Tom Peters Seminar: Crazy Times Call for Crazy Organizations, he appears dressed in a gray suit from the waist up and in loud orange-print undershorts from the waist down. Above the photo is this quote from Peters, “Welcome to a world where imagination is the source of value in the economy. It’s an insane world, and in an insane world, sane organizations make no sense.” By the mid-1990s most Fortune 500 companies were listening to the message that humor and fun could help boost their bottom line. Eastman Kodak was operating a “humor room” at its headquarters in Rochester, New York; Hewlitt-Packard, Price-Waterhouse, and dozens of other companies had similar facilities. One branch of Digital Equipment had created a “Grouch Patrol,” whose members would respond to sour faces with “bat faces.” To make a bat face, push the tip of your nose up, flick your tongue in and out quickly, and make a high-pitched “Eeeee” sound. The new “play ethic” supplementing the old “work ethic” encouraged not just humor but fun generally. In 1996, Karen Donnalley, head of IBM’s Inside Sales Center, a 75-member sales team selling mid-sized computers to 17,000 customers, got together colleagues who played musical instruments to form a pick-up orchestra of tubas, accordions, and anything else anyone brought in. The group also began recording sales in fun ways. When team members made their first sale of the day, they smashed a gong and moved race horse icons with their pictures on them out of a starting gate. Within a year Donnalley’s unit’s sales figures were up 30 percent. Academic studies in psychology and management backed up the new approach. David Abramis did a study in which small groups who laughed together were more productive in thinking up anagrams (in Pollio and Bainum 1983). Alice Isen of the Department of Psychology and Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University reported that groups who en-

Health, the workplace, and education  

461

gaged in a humorous task and then did a brainstorming exercise came up with more ideas and a greater range of ideas than control groups. David Abramis studied 923 adult workers from a wide range of jobs. He had 678 fill out a detailed questionnaire about humor and fun at work, and 347 were interviewed at length. Those who reported that they enjoyed more positive humor at work were also more involved with their jobs, had greater job satisfaction, and higher mental health scores. They were less anxious and depressed, and more satisfied with their lives in general. According to Abramis, there are six ways in which work quality and mental health may increase where fun is encouraged. Fun relieves boredom and fatigue, fulfills human social needs, increases creativity and willingness to help coworkers, fulfills needs for mastery and control, improves communication, and breaks up conflict and tension. In trying to get their employees to relax, many companies relaxed their dress codes at least once a week. In 1994 the Campbell Research Corporation did a survey of 750 major companies, in which 66% of the companies reported that they had casual dress days. 81% of those companies said that these days improved morale, and 47% said that it improved productivity. Several management studies also showed the importance of humor in management. A survey of more than 350 alumni from Salisbury’s Perdue School of Business found that women managers who used humor in the workplace were viewed by their staffs as more effective than those who did not use humor (in ”Humor on the job – avoid it to your detriment”). By the late 1980s there were a  dozen books on humor and fun in the workplace. While they sometimes referred to the psychology and management literature, they were intended mostly as practical guides rather than as research reports. Usually they were shelved under Psychology or Business or Self-Help. Virtually all of them were written by humor consultants and, like the oral presentations from which they were developed, they are light on theoretical studies and heavy on entertaining examples. One of the earliest entries in this field was Esther Blumenfield and Lynne Alpern’s The Smile Connection: How to Use Humor in Dealing with People. Based on a popular course the authors taught at Emory University, this book presents ideas and stories about workplace situations where humor can help: getting attention, presenting new information or risky opinions, criticizing, bringing people together, building morale, announcing unpleasant surprises, and training. There are chapters on humor in speeches, humor in dealing with difficult people, humor in friendship and romance, and humor in families.

462 

John Morreall

Blumenfeld and Alpern followed up in 1994 with Humor at Work: The Guaranteed, Bottom-Line, Low-Cost, High-Efficiency Guide to Success Through Humor. This expanded book has individual chapters on humor with employees, humor with co-workers, and humor in secretarial work, sales, teaching, and health care. One special value of the book is its female ­perspective. The authors tell how a group of women who held weekly meetings handled a male coworker who would routinely drop his pencil on the floor so that he could look under the table at their legs as he bent down to retrieve it. Instead of filing a formal complaint, or even mentioning the problem to him, they simply prepared for their next meeting by printing on their knees, one letter per kneecap, “H-I - R-A-L-P-H.” Bob Ross’s Laugh, Lead and Profit examines the benefits of humor in the new work environment of the Information Age. Humor fosters open communication, reduces stress, and supports a consultative and participative management style, he says. In 1998, Ross followed up with a  more practical book, Funny Business: The Art of Using Humor Constructively. It has many examples and tips about enhancing one’s sense of humor, and using humor to boost one’s image, lead, persuade, defuse hostility and confrontation, and solve problems. There are also chapters on humor in friendships and romance, and a concluding chapter, “Master the Art of Living and Laughing.” In 1989 Terry Paulson, Ph.D., published a  short “workbook,” Making Humor Work: Take Your Job Seriously and Yourself Lightly. It reviewed familiar points about humor’s impact in communications and its ability to create rapport, persuade, defuse anger, and help workers cope with rapid change. There are separate chapters on health and creativity. The Light Touch: How to Use Humor for Business Success was written by Malcolm Kushner, a former lawyer who bills himself as “America’s Foremost Humor Consultant.” The chapters on humor in speeches and presentations emphasize the importance of developing funny stories from one’s own experience. Kushner even offers a checklist of common situations to help the reader get started. He also presents short excerpts from effective speeches. There is a  chapter on “Seven Types of Humor Anyone Can Use” (quotes, cartoons, funny letters, lists, analogies, definitions, and observations) and a  chapter on telling jokes. Kushner stresses the value of self-deprecating humor, especially in handling embarrassing situations and difficult people. Other themes include using humor as a positive motivational tool and handling workplace conflicts with humor. To make the book appealing to human resource directors, Kushner provides exercises for developing humor skills,

Health, the workplace, and education  

463

offers suggestions on using humor as a barometer of organizational health, and encourages the creation of a Humor Action Plan. John Morreall published Humor Works after researching and writing about humor for twenty years, and after doing presentations on humor for eight years. The book is grounded in the Incongruity Theory, and it shows how humor is physically and mentally healthy, how it counteracts stress, and how it promotes mental flexibility. In a  chapter on humor as social lubricant, he explores the use of humor in situations such as criticizing, handling complaints, and making requests. He also shows how humor is essential to such features of the new management as empowering workers, team building, and encouraging critical thinking. A chapter on positive and negative humor explores women’s cooperative humor and men’s competitive humor. In the final chapter, “How’s Your Laugh Life?”, Morreall shows how humor can be a philosophy of life. Although most books on humor in the workplace have focused on American business, there is an excellent book about humor in European business by Jean-Louis Barsoux, Funny Business: Humour, Management and Business Culture. Based on first-hand observations and interviews with top-level European executives, it shows how humor can be a sword – to influence and persuade, to motivate and unite, to say the unspeakable, and to bring about change. It can also be a shield – to deflect criticism, cope with failure, and defuse conflict. For businesses as a whole, too, humor is useful in reinforcing shared values, bonding teams, and defining and perpetuating corporate cultures. The use of humor even defines national management styles. In addition to books on humor in the workplace, there are also a number on fun in the workplace. They tout fun activities as having many of the same benefits as humor – relaxing people, allowing them to interact in enjoyable ways, building morale and team spirit, and spurring creative thinking. The simplest of these books is Ron Garland’s Making Work Fun. After a short introduction in which he mocks the idea of providing any theory or data about fun in the workplace, Garland describes 101 fun things to do at work, including an art contest, computer tag, playing harmonicas, Nerf basketball, an office treasure hunt, a slogan contest, a talent contest, theme days, videos at lunch, a weight loss contest, and playing with yo-yos. This Job Should Be Fun: The New Profit Strategy for Managing People in Tough Times, by Bob Basso and Judi Klosek, also suggests lots of fun activities to spice up work, but does so within a cheerleading rhetoric for the New Economy. In writing the book, the writers claim, they interviewed 2,700

464 

John Morreall

managers. Their mantras are “M-I-B” (Make It Better) and “I  Care – You Matter – This Job Should Be Fun.” The text consists mostly of bulleted lists, checklists, motivational quotations, etc. Steve Wilson’s The Art of Mixing Work and Play is about incorporating laughter, playfulness and humor into the experience of work. The author of Eat Dessert First, ”Joyologist” Wilson got interested in humor through his practice as a clinical psychologist. In human babies, he says, the neural ­substrates for laughter are in place at birth, and laughter is our birthright. When we see ourselves and the world with a sense of humor, we acknowledge the human condition, that we are born vulnerable, valuable, imperfect, dependent, and immature. In his chapters on play in the workplace, Wilson discusses how play keeps people motivated, upbeat, and productive; and he suggests 89 fun activities. Matt Weinstein’s Managing to Have Fun: How Fun at Work Can Motivate Your Employees, Inspire Your Coworkers, Boost Your Bottom Line is based on the author’s work for over twenty years with Playfair, Inc., a company that runs workshops on incorporating fun into workplaces. Having fun activities at work, Weinstein says, is an effective way of rewarding and recognizing workers. He divides his 52 fun activities into those carried out by one person, those carried out by teams, company-wide initiatives, and fun rituals and celebrations. His closing chapter is “Having Fun in Difficult Times.” Weinstein has four principles for introducing fun into the workplace: think about the specific people involved; lead by example; if you’re not getting personal satisfaction from what you’re doing, it’s not worth doing; and change takes time. Here are some representative ideas: Pay for the car behind you at the toll gate. Play “Happy Birthday to You” on the telephone keypad (4 4 5 4 9 8). Arrange an Ugly Tie or Ugly Shoe Contest. Have casual dress days. Arrange a monthly outing. Reverse Roles. Distribute stuffed animals. Post baby pictures of employees on a bulletin board. Education As the humor movement picked up momentum in the early 1980s, it was embraced by many teachers and trainers. Several of the books on humor in the workplace discuss its special values in teaching and training, and there are also books devoted just to education. The three books described below explain the importance of humor and play in education, and suggest ways of bringing them into the classroom. They show how humor can foster analytic,

Health, the workplace, and education  

465

critical, and divergent thinking; catch and hold students’ attention, increase retention of learned material, relieve stress, build rapport between teacher and students, build team spirit among classmates, smooth potentially rough interactions, promote risk taking, and get shy and slow students involved in activities. Marilyn Droz and Lori Ellis’s Laughing While Learning: Using Humor in the Classroom has two parts. The first, Understanding Humor, covers humor and cognitive development, the general benefits of humor, and humor in school. Droz and Ellis have read the psychology material and deal with issues like gender differences in humor and teasing. The second part, Putting Humor to Work for You, applies humor to the classroom. It offers many suggestions for working humor into the curriculum for reading (with joke analysis), writing (making up tall tales), math, spelling, science, and history. There are also chapters on class clowns, shy students, using humor in discipline, and teaching students with disabilities. The Laughing Classroom: Everyone’s Guide to Teaching with Humor and Play, by Diane Loomis and Karen Kolberg, is similar to Laughing While Learning, but has more exercises and tips. The authors relate humor to positive thinking and to self-esteem. Ideas for humor in discipline include asking students to add to a  running list of “Exceptional Excuses.” There are many imaginative exercises adapted from Edward de Bono, Victor Borge, and Jonathan Winters. Fred Stopsky’s Humor in the Classroom: A  New Approach to Critical Thinking is written by a former social studies teacher, and has dozens of tips and exercises to bring critical and divergent thinking into the social studies curriculum. Among them are designing “Wanted” posters and scripting trials for Hitler and Cortez. The exercise “Ludicrous Laws” has students study odd laws like the one in Brooklyn, New York which made it illegal to let an animal sleep in a bathtub, and then make up similar laws. In another exercise, students discuss famous bad predictions such as Lord Kelvin’s “Heavier than air machines are impossible,” and Harry Warner’s 1927 comment, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” There are also interesting menus from history and song lyrics like “No Irish Need Apply.” The best known advocate of the educational value of humor is John Cleese, formerly of Monty Python, who in 1973 started the Video Arts company to produce training videos for business. The company is now the largest and most successful of its kind. By getting trainees to laugh, Cleese says, you get them to both pay attention and relax, an optimal combination for learning. Humor is especially useful in promoting a non-defensive attitude toward

466 

John Morreall

mistakes. Most of Cleese’s videos show mistakes in an exaggerated way to create humor. In his most popular, “Meetings, Bloody Meeting,” for example, everything that could go wrong at a meeting does go wrong. Trainees laugh and in doing so can admit to themselves that they make some of those mistakes too. In that way, they can correct them. Another example, not from Cleese, is the manager who had made a big mistake and had to call a meeting to correct the problems it had caused. He walked into the meeting wearing a t-shirt with a large red bulls-eye on the front. Everyone laughed, relaxed, and could begin to work on the problems. Many corporations are now using humor in similar ways. Chase Manhattan Bank, for example, started a program for handling often repeated mistakes by tellers. Instead of scolding them, the bank had a graphic artist make funny posters illustrating the trouble caused by the mistakes. The posters were placed on the walls of the banks. Tellers saw them, laughed, and in 95% of the cases, quickly corrected their mistakes. Another application of humor to reduce defensiveness and foster learning can be found in the driver education business. In the 1980s several driving schools in California found that their most successful instructors were part-time stand-up comics. Their humor allowed students to relax, and when students made mistakes, their humorous reactions allowed them to learn in a non-defensive way. One of the largest driving schools in the state, Lettuce Amuse U, now has only comics as instructors, and many of their clients are referred by the DMV as first-time traffic offenders who choose the training in place of having the offense go on their driving record. General benefits of humor In addition to books specifically on health, the workplace, and education, there are some general books on the benefits of humor. C. W. Metcalf and Roma Felible’s Lighten Up: Survival Skills for People Under Pressure uses many anecdotes to explore the nature of stress and how humor overcomes it. Their thesis is that humor “is a set of survival skills that relieve tension, keeping us fluid and flexible instead of allowing us to become rigid and breakable, in the face of relentless change.” The three Humor Skills they discuss are the ability to see the absurdity in difficult situations, the ability to take yourself lightly while taking your work seriously, and a  disciplined sense of joy in being alive. They explore humor not only in counteracting work-

Health, the workplace, and education  

467

place stress, but in handling depression and in recovering from alcoholism. Among their original techniques are “Photo Funnies.” Visit a  photo booth and have several pictures taken with your face outlandishly distorted. Then keep these photos in your wallet or purse. The next time you face a major problem, take out the photos and “Think. You are not just the problem you are having; you’re this too.” Another humor consultant with a comprehensive vision of the benefits of humor is Paul McGhee, who earned a Ph.D. in developmental psychology and was published widely in humor research before becoming a humor consultant. His self-published 1991 book, The Laughter Remedy: Health, Healing, and the Amuse System, reviews traditional theories of humor and outlines its health benefits, especially the reduction of pain and the increased activity of the immune system. One chapter examines the nature of stress, especially the loss of a sense of control, and the following chapter describes humor as a remedy for stress that gives us perspective and feelings of control. Humor is a subjective experience that requires a playful attitude, McGhee says, and it can be developed as a set of skills. So one third of the book is devoted to diagnostic tests of sense of humor, and techniques to increase humor skills. Among the tips for humor development are: Become more playful, Surround yourself with humor you enjoy, Begin telling jokes and funny stories, and Laugh at yourself. McGhee expanded these ideas in his 1994 book How to Develop Your Sense of Humor: An 8-Step Humor Development Training Program, with its accompanying Humor Log. The basic advice is that humor, as a set of intellectual, emotional, and social skills, can be practiced in non-threatening and mildly disturbing situations, so that it becomes habitual. Then when big problems come along, you will be better able to see the humor in your situation, and thus counteract potential stress. The attitude of taking yourself lightly that McGhee recommends includes recognizing that you are not the center of the universe and that your perspective is just one among many, refusing to carry around heavy feelings when you make a mistake, and seeing the funny side of your own behavior and circumstances. In 1999, McGhee revised these earlier books into Health, Healing, and the Amuse System: Humor as Survival Training. In this book he adds many applications to the workplace, with detailed real examples from American business.

468 

John Morreall

Issues In each of the three applied fields we have discussed – health, business, and education – the basic question is what benefits can be expected from humor. We will consider that question in each field separately, adding other important issues where appropriate. Health Many physical health claims have been made for humor. Several of these come from the research of William Fry and colleagues. For the muscles of the upper body, it is said, laughter provides moderate exercise. Twenty seconds of hearty laughter, Fry has often been quoted as saying, gives the heart and lungs a workout equivalent to three minutes on a rowing machine Laughter increases the circulation of the blood, as heart rate and blood pressure increase. The rapid inhaling and exhaling in laughter ventilate the lungs and increase the uptake of oxygen (six times the rate during quiet conversation). Laughter replaces residual air in the lungs with fresh air, which may reduce the level of water vapor and carbon dioxide in the lungs, and thus the risk of pulmonary infection. When laughter stops, heart rate and blood pressure drop to below normal, and remain below normal for up to 45 minutes. Muscles throughout the body relax. In the blood, humorous laughter lowers the level of stress hormones (epinephrine, cortisol, dopac, and growth hormone). In the brain, catecholamines are secreted, which may increase alertness, reduce inflammation, and trigger the release of endorphins, the brain’s natural opiates. This may account for the reduction of pain often reported after laughter. The most encouraging claims about laughter and humor in recent years have been in the area of psychoneuroimmunology, the study of the mind’s relation to the immune system. In the research of Lee Berk and Stanley Tan, several indicators of immune system activity increase when subjects laugh at a funny video, and that boost lasts for at least a day. While all of these claims have been warmly received by popular and medical audiences alike, a few critics warn that not all have been verified with sufficient rigor to be announced as scientific truth. At the 1999 meeting of the International Society of Humor Studies in Oakland, California, Professor Rod Martin argued that claims for the benefits of humor “are often simplistic,

Health, the workplace, and education  

469

exaggerated, and unsubstantiated.” He was especially critical of methodological weaknesses in the research on humor and the immune system. Drs. Berk and Tan have done few experiments, he said, and those with a small number of subjects. While everyone likes the idea that humor can cure many of our ills and protect us from more, he argued, we need more research. Martin (2001) makes similar points. Claims about the mental health benefits of humor are even more widespread than claims about its physical benefits. Countless speakers, articles, and books have said that humor reduces anxiety, fear, anger, and stress, and increases joy, optimism, and a sense of control over our lives. In psychotherapy, humor is said to relax clients, create rapport with therapists, and facilitate communication. It is also said to overcome clients’ resistance to therapy, allow them to overcome repressed feelings, and give them perspective and emotional distance from their problems. All these effects can yield insights for clients and progress in their therapy. Some of these claims have been empirically tested. Rod Martin and Herbert Lefcourt, for example, have done several experiments showing the apparent buffering effect of humor on negative emotions when people face potentially stressful situations. That is, people who have a greater appreciation of humor do not suffer as great downswings in mood and are better able to cope with potential stressors. Other claims about humor and mental health, however, are not as well verified. How should we understand optimism, for example? Do those who laugh easily have different beliefs about the future? Rod Martin, Willibald Ruch, and other are continuing empirical research in this area. Critics of the Humor and Health movement have asked about the many correlational studies touted as showing that people with a  good sense of humor are healthier or enjoy some other benefit. The question they ask is how we know what is cause and what is effect. In studies showing a  correlation between humor and positive mood, is it the sense of humor which causes the increase in positive mood, or might the increase in positive mood (from other sources) cause a heightened appreciation of the humorous stimuli in their environment? Or might there be some third characteristic causing both the sense of humor and the other variable? In the field of psychotherapy, as mentioned earlier, traditional experts were wary of using humor. And even the therapists who now advocate it warn that it is a complex phenomenon which can be misinterpreted, especially by people with severe mental problems. It can also have unintended negative consequences. If, after all, professional comedians using well-honed material

470 

John Morreall

have difficulty controlling the thought patterns of normal people, how much harder it must be for therapists to predict just how a client will respond to some funny line that comes to them spontaneously. Many therapists, therefore, use only the safest and gentlest humor, so that even if it fails to amuse the client, at least it will not hurt the therapy. Others, such as some in Rational Emotive therapy, routinely use more risky confrontational humor. Workplace Humor consultants are in general agreement about the benefits of humor in the new Information Age workplace. First, humor is physically and psychologically healthy, especially in its reduction of stress. Secondly, it fosters several forms of mental flexibility. By blocking negative emotions such as fear, anger, and depression, it helps workers keep their cool and think more clearly. Because humor is based on enjoying what is unexpected, it helps workers stay out of mental ruts and think more creatively. That helps them adjust to new situations and thus cope with change. Because humor often involves switching perspectives, too, it increases tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. Especially important here is people’s ability to laugh at themselves. To see the humor in our own situation, especially in our mistakes, involves seeing ourselves more objectively than usual, more “from the outside,” as we see other people. That makes us less defensive and more able to learn from mistakes. Thirdly, humor is essential to the new team-based workplace because it creates rapport between people and serves as social lubricant. Companies which intentionally foster a  spirit of humor and fun have found that their workers have higher morale, feel closer to their fellow workers, and are more loyal to the company than workers at other companies. In all forms of communication, humor can get attention, help persuade, and increase memory of the message. Humor is especially useful in situations where people might otherwise feel negative emotions towards each other. Laughing together – either about the potential source of friction or about something extraneous – brings them together, blocks negative feelings, and promotes cooperation rather than confrontation. Consider the situation of a person collecting a debt. No matter how clear it is that the debt is owed, the natural inclination of the debtor is to feel defensive and hostile toward the person asking for payment. Indeed, many debt collection letters work by

Health, the workplace, and education  

471

intimidation. But consider how everything changes when the debt collector gets the debtor to laugh, as in this middle paragraph from a debt collection letter: We appreciate your business, but, please, give us a break. Your account is overdue 10 months. That means that we’ve carried you longer than your mother did. Humor has been shown effective in managing difficult people, even in situations of physical hostility. After completing a humor training course, one California police officer was called to a family fight. As she pulled up to the house, she heard loud noises and screaming. As she approached the front door, a portable TV set came crashing through the front window. When she knocked loudly on the front door, a voice bellowed, “Who is it?” “TV Repair,” she answered. The couple stopped fighting, laughed, and came to the door. Now they could begin to sort out their problems. One indicator of the importance of humor in the new workplace is the number of corporate leaders who are showing humor in their public personae. Instead of acting omnipotent and omniscient, as old authoritarian leaders did, they are friendly and even playful with subordinates. Renn Zaphiropoulos, CEO of Versatec, a  Silicon Valley firm, for example, hosts an annual ceremony for all employees announcing the bonus. One year he arrived at the festivities on an elephant accompanied by the Stanford University Marching Band. The year before he had announced the bonus by singing a country song he had written himself. Part of the new style of leadership is soliciting input from everyone in the organization, encouraging critical thinking, and sharing knowledge to empower others. Here playfulness and humor are a big help. An example is the CEO of a large Canadian bank who appears in the monthly corporate video shown to all employees. He comes on camera to discuss recent issues and plans, but part way through his presentation, a hand puppet appears to ask him questions about recent problems in the bank and even to poke fun at him. This playful criticism encourages bank employees to think critically and to figure out solutions for current problems. The critical side of humor, of course, is not always so good-natured. Much of the humor circulating in the workplace today is negative and sarcastic. The website WorkingWounded.com is a forum for disgruntled workers to mockingly complain about how they have been mistreated. The site toxicboss.com lets people vent their feelings about how bad their bosses are. An even more

472 

John Morreall

negative approach can be found at the website whyworksucks.com, whose subtitle is “And What You Can Do about It (nothing).” The runaway success of Scott Adams’ “Dilbert” comic strip is testament to the power of humor to express negative feelings about work. “Dilbert” themes include downsizing, heavy work loads, micromanagement of budgets, humiliating small cubicles, the accelerating pace of change, corporate gobbledegook, management fads, cruel bosses, annoying colleagues, and red tape. One assessment of American business comes from Guy Kawasaki, a management expert at Apple Computer: “There are only two kinds of companies, those that recognize that they’re just like ‘Dilbert,’ and those that don’t know it yet.” Adams makes no apologies for his dark humor and the hopelessness of the office world he skewers. The ideas for many of his strips, he says, come directly from true stories he receives in his email. Adams finds “Dilbert” humor more authentic than the humor sanctioned by corporations in humor seminars. Some corporations are uncomfortable with humor that is critical of the organization, and others find some of it constructive, but there is another kind of humor that all organizations are trying to eliminate – sexist, racist, anti-gay, and any other humor intended to demean a particular group. Such humor not only fosters prejudice and negative feelings between groups, but is illegal as well. If an aggrieved worker goes to court, the organization can be held accountable if it knew about the offensive humor but did nothing to stop it. Education Among healthcare, business, and education, the slowest to join the humor movement is education. Traditional teachers, from first grade to graduate school, usually suppressed humor in the classroom unless they were initiating it. “What’s so funny, Mr./Miss Smith?” was one of their strongest putdowns. It was during our first week at school that most of us learned to suppress our natural urges to play and to be funny. Today there are many primary and secondary teachers trying to overturn this traditional prejudice against humor and playfulness. They agree on the central benefits of humor in the classroom, that it makes the teacher appear fully human, relaxes the students, creates an open and non-threatening atmosphere for learning, gets and holds attention, increases retention of learned material, promotes critical thinking, and promotes divergent or creative think-

Health, the workplace, and education  

473

ing. Humor is especially useful in skills-oriented classes where students need a playful way to handle false starts and mistakes. Primary and secondary school curricula have been developed for incorporating humor into social studies, literature, and even mathematics, as the three books discussed earlier show. Those not comfortable with humor in the classroom usually cite the critical side of humor and its disrespect for authority. But humor’s defenders point out that questioning authority is part of a well-rounded education too. Moreover, many say that when handled properly, humor does not encourage anarchy in the classroom. It is students who are not allowed to express their playfulness and humor that act up in class, they contend. Students whose humor is expressed and worked into the flow of discussion are likely to respect and cooperate with the teacher. Some humor is inappropriate in the classroom, or anywhere else, of course – nasty teasing, racist and sexist humor, for example. But that is no reason to suppress all humor and thereby lose its many benefits. Favorite case study If I had to pick a single organization that embodies the applications of humor discussed in this chapter, it would be Southwest Airlines. Since its founding in the late 1960s, Southwest has always made humor and fun part of its corporate culture, largely because of the vision of its CEO, Herb Kelleher. A cover of Fortune magazine in 1994 featured Kelleher dressed in a WWIstyle leather aviator’s helmet and goggles flying with just his arms. The caption: “Is Herb Kelleher America’s Best CEO? He’s wild, he’s crazy, he’s in a tough business – and he has built the most successful airline in the U.S.” The story explains how Kelleher’s sense of humor, his quick mind and business savvy, and his ability to create an enthusiastic team are interrelated. From the first job interview, anyone who works for Southwest has to show what Kelleher calls “an insouciance, an effervescence.” One of the items in the interview is “Tell me how you recently used your sense of humor in a work environment. Tell me how you have used humor to defuse a difficult situation.” “What we are looking for, first and foremost, is a sense of humor,” Kelleher explains. “We don’t care that much about education and expertise, because we can train people. . . . We hire attitudes.” Southwest employees are encouraged to be playful with passengers. When there are delays at the gate, for example, ticket agents will award prizes to the passengers with the most unusual items in the pockets or purses. A few years

474 

John Morreall

ago the Federal Aviation Administration asked Southwest to stop singing the flight safety announcements to the tune of the theme song from the Beverly Hillbillies TV show. Such antics, along with the best records for on-time arrival and baggage handling, have earned the airline top ratings from customers for many years. The spirit of fun also creates unparalleled camaraderie in Southwest employees, who often speak of the airline as a family. Although it is an 80% union shop, the company has the lowest turnover rate in the industry. And they have never laid off workers, even after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. Alan Boyd, retired chairman of Airbus North America, has said that “at other places, managers say that people are their most important resource, but nobody acts on it. At Southwest, they have never lost sight of the fact.” Understandably, Southwest regularly appears at or near the top in rankings of the best companies to work for. Kelleher’s own leadership style is nicely illustrated in an event held at the Dallas Sportatorium in March 1992. Southwest began running its “Just Plane Smart” advertising campaign but quickly learned that another company, Stevens Aviation, had been using “Plane Smart” as its slogan for over a year. Instead of taking the matter to court, Kelleher and Stevens CEO Kurt Herwald agreed to an arm-wrestling match. The winner of best two out of three would get to keep the slogan and the loser would donate $5,000 to the winner’s favorite charity. Herwald, a beefy 37-year-old weight lifter, strode into the ring in a dark muscle shirt. Keller, then 61, a  long-time smoker and afficionado of Wild Turkey bourbon, came down the aisle in a white t-shirt and gray sweat pants under red boxer shorts, to the trumpet blasts from Rocky. He had his right arm in a sling (an injury he said he got saving a little girl from being hit by a bus) and a cigarette dangling from his lip. His handler wore a bandolier holding rows of airline-size bottles of Wild Turkey. In one sense, Kelleher lost the contest – and he blamed that on a stubborn case of athlete’s foot and having accidentally overtrained by walking up a flight of stairs. But in a wider sense he won. The stands were full of Southwest people chanting, “Herb, Herb, Herb,” who still tell the story of that night. The publicity Southwest received was inestimable. And at the end, the head of the other airline laughingly told Kelleher that he could keep using the slogan anyway. Of the many accounts of Kelleher and Southwest Airlines, the most complete is Nuts! Southwest Airline’s Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success by Kevin Freiberg and Jackie Freiberg.

Health, the workplace, and education  

475

References Abramis, David 1992 Fun at work: Beyond job satisfaction. Paper presented at the Humor Project Conference. April 1992. Allport, Gordon 1950 The Individual and His Religion. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Barsoux, Jean-Louis 1993 Funny Business: Humour, Management and Business Culture. New York: Continuum. Basso, Bob, and Judi Klosek 1991 This Job Should Be Fun: The New Profit Strategy for Managing People in Tough Times. Holbrook, MA: Bob Adams. Blumenfield, Esther, and Lynne Alpern 1986 The Smile Connection: How to Use Humor in Dealing with People. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. 1994 Humor at Work: The Guaranteed, Bottom-Line, Low-Cost, HighEfficiency Guide to Success Through Humor. Atlanta: Peachtree. Buckman, Elcha Shain 1994 The Handbook of Humor: Clinical Applications in Psychotherapy. Malabar, FL: Krieger. Cousins, Norman 1979 Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing and Regeneration. New York: W. W. Norton. 1989 Head First: The Biology of Hope. New York: E. P. Dutton. Droz, Marilyn, and Lori Ellis 1996 Laughing While Learning: Using Humor in the Classroom. Longmont, CO: Sopris West. Fay, Allen 1978 Making Things Better by Making Them Worse. New York: Hawthorn. Frankl, Viktor 1967 Psychotherapy and Existentialism. New York: Washington Square Press. 1968 The Doctor and the Soul. 2nd ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Freiberg, Kevin, and Jackie Freiberg 1996 Nuts! Southwest Airline’s Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success. Austin, TX: Bard Press. Freud, Sigmund 1959 Humor. Collected Papers. Vol. 5. New York: Basic Books. 1960 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. New York: Norton.

476 

John Morreall

Fry, William 1968 1971a 1971b

Sweet Madness: A Study of Humor. Palo Alto, CA: Pacific Books. Laughter: Is it the best medicine? Stanford M.D. 10: 16–20. Mirth and oxygen saturation of peripheral blood. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics. 19: 76–84. Fry, William, and Waleed Salameh (eds.) 1987 Handbook of Humor and Psychotherapy. Sarasota: Professional Resource Exchange. 1993 Advances in Humor and Psychotherapy. Sarasota: Professional Resource Press. Garland, Ron 1991 Making Work Fun. San Diego: Shamrock. Goldstein, Jeffrey, and Paul McGhee (eds.) 1972 The Psychology of Humor: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues. New York: Academic Press. 1983 Handbook of Humor Research. New York: Springer. Isen, Alice M 1987 How mood affects creativity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53: 1122–1131. Keller, Dan 1984 Humor as Therapy. Wauwatosa, WI : Med-Psych.. Klein, Allen 1998 The Courage to Laugh. Los Angeles: Jeremy Tarcher. 1989. The Healing Power of Humor. Los Angeles: Jeremy Tarcher. Kubie, Lawrence 1971 The destructive potential of humor in psychotherapy. American Journal of Psychiatry 127: 861–866. Kuhlman, Thomas 1984 Humor and Psychotherapy. Homewood, IL: Dow Jones-Irwin. Kushner, Malcolm 1990 The Light Touch: How to Use Humor for Business Success. New York: Simon and Schuster. Loomis, Diane, and Karen Kolberg 1993 The Laughing Classroom: Everyone’s Guide to Teaching with Humor and Play. Tiburon, CA: H. J. Kramer. McGhee, Paul 1994 How to Develop Your Sense of Humor: An 8-Step Humor Development Training Program, with accompanying Humor Log. Dubuque IA: Kendall/Hunt. 1999. Health, Healing, and the Amuse System: Humor as Survival Training Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt. 1991 The Laughter Remedy: Health, Healing, and the Amuse System. Self-published: available from Paul McGhee.

Health, the workplace, and education  

477

McGuire, Francis, Rosangela K. Boyd, and Ann James 1992 Therapeutic Humor with the Elderly. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press. Martin, Rod 2001 Humor, laughter, and physical health: Methodological issues and research findings. Psychological Bulletin 127: 504–519. Metcalf, C. W., and Roma Felible 1992 Lighten Up: Survival Skills for People Under Pressure. New York: Addison-Wesley. Moody, Raymond 1978 Laugh after Laugh: the Healing Power of Humor. Jacksonville, FL: Headwaters Press. Morreall, John 1997 Humor Works. Amherst, MA: Human Resource Development Press. Paulson, Terry 1989 Making Humor Work: Take Your Job Seriously and Yourself Lightly. Los Altos, CA: Crisp. Peters, Tom 1988 Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution. New York: Alfred Knopf. 1994 The Tom Peters Seminar: Crazy Times Call for Crazy Organizations. New York: Vintage. Pollio, Howard. and C. Bainum 1983 Are funny groups good at problem solving? A  methodological evaluation and some preliminary results. Small Group Behavior 14: 379–404. Robinson, Vera 1991 Humor and the Health Professions: The Therapeutic Use of Humor in Health Care. 2nd ed. Thorofare, NJ: Slack. Ross, Bob 1989 Laugh, Lead and Profit. San Diego: Arrowhead. 1998 Funny Business: The Art of Using Humor Constructively. San Diego: Arrowhead. Stopsky, Fred 1992 Humor in the Classroom: A  New Approach to Critical Thinking. Lowell, MA: Discovery Enterprises. Sully, James 1902 An Essay on Laughter. New York: Longmans, Green. Taylor, Frederick 1967 Scientific Management. New York: Norton. Tyler, Kathryn 1997 Humor on the job – avoid it to your detriment. Executive Female 20: 23.

478 

John Morreall

Weinstein, Matt 1996 Managing to Have Fun: How Fun at Work Can Motivate Your Employees, Inspire Your Coworkers, Boost Your Bottom Line. New York: Simon and Schuster. Wilson, Steve 1992 The Art of Mixing Work and Play. Columbus, OH: Applied Humor Systems. Wooten, Patty 1996 Compassionate Laughter: Jest for Your Health. Salt Lake City: Commune-A-Key. 1994 Heart, Humor and Healing. Mount Shasta, CA: Commune-A-Key. Wooten, Patty, and Shobi Dobi 2001 The Hospital Clown. Salt Lake City: Commune-A-Key.

Humor and health Rod A. Martin

A sense of humor and the ability to laugh have long been viewed as important sources of both physical and psychological health. Since medieval times, a number of physicians and philosophers have suggested that laughter has important health benefits, such as improving blood circulation, restoring energy, counteracting depression, and enhancing the functioning of various organs of the body (for reviews see Goldstein 1982; Moody 1978). In the past century, various psychologists and psychotherapists such as Sigmund Freud (1928), Abraham Maslow (1954), and Rollo May (1953) have also discussed the importance of a benign sense of humor for mental health. Belief in positive health benefits of humor and laughter has become increasingly popular in recent years. Public interest in therapeutic benefits of humor and laughter was particularly stimulated by the publication of Norman Cousins’ (1979) account of his recovery from ankylosing spondilitis following a self-prescribed treatment regimen involving daily laughter and massive doses of vitamin C. The development of the field of psychoneuroimmunology and the popularization of alternative and complementary approaches to Western medicine provided a context that further fostered such ideas. These popular beliefs have been further bolstered by media reports of scientific research purportedly showing evidence of beneficial effects of laughter on health. As one example, a recent issue of Reader’s Digest (Rackl 2003) reports claims of scientific evidence that humor can alleviate allergy symptoms, increase pain tolerance, strengthen the immune system, reduce the risk of stroke and heart disease, and even help diabetics control their blood sugar. Stimulated by these ideas, a burgeoning “humor and health movement” has developed, made up of nurses, physicians, and other health care providers, psychotherapists, educators, clowns, and entertainers, who enthusiastically promote the therapeutic benefits of humor through conferences, seminars, workshops, books, videotapes, Internet websites, and organizations such as the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor (AATH). In recent years, the growth of the “laughter club movement,” whose adherents promote laughter as a form of yogic exercise (Kataria 2002), has further added to the chorus of claims for beneficial effects of even non-humorous

480 

Rod A. Martin

laughter on physical, mental, and spiritual health, as well as its potential for resolving conflicts at both the personal and the international level. The aim of this chapter is to provide an introduction to empirical research methods and findings regarding the role of humor and laughter in both physical and psychosocial health. I will begin by discussing some of the conceptual issues relating to the potential mechanisms involved in the humor–health relationship, and the definition and measurement of humor. I will then selectively review the existing research, summarizing the major findings, pointing out questions that remain unanswered, and noting some of the strengths and weaknesses of different research approaches (for more detailed reviews of this research, see Martin 2001; 2007; Lefcourt 2001). This overview of the literature will include a discussion of directions for future research, suggesting potentially fruitful avenues to pursue, as well as pitfalls to avoid. Besides offering suggestions for those interested in conducting research in this area, it is hoped that this chapter will be useful to practitioners who are interested in applying humor in health care settings and psychotherapeutic interventions. In addition to providing information about what we know and what we don’t know about the effects of humor and laughter on health, this chapter emphasizes the need for practitioners to be clear about what aspects or components of humor they are targeting in their interventions, and the mechanisms by which these interventions are expected to have their beneficial effects. Conceptual issues Theoretical mechanisms There are several potential mechanisms by which humor and/or laughter may be hypothesized to have beneficial effects on physical or psychosocial health. Martin (2007) conceptualized humor as a distinct positive emotion (i.e., mirth), which is elicited by a cognitive appraisal process (the perception of playful incongruity), is expressed interpersonally by means of laughter, and plays an important role in social communication and influence. This multifaceted conceptualization suggests several different pathways by which humor might potentially affect health, each of which lends itself to different research approaches, and each suggesting different implications for health care interventions (Martin 2007). Advocates of health benefits of humor and laughter often seem to confuse these different mechanisms when promoting

Humor and health 

481

humor interventions, and researchers often are not specific about which hypothesized mechanism they are testing in a given investigation. Systematic research is needed to investigate each of these potential mechanisms individually, and to determine which, if any, are supported by the data. Only when we have gained such knowledge can practitioners begin to design effective therapeutic interventions based on these findings. First, health benefits may potentially result from the respiratory, muskuloskeletal, vocal, and cardiovascular activity associated with laughter. For example, it has been suggested that frequent hearty laughter might reduce blood pressure or confer some of the cardiovascular benefits of aerobic exercise. In this hypothesized pathway, hearty laughter is the crucial component in the humor-health connection; humor and mirth without laughter would not be expected to provide any health benefits. Indeed, laughter might even be expected to have beneficial effects without humor and genuine mirth (e.g., feigned or forced laughter), as advocated by leaders of the laughter club movement (e.g., Kataria 2002). From this perspective, the person with a “healthy” sense of humor is the one who laughs uproariously as often as possible, rather than the one who enjoys dry humor accompanied only by the occasional chuckle or smile. In this model, humor interventions should be aimed particularly at encouraging people to engage in frequent and intense laughter. To test this hypothesis, researchers need to be sure that participants in their studies actually laugh (although this has not always been done in past research), and to examine whether differences in the duration and intensity of laughter account for differences in health-related outcomes. In addition, to ensure that any observed results are due to laughter and not the underlying positive emotion of mirth, they should compare participants who laugh with those who are also amused but do not laugh. The Facial Action Coding System (to be described below) should be used to distinguish between genuine and forced smiles and laughter, and their correlations with the outcome variables can then be examined to determine which, if any, account for any health-related effects. A second, alternative mechanism by which humor may potentially influence both psychological and physical health is through the positive emotion of mirth which is associated with humor. Like other positive emotions, mirth may enhance feelings of well-being and counteract negative emotions such as depression or anxiety. Consequently, individuals who frequently engage in humor may be less prone to various forms of emotional disturbance. Also like other emotions, mirth is associated with a variety of biochemical processes in the brain and other parts of the body, including changes in the levels

482 

Rod A. Martin

of various neurotransmitters, cytokines, opioids, and hormones (Ruch 1993). Such emotion-related biochemical changes may have beneficial effects on physical health, such as increasing pain tolerance (Bruehl, Carlson, and McCubbin 1993), enhancing immunity (Stone, Cox, Valdimarsdottir, Jandorf, and Neale 1987), or undoing the cardiovascular consequences of negative emotions (Fredrickson 1998). According to this model, overt laugher may not be necessary for health benefits to occur, because humor and amusement may induce the positive emotion of mirth without the need for laughter. Here, a “healthy” sense of humor would involve a  generally cheerful temperament characterized by mirth, happiness, joy, optimism, and a playful approach to life (cf. Ruch and Kohler 1998). To test this model, researchers should examine the degree to which positive emotion, measured via self-report, observational coding, or physiological measures, mediates any experimental or correlational effects of humor and/or laughter on health outcomes. A useful self-report measure for this purpose is the state version of the State-Trait Cheerfulness Inventory (Ruch, Kohler, and van Thriel 1996). If this model is correct, therapeutic interventions should aim at increasing people’s experience of mirth and other positive emotions by a variety of means not limited to the promotion of laughter. Third, humor might benefit physical and psychological health through cognitive mechanisms. By being able to shift perspective and to avoid taking things overly seriously, individuals who maintain a humorous outlook on life may be less likely to become stuck in the kinds of cognitive distortions that give rise to anxiety and depression (Kuiper, Martin, and Olinger 1993). This humorous perspective-taking may also be an important way of coping with stress. There is a large body of research evidence that stressful life experiences can have adverse effects on various aspects of physical and psychological health, such as increased risk of depression, anxiety, and psychotic episodes (Dohrenwend 1998), suppression of the immune system (Adler and Hillhouse 1996), and increased risk of heart disease (Esler 1998). According to Lazarus and Folkman’s (1984) transactional model of stress, appraisal and coping styles can influence the degree to which potential stressors lead to such adverse health outcomes (Taylor and Stanton 2007). Thus, a humorous outlook on life and the ability to see the funny side of one’s problems may enable individuals to cope more effectively with stress by allowing them to gain perspective and distance themselves from stressful situations, enhancing their feelings of mastery and well-being in the face of adversity (Lefcourt and Martin 1986; Martin, Kuiper, Olinger, and Dance 1993; Martin and

Humor and health 

483

­ efcourt 1983). As a consequence, these individuals may experience less of L the ­adverse ­effects of stress on their physical and psychosocial health. According to this stress-moderator view, the cognitive-perceptual aspects of humor are more important than mere laughter, and the ability to maintain a humorous outlook during times of stress and adversity is particularly important: humor and laughter during non-stressful times would be less relevant to health. This view also introduces the possibility that certain styles of humor (e.g., perspective-taking humor) may be more adaptive and health-enhancing than others (e.g., excessively self-disparaging humor). If this view is correct, therapeutic humor interventions should be viewed as a component of stress management training, focusing on teaching individuals ways of using humor (along with other strategies such as relaxation and cognitive reframing) to cope with stress in their daily lives. Fourth, humor may benefit physical and psychological health through a social or interpersonal mechanism by increasing one’s level of social support. Individuals who are able to use humor effectively to reduce interpersonal conflicts and tensions and to enhance positive feelings in others may consequently enjoy more numerous and satisfying social relationships. In turn, the greater levels of social support resulting from these relationships may confer stress-buffering and health-enhancing benefits (Cohen and Wills 1985). In this model, the focus is on interpersonal aspects of humor and the social competence with which individuals express humor in relationships, rather than the frequency with which they engage in laughter. Here, a “healthy” sense of humor would involve the use of humor to enhance relationships with others in an affiliative and non-hostile manner. If this mechanism is correct, therapeutic humor interventions may be seen as an adjunct to social skills training, teaching individuals to develop a socially facilitative sense of humor. Finally, a  fifth possible mechanism by which humor could conceivably have a beneficial effect on health is by promoting a healthy lifestyle. For example, one could speculate that people with a better sense of humor, because of their presumably higher self-esteem and more optimistic outlook on life, are more likely to engage in healthy behaviors such as obtaining regular physical exercise, eating healthy foods, maintaining an appropriate body weight, and refraining from smoking and excess alcohol consumption. However, although the research evidence relating to this hypothesis is quite limited to date, it actually suggests that, if anything, the effects are the opposite: high humor individuals seem to be more likely to engage in unhealthy lifestyles. For example, in a longitudinal study of humor and physical health in ­Finnish police officers, Kerkkanen, Kuiper, and Martin (2004) found that higher

484 

Rod A. Martin

scores on some humor scales were associated with greater obesity, increased smoking, and factors associated with greater risk of cardiovascular disease. Similarly, the well-known Terman life-cycle study, which followed a large sample of highly gifted individuals over many decades, found that those who were rated as being more cheerful as children (higher sense of humor and greater optimism) were more likely to smoke and consume alcohol as adults (L. R. Martin et al. 2002). These possible associations between humor and unhealthy lifestyle behaviors may be due in part to the more extraverted personality traits of highhumor individuals (Ruch 1994). Past research has shown that extraverted individuals, in comparison with introverts, are more likely to drink alcohol (Cook et al., 1998), more likely to smoke cigarettes (Patton, Barnes, and Murray 1993), less likely to quit smoking (Helgason et al., 1995), and more likely to be obese (Haellstroem and Noppa 1981). Although findings of an association between sense of humor and unhealthy lifestyle behaviors are in need of further replication, the evidence to date provides further support to the contention that humor may have deleterious as well as beneficial health consequences. Conceptualization and measurement of sense of humor The foregoing discussion suggests that researchers who are interested in studying the relationship between humor and health, as well as practitioners seeking to develop humor-based interventions, need to be clear about their conceptualizations and operational definitions of humor. If humor and/or laughter are beneficial for physical and psychosocial health, then people with a greater sense of humor should be happier and better adjusted, enjoy better physical health, live longer lives, and so on. But what aspects or components of “sense of humor” are likely to be health-enhancing? As we have noted, humor is a very complex phenomenon, involving cognitive, emotional, behavioral, physiological, and social aspects (Martin 2007). These different components of humor are also reflected in different conceptualizations of sense of humor, which refers to a set of humor-related personality traits or individual difference variables (Ruch 1998). Indeed, no single dimension or measurement instrument can adequately capture the whole concept of sense of humor. For example, sense of humor may be conceptualized as: (1) a cognitive ability (e.g., ability to create, understand, reproduce, and remember jokes; Feingold and Mazzella 1993); (2) an aesthetic response (e.g., humor appre-

Humor and health 

485

ciation, enjoyment of particular types of humorous material; Ruch and Hehl 1998); (3) a habitual behavior pattern (e.g., tendency to laugh frequently, to tell jokes and amuse others, to laugh at others’ jokes; Craik, Lampert, and Nelson 1996; Martin and Lefcourt 1984); (4) an emotion-related temperament trait (e.g., habitual cheerfulness; Ruch and Kohler 1998); (5) an attitude (e.g., bemused outlook on the world, positive attitude toward humor; Svebak 1996); (6) a coping strategy or defense mechanism (e.g., tendency to maintain a  humorous perspective in the face of adversity; Lefcourt and Martin 1986); and so on. These different facets of humor lend themselves to different measurement approaches, including maximal performance tests (e.g., humor as cognitive ability), funniness ratings (e.g., humor as aesthetic response), and observer ratings (e.g., Q-sort techniques for assessing humorous behavior), as well as self-report scales. Research has shown that these diverse components of sense of humor are not highly intercorrelated, and it is unlikely that all of them will be related to physical or psychosocial health. The challenge for researchers is to identify which components or aspects of sense of humor may be beneficial to which components or aspects of physical or psychological health, as well as which components may be irrelevant or perhaps even detrimental to health. Based on such research findings, practitioners can then develop humor-based interventions that target the specific aspects of humor that are found to be important for health. Some early studies on humor and health made use of measures of humor appreciation, which is assessed by having participants rate the funniness of a number of jokes and cartoons that are categorized in various ways (e.g., hostile, sexual, or nonsense humor). However, this research generally did not reveal meaningful relationships between these types of humor appreciation measures and health-related variables, suggesting that this aspect of humor may not be very relevant to health (e.g. Safranek and Schill 1982; Scogin and Merbaum 1983). Since the early 1980s, most of the research on humor and health has made use of self-report measures designed to assess individual differences in a variety of humor-related traits, such as the degree to which individuals tend to laugh and smile in a wide variety of situations (Situational Humor Response Questionnaire – SHRQ; Martin and Lefcourt 1984), use humor as a coping strategy (Coping Humor Scale – CHS; Martin and Lefcourt 1983), notice and enjoy humor (Sense of Humor Questionnaire – SHQ-6; Svebak 1996; Multidimensional Sense of Humor Scale – MSHS; Thorson and Powell 1993), and so on. A considerable amount of validation has been found for several of these measures (e.g., Martin 1996). However, although they purport to

486 

Rod A. Martin

­ easure different aspects of humor, factor analytic studies indicate that these m self-report measures all tend to load on the same basic dimensions (Kohler and Ruch 1996; Ruch 1994). Moreover, similar patterns of results are typically found with these different measures, with correlations being stronger sometimes for one measure and sometimes for another, but no consistent evidence of differential relationships with different components or aspects of health or well-being. Beyond the fact that sense of humor is multifaceted and that different components may or may not be related to health, it is also important to recognize that humor may actually be used in ways that are detrimental to health as well as beneficial. Although it can be used to enhance relationships and reduce interpersonal tensions, humor also can be used in ways that are aggressive, domineering, and manipulative. It can be a healthy means of gaining perspective on a stressful situation, but it also can be a form of defensive denial to avoid dealing constructively with problems. It can be self-deprecating, but it also can be excessively self-disparaging. One could perhaps even make the case that there is nothing inherent in humor that makes it particularly healthy: whether or not it is healthy depends on how it is used. Prior to the twentieth century, the word “humor” had a narrower meaning than it has today, and it was used to refer only to a sympathetic, tolerant, and benevolent amusement at the imperfections of the world and the foibles of human nature generally (Wickberg 1998). Humor was distinguished from wit, which referred to more aggressive forms of amusement such as sarcasm, satire, and ridicule. When Freud (1928, p. 6) spoke of humor as being the “highest of the defense mechanisms” and a “rare and precious gift,” he was referring only to humor in this narrow and special sense. Over the past century, however, humor has taken on a much broader meaning in popular usage, and has now come to be an umbrella term covering all forms of laughter-related phenomena, including jokes, stand-up comedy, television sitcoms, political satire, teasing, and ridicule. In this sense, humor now can be aggressive and hostile, as well as benevolent and philosophical (Ruch 1996). Recognizing this broadened meaning of humor, psychologists such as Allport (1961), Maslow (1954), and Vaillant (1977) have been careful to define what they consider to be “healthy” humor, noting that healthy psychological functioning is associated with distinctive uses or styles of humor (e.g., affiliative, self-deprecating, or perspective-taking humor), and that other forms (e.g., sarcastic, disparaging, or avoidant humor) may actually be deleterious to well-being. They noted that the funniest humor is not necessarily the healthiest, and that much of the comedy shown in the popular media is

Humor and health 

487

not likely to be particularly psychologically healthy. Maslow (1954, p. 222) suggested that a healthy sense of humor involves “rather thoughtful, philosophical humor that elicits a smile more usually than a laugh.” Some early researchers also recognized the importance of making these sorts of distinctions between healthy and unhealthy forms of humor in their measurement approaches (e.g., the Wit and Humor Appreciation Test; O’Connell 1960). Unfortunately, however, this distinction between potentially healthy and unhealthy forms of humor was absent in most of the research on humor and health until quite recently. For example, most of the self-report measures of humor were developed on the assumption that all forms of humor and laughter are healthy. Similarly, laboratory studies of the effects of humor on health tended to make use of comedy manipulations with little attention given to the content of the comedy or type of humor involved. This failure to distinguish between potentially beneficial and detrimental forms of humor may have resulted in weaker and less robust findings than might have been obtained with more careful measurement approaches, and potential negative relationships between some forms of humor and health variables may have been missed. More recently, however, Martin and colleagues (2003) have developed a  new humor measure, the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ), which includes scales for two potentially detrimental styles of humor (aggressive and self-defeating humor) as well as two potentially beneficial ones (affiliative and self-enhancing humor). The research evidence to date indicates that these four humor styles produce quite distinct patterns of correlations with various health and adjustment measures, including inverse relations for some styles of humor (for a review of this research, see Martin 2007). The HSQ has been translated into numerous languages, and is now one of the most widely used measures in research on humor and health. In addition to the measures discussed so far, there is a need for further development and refinement of other types of measures to assess distinct components or types of humor that may be related to health outcomes but have not received much research attention. For example, little research has examined the relation between ability measures of humor creativity and aspects of mental health (e.g., problem-solving ability in coping with stress or dealing with conflict in interpersonal relationships). In addition, one measure that has not been widely used in humor and health research, but which has considerable promise, is the State-Trait Cheerfulness Inventory (STCI; Ruch, Kohler, and van Thriel 1996). It defines sense of humor as an emotional temperament (i.e., the tendency to be habitually cheerful and playful), which seems

488 

Rod A. Martin

quite ­consistent with the way humor is often conceptualized in the humor and health literature (e.g., Lefcourt 2001). Besides the different components of sense of humor, it is also important to recognize that there are different forms of laughter that may have differential relevance to health. For example, although laughter can be a largely involuntary expression of genuine amusement and mirth, it can also be forced or feigned, and can include a blend of emotions, including hostility, fear, or sadness. The Facial Action Coding System (FACS), developed by Ekman and Friesen (1978), can be used to distinguish between genuine enjoyment (“Duchenne”) smiles and laughter (characterized by symmetric involvement of the zygomatic major and orbicularis oculi muscle groups) and faked or non-enjoyment smiling or laughter (characterized by the absence of the orbicularis oculi action, asymmetrical facial displays, involvement of muscles indicating a mixture of emotions, and/or unusual intensity or timing of muscle actions). A number of studies have found differential health-related outcomes for these two different types of facial displays, suggesting that genuine enjoyment laughter may be associated with positive outcomes, whereas forced laughter may not be (e.g., Bonanno and Keltner 1997; Zweyer, Velker, and Ruch 2004). Researchers should distinguish between these different types of laughter in investigations of the association between laughter and health. In addition, practitioners need to consider the types of laughter that they are promoting in their interventions. Humor, laughter, and physical health The remarkable range of bodily functions that are supposedly benefited by laughter and humor, according to contemporary claims, is reminiscent of the cornucopia of benefits often claimed by patent medicine manufacturers and health food fanatics. Laughter is said to provide exercise for the muscles and heart, produce muscle relaxation, improve blood circulation, reduce the production of stress-related hormones such as catecholamines and cortisol, enhance a wide range of immune system variables, reduce pain by stimulating the production of endorphins, reduce blood pressure, enhance respiration, regulate blood sugar levels, and remove carbon dioxide and water vapor from the lungs (McGhee 1999; Fry 1994). As such, humor and laughter have been said to provide some degree of protection against cancer, heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, pneumonia, bronchitis, hypertension, migraine headaches, arthritis pain, ulcers, and all sorts of infectious diseases ranging from the

Humor and health 

489

common cold to AIDS. As with all types of complementary and alternative medicine, it is important to conduct systematic, well-controlled research to determine whether the claimed benefits of humor and laughter are anything more than placebo effects (Bausell 2007). Some of the claimed physical health benefits of humor and laughter are highly speculative and essentially unfalsifiable, and therefore of little scientific merit. An example is the claim made by Fry (1994) that laughter reduces the risk of bronchial infections and pneumonia by expelling moist residual air from the lungs, resulting in a reduction of excess moisture that would otherwise encourage pulmonary bacterial growth. The difficulty with this claim (apart from the fact that there is no empirical evidence that laughter actually reduces moisture levels in the lungs) is that one could make an equally convincing argument for health-enhancing benefits of laughter regardless of the direction of its physiological effects. If it turned out that laughter somehow increased, rather than decreased, the pulmonary moisture level, one could come up with an equally plausible-sounding argument that it is beneficial because it keeps the lungs from drying out and shriveling up. Thus, regardless of what effect laughter may have on a particular system of the body, a “just-so story” can be concocted to explain why this effect is beneficial. It is interesting to note that one curmudgeonly nineteenth-century author (Vasey 1877) actually used similar kinds of arguments to support his contention that laughter is harmful to physical health! Other frequently-claimed health benefits of laughter, while testable, have been subjected to little or no scientific investigation. For example, the oftencited muscle relaxation effects of laughter have not yet been demonstrated in physiological data. In addition, although it is frequently reported in the media that laughter stimulates endorphin production, there is currently no research evidence for this. Indeed, two studies have examined blood levels of betaendorphins in subjects exposed to comedy, and neither of these found significant changes (Martin 2001). In addition, Fry (1992) asserted that several minutes of intense laughter produce physiological changes similar to those experienced during intense exercise, comparable to exercising on a rowing machine or stationary bicycle for 10 to 15 minutes. Only one published study has investigated the amount of energy expended during laughter, and it found that, although laughter is associated with some increase in calorie consumption over a resting state, this is far less than that found with physical exercise (Buchowski et al., 2007). In fact, we currently have only limited understanding of many of the physiological processes associated with mirth and laughter, and much more research is needed in this area before we can have

490 

Rod A. Martin

confidence about the effects of mirth and laughter on the brain, muscles, endocrine system, and immune system (see Ruch and Ekman 2001, for further discussion of research on laughter). Immune system A number of experimental studies have investigated the effects of mirth and laughter on various components of the immune system by taking saliva or blood samples from participants before and after exposing them to humorous stimuli (typically videotapes or audiotapes of stand-up comedy routines). The majority of these studies examined only salivary immunoglobulin A (S-IgA), a component of the immune system that is involved in the body’s defense against upper respiratory infections. The reason for this focus on S-IgA was not that it is a particularly important aspect of immunity or a particularly likely candidate for laughter-related influences, but that it is found in saliva and is therefore much easier for non-medical researchers to obtain than blood. Assays for S-IgA are also relatively inexpensive compared to some other components of the immune system. However, a handful of studies have taken blood samples from participants, and these have been assayed for a  wide variety of hormones and immunity-related variables such as cortisol, natural killer cells, helper and suppressor T-cells, immunoglobulins, and so on. Most (but not all) of these studies have reported significant changes in at least some components of immunity following exposure to comedy. For example, various studies have reported comedy-related increases in S-IgA, natural killer cell activity, T-cell helper–suppressor ratio, interleukins, and so on. However, numerous methodological problems with the studies make it difficult to draw firm conclusions. These difficulties are well exemplified by a study by Berk and associates, which has received a great deal of attention in the media and has been frequently cited in the humor and health literature. Only a few of the results of this study (having to do mainly with stress-related hormones) were reported in a  peer-reviewed journal article (Berk, Tan, Fry et al., 1989), while the remaining analyses were reported in conference presentations, only the abstracts of which were ever published. The participants were 10 male medical personnel, five of whom (the experimental group) were assigned as a single group to watch a 60-minute comedy video (“Gallagher: Over Your Head”), and the other five (the control group) sat quietly in a room together for 60 minutes. Blood was collected via IV catheters in the forearm at a number of

Humor and health 

491

intervals before, during, and after the stimulus conditions. Of 19 immunity and endocrine-related variables assayed, significant experimental effects were found in nine variables. Participants in the humorous video group had significantly lower levels of cortisol and dopac and higher levels of growth hormone following the videotape as compared to the control participants. In addition, in the experimental group, assays taken after the video revealed significant increases from baseline in the T cell helper–suppressor ratio, blastogenesis, IgG, IgM, natural killer cell (NK) activity, and complement (C3), suggesting immunoenhancing effects of humor. However, these analyses examined changes in the experimental group only, and did not compare them with the control group, so we cannot be sure that similar changes did not also occur in the control group. No experimental effects were found with a number of other variables, including norepinephrine, prolactin, beta-endorphin, IgA, and gamma-interferon levels. Although some promising results were obtained in this study, there are a number of methodological limitations that weaken our ability to draw firm conclusions. Besides the very small sample size of males only, the participants were informed several days beforehand which condition they would be in, resulting in evident differences in their mood states upon arrival and significant baseline differences in two of the physiological variables (epinephrine and growth hormone). It is also not reported whether the participants were randomly assigned to groups. In addition, the no-video control group does not adequately control for a variety of factors, such as the diversion of watching an interesting videotape, active social interaction, or general emotional arousal, which might account for the findings. The researchers did not include standard manipulation checks (e.g., ratings of funniness, interest, moods, etc.), so we do not know the extent to which the participants actually found the comedy video to be humorous, or whether the effects were mediated by the emotion of mirth. The researchers also did not monitor the laughter of the participants, so it is impossible to determine the degree to which the results may be due to laughter. Another serious concern is that, given the large number of dependent variables (nearly twice as many variables as subjects) and the numerous repeated measures, the researchers were able to conduct a very large number of statistical tests in search of significant findings. With such a large number of analyses, the Type I error rate becomes greatly inflated, and results that appear to be statistically significant may be unreliable and merely due to chance. Finally, the fact that most of the results have been published only in brief abstracts of conference papers leaves many details of the methodology and

492 

Rod A. Martin

analyses unknown and therefore difficult to evaluate. Thus, although there were some intriguing results from this study, it certainly does not provide the sort of conclusive scientific evidence of immunoenhancing effects of laughter that have often been claimed for it. Similar weaknesses are apparent in most of the other immunity-related studies, including inadequate control groups, small sample sizes, potentially inflated error rates, and failure to monitor laughter and moods (Martin 2001; 2007). Adding to the confusion in the immunity-related research is the fact that the findings are rather inconsistent across studies and across immune system variables, with some studies showing immunoenhancing effects, others showing immunosuppressive effects, and still others showing null effects with particular components of immunity. For example, whereas Berk and associates found increases in T-cell helper–suppressor ratio and NK cell activity with exposure to comedy, Kamei, Kumano, and Masumura (1997) did not replicate the T-cell ratio finding and found a decrease in NK cell activity. Similar inconsistencies are also observed in results pertaining to stressrelated hormones. Berk and associates reported humor-related decreases in cortisol levels, whereas other studies, using more rigorous methodologies, have found increased levels of cortisol with exposure to comedy, as well as positive correlations between funniness ratings and cortisol levels (Hubert, Moller, and de Jong-Meyer 1993). Thus, although the findings are somewhat promising, more well-controlled studies are clearly needed before any firm conclusions may be drawn concerning the effects of humor and laughter on the immune system. A further limitation of these sorts of laboratory studies is that they do not provide evidence of long-term benefits of humor and laughter on immunity. Even though it may be possible to document statistically significant changes in immunity-related variables with exposure to comedy in the laboratory, it is also important to determine whether such changes have any longer-term clinical significance. If humor and/or laughter have clinically meaningful and significant beneficial effects on the immune system, then it should be possible to demonstrate that individuals who engage in laughter and humor more frequently (presumably those with a greater sense of humor) have higher levels of immunity and are less likely to suffer from infectious illnesses over time. In other words, there should be a positive correlation between sense of humor and immunity-related variables and a negative correlation between sense of humor and rates of infectious illnesses. With regard to infectious illnesses, McClelland and Cheriff (1997) found no relations between several self-report measures of sense of humor and the

Humor and health 

493

frequency or severity of colds, either retrospectively or prospectively over a  period of three months. Several studies have also examined correlations between levels of S-IgA and participants’ sense of humor as measured by self-report scales. Although two early studies with very small sample sizes found sizable positive correlations between sense of humor scores and S-IgA (Dillon, Minchoff, and Baker 1985; Dillon and Totten 1989), a number of later studies with larger sample sizes failed to replicate these findings (e.g., Lefcourt, Davidson, and Kueneman 1990). It should be noted, however, that immunity levels are likely to fluctuate considerably over time, so that levels obtained in a  single assay may be too unreliable to expect significant correlations with a  trait measure of humor. Future research should aggregate immune measures across a number of assays over a period of time and examine correlations with humor measures. An alternative approach would be to look for possible relationships between day-to-day fluctuations in levels of immunity variables and fluctuations in experiences of humor, laughter, and mirth in individuals over a number of days, using statistical procedures like hierarchical linear modeling. Pain threshold and tolerance A number of studies have examined potential analgesic effects of laughter or mirth by testing participants’ pain threshold or tolerance before and after exposing them to comedy videotapes. Pain threshold is typically defined as the amount of time elapsed before a participant reports a noxious stimulus (e.g., immersion of the arm in ice water) to be painful, while pain tolerance is the duration of time before the individual wishes to terminate the painful stimulus (e.g., remove one’s arm from the water). These studies have generally been more carefully controlled and methodologically rigorous than the immunity research. Most of the studies have had several control groups, controlling for such factors as distraction, relaxation, and negative emotion. For example, Cogan, Cogan, Waltz, and McCue (1987) conducted a study in which college students were randomly assigned to either comedy (audiotape of Lily Tomlin), relaxation (progressive muscle relaxation audiotape), dull narrative (audiotape on ethics), or no-treatment control conditions. The results showed no difference between the laughter and relaxation groups on pain threshold obtained following the manipulation; however, thresholds for both of these groups were higher than those for the dull narrative and notreatment conditions. In a second study, these same authors assigned students

494 

Rod A. Martin

to either comedy (audiotape of Bill Cosby), interesting narrative (Edgar Allen Poe story), dull narrative (ethics lecture), active distraction (multiplication task), or ­no-treatment conditions. Subsequent pain thresholds were significantly higher in the comedy condition than in the interesting narrative, active distraction, and no-treatment groups, and marginally higher than in the dull narrative group. Overall, these and other similar studies provide fairly consistent evidence that exposure to comedy results in increases in pain threshold and tolerance that are comparable to the effects of relaxation and that do not appear to be simply due to distraction. There is also some evidence that the analgesic effects of humor observed in the laboratory may extend to clinical interventions, but only with moderate levels of pain. In a quasi-experimental field study, Rotton and Shats (1996) assigned hospitalized orthopedic surgery patients to one of three conditions: a  humorous movie group, who watched four feature-length comedy movies during the two days post-surgery; a  non-humorous movie group, who watched four drama movies; or a no-movie control group. The results showed lower levels of minor analgesic (e.g., aspirin) usage during the two days postsurgery in participants watching the humorous movies as compared to those in the other two groups. However, these effects did not extend to the use of major analgesics such as Demerol and Percodan. Furthermore, these findings only obtained among patients in the humorous movie condition who were allowed to choose which movies they would watch: those who were not given any choice actually showed significantly higher levels of analgesic usage compared to the control groups. Thus, watching humorous films that are not consistent with one’s own humor preferences may be aversive rather than beneficial. Interestingly, however, studies that have included negative emotion control conditions have demonstrated similar increases in pain threshold and tolerance with exposure to videotapes inducing negative emotions such as disgust, horror, or sadness. For example, Weisenberg, Tepper, and Schwarzwald (1995) found equal increases in pain tolerance in a group of participants exposed to a comedy film and a group exposed to a disgusting horror film, both of which showed greater pain tolerance than those in neutral-film and no-film control conditions. These findings suggest that the observed analgesic effects may occur with both positive and negative emotional arousal, rather than being specific to laughter or mirth. Although these humor-related increases in pain tolerance and threshold appear to be quite robust, it is still not clear exactly what the mechanisms are. Weisenberg, Raz, and Hener (1998) found that the increases in pain threshold

Humor and health 

495

and tolerance continued for 30 minutes after exposure to a humorous videotape, by which time changes in reported moods were no longer evident. These authors suggested that this finding indicates that humor and laughter may induce physiological changes that affect the sensory components of pain, rather than simply altering the cognitive-affective-motivational components of pain, and that these physiological changes take some time to develop and continue even after initial mood changes have dissipated. A study by Mahony, Burroughs, and Hieatt (2001) suggests that humorrelated increases in pain tolerance may be mediated by expectancies. In this study, participants who were shown a humorous videotape were told either that humor increases pain tolerance (positive expectancy), or that humor decreases pain tolerance (negative expectancy), or they were told nothing about the effects of humor on pain (no expectancy). The positive expectancy and no expectancy groups both showed significantly greater increases in pain thresholds as compared to the negative expectancy group. These results suggest that the analgesic effects of humor may be a sort of placebo effect, although this does not negate the possibility that they are mediated by physiological processes. However, as noted earlier, there is no evidence to date that these changes in pain tolerance are due to mirth-related increases in endogenous opioids such as endorphins, although this hypothesis remains plausible. One potential method for investigating the endorphin mediation hypothesis would be to determine whether humor-associated increases in pain tolerance disappear when participants are given the opiate antagonist naloxone. Until recently, none of the pain studies had examined correlations between overt laughter and changes in pain tolerance, and it was therefore unclear whether the effects are due to laughter in particular, or to some other mechanism such as the positive emotion of mirth. A recent study by Zweyer, Velker, and Ruch (2004) was designed to address such questions regarding the mechanisms involved in humor-related pain-reduction effects. They randomly assigned participants to three conditions while watching a funny film, to compare the effects of (1) a mirthful mood without smiling or laughing, (2) extensive smiling and laughing, and (3) production of humorous commentary. Using the cold pressor procedure, pain tolerance was measured before, immediately after, and 20 minutes after the film. The researchers also videotaped the participants during the procedure, and subsequently coded their facial expressions for genuine and faked smiling and laughter, using the Facial Action Coding System. Overall, the three conditions yielded similar significant increases in pain threshold and tolerance, which were evident immediately after the film and

496 

Rod A. Martin

continued 20 minutes later. These findings indicate that neither laughter nor humor production are necessary, beyond simple amusement, for the pain ­reduction effect to occur. Moreover, the observed increases in pain tolerance were positively associated with genuine enjoyment smiles (Duchenne display), but not with the frequency or intensity of laughter. In fact, voluntary efforts to exhibit or amplify laughter-related positive emotions were actually negatively associated with pain tolerance. Thus, this study casts doubt on the hypothesis (derived from the case of Norman Cousins) that hearty laughter is necessary for the increase in pain tolerance. Instead, the results suggest that the mechanisms have more to do with the amusement-related positive emotion of mirth. Laughter does not seem to be necessary and, in fact, forcing oneself to laugh seemed to have a contrary effect. Although these findings should be replicated before we can draw firm conclusions, this study, with its careful assessment of different types of smiles and laughter using the FACS system, provides an excellent model for future experimental research exploring the mechanisms and parameters of effects of humor and laughter on health-related variables. Blood pressure Although some have speculated that hearty laughter may lead to a reduction in blood pressure over time, experimental studies indicate that laughter is actually associated with short-term increases in blood pressure and heart rate, but no longer-term effects. White and Camarena (1989) conducted a 6-week intervention study to examine the effects of a laughter intervention on systolic (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) and heart rate (HR). They randomly assigned participants to a laughter treatment group, a relaxation group, or a health-education control group, each of which met for 6 weekly sessions of 1½ hours. The results showed no significant pre- to post-session changes in DBP, SBP, or HR in the laughter or health-education groups, whereas the relaxation group showed significantly lower post-session HR and SBP in comparison with both of the other groups. Thus, this study did not support the hypothesis that sustained laughter results in lower levels of heart rate and blood pressure over time. In a study of the relationship between sense of humor (i.e., trait humor) and blood pressure, Lefcourt and colleagues (1997) examined the correlation between participants’ scores on sense of humor tests and their SBP levels during a series of stressful laboratory tasks. They found an interesting sex differ-

Humor and health 

497

ence in the pattern of correlations: women showed the expected negative correlations between sense of humor and SBP, whereas the correlations for men were in the opposite direction, higher humor being associated with higher SBP. These authors suggested that the findings may be due to differences in the ways in which men and women express humor, with women engaging in more tolerant, self-accepting, and adaptive forms of humor, potentially leading to more beneficial physiological effects. Again, these findings hint at the possibility that different styles or types of humor may have quite different health consequences. Longevity If humor and laughter have beneficial effects on health, then it should be possible to demonstrate that, on average, people who laugh more frequently and who have a greater sense of humor tend to live longer than others. Indeed, this would seem to be the most important test of the humor-health hypothesis. Although one could still argue that frequently engaging in humor and laughter can at least improve the quality if not the duration of life, it is difficult to see how claims for actual physical health benefits of humor and/or laughter can be sustained if these do not result in greater longevity. However, the research evidence in this regard, although limited, is not very encouraging. Rotton (1992), in a series of four separate studies, found no differences in the life duration of comedians and comedy writers, as compared with that of serious entertainers and authors. Interestingly, though, he found that both professional humorists and serious entertainers died at a significantly younger age than did people who were famous for other reasons. Thus, the ability to create humor and to make other people laugh (as epitomized in individuals who make a living by their comedic abilities) does not appear to confer any health benefits resulting in greater longevity. If there are any health benefits to having a sense of humor, it would appear that it is a different component or aspect of humor that is involved. Friedman and colleagues (1993) reported analyses of data from 1178 male and female participants from the Terman Life-Cycle Study who have been followed since 1921. A composite measure of cheerfulness was derived from parent and teacher ratings of sense of humor and optimism that had been obtained on these individuals at the age of 12. Surprisingly, survival analyses revealed that those individuals rated as having higher cheerfulness at age 12 had significantly higher mortality rates throughout the ensuing decades. Thus,

498 

Rod A. Martin

on average, more cheerful individuals were more likely to die at a younger age as compared to their less cheerful counterparts, and this was true for both men and women. The authors suggested that these results may be due to more cheerful individuals being less concerned about health risks and taking less care of themselves. Proponents of the health benefits of humor have sought to dismiss this finding in a number of ways, suggesting, for example, that the definition of sense of humor was inappropriate, or that the results were due to the optimism component of the composite cheerfulness measure rather than the sense of humor component, or that cheerfulness in this study reflected a lack of emotional adjustment. However, the item used for rating sense of humor in this study had at its positive pole the following description: “Extraordinarily keen sense of humor. Witty. Appreciates jokes. Sees the funny side of everything,” and at its negative pole the following: “Extremely lacking in sense of humor. Serious and prosy. Never sees the funny side.” It seems difficult to argue that this description is very different from the way most people today (including proponents of the “humor and health” movement) would describe a sense of humor. Moreover, L. R. Martin and colleagues (2002), in a followup analysis of these data, found that the higher mortality rates remained even when the sense of humor rating was used by itself, and not only in combination with optimism. In their re-analyses, L. R. Martin and colleagues (2002) also found that individuals who were rated higher on cheerfulness as children were no more likely to be neurotic or to have emotional problems later in life and, indeed, they were better adjusted and more carefree in adulthood, as well as being more extraverted. On the other hand, their analyses showed that children who were rated as more cheerful in childhood went on to smoke more cigarettes, consume more alcohol, and engage in more risky hobbies as adults, although these more risky lifestyle behaviors did not completely account for their higher mortality rates. In any case, the existing evidence, though scanty, does not support the hypothesis that a sense of humor increases longevity. Illness symptoms As noted earlier, if humor and/or laughter confer beneficial effects on immunity and other aspects of health, individuals who laugh more frequently and have a better sense of humor should be less likely to become ill over a period of time. Several researchers have examined simple correlations between trait

Humor and health 

499

measures of sense of humor and overall health, as measured by self-report physical symptom checklists. A few of these studies have found significant negative correlations between these variables, indicating that individuals with a greater sense of humor report fewer symptoms of illness and medical problems (e.g., P. S. Fry 1995; Ruch and Kohler 1999). Other studies, however, have failed to replicate these findings (e.g., Porterfield 1987). Additionally, some studies have found a stress-moderating effect of sense of humor on selfreported illness symptomatology (e.g., P. S. Fry 1995), whereas these findings have not been replicated in other studies (e.g., Porterfield 1987). It is important to note that self-report measures of illness symptoms are notoriously confounded with negative emotionality or neuroticism, making them somewhat unreliable measures of objective health status (Watson and Pennebaker 1989). Because sense of humor tends to be negatively related to neuroticism, observed relations with self-reported illness symptoms may be due to this shared neuroticism component rather than any objective health benefits of humor. Indeed, research indicates that correlations between sense of humor and physical symptom measures disappear after controlling for neuroticism (Korotkov and Hannah 1994). A  recent study by Svebak, Martin, and Holmen (2004) represented a unique opportunity to include a measure of sense of humor in a large population health study that involved the entire adult population of a county in Norway. Besides completing a three-item humor measure derived from Svebak’s (1996) Sense of Humor Questionnaire (SHQ-6), over 65,000 participants completed a survey about their illness symptoms in a variety of areas (e.g., nausea, diarrhea, pounding heart, dyspnea, musculuskeletal pain) and their overall health satisfaction, and were also assessed for blood pressure, height, and weight (allowing for computation of body mass index, a measure of obesity). As such, this is the largest correlational study of sense of humor and health ever conducted. However, the results provided very little evidence for a simple relationship between sense of humor and health. After controlling for age, no meaningful relationships were found between sense of humor and either illness symptoms or objective health indicators, although the study did find a weak relationship between sense of humor and satisfaction with health (r = .12). These results suggest that, although high humor individuals do not seem to have objectively better health, they are somewhat more subjectively satisfied with their health. In view of the very large sample size of this study, the broad age range of participants, and the unselected nature of the sample, these data provide quite convincing evidence that people with a greater sense of humor (at least

500 

Rod A. Martin

as defined by high scores on such self-report tests as the SHQ) are no more healthy overall than their low humor counterparts. If a sense of humor does confer any health benefits, it would appear that either they are too subtle to be captured by such a cross-sectional design, or the type of humor involved is not adequately captured by the SHQ. For example, this study did not include a measure of life stress, so the authors were unable to examine the possibility of a stress-moderating effect of sense of humor on health. In addition, the possibility remains that effects of humor on health might emerge over time in a longitudinal design. A study by Kuiper and Nicholl (2004) also bears on the relationship between sense of humor and satisfaction with health. These authors suggested that it may be important to distinguish between actual and perceived physical health, and proposed that a greater sense of humor may contribute to more positive perceptions of physical health than may actually be warranted. Using a sample of undergraduate students, they found that individuals with higher scores on sense of humor measures report more positive health-related perceptions, such as less fear of death or serious disease, less negative bodily preoccupation, and less concern about pain. These results are consistent with the finding of Svebak, Martin, and Holmen (discussed above) that higher sense of humor is related to greater subjective satisfaction with health but not with more objective indicators of health status. These findings may help to explain the popularity of the idea that humor is beneficial for one’s health. People with a greater sense of humor may perceive themselves to be healthier, showing less concern about symptoms of illness, even though they are not objectively healthier. Ironically, this greater health satisfaction and lowered concern about health problems may actually lead to more risky health behaviors and consequently the higher mortality rates found by Friedman and associates (1993). Humor and psychological health As with physical health, there are many different ways of conceptualizing and assessing psychological health. Various definitions of psychological health include such components as: freedom from psychological distress and disturbance (e.g., depression, anxiety); presence of positive moods, self-esteem, self-confidence, optimism, purpose in life, etc.; ability to adapt to changing circumstances and to cope effectively with stressful events; and ability to maintain stable, intimate, and satisfying relationships with others. Theorists

Humor and health 

501

have suggested that a sense of humor may have beneficial effects on psychological health in all of these areas. Moods and psychological adjustment A  number of correlational studies have found that individuals with higher scores on various trait measures of sense of humor tend to have lower scores on measures of depression, anxiety, and other types of mood disturbance, and higher scores on measures of psychological adjustment such as positive emotions, optimism, self esteem, morale, quality of life, and well-being (e.g., Korotkov and Hanna 1994; Kuiper and Martin 1998; Lefcourt and Martin 1986; Porterfield 1987; Simon 1990; Thorson, Powell, Sarmany-Schuller, and Hampes 1997). As one example, Kuiper and Martin (1993) examined the relationships between several sense of humor measures (the SHRQ, CHS, and SHQ) and several indicators of self esteem in a sample of 100 male and female university students. Sense of humor measures were significantly positively related to self esteem as measured by the Rosenberg Self Esteem Inventory. The humor scores were also negatively related to scores on the Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale, indicating that high-humor individuals endorse more realistic and flexible standards for evaluating their own self-worth than do low humor individuals. In addition, the humor scales were negatively related to discrepancies between actual and ideal self-ratings on a variety of self-descriptive adjectives, and negatively related to changes in actual selfratings over one month, indicating that individuals with a  greater sense of humor showed a greater congruence between the way they actually viewed themselves and the way they would ideally like to be, as well as a more stable self-concept. Overall, these findings indicate that sense of humor (as defined by these scales) is associated with higher levels of self-esteem and more realistic and stable self-appraisals, although they do not demonstrate a causal relationship between these variables. Although these sorts of correlational studies have generally provided evidence of relationships between sense of humor and various measures of moods, adjustment, and well-being, it is important to note that the correlations are often rather weak and are not always significant. For example, Thorson et al. (1997) found a correlation of only −.18 between the Multi­dimensional Sense of Humor Scale (MSHS) and the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression scale (CES-D) in a sample of 347 adults, indicating that sense of humor accounts for less than 4 percent of the variance in depression.

502 

Rod A. Martin

­ imilarly, Nezlek and Derks (2001) found a correlation of only -.16 between S the Coping Humor Scale (CHS) and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) in a sample of 286 college students. With regard to more positive adjustment variables, Kuiper and Martin (1998), in a series of five studies, found only modest relationships between four measures of sense of humor and a measure of optimism (average r = .17). Sense of humor was also related to only one of the six subscales of the Ryff (1989) measure of psychological well-being (the Personal Growth scale). Little or no relationship was found between sense of humor and other well-being constructs such as self-acceptance, purpose in life, positive relations with others, autonomy, and environmental mastery. In addition, the correlations between sense of humor and various dimensions of psychological health and well-being were considerably weaker than those between optimism and these same well-being measures, indicating that sense of humor is less strongly related to well-being than is optimism. Thus, although the research to date provides some evidence of relationships between sense of humor and psychological well-being, the findings are often weaker than might be expected. The generally weak and inconsistent relationships between sense of humor and well-being variables may be partially due to the fact that the most widely used sense of humor measures tend to be quite strongly related to extraversion but only weakly (negatively) related to neuroticism (Ruch 1994), whereas most well-being constructs load primarily on neuroticism and not extraversion. Research is needed to determine whether there are some forms of humor that are less strongly related to extraversion (and perhaps even associated with introversion) and more strongly related (either positively or negatively) with neuroticism, and therefore more relevant to psychological well-being. The recently developed Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) represents a step in this direction. The self-enhancing humor subscale of this measure seems to be more strongly (negatively) related to neuroticism and less strongly related to extraversion than are most previous humor scales, while the selfdefeating humor scale is actually positively related to neuroticism (Martin et al., 2003). Thus, these scales may capture some styles of humor that are more relevant to well-being (both positively and negatively) than are many earlier measures (Martin 2007; Martin et al., 2003; Kuiper et al., 2004). Interestingly, some previous humor scales, such as the MSHS, have been found to be positively correlated both with the presumably negative and positive humor dimensions assessed by the HSQ (Martin et al. 2003). This finding supports the contention that measures such as the MSHS blur the distinction between potentially beneficial and detrimental humor styles, and may explain why

Humor and health 

503

correlations between these previous humor measures and well-being variables have often been quite weak (e.g., Thorson et al. 1997). It is also important to point out that these sorts of correlational studies do not allow us to determine causal relationships between variables. The finding of significant correlations between measures of sense of humor and various indicators of psychological health do not demonstrate that sense of humor has a causal effect on well-being. It is equally possible that greater humor arises as a consequence of increased well-being, or that the correlations are due to the influence of some third variable, such as neuroticism, which may have an important genetic contribution. Many of the correlational findings may simply be demonstrating the tautological truth that generally cheerful people tend to be happy much of the time. Well-designed experimental studies are needed, with random assignment of participants to humor conditions and appropriate control conditions, to provide convincing evidence of causal effects of humor on psychological well-being. Besides laboratory studies examining short-term effects of humor on moods and feelings of well-being (e.g., Danzer, Dale, and Klions 1990; Moran 1995), more intensive and longterm therapeutic intervention studies could be designed to compare interventions aimed at increasing humor with appropriate control conditions, looking at broader indicators of psychosocial well-being as outcome variables (e.g., White and Camerena 1989). Coping with stress Many authors have suggested that a humorous perspective on life is an important way of coping with stress, protecting the individual from the deleterious emotional and physiological consequences that typically occur with stress (e.g., Dixon 1980; Freud 1928; May 1953). Several investigations have provided evidence for the benefits of humor in coping with particular real-life stressors. For example, Bizi, Keinan, and Beit-Hallahmi (1988) obtained selfand peer-ratings of humor in a group of soldiers in the Israeli army undergoing a stressful training course. They found that peer-rated humor (but not self-rated humor) correlated positively with peer-rated coping, commanders’ ratings of initiative, and final grades obtained in the course. Carver and associates (1993) examined the role of humor in a sample of women coping with surgery at an early stage of breast cancer, and found that those who reported greater use of humor in coping subsequently reported greater optimism and lower levels of distress.

504 

Rod A. Martin

Other investigations have found evidence of correlations between sense of humor scales and various coping strategies and other coping-related variables. For example, Kuiper, Martin, and Olinger (1993) studied cognitive appraisals of university students before and after a midterm examination. They found that participants with high, as opposed to low, coping humor scores were more likely to appraise the upcoming exam as a positive challenge rather than a negative threat, and, following the exam, they were more likely to adjust their expectations about the next exam in a more realistic direction, based on their performance on the previous exam. A significant negative correlation was also found between the CHS and perceived stress scores, indicating that individuals with higher levels of coping humor perceived themselves as having more control over their lives and felt less overwhelmed, anxious, and stressed. The CHS was also significantly correlated with two types of coping assessed by the Ways of Coping Scale, namely confronting and emotional distancing. Rim (1988) has also investigated relationships between trait humor and coping styles. A  number of investigations have examined the stress-buffering role of sense of humor using the stress-moderator paradigm. In this approach, researchers assess three types of variables in participants: (1) sense of humor (usually by means of various self-report scales); (2) life stressors (typically using life events or “hassles” scales in which participants check off the major or minor negative events that happened in their lives over a specified period of time, such as the preceding 6 months); and (3) an outcome measure, such as depression, anxiety, or physical illness symptoms. These data are analyzed by means of hierarchical multiple regression to determine whether there is a significant interaction between the sense of humor and stress measures in predicting the outcome measure. In an early series of three studies of this type, Martin and Lefcourt (1983), using a measure of major life events over the preceding year as the stressor measure and general mood disturbance as the outcome measure, demonstrated significant stress-moderating effects of a variety of measures of sense of humor, including the SHRQ, the CHS, one subscale of the SHQ, and the rated funniness of narratives created by participants in the laboratory. In each case, participants with higher humor scores showed a weaker correlation between negative life events and mood disturbance. In particular, among subjects reporting high levels of life stressors, high humor individuals reported less disturbed moods than did those with lower humor scores. These results were interpreted as providing evidence that individuals with a greater sense of humor are better able to cope with stress and are therefore less adversely affected by stressful events.

Humor and health 

505

A  number of additional studies have been conducted using the stressmoderator paradigm with a variety of different measures of humor, stress, and outcome variables. The results of these studies, however, have been somewhat inconsistent. Some of them have provided further support for the stress-moderating effects of humor found by Martin and Lefcourt (1983). For example, Nezu, Nezu, and Blissett (1988), using both a cross-sectional and a prospective design, found stress-moderating effects of sense of humor in predicting depression but not anxiety. Additionally, in a prospective study of daily hassles and immunity, Martin and Dobbin (1988) found a stress-moderating effect of several sense of humor measures in the prediction of salivary immunoglobulin A (S-IgA) levels over a period of 1½ months. However, a number of studies have failed to provide support for the stress-moderating effects of sense of humor. For example, Porterfield (1987), using a sample of 220 participants, did not replicate the stress-moderating effects of sense of humor in the prediction of either depressed mood or physical symptoms. Similarly, Korotkov and Hannah (1994) failed to find a stress-moderating effect of humor on illness symptoms in a sample of over 700 participants. To add to the confusion, some studies have even found significant stress-moderating effects of sense of humor that were in the opposite direction to predictions, higher humor individuals showing more adverse effects of stress on outcome measures (e.g., Anderson and Arnoult 1989; Overholser 1992). Thus, the stressmoderator paradigm has provided limited and rather inconsistent support for the idea that a sense of humor is beneficial in coping with stress. One possible explanation for these inconsistent findings may have to do with weaknesses in the research paradigm, including reliance on trait measures of humor, retrospective assessment of stress, and a cross-sectional design. Consequently, this approach may not be sensitive enough to capture specific ways in which particular forms of humor are used on a day-to-day basis in coping with specific stressors. A more promising approach involves following participants over a period of time using daily diary or on-line reporting methods with hand-held computers to examine actual expressions of different types of humor in the context of particular types of stressful experiences. Such approaches allow for a more intensive, process-oriented study of interactions between expressions of humor or laughter, life events, and health-related variables over time. Such rich and complex data require more sophisticated analysis methods, such as hierarchical linear modeling approaches (Bryk and Raudenbush 1992). As one recent example of this approach, Puhlik-Doris (2004) had participants report their daily experiences of four different styles of humor (using

506 

Rod A. Martin

a daily humor version of the Humor Styles Questionnaire) as well as their stressful experiences and positive and negative moods on six days over three weeks, using an Internet reporting system. Analyses of the data employing hierarchical linear modeling revealed significant stress-moderating effects for three of the four humor styles. Although these findings are in need of replication, they suggest that this within-subjects research approach may be more sensitive to stress-moderating effects of humor than is the traditional trait approach using multiple regression. An alternative approach to studying humor as a  coping mechanism involves an experimental paradigm in which participants are exposed to a mild stressor in the laboratory and humor is manipulated to examine the effect on outcome measures such as self-reported moods or stress-related physiological arousal. Humor manipulations can include providing subjects with humorous stimuli or instructing them to create a  humorous narrative, and appropriate control conditions are needed. As an example of this approach, Newman and Stone (1996) had participants watch a stressful 13-minute film depicting gruesome wood mill accidents resulting from careless safety practices. Half of the participants were instructed to create a  humorous narrative while watching the film, while the other half were instructed to create a serious narrative. The outcome measures included self-reported moods and physiological measures of skin temperature, heart rate, and skin conductance. The study demonstrated a stress-moderating effect of humor, as subjects who produced a humorous narrative, as compared to those who produced a serious narrative, had lower negative affect, lower heart rate and skin conductance, and higher skin temperature (indicative of lower stress reactivity) while watching the film. Interestingly, this study found no relationship between the experimental effects and trait measures of sense of humor, suggesting that it may be more productive to investigate humor as a state rather than a trait in studies of humor and coping. Interpersonal relationships Humor is often seen as an important communication skill, and a number of authors have therefore suggested that a sense of humor may enhance marital relationships, friendships, and other close relationships. It has been suggested that humor allows one to discuss potentially problematic topics in a non-threatening and accepting manner, to engage in creative interpersonal problem-solving, and to enhance positive feelings of warmth, closeness, and

Humor and health 

507

enjoyment between partners in a relationship (e.g., Lefcourt 2001; Ziv 1984). In turn, more satisfying and enduring relationships may result in the wellknown psychological and even physical health benefits of greater social support (Cohen 1988; Cohen and Wills 1985). Some studies have demonstrated significant correlations between sense of humor measures and variables relevant to interpersonal relationships, such as intimacy (Hampes 1992), social competence and assertiveness (Bell, McGhee, and Duffey 1986), and satisfaction with social interactions (Nezlek and Derks 2001). There is also considerable evidence that people rate a sense of humor as one of the most desirable characteristics in a potential mate (Lundy, Tan, and Cunningham 1998; Smith, Waldorf, and Trembath 1990), and couples who were married for over 50 years attributed their marital longevity in part to their ability to laugh together (Lauer, Lauer, and Kerr 1990). Research on this topic has provided support for positive correlations between relationship satisfaction and perceptions of partners’ sense of humor. Rust and Goldstein (1989) found that appreciation of one’s partner’s sense of humor loaded highly on a measure of marital satisfaction. Similarly, Ziv and Gadish (1989) found that individuals’ marital satisfaction was positively correlated with their perceptions of their spouse’s sense of humor, but less so with their ratings of their own sense of humor. A number of studies of marital satisfaction have employed the Specific Affect Coding System (SPAFF; Gottman, McCoy, and Coan 1996), which includes a category for good-natured humor, to code videotapes of married couples engaging in a discussion about a problem area in their relationship. These studies have typically found positive correlations between the frequency of observed humor during problem discussions and individuals’ current marital satisfaction (e.g., Carstensen, Gottman, and Levenson 1995). However, in prospective studies that have examined longer-term marital stability, humor has not fared as well as a predictor. For example, Gottman and Levenson (1999) followed 79 married couples over 4 years. Although they found that SPAFF-coded emotional expression during a brief problem discussion at time 1 accounted for 93% of the variance in marital outcome (divorce or separation versus stability), humor was not one of the significant predictors. In a study of newlyweds, Cohan and Bradbury (1997) found that SPAFF-coded humor predicted marital satisfaction 18 months later in wives but not in husbands. In fact, a combination of high humor expression in the husband, along with high levels of life stress for the couple, actually predicted a greater likelihood of the couple separating within 18 months. Based on this finding, the authors suggested that, rather than facilitating problem-

508 

Rod A. Martin

solving, humor in husbands may be a way of avoiding problems and disengaging from problem solving, resulting in less marital stability over time. Thus, there is some evidence that humor may be positively related to current satisfaction in a relationship but less so to long-term stability. Recent findings reported in a Ph.D. dissertation by Puhlik-Doris (2004) lead to similar conclusions. In this study, university students who were currently in romantic dating relationships were asked to complete measures of relationship satisfaction as well as the Humor Styles Questionnaire. The couples were followed up 5 to 6 months later to see if the dating relationship was still continuing. As expected, the relationships of individuals with higher scores on the aggressive humor scale were more likely to have broken up by this time. However, contrary to expectations, those with higher affiliative and self-enhancing humor were also more likely to have broken up, and this was especially true if the partner had expressed some dissatisfaction with the relationship. This surprising finding may perhaps be explained by the fact that high-humor individuals are particularly attractive to potential alternative partners and are therefore more likely to move from one relationship to another. Assuming that these findings can be replicated, they cast doubt on the idea that a positive sense of humor is always associated with greater relationship stability. Further research is needed to determine whether this pattern is limited to dating relationships, or if it is also found among couples in more committed long-term relationships such as marriage. Despite the popular belief that a sense of humor is a desirable characteristic in a  partner and is beneficial for close relationships, there is currently very little research on this topic and, as noted, the existing findings are quite mixed. More research is needed to clarify the role of various types of positive and negative humor in different kinds of relationships. Besides looking at correlations between sense of humor measures and relationship satisfaction and stability, further research is needed to test specific hypotheses about humor in relationships, such as the idea that humor contributes to better communication skills and a greater ability to solve relationship problems. Further research is also needed to examine the role of humorous teasing in relationships (e.g., Keltner et al., 1998) and the effects of teasing on well-being (Janes and Olson 2000). In addition to correlational designs, researchers should consider experimental methodologies as well as longitudinal studies involving repeated assessments of couples over a period of time. As an alternative to self-report measures that assess how an individual generally expresses humor (such as

Humor and health 

509

the Humor Styles Questionnaire), researchers should make use of couplefocused measures that assess the positive and negative uses of humor within a particular relationship, such as the Relational Humor Inventory (de Koning and Weiss 2002). Conclusion Despite reports in the popular media and claims made by adherents of the “humor and health” movement, the research findings on health benefits of humor and laughter are not as strong, consistent, or unambiguous as is commonly believed. With regard to physical health, the strongest evidence supports the idea of humor-related increases in pain tolerance, although the mechanisms are still unclear, and there is evidence that similar effects can also be found with negative emotions. The empirical support for beneficial physiological effects of humor or laughter on the immune system, blood pressure, stress hormones, muscle relaxation, and so on, is weak and contradictory. Indeed, there is some indication that a greater sense of humor is associated with unhealthier lifestyle behaviors and a shorter life expectancy. With regard to psychological health, there is some evidence that a sense of humor can play a beneficial role in coping with stress, enhancing interpersonal relationships, and contributing to general well-being, although this research is also somewhat inconsistent. As I have attempted to show in this review, it is unrealistic to hold a simplistic view that all forms of humor and laughter are beneficial to a  wide array of physical and psychological health variables. Some types of humor and laughter may be beneficial to some aspects of mental or physical health, some may be neutral with regard to health, and some may even be detrimental. Furthermore, different mechanisms may be involved in different effects, and some forms of humor may be beneficial in some ways and detrimental in others. The mixed and weak findings in the research to date may be due, at least in part, to the fact that researchers generally have not distinguished different styles of humor that may be more or less relevant to health. In addition, the inconsistent findings may be due to a number of methodological weaknesses that are apparent in much of the research. Due in large part to a lack of adequate funding for such research, many of the experimental studies (especially those examining immune system variables) have been small scale, with inadequate control groups, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions one way or the other. Researchers often seem to have chosen

510 

Rod A. Martin

their humor measures and research procedures simply on the basis of what was readily available, rather than developing measures and methods based on well-formulated theoretical models. Most investigations in this field have been single studies, each using a  different set of paradigms and measures, making it difficult to compare results across studies and draw firm conclusions. The field is in need of more systematic and programmatic research, employing more well-formulated theoretical models, developing rigorous and sophisticated paradigms and methodologies, replicating findings across studies, carefully testing competing hypotheses, and thus providing an accumulation of knowledge. A number of suggestions for future research have been noted at various points in the preceding review. Rather than reiterate these here, I will make only a few general concluding comments. Future research should examine different components and styles of humor and laughter to determine which kinds of humor are beneficial for which aspects of health through which mechanisms, as well as which aspects or styles of humor are irrelevant to health, and which may even be detrimental to some aspects of health. The Humor Styles Questionnaire (Martin et al., 2003) is one attempt to develop a  measure of various styles of humor that may be differentially related to health variables. Much of the existing research has taken a correlational approach, using self-report trait measures of sense of humor. Although some weak to moderate correlations have been found between these humor measures and various health-related variables (more so for psychological than physical health), this approach suffers from a number of limitations, including an inability to determine the direction of causality, reliance on self-report, and a trait approach to humor which may be insensitive to subtle relationships. To determine causal relationships, experimental methodologies are needed, in the form of either laboratory investigations or intervention studies. Such methods of course require appropriate control groups to rule out possible alternative explanations of results. To determine the degree to which laughter or the humor-related emotion of mirth are responsible for any observed effects, these should be monitored via observational coding (e.g., the FACS system), physiological measures, and self-report scales (e.g., state version of the STCI), and analyses should be conducted to determine possible mediating effects of these variables. Humor intervention studies would be particularly beneficial to examine the longer-term significance of laboratory findings. Can people be taught to laugh more frequently in their daily lives, to engage in more healthy forms of humor, or to use humor as a coping strategy, and do these changes in humor

Humor and health 

511

and laughter result in significant and enduring changes in physical, emotional, and/or psychosocial health variables? Another promising alternative to simple correlational studies involves the use of hierarchical linear modeling approaches to study individuals over time, examining within-subject relationships between various components of humor and stress, interpersonal relationships, physical health, and psychological well-being (e.g., Nezlek and Derks 2001). For example, using these methods, one could study the degree to which day-to-day fluctuations in various components or styles of humor or laughter are related to corresponding changes in aspects of psychological or physical health within individuals over a  number of weeks or months. Rather than relying on trait measures of humor, adjustment, health, and so on, such repeated-measures approaches require assessment procedures that are sensitive to fluctuations in behaviors, moods, and health variables over short periods of time, such as days or even hours. For example, the four subscales of the Humor Styles Questionnaire have been modified for a  daily report format (Puhlik-Doris 2004). Instead of depending on retrospective reporting, data can be collected in “real time” using Internet websites or hand-held computers. These approaches may offer the benefit of greater ecological validity than laboratory studies and also allow for investigation of specific hypotheses regarding various mechanisms, such as relationships between particular styles of humor, social support, and health variables. Causal (or at least temporal) relationships can be teased out by examining relationships between time-lagged data. For example, to determine whether humor predicts well-being or wellbeing predicts humor, one could compare relationships between humor and next-day well-being measures with relationships between well-being and next-day humor measures. In conclusion, relationships between humor and laughter on the one hand, and psychosocial and physiological health on the other, are more complex than many people believe. More research is needed to disentangle these complex relationships. Only when a clearer picture has emerged from the empirical research can health care practitioners design humor-based interventions that are likely to be effective. There is little doubt that humor and laughter can enhance positive feelings of mirth, but we have only an incomplete understanding of the ways in which different aspects or styles of humor may contribute to broader dimensions of mental health and satisfying social relationships. Similarly, while children and adults who are suffering from serious, life-threatening illnesses are likely to feel more cheerful and hopeful if they can find something to laugh about, the jury is still out on

512 

Rod A. Martin

whether humor and laughter actually hasten the healing process or protect one from becoming ill in the first place. Clearly this is a  very interesting field of research, with a great deal of potential for further discoveries. References Adler, Christine M., and Joel J. Hillhouse 1996 Stress, health, and immunity: A review of the literature. In: ­Thomas W. Miller (ed.), Theory and assessment of stressful life events, 109–138. Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Allport, Gordon 1961 Pattern and Growth in Personality. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Anderson, Craig A., and Lynn H. Arnoult 1989 An examination of perceived control, humor, irrational beliefs, and positive stress as moderators of the relation between negative stress and health. Basic and Applied Social Psychology 10 (2): 101–117. Bausell, R. Barker 2007 Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bell, Nancy J., Paul E. McGhee, and Nelda S. Duffey 1986 Interpersonal competence, social assertiveness, and the development of humour. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 4: 51–55. Berk, Lee S., Stanley A. Tan, William F. Fry, Barbara J. Napier, Jerry W. Lee, Richard W. Hubbard, John E. Lewis, and William C. Eby 1989 Neuroendocrine and stress hormone changes during mirthful laughter. American Journal of the Medical Sciences 298: 390–396. Bizi, Smadar, Giora Keinan, and Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi 1988 Humor and coping with stress: A test under real-life conditions. Personality and Individual Differences 9 (6): 951–956. Bonanno, George A., and Dacher Keltner 1997 Facial expressions of emotion and the course of conjugal bereavement. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 106 (1): 126–137. Bruehl, Steven, Charles R. Carlson, and James A. McCubbin 1993 Two brief interventions for acute pain. Pain 54 (1): 29–36. Bryk, Anthony S., and Stephen W. Raudenbush 1992 Hierarchical linear models: Applications and data analysis methods. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Buchowski, M. S., K. M. Majchrzak, K. Blomquist, K. Y. Chen, D. W. Byrne, and J.-A. Bachorowski 2007 Energy expenditure of genuine laughter. International Journal of Obesity 31 (1): 131–137.

Humor and health 

513

Carstensen, Laura L., John M. Gottman, and Robert W. Levenson 1995 Emotional behavior in long-term marriage. Psychology and Aging 10 (1): 140–149. Carver, Charles S., Christina Pozo, Suzanne D. Harris, Victoria Noriega, Michael F. Scheier, David S. Robinson, Alfred S. Ketcham, Frederick L. Moffat, and Kimberley C. Clark 1993 How coping mediates the effect of optimism on distress: A study of women with early stage breast cancer. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (2): 375–390. Cogan, Rosemary, Dennis Cogan, William Waltz, and Melissa McCue 1987 Effects of laughter and relaxation on discomfort thresholds. Journal of Behavioral Medicine 10: 139–144. Cohan, Catherine L., and Thomas N. Bradbury 1997 Negative life events, marital interaction, and the longitudinal course of newlywed marriage. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73 (1): 114–128. Cohen, Sheldon 1988 Psychosocial models of the role of social support in the etiology of physical disease. Health Psychology 7: 269–297. Cohen, Sheldon, and Thomas A. Wills 1985 Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin 98 (2): 310–357. Cook, Mark, Alison Young, Dean Taylor, and Anthony P. Bedford 1998 Personality correlates of alcohol consumption. Personality and Individual Differences 24: 641–647. Cousins, Norman 1979 Anatomy of An Illness. New York: Norton. Craik, Kenneth H., Martin D. Lampert, and Arvalea J. Nelson 1996 Sense of humor and styles of everyday humorous conduct. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 9 (3/4): 273–302. Danzer, Amy, J. Alexander Dale, and Herbert L. Klions 1990 Effects of exposure to humorous stimuli on induced depression. Psychological Reports 66: 1027–1036. De Koning, Erica, and R. L. Weiss 2002 The relational humor inventory: Functions of humor in close relationships. American Journal of Family Therapy 30: 1–18. Dillon, Kathleen M., Brian Minchoff, and Katherine H. Baker 1985 Positive emotional states and enhancement of the immune system. International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine 15: 13–17. Dillon, Kathleen M., and Mary C. Totten 1989 Psychological factors, immunocompetence, and health of breastfeeding mothers and their infants. Journal of Genetic Psychology 150: 155–162.

514 

Rod A. Martin

Dixon, Norman F. 1980 Humor: A cognitive alternative to stress? In Irwin G. Sarason and Charles D. Spielberger (eds.), Stress and anxiety. Vol. 7, 281–289. Washington, DC: Hemisphere. Dohrenwend, Bruce P. 1998 Adversity, Stress, and Psychopathology. London: Oxford University Press. Ekman, Paul, and Wallace V. Friesen 1978 Facial Action Coding System. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. Esler, Murray D. 1998 Mental stress, panic disorder and the heart. Stress Medicine 14 (4): 237–243. Feingold, Alan, and Ronald Mazzella 1993 Preliminary validation of a  multidimensional model of wittiness. Journal of Personality 61: 439–456. Fredrickson, Barbara L. 1998 What good are positive emotions? Review of General Psychology 2 (3): 300–319. Friedman, Howard S., Joan S. Tucker, Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, Joseph Schwartz, Deborah Wingard, and Michael Criqui 1993 Does childhood personality predict longevity? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1): 176–185. Freud, Sigmund 1928 Humor. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 9: 1–6. Fry, P. S. 1995 Perfectionism, humor, and optimism as moderators of health outcomes and determinants of coping styles of women executives. Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs 121 (2): 211–​245. Fry, William F. 1992 The physiological effects of humor, mirth, and laughter. Journal of the American Medical Association 267: 1857–1858. 1994 The biology of humor. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 7 (2): 111–126. Goldstein, Jeffrey H. 1982 A laugh a day: Can mirth keep disease at bay? The Sciences 22 (6): 21–25. Gottman, John M., and Robert Wayne Levenson 1999 Rebound from marital conflict and divorce prediction. Family Process 38 (3): 287–292. Gottman, John M., K. McCoy, and James Coan 1996 The specific affect coding system. In John M. Gottman (ed.), What predicts divorce? The measures. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Humor and health 

515

Hampes, William P. 1992 Relation between intimacy and humor. Psychological Reports 71: 127–130. Haellstroem, Tore, and Henry Noppa 1981 Obesity in women in relation to mental illness, social factors and personality traits. Journal of Psychosomatic Research 25: 75–82. Helgason, Asgeir R., Mats Fredrikson, Tadeusz Dyba, and Gunnar Steineck 1995 Introverts give up smoking more often than extraverts. Personality and Individual Differences 18: 559–560. Hubert, Walter, M. Moller, and Renate de Jong-Meyer 1993 Film-induced amusement changes in saliva cortisol levels. Psychoneuroendocrinology 18: 265–272. Janes, Leslie M., and James M. Olson 2000 Jeer pressure: The behavioral effects of observing ridicule of others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 26 (4): 474–485. Kamei, T., H. Kumano, and S. Masumura 1997 Changes of immunoregulatory cells associated with psychological stress and humor. Perceptual and Motor Skills 84: 1296–1298. Kataria, Madan 2002 Laugh for no reason. 2nd ed. Mumbai: Madhuri International. Keltner, Dacher, Randall C. Young, Erin A. Heerey, Carmen Oemig, and Natalie D. Monarch 1998 Teasing in hierarchical and intimate relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75 (5): 1231–1247. Kerkkanen, Paavo, Nicholas A. Kuiper, and Rod A. Martin 2004 Sense of humor, physical health, and well-being at work: A threeyear longitudinal study of Finnish police officers. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 17 (1/2): 21–35. Kohler, Gabriele, and Willibald Ruch 1996 Sources of variance in current sense of humor inventories: How much substance, how much method variance? Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 9 (3/4): 363–397. Korotkov, David, and T. Edward Hannah 1994 Extraversion and emotionality as proposed superordinate stress moderators: A prospective analysis. Personality and Individual Differences 16: 787–792. Kuiper, Nicholas A., Melissa Grimshaw, Catherine Leite, and Gillian Kirsh 2004 Humor is not always the best medicine: Specific components of sense of humor and psychological well-being. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 17 (1/2): 135–168. Kuiper, Nicholas A., and Rod A. Martin 1993 Humor and self-concept. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 6: 251–270.

516 

Rod A. Martin

1998

Is sense of humor a positive personality characteristic? In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), The sense of humor: Explorations of a personality characteristic. 159–178. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kuiper, Nicholas A., Rod A. Martin, and L. Joan Olinger 1993 Coping humor, stress, and cognitive appraisals. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science 25: 81–96. Kuiper, Nicholas A., and Sorrel Nicholl 2004 Thoughts of feeling better? Sense of humor and physical health. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 17 (1/2): 37–66. Lauer, Robert H., Jeanette C. Lauer, and Sarah T. Kerr 1990 The long-term marriage: Perceptions of stability and satisfaction. International Journal of Aging and Human Development 31 (3): 189–195. Lazarus, Richard S., and Susan Folkman 1984 Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. New York: Springer. Lefcourt, Herbert M. 2001 Humor: The Psychology of Living Buoyantly. New York: Kluwer Academic. Lefcourt, Herbert M., Karina Davidson, and Karen Kueneman 1990 Humor and immune system functioning. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 3: 305–321. Lefcourt, Herbert M., Karina Davidson, Ken M. Prkachin, and David E. Mills 1997 Humor as a stress moderator in the prediction of blood pressure obtained during five stressful tasks. Journal of Research in Personality 31: 523–542. Lefcourt, Herbert M., and Rod A. Martin 1986 Humor and Life Stress: Antidote to Adversity. New York: SpringerVerlag. Lundy, Duane E., Josephine Tan, and Michael R. Cunningham 1998 Heterosexual romantic preferences: The importance of humor and physical attractiveness for different types of relationships. Personal Relationships 5: 311–325. Mahony, Diana L., W. Jeffrey Burroughs, and Arron C. Hieatt 2001 The effects of laughter on discomfort thresholds: Does expectation become reality? Journal of General Psychology 128 (2): 217–226. Martin, Leslie R., Howard S. Friedman, Joan S. Tucker, Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, Michael H. Criqui, and Joseph E. Schwartz 2002 A life course perspective on childhood cheerfulness and its relation to mortality risk. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28 (9): 1155–1165. Martin, Rod A. 1996 The Situational Humor Response Questionnaire (SHRQ) and Coping Humor Scale (CHS): A decade of research findings. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 9 (3/4): 251–272.

Humor and health  2001

517

Humor, laughter, and physical health: Methodological issues and research findings. Psychological Bulletin 127 (4): 504–519. 2007 The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach. Burlington, MA: Elsevier Academic Press. Martin, Rod A., and James P. Dobbin 1988 Sense of humor, hassles, and immunoglobulin-A: Evidence for a stress-moderating effect of humor. International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine 18: 93–105. Martin, Rod A., Nicholas A. Kuiper, L. Joan Olinger, and Kathryn Dance 1993 Humor, coping with stress, self-concept, and psychological wellbeing. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 6 (1): 89–​ 104. Martin, Rod A., and Herbert M. Lefcourt 1983 Sense of humor as a  moderator of the relation between stressors and moods. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45: 1313–1324. 1984 The Situational Humor Response Questionnaire: Quantitative measure of sense of humor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 47: 145–155. Martin, Rod A., Patricia Puhlik-Doris, Gwen Larsen, Jeanette Gray, and Kelly Weir 2003 Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation to psychological well-being: Development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality 37: 48–75 Maslow, Abraham 1954 Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper & Row. May, Rollo. 1953 Man’s Search for Himself. New York: Random House. McClelland, David C., and Adam D. Cheriff 1997 The immunoenhancing effects of humor on secretory IgA and resistance to respiratory infections. Psychology and Health 12 (3): 329–344. McGhee, Paul E. 1999 Health, Healing and the Amuse System: Humor as Survival Training. 3rd ed. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing. Moody, Raymond A. 1978 Laugh After Laugh: The Healing Power of Humor. Jacksonville, FL: Headwaters Press. Moran, Carmen C. 1995 Short-term mood change, perceived funniness, and the effect of humor stimuli. Behavioral Medicine 20: 32–38. Newman, Michelle Gayle, and Arthur A. Stone 1996 Does humor moderate the effects of experimentally-induced stress? Annals of Behavioral Medicine 18 (2): 101–109.

518 

Rod A. Martin

Nezlek, John B., and Peter Derks 2001 Use of humor as a  coping mechanism, psychological adjustment, and social interaction. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 14 (4): 395–413. Nezu, Arthur M., Christine M. Nezu, and Sonia E. Blissett 1988 Sense of humor as a  moderator of the relation between stressful events and psychological distress: A  prospective analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54: 520–525. O’Connell, Walter E. 1960 The adaptive functions of wit and humor. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 61: 263–270. Overholser, James C. 1992 Sense of humor when coping with life stress. Personality and Individual Differences 13: 799–804. Patton, David, Gordon E. Barnes, and Robert P. Murray 1993 Personality charactistics of smokers and ex-smokers. Personality and Individual Differences 15: 653–664. Puhlik-Doris, Patricia 2004 The Humor Styles Questionnaire: Investigating the role of humor in psychological well-being. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. Porterfield, Albert L. 1987 Does sense of humor moderate the impact of life stress on psychological and physical well-being? Journal of Research in Personality 21: 306–317. Rackl, Lorilyn 2003 But seriously folks: Humor can keep you healthy. Reader’s Digest, September: 62–71. Rim, Yalom 1988 Sense of humor and coping styles. Personality and Individual Differences 9: 559–564. Rotton, James 1992 Trait humor and longevity: Do comics have the last laugh? Health Psychology 11: 262–266. Rotton, James, and Mark Shats 1996 Effects of state humor, expectancies and choice on post-surgical mood and self-medication: A field experiment. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 26: 1775–1794. Ruch, Willibald 1993 Exhilaration and humor. In: Michael Lewis and J. M. Haviland (eds.), The Handbook of Emotions, 605–616). New York: Guilford Publications. 1994 Temperament, Eysenck’s PEN system, and humor-related traits. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 7: 209–244.

Humor and health  1996

519

Measurement approaches to the sense of humor: Introduction and overview. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 9 (3/4): 239–250. 1998 The Sense of Humor: Explorations of A personality Characteristic. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ruch, Willibald, and Paul Ekman 2001 The expressive pattern of laughter. In: A. W. Kaszniak (ed.), Emotion, qualia, and consciousness, 426–443. Tokyo: Word Scientific. Ruch, Willibald, and Franz-Josef Hehl 1998 A  two-mode model of humor appreciation: Its relation to aesthetic appreciation and simplicity-complexity of personality. In Willibald Ruch (ed.), The Sense of Humor: Explorations of a personality Characteristic, 109–142. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ruch, Willibald, and Gabriele Köhler 1998 A  temperament approach to humor. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), The Sense of Humor: Explorations of a  personality Characteristic, 203–228. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1999 The measurement of state and trait cheerfulness. In: I. Mervielde, I. J. Deary, F. De Fruyt, and F. Ostendorf (eds.), Personality psychology in Europe, 67–83. Tilburg: Tilburg University Press. Ruch, Willibald, Gabriele Köhler, and Christoph van Thriel 1996 Assessing the “humorous temperament”: Construction of the facet and standard trait forms of the State-Trait-Cheerfulness Inventory – STCI. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 9 (3/4): 303–340. Rust, John, and Jeffrey Goldstein 1989 Humor in marital adjustment. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 2: 217–223. Ryff, Carol D. 1989 Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57: 1069–1081. Safranek, Roma, and Thomas Schill 1982 Coping with stress: Does humor help? Psychological Reports 51 (1): 222 Scogin, Forrest R., and Michael Merbaum 1983 Humorous stimuli and depression: An examination of Beck’s premise. Journal of Clinical Psychology 39 (2): 165–169 Simon, Jolen M. 1990 Humor and its relationship to perceived health, life satisfaction, and morale in older adults. Issues in Mental Health Nursing 11: 17–31.

520 

Rod A. Martin

Smith, Jane E., V. Ann Waldorf, and David L. Trembath 1990 Single white male looking for thin, very attractive… Sex Roles 23 (11/12): 675–685. Stone, Arthur A., Donald S. Cox, Heiddis Valdimarsdottir, Lina Jandorf, and John M. Neale 1987 Evidence that secretory IgA antibody is associated with daily mood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52 (5): 988–993. Svebak, Sven 1996 The development of the Sense of Humor Questionnaire: From SHQ to SHQ-6. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 9: 341–361. Svebak, Sven, Rod A. Martin, and Jostein Holmen 2004 The prevalence of sense of humo in a large, unselected county population in Norway: Relations with age, sex, and some health indicators. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 17 (1/2): 121–134. Taylor, Shelley E., and Annette L. Stanton 2007 Coping resources, coping processes, and mental health. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 3: 377–401. Thorson, James A., and Falvey C. Powell 1993 Development and validation of a multidimensional sense of humor scale. Journal of Clinical Psychology 49: 13–23. Thorson, James A., Falvey C. Powell, Ivan Sarmany-Schuller, and William P. Hampes 1997 Psychological health and sense of humor. Journal of Clinical Psychology 53 (6): 605–619. Vaillant, George E. 1977 Adaptation to Life. Toronto: Little, Brown & Co. Vasey, George 1877 The Philosophy of Laughter and Smiling. 2nd ed. London: J. Burns. Watson, David, and James W. Pennebaker 1989 Health complaints, stress, and distress: Exploring the central role of negative affectivity. Psychological Review 96: 234–254. Weisenberg, Matisyohu, Tal Raz, and Tamar Hener 1998 The influence of film-induced mood on pain perception. Pain 76: 365–375. Weisenberg, Matisyohu, Inbal Tepper, and Joseph Schwarzwald 1995 Humor as a cognitive technique for increasing pain tolerance. Pain 63: 207–212. White, Sabina, and Phame Camarena 1989 Laughter as a stress reducer in small groups. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 2: 73–80.

Humor and health 

521

Wickberg, Daniel 1998 The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ziv, Avner 1984 Personality and Sense of Humor. New York: Springer. Ziv, Avner, and Orit Gadish 1989 Humor and marital satisfaction. Journal of Social Psychology 129 (6): 759–768. Zweyer, Karen, Barbara Velker, and Willibald Ruch 2004 Do cheerfulness, exhilaration, and humor production moderate pain tolerance? A FACS study. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 17 (1/2): 85–119.

Humor in literature Katrina E. Triezenberg 1.  Why it’s handy to study humor in literature The study of humor in literature is akin to the study of biological specimens that have been dyed, fixed, and mounted on slides: both convenient and, like most convenient things, unsatisfactory. The thing being studied has been immobilized and clearly laid out for study. Unlike a live specimen that is likely to be colorless and for many of its parts to be therefore nearly invisible, one can see every cell wall and organelle in brilliant purple detail – and likewise one can see every word and every quotation mark, can map every reference and co-reference and innuendo. One can look for as long as one wishes; in the same way that a fixed protozoan cannot squirm off of the slide, words that have been fixed on a page cannot be forgotten, misquoted, or misheard, and are not lost in the stream of time. Multiple observers can be sure that they are all seeing exactly the same physical evidence. These preserved specimens are invaluable tools in research and without them scientists and students would be lost, but they also provide an incomplete picture of the thing being studied. If one does not see a protozoan squirm off of the edge of the slide, one hasn’t really seen a protozoan, even though the stained slide may have made it very easy to pick out every membrane and flagellum. Likewise, humor as represented by words on a page is only a dry and dead record of what the humor had been when in the wild – in this case, in the mind of the author and reader rather than in a drop of pond water. Fortunately, it is easy to reanimate a piece of fixed and mounted humor: it happens every time the text is read or thought about. Thus unlike the kind of everyday social humor that springs into existence and is promptly lost, literary humor can and does endure for millennia. Hermeneutics aside, audiences today are laughing at the same jokes that amused ancient Greek audiences more than two thousand years ago. Literary humor is therefore a vast arena of material for humor researchers that can conveniently be shared, copied, and referenced, and, because of the hermeneutics question (the question of how a text can be interpreted differently by every reader based on his or her

524 

Katrina E. Triezenberg

world experience, and how each of these readings differs from the author’s idea of what he meant), every piece of literary humor can be said to become a new joke every time it is read by a new person at a new time. Of course, there are at least two possible ways to interpret the phrase “literary humor”: first, as the preservation of a joke through writing, and second as an instance of a joke inside a work of literature. The dissection and criticism of what writing is “literature” and what is not is a question not answered here, though it is easy to find it argued and re-argued elsewhere. For the purposes of this chapter, “literary humor” shall be defined as anything funny inside any piece of fiction, drama, or narrative. What is and is not “funny” depends on what theory of humor is being subscribed to, and these theories are discussed elsewhere in this primer. This chapter will first give an overview of some major works of “humorous” literature in the Western tradition, beginning with the Greek playwrights and ending with 20th century satirists, and will subsequently or simultaneously describe literary terminology associated with the study of humor as well as various historical theories and observations about the qualities of humorous texts, very often made by the same people who produced the texts. The second part of this chapter will be theoretical itself, focusing on Raskin’s theory of humor (1985), which will be found to be a summation of most of the prior discussion of humor in literature, and Raskin and Attardo’s extension to this theory, which is particularly suited to the study of literature, as well as Attardo’s own work using linguistic approaches to studying humorous literature. The chapter will then end by discussing two mild challenges to these theories, first the issue of “humor enhancers” in humorous literature, and then the interesting instances of literature that seem to conform to Raskin’s theory but are clearly not humorous. 2.  Literary humor: A historical sketch Before launching into an exploration of early literary humor, it is necessary to explain some basic terminology regarding humor and comedy. “Comedy” is popularly used to denote any media that is light-hearted and funny, usually with a happy ending. Thus funny television shows are called situational comedies or sitcoms, pleasant romances are called romantic comedies, and funny people who perform live are called stand-up comedians. This popular usage of the word comedy and its derivatives (comic, comedian) is often carried over into the discussion of literary humor, where it causes confusion

Humor in literature 

525

with the classical meaning of “comedy” as a story about the powerless vs. the powerful, or the little man vs. the big man, or even about the perils and pitfalls of social pretence. Thus Dante named his magnum opus “The Divine Comedy” even though it is not in all parts (most notably the Paradiso, but also most of the Purgatorio and some of the Inferno) at all funny. Greek comedies, from the language of which the word is derived, were often bawdy or ribald and ended happily for everyone. To Chaucer, Shakespeare, and other writers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance a comedy was a story (but especially a  play, as to the Greeks) with a  happy ending, whether humorous or not. Throughout this chapter, the term “comedy” and its derivatives will be used in the classical rather than the common sense. The comedy was developed as a stage play by the ancient Greeks and is generally divided into three major phases, the Old Comedy of the sixth and fifth centuries bce, which often makes fun of a specific person and of current political issues, the Middle Comedy of the fifth and four centuries bce, which makes fun of more general themes such as literature, professions, and society, and the New Comedy of the fourth and third centuries bce which typically revolves around the bawdy adventures of a blustering soldier, a young man in love with an unsuitable woman, or a father figure who cannot follow his own advice. Of the Old and Middle comedies, the only that have survived complete are eleven plays of Aristophanes’. The Clouds (of which only a revised version survives) lampoons Socrates in heaven, in the Old tradition, while Lysistrata makes fun of human nature in general, and Plutus personifies both wealth and poverty in Athens, who so distract the citizenry that they neglect the gods, and is considered to be a Middle comedy. The author of New comedy whose work has best survived the ages is Menander, whose complete play Dyskolos (The Grouch) was discovered in 1957. Many other long pieces of Menander’s work have survived in Latin translations by Terence and Plautus. The stage was not the only medium of comedy recognized by the ancient Greeks. Aristotle’s Poetics, written towards the close of Middle Comedy, includes Homer in his discussion of the comic: “A poem of the satirical kind cannot indeed be put down to any author earlier than Homer; though many such writers probably there were. But from Homer onward, instances can be cited – his own Margites, for example.” The Poetics also includes a beautifully concise observation of the differences between comedy and its evil twin, or photo-negative, the tragedy: “for comedy aims at representing men as worse, tragedy as better than in actual life.” Satire was firmly established in ancient Greece, and nothing was safe from it – not the gods, not professions, not even

526 

Katrina E. Triezenberg

poetry itself. Lucian (120–180 ad) wrote his own Symposium, in which the diners are rowdy and drunken. Comedy in the Roman Empire is generally reduced to the works of the aforementioned Plautus and Terence, the former of whom lived at about the same time as Menander, the latter about a century later. Both of these men wrote plays of essentially the Old Greek kind – farces involving the same stock characters (father, soldier, slave) and which, unlike the plays of Aristophanes, offended no one in particular. More than a dozen plays of Plautus’ have survived. Six plays of Terence have survived, and were enormously popular through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. In the Middle Ages, the farces, bawdies, and satires of Greek and Roman literature continued to be popular. Geoffrey Chaucer is best known for his Canterbury Tales, some of which (most famously, perhaps, The Miller’s Tale) are both bawdy and still funny by today’s standards. Chaucer also penned The Romaunt of the Rose, a satire on love and courtship, and The House of Fame which seems to spoof Dante’s idea of the narrator and the guide – in Chaucer’s version, he the narrator would rather not listen to the guide. The Inferno, the first installment of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, describes damned souls engaging in bawdy behavior and word play. Dante and his guide Virgil also encounter a great many Florentines who sometimes regret their sins and sometimes do not, thus satirizing Florentine society. The second and third installments of the Divine Comedy are however distinctly not funny, and clearly illustrate that by the fourteenth century a comedy need do nothing more than end happily. Chaucer seems to have also been heavily influenced by another Italian writer, Bocaccio, whose Decameron is a collection of stories told by a group of ten nobles who have fled the Black Death by shutting themselves up in a lonely castle. Many of these stories involve the same themes as New Greek comedy and Roman comedy before them. A century after this trio of comic writers, a French monk named Rabelais published a series of five books collectively known as Gargantua and Pantagruel. Gargantua and his son Pantagruel are two giants of unfixed size, who can sometimes fit into a normal building and sometimes hold whole civilizations inside their mouths. These books contain satires on the Roman Catholic church, bawdy stories, and scatological humor as well as plain silliness that reminds the modern reader of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. These books are not particularly associated with Comedy, but are undeniably humorous. Rabelais’ brand of silliness and freedom from the laws of physics and of logic was discussed by the critic Bakhtin, who calls this atmosphere the “carnival” world. More on carnival can be found in dozens of books by Bakhtin and others.

Humor in literature 

527

Rabelais is an excellent example of a  writer who wrote for the sake of humor itself, and included some satire only because it is practically unavoidable in making jokes. Erasmus (1466–1536), on the other hand, has very clear political and religious objectives in The Praise of Folly, where Folly is nursed and instructed by Self Love, Flattery, Intemperance, and a number of other personified sins, and goes on to criticize the Catholic Church. Oddly enough, the joke was on Erasmus, who was a staunch Catholic, but whose work became a major catalyst of the Protestant Reformation. Shakespeare’s plays are sometimes divided into Comedy, Tragedy, and History. The history plays are, obviously, those based on historic personages such as Richard III and Henry IV. The difference between comedy and tragedy is still very much the same as in Greek plays – comedies have happy endings and tragedies have sad ones; tragic heroes are larger than life, while comic heroes are flawed. Shakespeare’s comedies are also usually funny, but unlike the Greek bawdy plays and satires, their humor lies in word play – puns, allusions, and double-entendres that are very often lost on today’s audience. Careful perusal of an annotated version of Love’s Labours Lost or All’s Well That Ends Well will reveal the surprising density of jokes in these plays, which are supposed to have had Elizabethan audiences roaring with ­laughter. Shakespeare’s humor is not limited to his comedies. Falstaff, one of the great comic (and humorous) characters of all time, appears in Henry IV parts I and II, where he often embodies or describes something similar to Bakhtin’s carnival. Shakespeare’s tragedies, too, often include a figure of a clown or fool. While this figure cannot be said to be the source of much mirth or laughter, his job is to provide commentary that is sometimes satiric and very often, according to most theories of humor, funny. Less than a  century after Shakespeare, the philosopher Hobbes briefly addressed humor in his work Leviathan. He says “Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.” Thus Hobbes seems to have subscribed to the aggression theory of humor, also favored long before him by the Greek and Roman classics. The eighteenth century saw the rise of a new kind of humorous author: the wit. A wit is usually a person who can make quick, wry comments in the course of conversation, but many wits turned their talents to paper. Shakespeare and many others had, before this time, displayed such word play, but the wit as a personality seems to first emerge in the public consciousness as the English writer Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) and the French writer Francois-Marie

528 

Katrina E. Triezenberg

Arouet, known as Voltaire (1694–1778). Voltaire seems to have dabbled in every literary form known, from novels to plays, history, poetry, letters, and essays. His signature wit is present in all, and some are expressly meant to be satires, especially on the Catholic church, censorship, and French civil liberties (or lack of). Swift is perhaps best known for his novel Gulliver’s Travels, in which sailor Lemuel Gulliver recounts his visits to strange lands inhabited by fantastic peoples. Gulliver’s last voyage finds him in a land where horses are the dominant species, and keep dumb, barbaric humans (called yahoos) as beasts of burden. This last tale, more than the others, reflects in a humorous way upon the failings of civilization. Swift is also the author of A Modest Proposal, an essay which suggests that the problems of overpopulation and starvation in the lower classes would be readily solved if they would eat their own children. Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and William Congreve (1670–1729) were contemporaneous with Swift. If Swift represents satire in eighteenth century England, then Pope represents satiric poetry of the same time. Imitations of Horace satirizes policies of George II and Horace Walpole while imitating the form of a classical poet. His Moral Essays are works more of ridicule than of satire (and therefore do not necessarily fall under the realm of humor). William Congreve wrote four comedies that were simultaneously highbrow and bawdy, and has also left a wealth of letters written to various wits and intellectuals of the era, which received witty replies. He corresponded with the essayist Lady Mary Wortley Montague, to whom Pope famously dedicated first love, then hate, and who appears in his Dunciad. The eighteenth century also saw the birth of the novel as an accepted form in English literature, and many early novels are humorous. Tristram Shandy is perhaps too disorganized and strange to be called a proper novel (indeed, it still seems like a piece of cutting-edge comedy today) but the ridiculous behavior of all its characters makes it uproariously funny. More in line with the standard story arc of the novel is Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, which tells the story of Arabella, a young woman whose only education and contact with the outside world has consisted of reading romance novels, and the adventures she has when she becomes independently wealthy and comes face to face with the outside world. Tom Jones also follows the criteria of the Comedy as understood by the Greeks, the medieval storytellers, and Shakespeare: it is a light-hearted tale of adventure, containing many hilarious episodes and ending happily for everyone who deserves to so end. Jane Austen deserves mention as a  novelist with enormous powers for understanding and portraying characters that are simultaneously true-to-life

Humor in literature 

529

and ridiculous. Though the substance of her plots is always earnest and could not have offended anyone, all of her novels can simultaneously be read as scorching satires of human nature and society manners. Among the Victorians can be found many instances of humor, as Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray both became enormously popular for sympathetic portrayals of eccentric characters and were copied by other novelists and story writers. Though there are many straightforward jokes and satire in their novels, and the novels themselves can be considered comedies because they end well for almost everyone, it is instructive to consider why precisely a Dickens characterization – of Silas Wegg and Mr. Venus from Our Mutual Friend, for example – is labeled as being “funny.” These characters do not tell jokes themselves, and most of their dialogue is not particularly witty, and yet they make us laugh in delight at the recognition and exaggeration of a “type” of person that we ourselves have met in real life. Perhaps for this reason, Dickens is rather more successful with British readers than with Americans, who are sometimes left out in the cold by his humor, while Americans more readily recognize the same humor in the works of Samuel Clemens, known as Mark Twain. Twain did very much the same thing that Dickens was doing, writing stories about characters that are more real than real life, more true to type than any true person could be. At the same time in Russia a story writer named Nikolai Gogol was writing short stories that were as much ahead of their time as Tristram Shandy was ahead of its own. Gogol’s short stories alternate between being simply bizarre, almost to the point where humor is lost to wonder and confusion (such as The Nose, in which a man’s nose goes AWOL and walks about the city causing trouble), and so dark and horrible that, while the story is most certainly a joke with a punch line, the reader is loathe to laugh (such as The Overcoat, in which a poor clerk starves himself to buy a new coat, which is stolen from him on the first night he wears it). 1890–1900, a period called the fin-de-siecle by students of English literature, was the golden age of Oscar Wilde, a great comic playwright whose only joke, it seems, was to contrast the honest, industrious mores of the public world with the lazy and selfish motivations of his elegant heroes. Wilde’s plays exhibit a gift for word play and repartee, as well as cultivation of ridiculous situations, which has become a staple of “comedy” in the 20th and 21st centuries. Satire and characterization continued to be popular kinds of literary humor in the 20th century novel, as exhibited in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Jaro­slav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk. P. G. Wodehouse’s long string

530 

Katrina E. Triezenberg

of ­novels, mostly featuring the nitwit Bertie Wooster and his gentleman’s gentleman Jeeves, are reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s comedy sans elegance and with an extra infusion of silliness. Like Wilde, Wodehouse’s works usually hinge around a ridiculous social situation created by the characters themselves, very much in the same line as the late 20th century’s televised situational comedies, or sitcoms, which are too numerous and too well-known to list here. Television in general opened up huge new vistas for humor along with every other kind of performing art. In addition to the sitcom, humorous variety shows with invited guests (such as Laugh In and Saturday Night Live) and collections of sketches (such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus) were popular in the 20th century. Before television, cinema provided a new venue to perform the same kind of comic plays that had been popular ever since the Greek theatre, and for comedians to become household names the world over. Independent of technological innovations, the 20th century also saw the beginning of the musical comedy in 1943, when Oklahoma! premiered. Twentieth century authors who are known to have meditated on the subject of humor include E. B. White, who suggested this chapter’s introductory metaphor when he said, “Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind” (White and White 1941). Isaac Asimov, better known for writing science fiction, has published two books of jokes (1971, 1993) that include commentary on why the jokes are funny and suggestions on how to successfully tell the jokes. He recognizes that humor comes from an abrupt change in point of view. Comedian Rowan Atkinson, familiar from his humorous sketch show Mr. Bean, proposes that a person can be funny in three ways: by being in an unusual place (as Lemuel Gulliver), by behaving in an unusual way (as Monty Python’s sketch The Ministry of Silly Walks), and by being the wrong size (as Gargantua and Pantagruel – but is Alice funny after she drinks potions in Wonderland?) It is suggested that the reader keep these theories in mind, for discussion later in this chapter. But first, the author has judged that it would be expedient to include a short glossary of literary terms commonly used in the discussion of humor. 3.  Glossary of pertinent terms Absurd: aside from the general meaning of illogical or impossible, absurd can specifically refer to the purposelessness of existence. This meaning comes from the existentialist writings of Albert Camus.

Humor in literature 

531

Adoxography: literature that uses highbrow words and phraseology to describe something base or common. Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly is an example. Agon: the power struggle between two characters in a Greek comedy, especially the Old comedy. Ambiguity: humor scholars both amateur and well-versed agree that humor has something to do with ambiguity, the state of having more than one possible meaning. Whether ambiguity is the be-all and end-all of humor, or just a component, is a debated question. Anachronism: placing a person or thing outside of its proper historical era. This is often used to humorous effect, though is not necessarily funny. See the discussion of script oppositions later in the chapter. Antaclasis: a pun composed of two homographs or homophones, with different meanings. Anti-masque: a prelude to a masque, a particular kind of costumed performance that could include song and dance as well as drama and comedy. Anti-masques were typically burlesque, often grotesque. Antiphrasis: the use of a word as its own antonym. A kind of irony. Bathos: bad poetry written by a poet who is trying too hard. Though bathos is often funny, the poet never intends it to be so. Bawdry, bawdy: a piece of funny literature, especially a play, that revolves around sex. Black comedy: drama or any kind of humor dealing with subjects that are usually too serious to be funny, such as war, death, and plague. Braggadocio: a stock character in Greek comedies who is excessively proud of himself and lets everyone know it. The braggadocio and the eiron play off each other. Burlesque: an undignified parody of a famous piece of literature. Carnivalization: turning the norms upside down and inside out; from Mikhail Bakhtin’s book about Rabelais. Clown: a performer who interacts with his audience, usually in a humorous way. Clown often wear ridiculous costumes and are sometimes satirists or social critics. Comedy: classically, a play about the little man vs. the big man; proponents of the aggression theory of humor may argue that the eventual triumph of the little man over the big man arouses a sense of triumph or superiority in the audience, leading to humor. Eiron: a stock character in Greek comedies who, through excessive humility, pokes fun at other characters. Source of the word irony.

532 

Katrina E. Triezenberg

Enthymeme: an argument with an unstated premise. This unstated premise is often the grounds for a humorous conclusion to the argument. Mark Twain was a particular master of this usage. Fabliau: a short story, written in verse, in which stock characters have bawdy adventures. Some of the Canterbury Tales, such as the Miller’s Tale, are fabliaux. Farce: a play that derives humor from putting its characters into ludicrous situations. A form that continues to be popular today, as in most sitcoms. Flyting: a poet’s duel, in which the opponents exchange insulting verses about each other. Fool: can used synonymously with “jester”, but in some cases (notably Shakespeare’s plays) the fool is not clownish or humorous, but rather a semi­detached observer and critic. Funny because the insults run against social norms of politeness, and because the verses are usually witty. Grotesque: literature that distorts its characters, either physically as in the masks and hump-backed costumes of commedia del’arte characters, or in their personalities and actions, as in many Victorian novels. Humour/humor: from the medieval theory that four fluids (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) in the body controlled the personality, this may have acquired its modern meaning from “humoural comedies” in which characters with an excess of one fluid behaved grotesquely. Humorous triple: a sequence of three statements, the last of which is in humorous opposition to the first two. Much of Woody Allen’s dialogue consists of humorous triples. Hyperbole: dramatic overstatement. Irony: humor derived from the inconsistency of a thing with its environment. Jester: a clown employed by a royal court, most often thought of in the Middle Ages. Unlike fools and some other kinds of clown, jesters were not expected to be satirists or to make observations about human nature, society, etc., but simply to be a target of laughter. Lampoon: a literary attack upon a person, funny (or not funny) for the same reasons as flyting. Limerick: a five-line poem, rhyming aabba. The first two lines set up a situation, the third and fourth develop it, and the fifth is a punchline. Malaprop: incorrect usage of a long word, resulting in comic effect. Named for Mrs. Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The Rivals. Menippean satire: Tristram Shandy is an excellent example of this satiric genre, which is characterized by continual sidetracks, interruptions, and

Humor in literature 

533

leaps of logic. Also called Varronian satire, after the Roman playwright Varro and the Greek playwright Menippus. Mime: today’s mimes are a variety of clown whose performances are not necessarily funny. In Greek usage, a “mime” is a farce. Mock epic: a satiric spoof of the epic form. Alexander Pope’s Dunciad is an example of this genre. Mock heroic: the same as an epic, though not necessarily on such a grand scale. The grandiosity of language employed is at odds with the low subject matter, creating humor. Paraprosdokian: a phrase or list with an amusingly out-of-place ending. Parody: a  humorous work, mimicking the style of another author. While mock epics and heroics are spoofs on a genre, parodies are usually identifiable as spoofs of the work of one particular person. Aristophanes’ play The Frogs is a parody of Euripides; in the modern day, the musician Weird Al parodies the popular songs of other musicians. Pun: an expression that has two or more possible meanings all hinging on one word being polysemous or homophonous with another, or two words together being phonologically similar to a third word. Also called paronomasia. Repartee: rapid, witty dialogue, funny either explicitly through its content or implicitly because it contrasts so sharply with everyday speech. Restoration comedy: a particular kind of comedy that hinges around repartee; popular during the English restoration. William Congreve’s plays are of this type. Ribaldry: literature that discusses sex in a humorous fashion; the same as bawdry. Romantic comedy: a comedy that revolves around the adventures of lovers. Sarcasm: verbal expression of irony or satire, often with a particular vocal intonation. Satire: literature that criticizes individuals or organizations, preferably in a witty manner. The best satire, with the best picked targets, does not have to resort to grotesquerie to make its point. Scatology: literature that discusses excrement and its production. One of Rabelais’ favorite subjects. Sentimental comedy: popular in the 18th century, sentimental comedy’s characters are virtuous if not also attractive, affectionate, and industrious, and the happy ending is domestic. Noted here because this particular kind of comedy is not well-known for containing any humor at all.

534 

Katrina E. Triezenberg

Spoonerism: a phrase in which the first letters or syllables or two or more words have been switched, often creating a humorous effect. For example, “it is kisstomary to cuss the bride.” Squib: a short satirical attack. Trope: any phrase that uses a word outside of its normal meaning. Thus irony, metonymy, and synechdoche are all kinds of trope. Wit: as discussed in the previous section, wit is the display of quick mental powers, or even just the possession of them. In dialogue, wit is often humorous. Sigmund Freud dissected humor into three types, one of which is wit. 4.  Study of literary humor Since the ancient Greeks (or possibly before) writers and philologists have speculated about what precisely “humor” is, what makes something funny, why laughter is the response, and what good laughter does. Humor can be conveyed through an enormous number of media, but because this chapter focuses on literary humor, it is natural to look for work on literary or verbal humor specifically. Raskin’s Semantic Mechanisms of Humor (1985) was written specifically with verbal humor in mind. To sum up the whole book, Raskin posits that humor occurs when two scripts that shouldn’t be in the same place, are put in the same place, and somehow made to make sense within that place. A “script” is the stereotypical understanding of an object or an event – for example, the script for “doctor” includes ideas like “studied for a long time, is intelligent, serious, and thoughtful, knows a great deal about human physiology, growth, and infection, can be trusted to do no harm, and can be privy to embarrassing secrets and keep them to himself.” This script for what a doctor should be is in direct opposition to the greedy, careless, and cold-hearted behavior sometimes perceived by patients. Thus, the following line is funny: Doctor to patient: “Well, Mrs. Jones, you’re not quite as sick as we’d hoped.” In later work, Raskin includes a list of what he believes are all of the funny script oppositions, thus narrowing the playing field and quietening some objectors who had claimed that if one looks hard enough, one can find humor in anything, according to his theory. Many of Raskin’s script oppositions are open to

Humor in literature 

535

extremely broad interpretation, however, for example reality vs. unreality and expected vs. unexpected. Others, such as sex vs. religion, are less murky. Let us compare Rowan Atkinson’s quotation about the three ways a person can be funny, to Raskin’s theory. Atkinson said that a person can be funny by being in an unusual place, by behaving in an unusual way, and by being the wrong size. The first two are instances of the expected vs. unexpected opposition, the third of reality vs. unreality. Mr. Atkinson therefore agrees with Raskin, but Raskin’s theory wins in breadth of applicability. Most theories of humor, in fact, can be boiled down to something like the Script Semantic Theory of Humor. One theory of humor that stands in stark contrast is the aggression theory, according to which laughter is an aggressive social mechanism, and all jokes must have a butt. A common argument against the aggression theory of humor is that there are jokes that seem to have no butt at all, for example the elephant jokes popular in the 1950s:

Q: How does an elephant hide in a cherry tree? A: It paints its toenails red.

Possibly one could say that the silly elephant is the butt of the joke. Possibly someone adept at the black magic of literary theory could come up with an even more interesting target. But really, the joke is funny just because it’s silly – or according to script opposition, because it pits the elephant’s enormous bulk against the small size and negligible strength of a cherry tree. Script opposition is not enough to make a joke even in Raskin’s theory, however. Not every pair of incongruous things are funny. For example, there are several literary terms that would seem, at first glance, to qualify as jokes, but which are not. Here are some of them: Allegory: a story that has two meanings, that is really about two things. For example, George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm is on the surface a story about anthropomorphized farm animals – but it is arguably about the Russian revolution. Allegories are not usually funny because though the story means two very different things, they are really the same, and really very parallel to each other. Anagogy: a text that has some sort of higher meaning, beyond the literal one of the text. For example, some medieval theologians believed that the Bible could be read at several levels, each accessible to people who had attained a certain level of spiritual enlightenment. To people sufficiently unenlightened to read only the lowest of these levels, there would be no script opposition at all – and everyone else would see either an allegory, or

536 

Katrina E. Triezenberg

read each level in an entirely different dimension, offering no opportunity for script opposition to occur. Conceit: a kind of poetry popular in the Renaissance in which two seemingly dissimilar things are revealed to be very similar. As in the allegory, this isn’t funny because in the course of the poem we come to see that there is no script opposition at all. Double entendre: a  phrase that can be interpreted in two different ways, one of them usually obscene. These are very common in witty discourse and humorous literature that plays on words, but they are not necessarily funny themselves, because the two meanings may have nothing to do with each other. In the same way, a pun is not necessarily funny (see Hempelmann 2004). Metaphor: the use of one word or situation to denote another, as having the same qualities. Once again, not funny because the whole point is that the two things are similar, not opposed. Oxymoron: a compound word or a phrase consisting of two contradictory words, like “jumbo shrimp” or “bittersweet.” Some jokes are composed solely of an oxymoron (“military intelligence”) but many oxymorons aren’t funny, either because the terms don’t actually contradict each other (a food cannot be simultaneously sweet and bitter, but an emotion can) or because we are so used to hearing them that they are interpreted as phrasals, with no compositional meaning. Simile: to say that one thing is like another thing. As several times before, not funny because the two things are different but not opposed. In 1991 Attardo and Raskin (1991) extended the script opposition theory into a full-blown theory of verbal humor. In the General Theory of Verbal Humor, the script opposition (now called SO) is only one of six possible dimensions of a joke. The others are the target of the joke (TA), the logical mechanism by which the SO is resolved (LM), the situation in which the joke is set (SI), the language used to tell the joke (LA), and the narrative strategy used to tell the joke (NS). Not all of these dimensions apply to every joke; for instance, as noted during the discussion of the aggression theory of humor, not all jokes have targets. The language, or diction, used to tell the joke may also vary considerably from telling to telling especially if the humor is verbal rather than written, and a lot of jokes are really the very same joke put in a different situation, or as literary scholars would call it, setting. In fact, one can argue from the perspective of a person who is studying humor and the variety of jokes, that the only two which are unique to humor are the SO and the LM.

Humor in literature 

537

The existence of the LM implies that the SO needs to be somehow “resolved” to create humor – that is, one cannot simply juxtapose two incongruous things and call it a joke, but rather one must find a clever way of making them make pseudo-sense together. Attardo recently published what he considers to be the complete list of LMs (Attardo et al. 2002), and the reader is referred to this list for further reading on the subject. Attardo has continued to work in humor and literature since the publication of the first GTVH article, and the reader who is interested in studying literature from a linguistic point of view is strongly encouraged to read his work on the subject. He has, for instance, found that it is useful to chart each instance of a script opposition or “jab line” (rather than punch line, of which even a work of humorous literature should have no more than one) and to graph their occurrence throughout the text. Many authors display distinctive patterns on this kind of graph. O’Henry stories usually display only one joke, at the very end of the story, for example, while an Oscar Wilde play will have concentrations of them during particularly hilarious scenes, and a P. G. Wodehouse novel will have them with delightful – or perhaps stultifying – regularity. 5.  Literary enhancers GTVH goes a long way towards explaining what goes on inside an isolated joke, and Attardo’s further work has gone a long way towards applying the GTVH to literary humor. Such regular, structured theories have been created to explain all mediums of artistic expression and the student beginning studies in any particular art will quickly be acquainted with the formal theories he needs to know in order to take part in the medium’s discourse and evolution. Just knowing the theories, however, does not an artist make – and nor can the theories ever fully explain why one artist is successful and another isn’t. It is therefore inevitable that, while a scholar may agree with the SSTH and the GTVH (although it should be noted that there are some who agree with neither), these theories cannot be accepted as the be-all and end-all of humorous expression, especially not of humorous literature, which combines the craft of humor with the craft of storytelling. Triezenberg (2004) explored the techniques that a humorous writer or narrator uses to help the audience appreciate the humor in texts, and found a number of standard techniques (though by no means an exhaustive list of them) called humor enhancers. A humor enhancer is a narrative technique that is not necessarily funny in and of itself, but that

538 

Katrina E. Triezenberg

helps an audience to understand that the text is supposed to be funny, that warms them up to the author and to the text so that they will be more receptive to humor, and that magnifies their experience of humor in the text. Word choice or diction is listed as one of the six knowledge resources, but is used by Attardo to catalogue nameable literary entities such as those listed in the previous section. Diction can also be used as a humor enhancer, however, when words are carefully chosen to evoke particular scripts in the minds of the audience. Given that the heart of humor theory is script opposition, it makes sense that enforcing the desired scripts in the mind of the audience makes it more likely that they will understand jokes using those scripts. Thus a joke about lawyers will benefit from being prefaced by legal jargon, and a joke about farmers will benefit from being prefaced by rustic idioms. These scripts very often take the form of shared stereotypes. A stereotype is already familiar to most of the audience, and by using it as a script instead of painstakingly building up a fresh script in the mind of the audience, the humorist is able to make his jokes much more compact and elegant than they would otherwise be. Any joke can be killed by being told in too painstaking a manner, and literary jokes are no different. It goes without saying that, in using stereotypes, the humorist must be very careful first to make sure that the stereotype he is using really is a stereotype that is immediately recognizable by the majority of the audience, and second that its use is not likely to offend the audience – unless the aim is to amuse through shock value. Various cultural factors such as the recognizability or offensiveness of a stereotype can also be called humor enhancers, because the author must be so careful to know her audience before she crafts her jokes. An author who is very well-versed in the prejudices, hang-ups, and taboos of the intended audience, as well as the history of humor in that audience’s culture, will be much more successful than one who doesn’t know these things. To use an unrecognized stereotype is to fail to make a joke; to make fun of an issue that has rubbed the audience raw is to be at best boring and at worst boorish; to not know what was funny once, for twenty minutes, in 1965, is to be stale, to create a complete disconnect with the readers, and to fail utterly. Familiarity, however, can be used to the humorist’s advantage. If the humorist focuses on an issue that has been focused on before (being careful to do it in a fresh and original way), then the audience is relieved of the mental effort of taking in an entirely new idea – which leaves them relaxed and more apt to recognize humor when it comes along. Many newspaper columnists choose to focus on old humorous standbys, such as the war of the sexes, or the disagreeableness of co-workers, because so many people are able to so

Humor in literature 

539

easily digest such humor, which makes the columnist appeal to a  broader demographic. An author like Jane Austen has been around for so long that the literate public is more or less familiar with the way she pokes fun at her characters’ little foibles and faults, but she does it so cleverly that few authors have been able to successfully mimic her, and so the person who is reading her for the first time may have never encountered such social criticism before and may miss her humor entirely – especially since so much of it consists of (sexually innocent) double entendres. Familiarity also, for a reason that has never been satisfactorily explained, can be funny in and of itself. A comedian who can describe something spot-on elicits laughs, as does an actor who can do good impersonations. Repetition and variation can also be used to enhance humor in a piece, though unlike the other humor enhancers they can be interpreted as actual script oppositions, because normal language strives to avoid repetition, and so when it occurs an expected/unexpected opposition occurs. Repetition with skillful variation allows an author to use the same joke over and over again, magnifying it each time and also impressing the audience with his inventiveness. Good use of repetition makes a good joke even better, takes advantage of both stereotypes and familiarity to make the humor funnier. The script opposition structure works very well to describe an individual joke, and pretty well to describe a piece of humorous literature that depends on one big punch line near the end, such as many of O’Henry’s short stories or Gogol’s The Overcoat. It works less well to describe the overall structure of a piece that is primary literature and, secondarily, funny, such as the works of Oscar Wilde and P G. Wodehouse (although, if one dissected the humor out of the average Wodehouse novel, there would be precious little left). Three of Attardo and Raskin’s knowledge resources are universal to all literature: the diction or word choice, the setting, and the narrative strategy. The other three, the target, script opposition, and logical mechanism, are selectively applicable to various works. One could say that Animal Farm for example had Soviet Russia as its target and that, by extension, all works of satire or parody have a target. 6.  Why mysteries are not funny Script opposition and logical mechanism are both, interestingly, applicable to lies as well as to humor. This is perhaps not surprising when one takes into account Grice’s maxims of bona-fide communication (Grice 1975) and

540 

Katrina E. Triezenberg

finds that jokes and lies are both non-bonafide modes of communication, as is play-acting. One particular genre of literature is very interested in lies, and that is the mystery novel, the action of which often hinges around lies told by various characters. Part of the fun of reading a mystery is to try to tease out what characters are saying truths and untruths, and why they are doing it. The reader catches lies by catching script oppositions: by discovering that two incompatible scripts are supposed to be compatible. For example, in A  Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie, Dora Bunner calls her friend Miss Blacklock both Letty and Lotty, alternately. This is a script opposition: Miss Blacklock’s name is Letty, versus Miss Blacklock’s name is Lotty. The observant reader (as opposed to the merely voracious reader) will notice this disparity, and will find a reason to dismiss it: Dora Bunner is a scatty old lady who can’t keep anything straight in her head. This is a form of logical mechanism, from a strictly theoretical point of view. It allows the reader to see two incompatible ideas, and make them compatible. A similar script opposition happens later in the novel when Miss Blacklock receives a letter from Julia Simmons, who asks if she may come to live with Miss Blacklock – and Miss Blacklock is already sheltering Julia Simmons. Opposition, Julia Simmons is already living at Little Paddocks vs. Julia Simmons wants to come live at Little Paddocks. The logical mechanism that resolves this script opposition is impersonation: the Julia Simmons already living at Little Paddocks isn’t Julia Simmons at all. One can begin to build up a list of logical mechanisms used in mystery novels, and they are different from the logical mechanisms used in jokes. Experienced comedians have often observed that there are really very few jokes in the world, by which they most likely mean there is a finite list of logical mechanisms, and all jokes that use the same logical mechanism are fundamentally the same (interestingly, Ruch et al. 1993 found that readers of jokes were the least likely to rate two jokes with the same logical mechanism as being similar, compared to jokes that shared other knowledge resources – and yet, one instinctively thinks that all “garden path” jokes must be the same, and all “figure/ground reversal” jokes too, and one is absolutely sure that all linguistic deixis joke are the same, because there is an English word for them – puns. Why precisely the logical mechanism was so problematic should be explored further, but in the meantime, two explanations are proffered: first, that the logical mechanism lies so deep in the semantic structure of a joke that the naïve listener may not be aware of it while the experienced comedian, after hearing several tens of thousands of jokes, begins to make the

Humor in literature 

541

connection; second, that at the time the paper was written, the list of logical mechanisms was insufficiently elaborated). Just as the same logical mechanisms are used over and over again in joke after joke, they also begin to be used again and again by mystery writers. There are, after all, only so many ways to lie. Script opposition resolution through the two mechanisms given as examples, faulty memory and impersonation, are very common. What is particularly interesting about these logical mechanisms for mystery novels is that they can be divided into two different kinds. Both of them are the explanations that the reader is supposed to accept for the given script opposition, but while some of them really do represent the true resolution of the ambiguity in question, others are the lies, linguistic and otherwise, that characters in the novel have used in order to dismiss the incongruity. The reader is referred to A Murder is Announced to find out which of the two examples given is which. The last question to answer is the one that ought to have been in mind for several pages now: given that mystery novels seem to follow not only the GTVH, with knowledge resources, but also the SSTH with script oppositions, why are they not necessarily funny? The answer to this mystery is well-hidden in the earlier part of the chapter: the key to making the whole theory of humor work is the trigger, which alerts the reader to the fact that not only are two incompatible scripts trying to occupy the same space, but that there is a way to resolve this incongruity. In a joke, the realization comes upon the reader all at once, and this sudden reversal – very much what Isaac Asimov probably meant by “a sudden change of viewpoint” – elicits the experience of humor. The lies in a mystery novel, on the other hand, are often realized slowly, as the reader puts the pieces together, and so humor is often lost. Some of the very best and most famous mystery novels, however, such as Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, do save the whole explanation for the very end, and the explanation is skillfully and concisely enough written that the reader feels like laughing in delight – this is not quite an experience of humor, but something akin to it. This part of the discussion has been presented in order to illustrate the usefulness of humor theory in other types of literature besides the kind that is strictly humorous. A  modified version of the GTVH has been found to successfully describe many aspects of the standard murder mystery. Further research may discover (and has in the past discovered, a la Vladimir Propp’s formula for fairy tales, Propp 1971) that other genres are also amenable to structural theories.

542 

Katrina E. Triezenberg

References Asimov, Isaac 1971 Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor. A Lifetime Collection of Favorite Jokes, Anecdotes, and Limericks with Copious Notes on How to Tell Them and Why. New York: Houghton Mifflin. 1993 Asimov Laughs Again: More Than 700 Jokes, Limericks, and Anecdotes. New York: Harper Books. Attardo, Salvatore, and Victor Raskin 1991 Script theory revis(it)ed: Joke similarity and joke representation model. Humor 4 (3/4): 293–341. Attardo, Salvatore, Christian F. Hempelmann, and Sara Di Maio 2002 Script oppositions and logical mechanisms: Modeling incongruities and their resolutions. Humor 15 (1): 3–46. Grice, H. Paul 1975 Logic and conversation. In: Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 3: Speech Acts, 41–58. New York: Academic Press. Hempelmann, Christian F. 2004 Script opposition and logical mechanism in punning. Humor 17 (4): 381–392. Propp, Vladimir 1971 Morphology of the Folktale. Bloomington: American Folklore Society and Indiana University. Raskin, Victor 1985 Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Ruch, Willibald, Salvatore Attardo, and Victor Raskin 1993 Towards an empirical verification of the general theory of verbal humor. Humor 6 (2): 123–136. Triezenberg, Katrina 2004 Humor enhancers in the study of humorous literature. Humor 17 (4): 411–418. White, E. B., and K. S. White (eds.) 1941 A Subtreasury of American Humor. New York: Coward-McCann.

Communication and humor Dineh Davis Introduction Scholars from a  variety of disciplines are well represented in this volume and have traced the origins of humor and its well-established theories developed through many centuries of philosophizing and conducting field and experimental research. My task is to focus on the issues of humor as they relate to human communication needs and desires. Given our vantage point in early twenty-first century, I am delighted to have the paradigmatic excuse to summarize the knowledge in this field from a fundamentally post-modernist perspective. However, my intention in presenting my findings in this manner is primarily self-serving and a reiterative reflection of the paradoxes inherent in the topic of humor. Suffice it to say that I believe humor theories tell us more about the theoreticians’ own perspective on life and their attitudes toward other humans than they do about humor itself. Humor, therefore, is simply a manifestation of a person’s outlook on life; and by extension, the following are my subjective ruminations on this topic and may, therefore, tell you more about this writer than about humor. Defining humor  

“To define is to exclude and negate.” – Jose Ortega y Gasset

First, it is helpful to realize that the mere process of defining such a broad concept as humor has its own drawbacks and dangers. While some authors have used a variety of words and concepts interchangeably with humor (such as wit, comedy, risible, mirth, etc.), others have gone to great lengths to distinguish the nuances evident in such lists. Samuel Butler noted that definitions are “A kind of scratching, and generally leave a sore place more sore than it was before.” (Webster’s quotable definitions, 1988). Yet, operationalizing a  definition is instrumental in achieving common ground. At least,

544 

Dineh Davis

for the purposes of the current discussion, I must submit to a broader and more flexible definition than those adopted by some other scholars. McGhee (1979), for example, defines humor “as a form of intellectual play, (p.42)” He then suggests that there are two forms of such play, one which is quite serious and involves knowledge expansion; while the other is intended to be playful and focuses on resolving fantasy incongruities – which he identifies as the essence of a child’s sense of humor. Though I can easily agree with this working definition, I do have a concern with what McGhee has chosen to exclude from his studies: the concept of mirth. He states, “we are mirthful when we are merry and in a  generally lighthearted mood… Mirthful laughter may result from one’s gay mood and a sense of fun and amusement, though, without anything being funny in a humorous sense. (p. 8)” Here, I presume, he is using the term “humorous” to be limited to obvious and addressable incongruities easily discernible in a punch-line. It presumes that we all share the same concept of what is “humorous.” Gruner (1997) has further reduced the concept of intellectual play into a “game” and further delimits the concept of a game to that which has a winner and a loser. Yet, unlike Gruner, there are many who don’t consider every humorous episode as a win/lose proposition – nor would some consider any act of losing as an occasion for grieving. My definition expands to the metalevel of life as a game – potentially with many winners who are at the same time losers – given that none of us has yet managed to get out of this life alive. Therefore, life itself is full of incongruities; yet, for many individuals and for most of the time, such incongruities are strictly a cause for pain. This tragicomic view of life is clearly within the greater tradition of communication as a narrative or story-telling paradigm (Fisher 1978; Fisher 1987) As such, game-playing may be considered the essence of each human communication act. At the risk of getting ahead of myself in the discussion of humor and gender, I must admit to having read a variety of books and articles on humor without ever choosing to stop and define the word humor, per se. In fact, I chose to read and enjoy most of two books by McGhee (1979; and with Chapman 1980) before retracing my steps and looking more carefully at his definition of humor. I did so only because I was baffled by some of the gender differences noted in research environments that worked from pre-selected items of a humorous nature – as defined by the researchers. Once I did submit myself to the parameters drawn for humor, however, I recognized its exclusionary nature and the artificiality of its limitations.

Communication and humor 

545

What is more interesting than “humor” from a communication perspective is to focus on the qualities of a “sense of humor” and what it brings to bear on the process of effective communication, rather than limit oneself to the particular applications or “episodes” of humor in various settings. This approach forces us to examine the full effects of humor on communication without necessarily relying on prefabricated examples of humor (each with its own inherent researcher-imposed personal and cultural biases) or looking for external signs we may have come to associate with humor such as smiling, laughter, or knee-slapping; albeit that such signs are likely to be present when humor is in full force. In fact, as we shall see, considering the obvious difference between “humor” and a “sense of humor” forces us to distinguish between the more superficial aspects of funny, laugh-out-loud moments in life and a deeper, wiser, more light-hearted approach to life in general. While in agreement with Alice Meynell’s proclamation that “The sense of humor has other things to do than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter.” (Partnow 1977) I must also find room for Fleet’s definition of humor, first published in 1890, which comes rather close to a universal state of mind relating humor to imprefection: “It is this imperfection in one form or another which furnishes the risible element in any incident, presenting ingenuity, which excites laughter or the smile of risibility as well as admiration.” (Fleet 1970) He is quick to point out that the term imperfection should not be construed as a moral deficiency. Given the wide range of existing definitions, and sensing a personal dissonance from my inability to resign myself to any single one, I took on the challenge of finding a broad enough definition to satisfy a variety of tastes. To this end, I posed the question “How do you define humor?” via e-mail and in person to approximately 120 students, colleagues, and friends with varied cultural backgrounds; a fortunately trivial task in Hawaii. Though some used the masculine and predetermined definition and were specific about what constitutes humor for them (an element of surprise or incongruity, for example; or a thinly veiled display of hostility or aggression); I received a much broader range of definitions – as well as related words and concepts - from women and men who self-identified as lacking a sense of humor (apparently, as defined by the respected mainstream) or of having no desire or ability to be humorous. One thread which tended to come from non-Western traditions equated humor with wisdom of the highest order and sought to differentiate this concept from the more mundane “joke.” This, in itself, defies the accepted lumping together of humor and jokes (or creating, telling, or understanding jokes as

546 

Dineh Davis

the primary testing ground for determining one’s humor quotient!) by many Western humor researchers. Along these lines, another wrote: “I also think that maybe both happiness and humor evoke that same feeling in a person... the feeling of satisfaction maybe?” Though Gruner would zero in on the word “satisfaction” here as an indication of “winning,” there is no reason to assume that someone else has, by default, “lost” something in the process. Humor is the ability to mock reality; a will to experience joy (versus condemnation for one’s awkwardness)” said one man who had pondered for several weeks why he was always so serious and unable to appreciate humor. The revelation came to him quite self-consciously in a  friendly get-together in which others, near-strangers, had tried to put him at ease by making light of his awkwardness. Here was a situation that was not “funny” for any of the participants, yet it brought a sudden and deep appreciation for what became the embodiment of the self-definition of humor in a highly-reasoned humorous moment. A final thought on a sense of humor sums up the various points made so far: “A sense of humor to me is the ability, desire and willingness to sieve through all that tragedy and suffering, and recognize the little pockets of optimism and hope. It is like panning for gold- you have to go through all the dirt and muck first.  (Lim 2002)

Humor is the quintessential manifestation of the human psyche exposed and potentially bared to its core. Seeing the humor in what someone else takes quite seriously and therefore recognizing the critical role that pure subjectivity of the receiver of information plays in humor is best portrayed in a classic anthropological study published in a  most respected scholarly journal depicting the strange rites and rituals of the Naciremas (Miner 1956) – who ultimately turn out to be the American “tribe.” In two separate readings which is typically what it takes most readers to come to grips with the full flavor of this piece - absolutely nothing external to the reader need change at all. On second reading, the only shift is in the internal frame of reference and perspective of the reader. This perspective is sure to change and take on a humorous overtone on how North Americans have been looking at tribes around the world and reporting their scientific findings on their behaviors, rites, and rituals – purportedly in a fully objective manner. The moral of the Naciremas account from my personal perspective is that what we may take for granted in our daily lives (such as brushing our teeth or going to the dentist) will sound strange and ritualistic indeed to the uninitiated. This strangeness, when played back to us with a different sensibility, will suddenly seem absurd and therefore humorous; albeit the action and outcome remain unchanged. It is this seemingly arbitrary shift in the internal perception and interpretation of

Communication and humor 

547

the world that casts some doubt on the narrower definitions of humor and its relationship to a sense of humor. Thus, still hesitating to choose a single, exclusionary definition for humor, I propose this broader (and therefore much more vague) concept: humor is any sudden episode of joy or elation associated with a new discovery that is self-rated as funny. A sense of humor is the subtle but consistent ability to remain lighthearted in a wide range of circumstances, from the obvious occasions of happiness and joy to the more sacred and grave encounters with distress and tragedy. Given that all interpretations by humans are ultimately subjective and self-directed, this definition extends to any discovery in its broadest sense, as it becomes conscious in one individual’s mind and causes that person to believe she or he has experienced the essence of humor. Such joy is created intrinsically, but may manifest itself outwardly in smiles or laughter and is very much affected by a person’s general environment, including immediate natural and social surroundings as well as the larger cultural contexts. Having established my preference for a  subjective and inclusive definition of humor from a personal perspective, I must indulge in a paradox of offering some options on what humor may not be – from a social perspective or in certain specified contexts. As a culture, we have come to acknowledge the Political Correctness of not using hurtful humor to stratify society. In a more specific context, it seems perfectly logical to differentiate among terms that may be considered synonymous with humor. In a lucid example of this variety, Kronenberger (Kronenberger 1972) differentiated between wit and humor as follows: Where wit is a  form of criticism or mockery, humor includes an element of self-criticism or self-mockery; where wit tends to proclaim imperfection, humor wryly acknowledges it; where wit undresses you, humor goes naked. At its best, humor simultaneously hurts and heals, makes one larger from a willingness to make oneself less. It has essentially much more breadth than wit, from being much more universal in appeal and human in effect. If harder to translate or explain, it often need not be explained or translated at all, revealing itself in a sudden gesture, a happy juxtaposition. We speak constantly of ‘the humor of the situation,’ almost never of the wit; just so, virtually everything that is farcical or funny derives from humor gone a bit wild.  (p. 11)

The list of synonyms for humor and related words and concepts is obviously quite long. In reviewing such a list, it becomes quite apparent that one cannot arbitrarily include or exclude any one of them based on their positive or negative connotations. I asked a broad range of individuals to provide me with

548 

Dineh Davis

words they associated with humor. The following sample compilation from their suggestions will indicate the quite subjective interpretation of the concept of humor – given that some of these words have quite negative connotations: burlesque, cachinnate, chestnut, clown, comic, farce, farceur, farcical, fleer, fun, funny, hilarity, inside joke, irony, irreverent, jape, jest, jester, jocosity, jocularity, jovial, joke, jolly, joy, laugh, laughter, merry, mirth, mockery, nicker, pantagruelism, parody, practical joke, riant, ribald, ridden, ridicule, ridiculous, risible, risqué, roast, sarcasm, satire, scoff, scurrilous, silly, sneer, snigger, tease, wag, waggery, wheeze, wit. This exercise provides further evidence of the subjectivity of humor in a single society. Literature review As with any social-scientific disciplinary creation of the last century or two, the roots of communication studies (and, therefore, humor studies from a communication perspective) go deep into the realm of philosophy, rhetoric, language, and politics of Plato and Aristotle. Such matters are well represented by Morreall in his chapter on philosophy. As the modern scientific forces became stronger with influences of psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and the like, communication as a discipline turned to methods of inquiry with heuristic values and more readily quantifiable answers to questions that lent themselves more readily to having definitive answers. In this fledgling discipline that had to establish its legitimacy as a science within the positivist tradition of its time, one could hardly fault the scholars for avoiding the study of humor – which could easily be classified as frivolous and nonessential to those most interested in funding the research needed to streamline the command structures of the military and business world. Given the scientific recognition of ambiguity and subjectivity at the very core of inquiries in the natural and social sciences, there has been a  slow shift in acknowledging merit in the study of concepts that don’t readily lend themselves to quantification or absolute answers. It is in this context that I will now move forward in the recent history of humor studies in the field of communication. Where I have found specific references to research already accomplished within the discipline, I  have noted such efforts. Otherwise, the following narrative offers a more personal version of elements that affect humor. As will be reviewed below, most communication scholars have focused on how humor is formed for communication purposes, (such asBerger 1976;

Communication and humor 

549

Berger 1993) and its functionality or applicability in various contexts and circumstances (Alberts 1990; Bippus 2000; Boland and Hoffman 1983; Gruner 1997; Honeycutt and Brown 1998; McGhee and Chapman 1980; Meyer 2000; Perry et al., 1997). These issues are potentially less complex and more amenable to objective observation, thus lending themselves more readily to scientific inquiry. What is less directly examined is what affects the sender’s perceptions of humor and what allows the recipient to understand the true intentions of the sender of a  humorous message. Such inquiries face the familiar dilemmas of too many variables within the social environment (Chapman et al., 1980). Therefore, after defining humor and offering a brief literature review - based on sources of influence, I will turn to those issues of a purely subjective nature such as gender and humor, and my perspective on the role of archetypes in universalization of humor. A discussion of the physiognomic origins of laughter and the innate predisposition of humans to use these facial gestures to signal peace, happiness, or submission and to enhance harmony and survival is beyond the scope of this discussion, but is well documented in a  variety of related disciplines and in early works (see, for example, Chapman and Foot 1976; Haig 1988). Nevertheless, by focusing specifically on the positive social role that such nonverbal communication plays, it is hard to relegate the origins or functions of humor to an arbitrary subset of human needs for communication and interaction. Rather, we must recognize the central role of humor in any human communication and strive to legitimize its continued and systematic study. Humor begins within and may remain entirely within the individual (such as in self-talk or self-discovery); and as such can be dealt with within the disciplines of philosophy or psychology. Once it manifests itself in any public sphere where two or more individuals are involved, however, we can most justifiably examine its consequences or effects within the discipline of communication. As with any human communication environment, we can identify several clusters of elements that can affect a  single act of humor communication. One of the earliest and simplest communication theories describing the functions of mass communication identifies the critical elements in this process as the sender, message, receiver, channel, and outcome (“Who says what in which channel to whom and to what effect?” (Lasswell 1948). Depending on the specific focus of researchers in the field, numerous other elements have been identified since then. The following compilation and expansion on those elements recognizes the complexity and nuances of understanding and enjoying humor from

550 

Dineh Davis

a communicative perspective. Though I have chosen to define humor in its broadest possible sense to form a unifying umbrella for this concept, it is only fitting that the sources of influence be identified much more specifically to illustrate the subjectivity of humor. –– Sender: Will obviously have the same generic characteristics as shown below for the receiver. I have focused on the receiver since humor, more than any other genre of communication, implies an overt or hidden desire for the recipients’ enjoyment and depends on their positive and clear understanding for its success. Mood is everything – but not necessarily just for the sender – as may be the case for many other forms of communications. Predispositions and individual differences pointing to a person’s proclivity toward using or attempting to use humor in certain settings and behavior related to such decisions has been studied systematically, leading to a reliable Humor Orientation Scale (Booth-Butterfield and Booth-Butterfield 1991). The Booth-Butterfield studies can also show a positive relationship between self-ratings and projections of those who are close friends or associates. Still, one of the self-fulfilling (or self-defeating?!) prophecies found in many humor studies that rely on self- and other-ratings is that in all likelihood those with a similar sense of humor form closer ties. In fact, it may be far more interesting to take such Humor Orientation (HO) study results as a base to determine whether similarities in HO scores can be an indicator of other shared predispositions. –– Receiver: Along with the sender, will have innate personality characteristics and predispositions that embody archetypical elements of moods, values, virtues, sins & vices; intelligence, as well as the hidden and unconscious elements of the self. Given the complex nature of each receiver’s inherent disposition and his or her social construction of the world, those who have attempted to conduct research in this area have had to focus their study on an extremely limited domain, such as the receiver’s evaluation of humorous and nonhumorous speeches for credibility (for example,Chang and Gruner 1981; Hackman 1998). One of the exception to this approach is a study of teasing and recipient reaction to this form of humor, which is greatly affected by the receiver’s personal perception of the sender’s intent. This study confirms our common sense that when the sender’s intent is interpreted as serious, then the teasing is simply “not funny” (Alberts et al., 1996). –– Culture: human-made elements in the environment arguably have the most distinct effects on the perception of humor as confirmed by cross-cultural studies (such asBremmer and Roodenburg 1997; Hackman and Barthel-

Communication and humor 

551

Hackman 1993). Ethnic jokes are the most blatantly obvious manifestation of this effect. However, cultural biases and effects are not limited to regional, national, or racial/ethnic differences among us. Other subcultures such as gender, sexual orientation, various disabilities, and age are among the many classifications that provide cohesion for the inner circle and tend to exclude “outsiders” in humor-related circumstances. –– Environment: natural elements such as the weather, geographic location, seasons, and the like serve not only as unique settings for humor but also affect the perception and mood of humor recipients. Despite the negative emotions associated with natural disasters, such settings provide one of the staple scenarios for jokes: storms and floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and the like provide ample opportunities to throw together those human elements in society that don’t typically interact under normal circumstances. Supernatural elements (such as humans meeting at heaven’s gate or in the depths of hell; appearance of ghosts or aliens, etc.) are also used in abundance to add mystery and magic to the environment. –– Surroundings: combination of human and natural elements in a more immediate sense, can determine the receptivity of the humor recipient. For example, the same joke that may be considered quite hilarious in a locker room with same-sex friends, may fall flat at a formal dinner party with the same set of friends, but within a larger group. I am, therefore, separating the more specific concept of “surroundings” from the more general variations of an environmental or cultural system. Furthermore, within such specific surroundings, other characteristics will continue to cause situational differences. Thus, the adage: “You had to be there!” –– Situational characteristics: –– Mood: Based on the surroundings, as described above, receptivity can change dramatically. Even the sequencing of jokes can result in aftereffects or residual mood-shifts that will affect the outcome of new interactions –– Demographics of EACH of the senders and receivers and bystanders in the surroundings: Age, sex, sexual orientation, gender, race, ethnicity, education, economic status, power status, birth order, ad infintum… –– States of life: Pregnancy, Infancy, Toddlerhood, Childhood and being a “student” – preschool through grad school, dating & courtship, Marriage & divorce, old age, death, illness, & other morbidities. Clearly, even within the same category in the “state of life” one must remain sensitive to the recipient’s moment-to-moment situation to make sense of what may be appropriate humor. For example, what may be quite a funny and

552 

Dineh Davis

pleasant activity to a woman in the first trimester of her pregnancy may simply become physiologically or emotionally unbearable in the second or third trimester (at such a time, for example, don’t plan a surprise funny movie marathon aboard a three-hour trolley ride with no rest-stops - if you plan to impress her with your sense of humor!) –– Time of day; era or epoch and all other variations in time. Time, in larger increments, clearly involves a change of culture and human sensibilities. Just as some people wish to remain in the most pleasant time of their lives by keeping their hairstyle or clothing fixed in that era, so do some tend to keep the same perception of what’s funny when all around them the world may have changed. In shorter time increments, we might consider the same concept of external appearance and relate it to a single day. One may change clothes when going to bed, going to work, or going to formal or informal parties after work. Humor may need the same shift throughout the day or week – but many tend to have a “one size fits all occasions” attitude about practical jokes, teasing, clowning, and other forms of humor that are hard to sell independent of the time factor. –– Opportunities: in the context of interactivity options; relationship with message sender; relationship of demographics to surrounding environment; relationship of innate characteristics to surrounding environment, etc. What is most important to consider is whether the opportunity for interaction will allow the sender to clarify misunderstandings or offer the recipient a chance to respond, if one is needed. Of course, there may be a physical opportunity – in that both the sender & receiver are in the same location at the same time – but this does not take into account the power-relationship that may prevent the recipient to be honest or forthcoming with a heartfelt response. –– Channel of communication: With new communication technologies presenting themselves more rapidly than we can assimilate, not only do such channels present an abundance of opportunities for innovative modes of communication, but they also provide a wealth of resources for humor and can themselves become the butt of new jokes. In fact, one can easily determine the diffusion level of new communication technologies by how often they are referred to in humor-based situations (just think of when VCR/ clock-setting jokes entered our collective consciousness and the creativity humorists show in the context of ubiquitous computing, such as the bathroom scale locking your refrigerator door!) Back to the uses & effects of media choice on humor reception, here is a very brief synopsis of uses & effects;

Communication and humor 

553

–– face-to-face & live; humor use is studied as a  turn-taking cue; attention-getting device; display of hearership; and an invitation to elaborate (O’Donnell-Truijillo and Adams 1983) At best, all communication has the potential for ambiguity. Humor, on the other hand, has every reason to build in ambiguity simply for its effect. Though I am not aware of any full scale studies in this context, I have suggested elsewhere the incongruity resulting in our expectation of what is real and what is virtual when hearing recorded messages where a real voice was expected (Davis 1995). It is, therefore, quite possible to make positive use of this element of ambiguity to create sudden shifts in meaning, even after the message has been delivered. It is quite common that something said in earnest will be turned into a “joke” if the sender of the message has the opportunity to observe the recipient’s facial or body language. If the serious message is not received well, the sender can always plead “I was just joking” and save face. This, of course, becomes much more difficult in mediated circumstances. –– mediated: one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, many-to-one; oneway; two-way; synchronously interactive & “live”, etc. When a message – even one with little nuance to its meaning – is relayed over a technologically mediated channel of communication, we are immediately introducing some level of ambiguity for the recipient in that the individual has to take it “on faith” that the message received is in fact the message sent and that it has in no way changed during the transmission process. Technology, however, is not infallible. On the one hand it may be possible to use this fallibility to “back out of ” humor-gone-awry. On the other hand, once the damage is done, it is far more difficult to recover from mistakes; especially because a documented message is harder to forget and easier to collect, archive, and pass on to others. Thus, what may have been ephemeral in a face-to-face circumstance, is now likely to haunt the sender or receiver indefinitely. It is my contention that this is why not much “spontaneous” humor takes place in fully on-line classroom settings (Alarcon 2001). –– Message, or the humor itself which can be verbal or nonverbal; planned or spontaneous; intentional or unintentional (Keysar 2000); effortless or contrived; directed or undirected (toward a given recipient or bystander, or a larger audience); as well as purposive or purposeless. Messages are further analyzable based on whether they achieve their internal goal of conveying what the message producer intended (Edwards and Chen 2000) and their function (Meyer 2000). The latter perspective which focuses on

554 

Dineh Davis

the sender’s intent is, in fact, the locus of a great deal of research in communication and humor. Such functions, as succinctly described by Meyer (2000) fall into two major categories of unity/division and are further subdivided as follows: –– To unite (helping to bring people together in one group) –– Identification: –– as credibility enhancer –– for group cohesiveness and resource for affiliation (Murstein and Brust 1985; O’Donnell-Truijillo and Adams 1983) –– to communicate feelings –– to deepen relationships –– to enhance uncertainty reduction –– To clarify issues or positions –– To create or promote division (separating the in-group from Others) –– For enforcement of social norms –– To facilitate differentiation. All of the above functions are fully explored by Meyer (2000) –– Context: Ranges from interpersonal (Honeycutt and Brown 1998; Wanzer et al., 1996) and small group settings (Bethea et al., 2000) to organizational (Brown 1990) and mass media contexts (Perry et al., 1997) and in every imaginable field of endeavor. In addition, to the basic issues of context, scholars have also paid attention to the recontextualization of rhetoric as in the case of re-presentation and creation of the “Dole humor myth” (Levasseur and Dean 1996). The concept of context is too broad to quantify in this chapter, so the following examples serve as a somewhat random walk through the context territory: –– Interpersonal relationship building and maintenance (O’Donnell-Truijillo and Adams 1983; Payne 2001); role of humor in overcoming communication apprehension (Hackman and Barthel-Hackman 1993); and functions of humor in conversation (Graham et al., 1992) –– Educational setting (Wanzer and Frymier 1999) –– Intercultural studies (Hackman and Barthel-Hackman 1993) –– Political humor and its effectiveness in political campaigns and gaining popularity in office (Chapel 1978; Levasseur and Dean 1996; Meyer 1990; Moore 1992) and even an analysis of the role of cartoons in depicting the role of the first lady/first wife (Edwards and Chen 2000) –– Religious settings (Jablonski 2000) –– Humor in public address is a very well studied area both in terms of edu-

Communication and humor 

555

cation and effectiveness (Chang and Gruner 1981; Grimes 1955a; Grimes 1955b; Gruner 1967; Gruner 1985; Hackman 1998). –– Effects of humor in mass media (King 2000; Perry et al., 1997) –– Bystanders: though not typically considered a part of the communication environment, we must add the “innocent” bystander who may easily play an unforeseen role in the creation, execution, or enjoyment of the humor in any potentially humorous communication act and thus lose the bystander status in the process of humor assimilation! –– Disciplinary bystanders: though we associate the study of humor with a variety of arts, humanities, and social science disciplines, we are less inclined to look for connections to certain other disciplines such as mathematics. To illustrate that humor can be studied from nearly every angle, Paulos (Paulos 1980) offers a book on mathematics and MacHovec (­MacHovec 1988) relies on the astronomical concept of syzygy to build a theory of humor that once again demonstrates the subjective perceptions of the receiver even when the outcome is a scientific offering. As can be deduced from the above list and the numerous additional elements at play in any given communication act, humor is likely to be too subtle, fielddependent, and riddled with individual differences to lend itself readily to communication research at an inclusive or unified level. The most universally visible and therefore the most researched and explored forms of humor are those that are premeditated and contrived. These consciously purposive forms of humor may, in fact, form the smallest subset of all experienced humor in daily life for the majority of the world’s population. Just the same, because of the convenience and availability of such resources as well as their reproducibility, observability, and sharability through public media, this is the primary base for most humor research in the field. Issues There are a wide range of issues to be considered in the study of humor in communication. The literature review section above provides a glimpse of where most research has taken place, thus leaving open a wide range of topics that remain to be explored by future researchers. I have chosen two inter-related issues that are of potential interest to the general public and that blend well with my subjective approach to the concept of humor in communication.

556 

Dineh Davis

Humor and gender In response to my inquiry regarding the definition of humor – especially as represented by Gruner’s unified model of humor as a win–lose game (1997) – a female professional (engineer) responded as follows: Got me thinking regarding the ‘win/lose’ strategy: There exists the sociological tendency to dichotomize ‘us vs. them’, however, I do not feel that it is a grand theory at all. Rather, in my opinion it is our INABILITY to see beyond this dichotomy that restricts us in this life. It was suggested to me recently by a very ‘intelligent’ individual (my framing) that there is NO SUCH THING as win/win; there is just compromise/compromise or win/lose. The implicit assumption: that ‘our’ goals are conflicting, that we cannot ‘both’ get what we want at the same time. I thought that this was a rather pessimistic take on the subject… You REALLY made me wonder about myself & my own outlook on life (although it might explain why I really don’t appreciate much humor (ethnic, gender, etc) - to me it is insulting even if I am not “the party” being selected out. However, am I taking it too seriously? And, is humor a game? Is life a game? If I only had these answers...



A female professor of literature shared similar thoughts: I don’t own a television set myself [because I would spend far too much time watching], but have been house-sitting for some friends who have cable and I decided to catch up on viewing some sitcoms. I was amazed and depressed at all the dissing that goes on. How is this funny? It is especially depressing to see women (and worse yet, women on women) using this technique to get laughs. Don’t we get dissed enough every day of our lives? Why do we need to subject ourselves to even more of this in the name of humor?

One of the most useful theories applied to communication acts and outcomes from the perspective of the “underdog” is the Standpoint theory which acknowledges the unique perspective of those in less powerful positions. It contends that while those in power need see and interpret events only from their own point of view, those with less power have to learn at least two perspectives based on their status in life: that of the group in power as well as that of their own. This is simply a matter of survival. A clear example of Standpoint theory in the context of humor involves the very definition of this term. McGhee (1979) notes in his study of children that it is not considered socially acceptable to ask children to react to humor that relies on sexual innuendoes whereas it is permissible to share aggressive and hostile humor with kids. This points out the dilemma referred to earlier in defining “humor”

Communication and humor 

557

and how other researchers had defined humor in the existing literature. There is considerable anecdotal evidence that the majority of the fans of the Three Stooges are boys and men. Because boys and men find inflicting physical pain upon others (such as poking someone’s eyes out or beating them over the head) as hilarious, it seems perfectly natural to define humor within such parameters that make physical abuse a funny – or at the very least, a trivial matter. It is not so much an objection to Three Stooges – for humor is subjective and therefore if this is what some find funny, so be it. I am in no position to deny someone their reality of considering physical abuse done in jest as funny. What is more bothersome is the exclusionary clause that tends to limit, from my standpoint, what I may find equally humorous from the definition for humor. In other words, why would a  scholar/researcher limit my reality by using Three Stooges as an example of humor but a win/win game of word-play or a challenge to create a new, and potentially funny word for an existing concept as “not funny” - by declaration - simply because this mental challenge does not have a punch-line or a loser? The following may serve as another illustration of how such declarations or exclusive definitions may bias our views of what can be legitimately considered funny. Past studies have identified a greater ability on the part of boys and men to create humor (as self-defined by men). It is also well-documented by educators that the single category of verbal skill at which boys, on the aggregate, outscore girls on the SAT exams is the understanding and making of analogies. It may be interesting to research the common connection between the skill of solving analogies, and the linking of two incongruous concepts, i.e., a mainstream definition of humor. This, in turn leads to the types of riddles that can only be solved by their makers, thus easily associated with the win/ lose theory of humor as a game. Of course, there are those among us who have no particular genetic or socially constructed mandate to try to solve riddles; in which case there is more amusement when the riddle is presented “solved” in a joke’s punch line. One such joke used by a stand-up comic recently can be represented as a riddle here: How is an Irishman at the beach the same as a fork in a microwave oven? A much older example that uses an analogy format yet defies – or defeats – the logical semantic purpose has been used on bumper stickers and T-shirts: “A woman without her man is like a fish without a bicycle.” Another variation on this theme is metaphor building as a common joke script. An appropriate example in this case would be: “Women are like dictionaries, they have a million different words to describe the same thing.”

558 

Dineh Davis

McGhee (1979: 211) cites a 1933 study by Brackett confirming that preschool boys and girls at play show equal amounts of laughter. Once children reach school age, social and cultural norms for humor have already become better established. Is it any wonder then, that if the prototypical jokes “tested” with children are reinforcing humor preferred by men or boys that they will show a preference for it in research settings as well? The long-term differences continue to show divergent reactions by men and women to the same stimuli considered to be humorous in nature. For example, King (2000) reports a distress reaction by women who watch movies where the hero makes wisecracks, but that subsequently reduces their stress level when measured after viewing televised depictions of nonhumorous real violence. Converse to this reaction, men watching the same wisecracking hero found the film less distressful than the women, yet noted greater distress when watching the real nonhumorous violence. Although these reactions were extremely shortlived, they still point to a  basic difference in the way such information is processed by women and men, which the researchers are attributing to their ­disposition. The same social roles that boys and girls learn in their early school years are also reflected in their later intimate relationships and well into their marriage. Men tend to be the joke-tellers while women stay with their supportive roles of enjoying the jokes offered (Honeycutt and Brown 1998). McGhee (1979) showed tremendous foresight, however, in predicting that the women’s movement of the early 1970s was likely to produce a feminine genre of humor that could have universal appeal. As with all other social movements, the outcome was perhaps not quite as immediate as hoped for, but by 1993 Morreall (1993) was reporting the following differences in the origins and delivery of traditionally masculine and emerging feminine forms of humor: While men displayed a competitive attitude stemming from distrust, hostility, envy, and jealousy, used a  negative tone and singled out victims and aimed to make some people feel good at the expense of others, women’s humor stemmed from a caring concern for everyone and depended on a cooperative attitude to bring everyone together and make them feel good. Men were more likely to single out one person and target the weak while women took aim at the powerful but did so in a positive light and focused on what many of us do. Women have also been noted for using more self-disparaging humor than men (McGhee 1979: 206) One of the advantages of Xerox-lore, Fax-humor, and Internet-based humor is that the collective contributions from a wide range of participants lend and even-handedness to gender-based humor. For example, metaphor

Communication and humor 

559

lists are combined to present both male and female perspectives on a variety of topics. One of the most popular examples of this genre involves comparing both men and women to computers. Here are two finalists in this genre: A computer must be female because as soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it. Yet, a computer must be male because they’ll usually do what you ask them to do, but they won’t do more than they have to and they won’t think of it on their own. The singular subjectivity of the experience of humor as compared to other universal states of mind is quite apparent when we begin to delve into our mass media instruments. One might notice, for example, that American television programs don’t resort to fake audience “gasp tracks” to show surprise or fear in scary scenes, whereas many feel compelled to use laugh tracks to increase audience compliance to consider something humorous. In fact, this points to two different observations regarding the truly subjective nature of humor: (1) that despite the universality of humor in human life, there is no single way to represent, depict or evoke this emotion beyond the verbal and visual cues (such as showing or hearing an audience’s laughter) whereas, for example, we might find a universal aural or musical cue to arouse other emotions – such as fear or grief; and (2) there is a need to reinforce the concept of humor in mass presentations or use social pressure to bring every viewer into compliance with what the media (message sender) would like to dictate or establish as a humorous “norm.” Use of laugh tracks, even when taken from a “real” audience but superimposed over a single person’s way of seeing and interpreting creates simply an illusion of humor, therefore putting the onus on the individual viewer to justify why they “just don’t get it.” Gender differences point toward women’s greater proclivity to enjoy humor as a social construction above and beyond their equally inherent ability to see the logic of a humorous piece. (McGhee 1977) Why, then, do so many men and women consider the use of laughtracks offensive? Would such contrivances not be superfluous if something rang genuinely funny to the audience because of a shared sense of humor? The mere fact that girls and women feel socially compelled to laugh at a joke and see humor where none really existed for them before should not be a license for promoters of any message to capitalize on this behavior to further their own cause. Still, what the public hears from the scientific community is that laugh-tracks work, rather than the how or why of this phenomenon. Clearly, we offer few courses to men and women on media literacy and its gendered nuances. Thus we continue with a sanctioned exploitation

560 

Dineh Davis

technique well within the accepted parameters of the application of scientific research to promote industry. The deeper pervasive level of social impact also prevails by not openly acknowledging human differences in the context of “equally valid” frames of reference as opposed to the dichotomy of right/ wrong or better/worse. Humor archetypes in communicating frailties For this issue, I would like to begin by building the following scenario: Let us presume, for the purposes of this discussion, that there is only one “prototype” human on earth who embodies the entire human race as we know it today. Because this person is alone and strictly a unified prototype, we need not gender-differentiate, nor can we recognize a  race or ethnicity. Finally, because time and distance are not of the essence, there is no need to consider space/time variations that affect its sensibilities. In a Jungian tradition we may consider this person the embodiment of our collective unconscious. This person, then, will possess all the human qualities we recognize and attribute – in part – to those around us today. This is Every Human about whom myths and legends abound. Psychologists and other social scientists rediscovered through scientific methods the essence of Every Human in ancient myths and folklore: that, in the aggregate, people have a  predictable set of personality traits. Some traits may be more pronounced – or even overpowering – in some individuals while minimized or not quite as apparent in others. Clearly, it is more than a coincidence that various spiritual traditions of the world have identified a similar set of vices and virtues for their own practitioners. A reasonable representation of such vices in Western tradition are the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, gluttony, covetousness, sloth, lust, envy, and anger. If we were to look carefully at the majority of scripted jokes and humor around the world, we would be sure to find that the greater percentage of the cause for laughter stems from violations of what – somewhere deep in the recesses of our mind - we hold to be moral values. Now, let us look back at our Every Human. In some cultural traditions for the telling of a humorous story all the qualities of Every Human are transferred into a single character, typically necessitating the creation of an idiotsavant. Such is the case of Mulla Nasr’aldin, the ever-present character in all Sufi jokes. Sometimes he seemingly behaves like an idiot, sometimes he is the wisest person around. The stories may make us laugh or they may just make

Communication and humor 

561

us wonder. While Mulla Nasr’aldin served the Sufis well, for the rest of us it may be easier to provide a wider range of culturally discernible “shorthand” joke characters that epitomize certain qualities. Thus, stereotypes are born. Rather than speak of the frailty within, some of us are happy to attribute shortcomings to the “Other” (thus freeing ourselves of the need for the virtue of humility, I might add!) Once we become familiar with humor from other cultures, it is relatively easy to see that the stereotypes are localized or globalized depending on the country and the occasion and the level of nationalism (among, I’m sure, hundreds of other variables that shall remain unaccounted for here). Suffice it to say that if we wish to have a joke “work” with little set-up or prior character-building, it helps to have an easily identifiable cast of characters ready for plucking. We are constantly building new stereotypes and the media play a large role in perpetuating the process. A cosmopolitan audience, for example, has no problem catching on to the innuendoes posed by Rueters (Reuters News Service 1999) in the following news story: LONDON (Reuters) – If you are Swedish, you stroke it. If you are Spanish, you beat it. If you are German, you cover it in food. And if you are British, you use it as an excuse not to have sex. The attention-grabbing personal computer is taking over. A quarter of Britons would rather be on their PC than making love. And more than half of the population admits to talking to the screen – not bad for a nation which once ridiculed Prince Charles for talking to his plants.   PCs in Spain suffer violence with 57 percent of owners admitting to hitting them, according to a survey of computer use in five European countries by technology giant Microsoft. Another 18 percent of Spaniards are driven to tears of frustration while Germans are distinctly unamused by them – only one in six has enjoyed a laugh with their PC.

If variations on this theme continue to appear or if the same story is widely distributed and quoted, we begin to make new associations, extending national stereotypes to include their attitude toward personal computers. Such is also the basis for what Bormann (Bormann 1982) refers to as inside jokes, more generically identified as a  fantasy based on understood archetypes. A most appropriate example of building archetypes in a universal and unbiased environment is the work of Russian artist and clown Slava Polounine (Polounine 2001). Humor and pathos permeate Slava’s multiple-award winning SnowShow. The nonverbal nature of this theatrical performance makes it accessible to a wide, cross-cultural audience. Once we move past the fact that its audience is self-selected to enjoy this form of comedic fantasy, it is easy to pick out

562 

Dineh Davis

the human archetypes without ever having to rely on verbal language. The performers’ only reference to gender shifts is through voice or sound pitch differences (both roles being performed by the same performer, which further minimizes human differences). Universal qualities of ambivalence and struggle with cosmic issues such as life and death, love and loss, joy and sadness, fantasy and nightmare, loneliness and fear are portrayed nonverbally. Lim (Lim 2001) begins his review of this program as follows; It was pure delight … and to my surprise the child in me came out to play…. The musical choreography was enticing, with opera, classical, samba and jazz; all adding up to paradoxically sculpt and shape reason and gibberish, emotion and anesthesia, significance and inconsequentiality, into the dream that is ­SLAVA’S SNOWSHOW. A clown laughs at society’s ills, while we laugh at the clown… Comic tragedy- a paradox that somehow really works. In ­SLAVA’S SNOWSHOW, the discovery is within the individual. Skim the surface and laugh at the antics; then Slava dares you to plunge into the soul and really, really look.

It is, therefore, my contention that if we begin to view and to communicate what we perceive as humorous in the context of Every Human, we can see past the stereotypes that had to be created in order to allow humor to function. By this I am referring to the inherent “needs” of humor with its dependence on a short and fast-moving set-up that does not get caught up in having to explain an entire culture’s interpretations of vices and virtues. Of course, that may be easy for me to say since I don’t necessarily see myself as fitting any of the pat and negative stereotypes – except as a woman. I am quite sympathetic, however, to the plight of the visibly “blonde” or the “jock” who does not share the low intelligence gene with the stereotypes and see nothing funny about such humor, even if it is rationally represented as a simple joke script. Perspectives and conclusion One could make a  case for the argument that humans exist to fulfill their desire and capacity to lead happy, joyful, and playful lives. As such, one cannot preclude a  sense of humor closely associated with well-being. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has lectured and written extensively on the Art of Happiness and the merits of a joyful life (Bstan-’dzin-rgya-mtsho and Cutler 1998). One does not often associate the games of one-upmanship and acts of hostility and aggression with the Dalai Lama. Yet, for anyone who is familiar with this man, it would be difficult to say that he does not have a highly

Communication and humor 

563

developed and keen sense of humor and appreciation for this form of human communication. A  sense of humor is seen, potentially, as a  stand-in for a  larger cluster of positive human traits that may be too nebulous to enumerate. This trait does seem to represent to many an indication of a better overall “mood” and a greater facility in dealing with conflicts and stress. A good sense of humor, therefore, can be a good indicator of an individual’s stability, values, needs and interests, imagination and intelligence, and a reasonable credential for long-term life or business partnerships (Murstein and Brust 1985). On the other hand, these are not necessarily the inherent qualities of someone who studies humor or delivers humorous lines or jokes in a personal or professional capacity. Almost anyone can be taught to laugh at jokes or to deliver them during a public address, but developing a sense of humor must come from within. Yet, communication scholarship has not necessarily differentiated in any systematic way the concept of having a sense of humor from that of being humorous. Humor can be used as the most vivid prototype for all manner of communication because of its great depth –with biological origins - as well as its amazing breadth and persistence across cultures and contexts. It exemplifies an archetypal response that is very difficult to fake. While many can feign seriousness or remain expressionless under difficult circumstances (e.g., by having a “poker face”) most false laughter is easily detectable and a sense of humor remains apparent only when it actually exists. It can therefore be one of the most accurate measures of a person’s true attitude toward others. There are many intriguing questions in life for which we cannot devise straightforward scientific experiments or even conduct “doable” research in a systematic manner. If we eliminate enough variables that can affect a person’s humor we are sure to approach such a small subset of the field that generalizations become problematic. On the other hand if we choose to overlook so many factors related to this equation in an attempt to develop a unified theory of humor, the concept will become so nebulous as to render the general theory relatively useless for scientific inquiry. Just the same, this complexity should not keep us from looking at the wonder of humor in communication and its positive influence and strong effect in every context of human inter­ action. Humor and its ensuing laughter come from ironies, incongruities, surprises, and paradoxes that surround us, and from simply living our mundane daily lives. They need not be contrived or premeditated, nor have a punch line, or demand a logical explanation. They simply need to be enjoyed.

564 

Dineh Davis

References Alarcon, Christy 2001 Student learning of elementary Japanese in online and traditional instructional environments. Master’s thesis, School of Communications, University of Hawaii. Alberts, J. 1990 The use of humor in managing couples’ conflict interactions. In: D.  Cahn (ed.), Intimates in Conflict, 110–120. Hillside, NJ: Erlbaum. Alberts, J. K., Y. Kellar-Guenther, and J. R. Corman 1996 That’s not funny: Understanding recipients’ responses to teasing. Western Journal of Communication 60: 337–357. Berger, Arthur Asa 1976 Anatomy of the joke. Journal of Communication 26: 113–115. 1993. An anatomy of humor. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Bethea, Lisa Sparks, Shirley S. Travis, and Loretta Pecchioni 2000 Family caregivers’ use of humor in conveying information about caring for dependent older adults. Health Communication 12: 361–​ 376. Bippus, A. M. 2000 Humor usage in comforting episodes: Factors predicting outcomes. Western Journal of Communication 64: 359–384. Boland, R. J., and R. Hoffman 1983 Humor in a machine shop: An interpretation of symbolic action. In: L. R. Pondy, P. J. Frost, G. Morgan, and T. C. Dandridge (eds.), Organizational Symbolism, 187–198. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Booth-Butterfield, Steven, and Melanie Booth-Butterfield 1991 Individual differences in the communication of humorous messages. Southern Communication Journal 56: 205–218. Bormann, Ernest G. 1982 Colloquy – I. Fantasy and rhetorical vision: Ten years later. Quarterly Journal of Speech 68: 288–305. Bremmer, Jan N., and Herman Roodenburg 1997 A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brown, Mary Helen 1990 “Reading” an organization’s culture: An examination of stories in nursing homes. Journal of Applied Communication Research 18: 64–75.

Communication and humor 

565

Bstan-’dzin-rgya-mtsho, Dalai Lama XIV, and Howard C. Cutler 1998 The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. New York: Riverhead Books. Chang, Mei-Jung, and Charles R. Gruner 1981 Audience reaction to self-disparaging humor. The Southern Speech Communication Journal 46: 419–426. Chapel, Gage William 1978 Humor in the White House: And [sic] interview with presidential speechwriter Robert Orben. Communication Quarterly 26: 44–49. Chapman, Antony J. and Hugh C. Foot 1976 Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research, and Applications. London: New York: Wiley. Chapman, Antony J., Jean R. Smith, and Hugh C. Foot 1980 Humour, laughter, and social interaction. In Paul E. McGhee and Antony J. Chapman (eds.), Children’s Humour. Chichester/New York: J. Wiley. Davis, Dineh 1995 Illusions and ambiguities in the telemedia environment: An exploration of the transformation of social roles. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 39: 297–335. Edwards, Janis L., and Huey-Rong Chen 2000 The first lady/first wife in editorial cartoons: Rhetorical visions through gendered lenses. Women’s Studies in Communication 23: 367–391. Fisher, W. R. 1978 Toward a logic of good reasons. Quarterly Journal of Speech 64. 1987 Human communication as narration: Toward a philosophy of reason, value, and action. Vol. 64. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Fleet, F. R. 1970 A Theory of Wit and Humour. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press. Graham, E. E., M. J. Papa, and G. P. Brooks 1992 Functions of humor in conversation: Conceptualization and measurement. Western Journal of Communication 56: 161–183. Grimes, Wilma H. 1955a A theory of humor for public address: The mirth experience. Speech Monographs 22: 217–226. 1955b The mirth experience in public address. Speech Monographs 22: 243–​255. Gruner, Charles R. 1967 Effect of humor on speaker ethos and audience information gain. Journal of Communication 17: 228–233.

566 

Dineh Davis

Gruner, Charles R. 1985 Advice to the beginning speaker on using humor: What the research tells us. Communication Education 34: 142–147. 1997 The Game of Humor: A Comprehensive Theory of Why We Laugh. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Hackman, M. Z. 1998 Reactions to the use of self-disparaging humor by informative public speakers. Southern Speech Communication Journal 53: 175–183. Hackman, M. Z. and T. A. Barthel-Hackman 1993 Communication apprehension, willingness to communicate, and sense of humor: United States and New Zealand perspectives. Communication Quarterly 41: 282–291. Haig, Robin Andrew 1988 The Anatomy of Humor: Biopsychosocial and Therapeutic Perspectives: American Series in Behavioral Science and Law. Springfield, Ill.: Thomas. Honeycutt, James M., and Renee Brown 1998 Did you hear the one about? Typological and spousal differences in the planning of jokes and sense of humor in marriage. Communication Quarterly 46: 342–352. Jablonski, Carol J. 2000 Dorothy Day’s contested legacy: “Humble irony” as a constraint on memory. Journal of Communication and Religion 23: 29–49. Keysar, Boaaz 2000 The illusory transparency of intention: Does June understand what Mark means because he means it? Discourse Processes 29: 161–​ 172. King, Cynthia M. 2000 Effects of humorous heroes and villains in violent action films. Journal of Communication 50: 5–24. Kronenberger, Louis 1972 A Mania For Magnificence. Boston: Little, Brown. Lasswell, Harold 1948 The structure and function of communication in society. In: L. ­Bryson (ed.), The Communication of Ideas. New York: Institute for Religious and Social Studies. Last Laugh 1993 News & Trends: Battle of the sexes: Last laugh. Psychology Today. 16–17. Levasseur, David G., and Kevin W. Dean 1996 The Dole humor myth and the risks of recontextualizing rhetoric. The Southern Communication Journal 62: 56–72.

Communication and humor  Lim, Daniel 2001

567

Slava’s SnowShow review. Vol. 2001: The Flying Inkpot theatre Reviews. MacHovec, Frank J. 1988 Humor: Theory, History, Applications. Springfield, Ill.: C. C. Thomas. McGhee, Paul E. 1979 Humor, its Origin and Development. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. McGhee, Paul E., and Antony J. Chapman 1980 Children’s Humour. Chichester, New York: J. Wiley. Meyer, John 1990 Ronald Reagan and humor: A politician’s velvet weapon. Communication Studies 41: 76–88. Meyer, John C. 2000 Humor as a double-edged sword: Four functions of humor in communication. Communication Theory 10: 310–331. Miner, Horace 1956 Body ritual among the Nacirema. American Anthropologist 58: 503–507. Moore, Mark P. 1992 “The Quayle Quagmire”: Political campaigns in the poetic form of burlesque. Western Journal of Communication 56: 108–124. Murstein, Bernard I., and Robert G. Brust 1985 Humor and intepersonal attraction. Journal of Personality Assessment 49: 637–640. O’Donnell-Truijillo, Nick, and Katherine Adams 1983 Heheh in conversation: Some coordinating accomplishments of laughter. Western Journal of Speech Communication 47: 175–191. Partnow, Elaine (ed.) 1977 The Quotable Woman, 1800–1975. Los Angeles: Corwin Books. Paulos, John Allen 1980 Mathematics and Humor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Payne, David A. 2001 Superiority vs. incongruity theories of humor: A critical test conducted in the context of friendships, Speech. Master’s thesis, University of Hawaii. Perry, Stephen D., Stefan A. Jenzowsky, Joe Bob Hester, Cynthia M. King, and Huiuk Yi 1997 The influence of commercial humor on program enjoyment and evaluation. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 74: 388–399. Polounine, Slava 2001 Slava’s SnowShow. Vol. 2002. . Programme Guide. Hawaii Theatre, Honolulu, Hawaii.

568 

Dineh Davis

Reuters News Service 1999 No sex please, we’re on the computer. Vol 1999. London Wanzer, M. B., and A. B. Frymier 1999 The relationship between student perceptions of instructor humor and students’ reports of learning. Communication Education 48: 48–62. Wanzer, Melissa Bekelja, Melanie Booth-Butterfield, and Steve Booth-Butterfield 1996 Are funny people popular? An examination of humor orientation, loneliness, and social attraction. Communication Quarterly 44: 42–52. Webster’s quotable definitions 1988 Webster’s new world dictionary of quotable definitions, ed. by ­Eugene E. Brussell. New York: Webster’s New World.

Verbally expressed humor and translation Delia Chiaro Introduction It is a well known fact that verbally expressed humour (VEH) travels badly. Regrettably, beyond the boundaries of the society in which it originates, VEH will encounter two major barriers which will restrict its purpose: different languages and different cultures. Translations are attempts at demolishing these apparently insurmountable barriers but, the translation of VEH is a notoriously arduous task the results of which are not always triumphant. Generally considered to be untranslatable, yet systematically translated, no matter how complex the VEH in question, the translator feels obliged to desperately search for an adequate solution to what is often a multifaceted linguistic and/ or cultural rebus. As far as humorous discourse is concerned “Il en est de la traduction comme des sports: la limite semble pouvoir toujours être reculée.” (Laurian 1989: 6). This chapter aims at examining issues concerning the interlingual1 translation of VEH (i.e. translation from one language to another) within the broader framework of Translation Studies (TS). Humour and translation Scholars of TS have, however, generally dedicated little energy to the subject of humour. This new discipline, having recently gained independence from both comparative literary studies and linguistics (Bassnett 1980: 13) in a struggle to gain its academic feet, has been mainly concerned with establishing its theoretical foundations and the bulk of research carried out in the field has been principally occupied with issues concerning the translation of biblical, historical and literary texts. TS have been, as a result, very much dedicated to the written mode and studies in interpreting and other forms of oral and multimedia translation2 such as automatic translation and screen translation, are still relatively new. Thus, the issue of the translation of ­humorous discourse has been largely ignored and it is likely that such neglect

570 

Delia Chiaro

has been due to the sheer complexity involved in the production of adequate translations which were initially witty in intent. Hence, apart from the odd exception, (Laurian and Nilsen eds. 1989; Mateo 1995; Ballard 1996; Pisek 1997), the translation of VEH has been generally swept beneath the carpet and ignored. Furthermore, scholars who have dared venture into the field, have tended to approach the subject from a literary angle, typically analysing, for example, the puns of Shakespeare (Delabastita 1993) and Joyce (Golden 1996). Only recently have TS begun to wake up to the fact that both humour and translation can also occur beyond the realms of purely literary phenomena. Yet despite this, in two entire volumes dedicated to the translation of puns (Delabastita ed. 1996, 1997), only three essays endeavour outside the literary to deal with the translation of humorous phenomena in oral and/or multimedia texts (see Chiaro 2000a). Furthermore, it would appear that humour scholars have also largely ignored the issue of translation, exceptions being Vandaele (2003) and Chiaro (2005) who have attempted to bring together Translation and Humour Studies. The issue of the interlingual translation of VEH, whether written or oral, opens up an extremely problematic area within the discipline of TS. In fact, whether the kind of VEH to be translated is a short text such as a joke, whether it is a longer text such as a novel or a more polysemiotic entity such as a film, a play or a sitcom and whether we are dealing with puns or irony, satire or parody, the transposition from source language (SL) to target language (TL) will present the translator with a series of thorny problems which will be both practical and theoretical in nature. Such difficulties are due to the fact that the translation of VEH manifestly touches upon the most central and highly debateable issues in TS, those of equivalence and translatability. In this respect, the translation of VEH shares many problems with the translation of conventional poetry. In poetry linguistic deviation is very high. As well as the presence of unusual lexical collocations and irregular word order, poetry relies on patterns of repetition at all levels of sound, syntax, lexis and meaning. Furthermore, the visual impact of a poem is also essential, and this is even more so the case with regard to more unconventional poetic forms such as concrete poetry. As it is highly improbable that any two languages will share such similar features as to be able to reflect identical effects, poetry is theoretically untranslatable. Yet, paradoxically translations of poetry do obviously exist. However, just how comparable a Shakespearian sonnet in Italian is to its original is a disputable issue. No matter how proficient the translator may be, the very nature of the two codes in question make a mockery of the concept of formal equivalence. In other words, the

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

571

formal features of the poem, the length, the shape, rhymes, rhythm and other stylistic devices contained in the target text (TT) are bound to be unlike those of the source text (ST). Thus readers are forced to content themselves with some manner of linguistic compromise in the name of functional correspondence. Although what results in the TL is a poem on the same topic as the SL poem, it is likely to share few physical and consequently poetic similarities to the ST. Yet, albeit a new poem, it is still a poem and, as long as readers are willing to accept it as such, it is a translation of the ST, thus the function of the ST remains respected. (For detailed discussions of the untranslatability of poetry see: Kristeva 1968; Lefevère 1975; Popovič 1976; De Beaugrande 1978.) VEH in translation suffers a similar fate to poetry in translation. However, whereas in conventional poetry the translator attempts to emulate the SL unyielding patterns of stanza, rhythm and rhyme, in the case of humour s/he has to deal with anarchic breaking of such patterns. For example, puns, a common feature in jokes, are notoriously untranslatable. When dealing with an example of wordplay which pivots around a pun, an interlingual translation is bound to involve some kind of compromise due to the fact that the chances of being able to pun on the same word in two different languages is extremely remote. And even in the prospect of such a possibility, the chances of finding the same type of pun (i.e. a homophone, a homograph, a homonym etc.) are even slimmer. Thus, as with poetry, generally speaking, as far as the translation of VEH is concerned, formal equivalence is sacrificed for the sake of dynamic equivalence. In other words, as long as the TT serves the same function as the ST, it is of little importance if the TT has to depart somewhat in formal terms from the original. Some feature of the ST is lost in exchange for a gain in the TL. “Don’t you mean purpose?” said Alice. “If I’d been the whiting,” said Alice, whose thoughts were still running on the song, “I’d have said to the porpoise, ‘keep back, please, we don’t want you with us’.” “They were obliged to have him with them’, the Mock Turtle said:” No wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.” “Wouldn’t it really?” said Alice in a tone of great surprise. “Of course not,” said the Mock Turtle: “why if a fish came to me and told me he was going on a  journey, I  should say ‘with what porpoise?’”.  (Lewis Carroll 1962: 91) “Si j’avais été à la place du merlan” déclara Alice, qui pensant encore à la chanson, “ j’aurais dit au brochet : ‘En arrière s’il vous plaît ! Nous n’avons pas besoin de vous!’”

572 

Delia Chiaro

“Ils étaient obligés de l’avoir avec eux,” dit la Simili-Tortue : “aucun poisson doué de bon sens n’irait où que ce fut sans un brochet ?” “Vraiment !” s’exclama Alice d’un ton stupéfait. “Bien sur que non. Vois-tu, si un poisson venait me trouver, moi, et me disait qu’il va partir en voyage, je lui demanderais : ‘avec quel brochet?’” “N’est-ce pas : ‘projet’ et non : ‘brochet’ que vous voulez dire ?” (Carroll, translated by Papy 1961: 140, quoted in Ballard 1996: 344.)

In order to produce an effective French translation of the pun porpoise/purpose the translator transforms the SL fish into a pike: brochet thus enabling him to manipulate the word brochet into a pun with the word projet. Clearly the ST and the TT are quite dissimilar both in formal terms and in semantic terms, a porpoise is a very different fish from a pike and thus the TT loses part of the significance of the ST. On the other hand the TT retains a pun, albeit a different one from the ST. Interestingly, even though totally diverse from the ST, the pair brochet/projet similarly to porpoise/purpose, is also almost homonymic in nature and in this sense quite comparable to the original. Over and above equivalence, however, the humorous purpose (or should we say porpoise?) of the text is maintained in the translated version. Likewise, the problem of fidelity to the ST also arises when VEH is based on aspects of the world which are typical only of the source culture as frequently occurs in satire and parody. How, for example, can Richard Curtis’s parody of the Shakespearian tragedy The Skinhead Hamlet<3/i> be efficiently translated? All the characters are skinheads and the comic effect of the play is created through the parody of this category of typically British layabouts. Renowned above all for their violent behaviour, their lack of intellect and their poor command of the English language which is thick with four-letter words and obscenities, these delinquents reduce the play to a linguistic brawl which, to complicate translational matters further, is delivered in Cockney, the traditional dialect of London’s East End. Now, is the hypothetical translator to simply let sleeping dogs lie and hope that the reader will have sufficient knowledge of the Shakespearian play and the phenomenon of Skinheads to be able to appreciate the parody via a word for word translation, or is s/he to manipulate the text in such a way to make it more comprehensible in the target culture? It is highly likely that cultures outside the UK will not be completely familiar with the phenomenon of skinheads let alone possess a corresponding genre of youth culture. And even if they do, will continental skinheads necessarily speak in a non standard variety of their language like their English counterparts? Linguistic variation constitutes an important problem in multimedia translation (see Pavesi 1994 and

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

573

1996). So the next question is, which TL variety can replace Cockney? The connotations attached to a Cockney accent are quite different from those belonging to a Sicilian, a Neapolitan or a Viennese accent. Thus the translator is on the horns of a dilemma, either s/he translates the text as faithfully as possible in the hope that the recipient’s world knowledge will suffice to appreciate its humorous intent or s/he is unfaithful to the ST and rewrites it substituting skinheads with some other genre of local youth. In the case of such a culture-specific text, either way, loss in correspondence to the ST is likely to be greater than gain. In fact, the substitution of one culture with another is rarely a winning option. The Italian version of the US sitcom The Nanny (CBS Television, 1993–1999.)was broadcast in Italy between 1995 and 1999. The sitcom stars Jewish nanny Fran Fine (Fran Drescher) from Flushing, Queens who falls in love with her gentile boss Maxwell (Charles Shaughnessy). Like many US sitcoms and series, The Nanny is heavily based on Jewish-American culture (e.g. The Passed-Over Story; The Hanukkah Story) and New York Yiddish terms are used quite liberally for comic effect. However, while across Europe the sitcom retains its ‘Jewishness’ (Die Nanny in Germany; Une Nounou d’enfer in France), in Italy, La Tata4 Fran was transformed into an Italian born immigrant, Francesca Cacace, who goes to live with her relatives in Queens. Thus many allusions to Kosher culture are replaced with others pertaining to Frosinone, a town in South-central Italy where Italian Fran was born. This choice was made by translators and dubbing-scriptwriters5 of the series who considered Italian audiences to have insufficient knowledge of Jewish-American culture to understand what was going on and thus intervened and replaced the original situation with another one closer to the target culture. In the following example, Fran’s teacher Steve, invites her on a date on a Saturday, but then retracts when he remember that it is his ­nephew’s Bar Mitzvah. Original

Italian dub

Back-translation

STEVE: What about Saturday? FRAN: I’m sorry. STEVE: Oh FRAN: Wha? STEVE: I’m sorry, it’s my nephew’s Bar Mitzvah.

STEVE: Facciamo domenica? FRAN: Mi dispiace. STEVE: Oh FRAN: Cosa? STEVE: Ah no, domenica ho la famiglia a pranzo, siamo italiani.

STEVE: What about Sunday? FRAN: I’m sorry. STEVE: Oh FRAN: What? STEVE: Oh no, I’ve got the family over for lunch we’re Italian.

574 

Delia Chiaro

In Italian, the invitation is changed from Saturday to Sunday and the excuse for Steve changing his mind becomes the obligation to have lunch with his family. Again, reminiscing about her daughter’s birth, Fran’s mother Silvia, remembers how she almost ate meat on Jewish New Year: Original

Italian dub

Backtranslation

SYLVIA: Fran, you’re my daughter. I remember every detail of your birth like it was yesterday. I remember I ordered two eggs over peas, they came scrambled, but I’m not a complainer. Then I’m thinking they were so delicious and I found pieces of meat in it. I had to push it away it was Rosh Hashana.

ZIA ASSUNTA: Io mi ricordo che avevo ordinato due uova a colazione, e me le hanno portato di cioccolata perché era Pasqua! Tanto che le ho mangiate senza discutere e tu sembravi un ranocchietto venuto male! Tua madre quando ti ha visto è scoppiata a piangere!

AUNT ASSUNTA: I remember ordering two eggs for breakfast and that they bought me chocolate eggs because it was Easter! In fact. I ate them right up and you looked like a funny little toad! Your mother burst into tears when she saw you!

In the Italian version, Fran’s mother (who for some bizarre reason, in the Italian version becomes her aunt) is given chocolate eggs for breakfast, because it is Easter. Notably, the irony of the stereotypical Jewish mother: “I’m not a complainer” is also deleted in the translation. Yet, amazingly perhaps, the series was extremely successful in Italy and was given several re-runs, yet such gross manipulation is beginning to become less tolerated by ever more knowledgeable audiences (Chiaro 2008). 2.  Major issues in Translation Studies 2.1.  Equivalence Although rather démodé in the 21st century, the issue of the fidelity or the faithfulness of translation is one which has raged for hundreds of years with regard to the translation of sacred, historical and literary texts. The question regarded how much formal freedom a translator could exercise in the TT with respect to the ST. What was the unit of text to be translated at any given time; the word, the phrase, the sentence or the paragraph? How was the translator to

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

575

overcome the hurdle of different word order? This debate divided translators between those who were SL oriented, and consequently preferred a translation which perfectly mirrored the ST and tried to remain as closely as possible to the original text and those who were TT oriented and favoured a translation in which the ST served as a model from which the translator was free to elaborate a completely new TT. Steiner pertinently takes stock of centuries of tugof-war between these two factions as follows: “…the craft of the translator is…deeply ambivalent: it is exercised in a radical tension between impulse to facsimile and impulse to appropriate recreation.” (1975: 235). Consequently, through the centuries theorists argued either in the direction of the word or in the direction of sense without ever coming to any clear conclusions or even getting much further than their Roman predecessors.6 The word/sense debate continued well into Romanticism and beyond and it is also worth reflecting on Steiner’s view of translation history: “List St.Jerome, Luther, Dryden, Hölderin, Novalis, Schleiermacher, Nietsche, Ezra Pound, Valéry, MacKenna, Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin Quine – and you have very nearly the sum total of those who have said anything fundamental about translation.” (quoted in Bassnett 1980: 74). Fortunately, nowadays there is a greater realization that neither fidelity or freedom are mutually exclusive, No longer restricted to the sacred or the literary, translators are faced with a myriad of extremely diverse text types which stretch from scientific documents and technical manuals to advertisements and multimedia texts such as films and web pages. Thus, whether to take an SL oriented approach or a TL oriented approach will depend not only upon the text itself, but also upon the modality in which it is couched, as well as its intended recipients. In the case of interlingual translation, texts need to be adjusted and/or localised for them to be able to pass into the target culture. As we shall see, the issue of equivalence is especially significant with regard to the translation of VEH because the nature of these texts tends to be such that the ST is either so language-specific or culture-specific that the translator is compelled to make radical changes in the TT if s/he wishes to retain the text’s original communicative function i.e. that of attempting to amuse the recipient, or at least making a recognizable attempt at doing so.

What has fifty legs and cannot walk? Half a centipede. (Laurian 1989: 6)

In order to translate this riddle into French and produce a functional equivalent, i.e. an utterance which functions as the same riddle in French, the

576 

Delia Chiaro

number fifty has to be transformed into five hundred simply because in France centipedes are known as mille-pattes (literally ‘thousand-pedes’):

Qu’est-ce qui a cinq cent pattes et qui ne peut pas marcher? La moitié d’une mille-pattes.

Needless to say the two riddles are no longer formally equivalent – they could, of course never be so even between closely related languages such as French and Italian, let alone French and English – yet they are equivalent in several other ways. If we test the translated riddle according to the equivalence typologies formulated by Koller (1979: 187–191; 1989: 100–4) we find that despite the number of legs the insect actually has, the riddle does in fact possess what he labels connotative equivalence. In other words, both ST and TT supposedly refer to the same thing in the real world and on the basis of their referential or denotative equivalence the two texts trigger off the same or similar concepts both in the SL and TL cultures: The riddle also passes the test of text normative equivalence (1989: 102) as it contains SL and TL words which are adopted in similar communicative contexts in both cultures, in this case the frame of a riddle What has…but…/ Qu’est-ce que a…et… Finally the riddle also possesses pragmatic (ibid.) or dynamic (Nida 1964) equivalence as it should produce the same effect on both SL and TL recipients i.e. that of being recognized as a riddle. In such a loose sense the two riddles may be considered as being equivalent. Furthermore, with regard to equivalence, the 20th century produced a series of dichotomies which range from Nida’s distinction between formal translations and dynamic translations (1964, 1969, 1975) to Newmark’s division between semantic translations and communicative translations (1982, 1988, 1991). Although these scholars shift the emphasis onto the process of translation, it would appear that different labels are however being attached to similar concepts. With the realization that equivalence cannot be absolute, Nida imagines that translation should aim at “closest natural equivalent of the source language message” (1975: 12) hence mitigating the extreme positions of the past. Yet all this rings uncomfortably familiar. Thus, when all is said and done, the issue of equivalence seems to have come full circle and rather like the dog that bites its tail, it has essentially made little progress. On balance, are such dichotomies any different from what was deduced by Cicero in the first century BC? Is it best to produce a text which strictly reflects the ST with the risk of it being user-unfriendly or are we better off with a text which is to some degree divorced from the ST yet digestible by the target culture?

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

577

Of course, with reference to VEH, this issue is particularly relevant, precisely because we are dealing with such an extreme area of language use in which, as we said, the probability of even the slightest formal equivalence must surely be especially remote. Hence, theorists such a Toury who consider equivalence to be “…any target-language utterance which is presented or regarded as such” (1985: 20) thereby accepting any ostensible translation no matter its linguistic or aesthetic quality, provide convenient alibis for the acute indeterminacy of translated VEH. Consequently, recent debates on equivalence have been favouring TT oriented approaches which are becoming ever more divorced from formal equivalence or faithfulness. For example so-called Skopostheorie (Vermeer 1989) puts the intended function or Skopos of a text in pole position, a convenient approach so far as the translation of VEH is concerned. “Well, have a plum,” said the doctor in an effeminate voice. “If you swallow the stone you’ll put on weight.” (The Children of Dynmouth, William Trevor.) In this case the issue of translational equivalence becomes more intricate as the wordplay in the question involves punning. A plum contains a stone, a word which as well as having the meaning of ‘kernel’, can also refer to a unit of measurement, more exactly concerning weight. In Italian, a  plum will contain a nocciolo rather than a ‘stone’, besides which, a ‘stone’ is a pietra a ‘piece of rock’ which does not denote weight in any way. The Italian translators offer the following solution: ‘Mangia I tordi’ egli gli disse in falsetto. ‘Così ingrasso dottore?’ ‘Cinquetti!’ (translated by Lucia Sinisi and Chris Williams) The substitution of ‘plum’ with tordi ‘thrushes’ allows the patient to ‘chirp’ cinguettare a verb which in the second person singular of the present tense (tu) cinguetti is conveniently (loosely) homophonic with ‘five hundred grams’ = cinque etti = cinqu’etti . Naturally the two texts are very different both formally and semantically yet the translators have succeeded in retaining the concept of weight gain from the ST into the TT. Popvič’s notion of the “invariant core” (1976) can be useful here. According to Popovič if a dozen translators were given the same poem to translate they would come up with twelve different versions yet all would have something in common. These shared elements are the stable, constant, basic ingredients of the ST, the existence of which can be proven

578 

Delia Chiaro

through experimental semantic condensation. If the invariant core in the previous example consists of the concept of weight and if the Skopos in the SL was to amuse, should it matter if equivalence is somewhat skewed compared to the ST as long as if the original function is fulfilled? Furthermore, why shouldn’t functional equivalence be acceptable equivalence? At this point it is worth considering notions which suggest that equivalence is “illusory” (Snell-Hornby 1988), that it “creates a  presumption of complete interpretative resemblance” (Gutt 1991: 186); that it is a “functional concept that can be attributed to a  particular translational situation” (Neubert 1994: 413–414) and finally, and possibly most convincingly, that it “is crucial to translation because it is the unique intertextual relation that only translations, among all conceivable text types, are expected to show” (Stecconi 1994: 8). Together with Stecconi, Pym (2000) defines equivalence by examining translation itself in contrast to non-translation. In other words, to what degree can a TT formally dissociate itself from the ST yet still be seen as a translation? Can we go as far as accepting Lefevère’s “rewritings” (1992) as being translations?7 In the case of VEH the answer is likely to be closer to yes than to no. If the notion of equivalence can be seen as the “affirmation of the social existence of translation” (Pym 2000: 14) then we have a constructive concept, but until we define non-translation, it is totally useless. Thus, instead of assessing equivalence in absolute terms, the issue can be approached in terms of degrees of equivalence. Toury’s ‘equivalence postulate’ does not seek to establish prescriptive criteria of equivalence but treats its existence as given. “The question to be asked is (…) not whether two texts are equivalent but what type and degree of translation equivalence they reveal” (1980: 47). Finally, Pym (1992) avoids the difficulty of pinning down the nature of equivalence to linguistic meaning and views translations adopting a metaphor taken from economics and seeing them seen as transactions and equivalence in terms of equality of exchange value. We have thus come full circle. By accepting translations as given (Toury op.cit.) the issue of equivalence is reduced to degrees of equivalence, with equivalence itself remaining largely undefined. Let us consider that both ST and TT are two totally independent entities which are represented by two circles (see Fig. 1). As we have seen, it would be absurd to think that a translator can create a carbon copy of the ST, or that the two texts can perfectly mirror each other. Thus we could say that what occurs in the process of translation is a kind of linguistic compromise which transforms the content of the ST into a fresh form in the SL.

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

ST

579

TT

Figure 1. If each language is an independent and autonomously functioning system sui generis, then we cannot expect that the asymmetry between its signs and the extralinguistic entities and their conceptualisations will reflect an identical pattern across languages. (…) The roots of these interlingual asymmetries should be looked for, first and foremost, on the level of our conceptualisation of our knowledge and experience of the world and the way it is fixed in language. (…) The way we conceptualise our world also seems to acquire some language and culture-specific features.  (Alexieva 1997: 141)

However, translations are atypical text types in virtue of the fact that their being is possible because of the existence of a primary text in another language. On the one hand, if a translation of a text exists as a totally new entity, represented by a new circle, this circle can never be entirely independent of the original circle from which it stems. Thus, instead of two independent circles, a translated text can be conceptualised in terms of a single circle deriving from the pre-existing circle of the ST. Let us imagine the occurrence of a sort of osmosis of the quintessence of the ST which permeates into the TT to create a translation. The quality, naturalness and indeed degree of equivalence of this translation could well be defined in terms of the least critical area between two the texts in question. We could now consider ST and TT in terms of two concentric circles with the area of overlap between the two representing the least critical area between the two texts. Thus if we compare Figure 2a to Figure 2b, in which the shaded areas represent the least critical area, the latter represents the more natural text in the TL. In other words, the greater the least critical area, the better the translation.

a.

b. ST

Figure 2.

TT

S T

TT

580 

Delia Chiaro

The following traditional riddle is firmly embodied in centuries of British children’s culture:

Q. What’s black and white and red all over? A. A newspaper.

Now, let us consider two feasible solutions into Italian: a. Che cosa è nero, bianco e rosso ovunque? L’Unità (Left-wing newspaper traditionally associated with the Italian Communist Party and with left wing sympathizers in general). b. Una zebra con l’abbronzatura. (a zebra with a suntan). Two very diverse solutions neither of which manage to encapsulate the semantic bivalency attached to the words ‘red/read’ nevertheless, solution a does capture the ‘reading’ element of the original riddle coupled with the metaphorical value of the colour term ‘red’ attached to a popular left wing newspaper L’Unità. We could thus assign the translated riddle with an average area of criticalness such as that illustrated by the shaded area of Figure 2. However what we are doing is translating a children’s riddle and let us not forget that it is unlikely that the average 7- to 10-year old will be au fait with the intricacies of press and politics. Thus it might be more reasonable to assign a greater shaded area to solution b (see Fig. 2) simply because, unlike solution a, in terms of Skopos it is clearly a children’s riddle. Although the ‘reading’ element is lost, the riddle certainly gains in the kind of silliness normally associated to children’s riddles and no longer requires access to adult knowledge resources (Attardo 1994). We can thus conclude that solution b possesses a greater degree of equivalence than a.

2.2.  Translatability and untranslatability Closely linked to equivalence the concept of translatability refers to the capacity of some kind of meaning being transferred from one language to another without undergoing radical changes. Naturally, debates ensue regarding the issue of exactly what kind of ‘meaning’ is involved and consequently it is extremely hard to argue that all meanings are always translatable. Applying the concept of untranslatability to a humorous text is an easy task. The following

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

581

Italian joke for example, (first heard Summer 2002) contains all the ingredients necessary to render it ‘untranslatable’.8 Hai saputo che Monica Lewinsky riprende a lavorare nella Casa Bianca? Sembrerebbe che dovrà prima superare una prova scritta. (Literally: Have you heard that Monica Lewinsky is going to start working at the White House again? Apparently she’s got to sit a written exam first.) In English the joke is a non starter owing to the fact that the two opposing scripts of the ST (Raskin 1985) are no longer such in the TT. There is a mismatch in the two scripts simply because the testing systems which exist in schools and colleges in most English speaking countries and are very different from those in Italy. In Italian schools and universities most courses end with a written test or examination called a prova scritta, which is in turn followed by a viva known as a prova orale, literally an ‘oral test’. Thus the Italian joke works on the opposition of scritto/orale (written/oral) and the obvious references to Ms Lewinsky’s extra-curricula activities at the White House. In English-speaking cultures, the absence of an examination organization systematically based on ‘written first’ + ‘oral testing second’(i.e. viva) would render a translation which included the term ‘written’ slightly contorted for the recipient who would need to unravel the conundrum in order to arrive mentally at the polysemic term ‘oral’. An understanding of the ‘written/oral’ opposition in the real world is essential to gaining an understanding of the contrasting humorous text – a good linguistic translation which refers to having to pass a viva would simply not do in humorous terms. In such a sense the joke remains untranslatable. The basic problem in theories for and against translatability is the relation between ST locutionary acts and meanings which are subject to mediation in the act of transference into the TT. Thus, traditionally, the concept of translatability can work in one of the following three ways: a. according to rationalists, meanings are universal and are generally translatable. b. according to relativists thinking and speaking are inextricably linked and translation is thus “an attempt at solving an impossible task” (Humboldt 1796/1868:vi). c. according to compatibilists all languages are highly individual but they can be translated and the translators task is to make sense of the ST and at the same time express their understanding of it.

582 

Delia Chiaro

This issue can be most clearly illustrated through kind of hermeneutic argument which is linked to the untranslatability into French of the utterance “The first word of this sentence has three letters” since the first word can only have two letters (Le premier mot…) and thus translation is forced to adopt the principle of necessary sacrifice (Burge 1978). For example, an acceptable instrumental translation could be Le premier mot de la phrase en anglais a trois lettres. Such dynamic translatability thus depends on the TL. As far as VEH is concerned, more often than not, translational sacrifice is frequently inevitable and the concept of dynamism can be quite useful. 2.2.  Sociocultural issues If a joke is to be translated interlingually, the process involved requires the translator to transcend the purely linguistic and to analyse the ST in order to produce a TT through a process of restructuring. Nida’s well known model (1969: 484) illustrates the process which a translator must elaborate in order to produce a TT which is an acceptable reflection of the original text. Although Nida’s model is applicable to any translation, the analysis and restructuring involved in the translation of VEH is likely to be more complex compared to the process involved in the translation of a  highly referential text. Cicero was the first to observe that VEH could be divided into humour which is linguistic in nature and humour which is referential: “For there are two types of wit, one employed upon facts, the other upon words” (De Oratore, II, LIX)(1965: 377), and from Cicero onwards it has been commonly argued that humour which depends on the linguistic sign is untranslatable in the sense that like poetry, formal equivalence is impossible (Attardo 1994: 28–29) while referentially based humour is less likely to resist translation. source language text

receptor language translation

analysis

restructuring transfer

Figure 3.

Verbally expressed humor and translation 



583

What do they write on the bottom of Guinness bottles in Ireland? Open other end.

To demonstrate that resistance to translation is a  feature of VEH whether linguistic or referential in nature, let us attempt a translation of this British English underdog joke into Italian. Now, despite the ease which is usually attributed to the interlingual translation of non-linguistic jokes as opposed to that of referential jokes, the example chosen presents numerous difficulties. In fact, it would be quite meaningless to Italians if translated literally. Unless they are acute observers of British culture they are unlikely to know that the Irish are the butt of English stupidity jokes. Thus, the obvious strategy which springs to mind would be to localise the joke for the recipient cultures by substituting the Irish butt of the joke with the local stupid group which appears in Italian and German underdog jokes. Now, the peripheral group in Italy is not an ethnic group but a professional one – the carabinieri one of Italy’s police forces (Davies 1998).9 Thus the translator has the option of transforming an Irish joke into a carabiniere joke. The next hurdle to overcome is the fact that there is no national drink in Italy, or rather, although Birra Peroni and Nastro Azzuro are national beers, they do not have the same association with Italy as Guinness has with Ireland. Although widely consumed, substituting Guinness with wine would not be an adequate solution and neither would substitution with well known alcoholic beverages like Strega, Campari or Martini. The point is that Italians are not great consumers of alcohol outside meals, and, unlike the Irish, are not stereotypically renowned for their drunkenness. However, Italians do consume soft drinks and juices. So, Coca Cola, for example, could be an effective substitution for Guinness. Finally, the whole text needs to be placed in an environment solely frequented by carabinieri because if the TT were placed out of context, as in the ST, it would not make any sense because most Italians can work out which end of the bottle is to be opened, thus rendering the instructions on the bottom of the bottle superfluous. Thus the bottle is transformed into a can, and the can is positioned inside a drink dispenser in a caserma (police station).10 We have now produced a  text which is recognizable as a joke in Italian culture.

 he cosa scrivono sul fondo delle lattine di Coca Cola che si trovano nei C distributori di bibite nelle caserme dei carabinieri? Aprire dall’altro lato.

584 

Delia Chiaro

source language text

receptor language translation carabinieri/coke/

guinness /ireland

police station

restructuring

analysis local stupid group

where to place joke?

transfer italians not heavy drinkers

Figure 4.

Mounin saw translations as a  series of significations in one culture which become replaced with significations in another culture (1963). Replacing the Irish with carabinieri certainly produces a different joke but the signification of the two groups in their respective cultures is extremely similar (cfr. Davies). Naturally the same joke could have been translated without a change in cultural signification. In other words, it could have remained an Irish joke in the Italian language and it could well be argued that such an approach in which the ST is not manipulated would teach the recipient something about the source culture. True but we would no longer have a joke. We can apply similar reasoning for a translation into German: Warum ist die österreichische Flagge oben und unten rot? Damit man sie auf jeden Fall richtig aufhängt. (Why is the Austrian flag made up of two red stripes and a white stripe in the middle? So that the Austrians don’t hang it upside down.) In this translation the decision was made to replace part of the SL the joke’s invariant core (i.e. drink) with another object, a  flag, arguing that, the invariant core is not the object itself but the geometry of the object, i.e. in the original text the top and the bottom of a bottle were easily confused by the stupid group. As the Austrian flag is composed of a white stripe sandwiched in between two red stripes, in the TT it is the colours placed at the top and the bottom of the flag which must be simplified so as not to be confused by the butt of the joke.

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

585

Thus we have seen that translation is not simply a matter of substituting the words of one language with those of another and adapting the syntax to suit it. Each language is inextricably linked to the culture to which it belongs, thus the process of interlingual translation, while being a primarily linguistic activity, also involves the transposition of a series of extra linguistic features inherent to the source culture: …before the joke can be discharged in all its swiftness there is much to be apprehended about cultural and social facts, about shared beliefs and attitudes, about the pragmatic bases of communication. (…) We share our humour with those who have shared our history and who understand our ways of interpreting the experience. There is a fund of common knowledge and recollection, upon which all jokes draw with instantaneous effect.”  (Nash 1985: 9)

Let us consider the apparently straightforward translation of the English word tea with the Italian word tè. While both words denote a product derived from the chopped leaves of a tea plant, arguably, the English word for tea conveys a set of associations missing from the corresponding Italian word. Although tea bags are now widely used in the UK, the ritual which accompanies the use of loose tea leaves is by no means obsolete. Thus, English tea is usually brewed in a pot until it is quite dark in colour and consequently strong before consumption. It is drunk hot, with milk, often in a mug, and accompanied by biscuits or cake. In Italy tè is often prepared directly in a cup (or glass) by pouring hot water directly over a teabag. It is much lighter in colour, therefore weaker and tends to be drunk highly sugared and with a slice of lemon. The same beverage is drunk cold in the summer. The traditional British cuppa is served as an antidote when one is tired or emotionally upset (hence the expression ‘to offer tea and sympathy’) and is usually drunk in large quantities which would be unheard of in Italy. Teapots are kept warm beneath woollen tea cosies and tea itself is stored in special recipients known as tea caddies. Furthermore, in Britain, office and factory workers intersperse their day by taking regular tea breaks11 while the word tea also refers to many people’s main meal of the day – not to be confused with afternoon tea or even high tea which are meals consumed between lunch and dinner by a different social class of person. Finally, in British English, a small crisis is known as a storm in a teacup and if someone or something is not someone’s cup of tea it means they are not the kind of person or thing that they like. So, even though the words tea and tè denote exactly the same substance, they conjures up quite dissimilar meanings in the two cultures. Thus, between languages meanings tend to be approximate, not necessarily because of the absence of a particular

586 

Delia Chiaro

term in one of the languages, but simply because the signification of a term may not coincide in the two cultures. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.  (Sapir 1956: 59)

Consequently, the process of translation is not merely a linguistic activity but also involves the careful consideration of the world in which the language is produced. Let us consider the following dialogue from the opening scenes of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994, USA): vincent: You know what they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese in Paris? jules: They don’t call it a Quarter Pounder with cheese? vincent: No man, they’ve got the metric system, the don’t know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is! jules : So what do they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese? vincent: They call it a Royale with cheese. jules: Royale with cheese. vincent: That’s right. jules: What do they call a Big Mac? vincent: A Big Mac’s a Big Mac only they call it Le Big Mac. jules: Le Big Mac. What do they call a Whopper? vincent: I don’t know, I never went to a Burger King. You know what they put on French Fries instead of Ketchup? jules: What? vincent: Mayonnaise. The observations made by a  rather ineloquent hit man Vincent (John Travolta) in this brief dialogue with Bible basher Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) are unwittingly worthy of any serious treatise on translation theory. The fact that Quarter Pounders are known as Royales in France appears to fill Jules with wonder until Vincent explains that within the metric system, the original label would be meaningless. Further amusement is caused by the fact that the French precede the item Big Mac with the definite article le and in addition prefer mayonnaise to ketchup on their fried potatoes. Indeed, the excellent linguistic mediations produced, presumably, by hidden teams of linguists, semioticians and translators behind multinationals like MacDonald’s reveal the meticulous research that must go into the internationalisation (and hence

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

587

localisation) of their products. Of course a Quarter Pounder would make no sense in metric Europe. And the absence of an article before a noun would be unthinkable in French. A glimpse at a menu in Paris or Rome does not indeed reveal a straight translation of a menu in Washington, but both a linguistic and semiotic localisation of a slice of North American culture. Not only do we find mayonnaise for European French fries but pasta dishes in Macdonald’s in Rome while beer is readily available in many European outlets. Thus successful translation does not simply involve the translation of words, but also the translation of worlds.

“Mummy, Mummy, is it still a long way to France?” “Shut up and keep swimming!” “Maman, Maman, est-ce que l’Angleterre loin?” “Tais-toi et continue à nager!”

The substitution of England for France does indeed provide an adequate solution for a joke which contains neither paranomasia nor features which are strikingly referential in nature. Yet, as a French colleague checking my translation dryly pointed out, “Why should someone French want to go to England?” Naturally, the pre-suppositions underlying the two exchanges are radically diverse. Different languages, different worlds. 2.4.  Puns Naturally, when the VEH in question is dependant upon a pun which owes its meaning to the very structure of its own language, once divorced from and transported into another language, it is unlikely to be able to function any longer as a pun. With the logic of the Age of Reason, Addison defines the pun as: … a Conceit arising from the use of two words that agree in the Sound, but differ in the Sense. The only way to therefore to try a Piece of Wit, is to translate it into a different Language. If it bears the Test you may pronounce it true; but if it vanishes in the Experiment you may conclude it to have been a Punn.  (1928 [1711]: 343)

Furthermore, let us not forget the etymology of the term ‘translation’ from the Latin traductio which not only meant ‘transposition’ but also a rhetorical device and, according to Lausberg: ”Figures of moderate similarity are

588 

Delia Chiaro

included within the term traductio…” which he goes on to gloss with the French terms jeu de mot/calembour and the English term ‘pun’ (1967: 147). And it is precisely the pun which embodies the concept of untranslatability. In the same way as it is ‘impossible’ to flawlessly represent countless cultural phenomena in another language, an identical imitation of a language’s puns would be equally arduous. However let us, for the sake of argument consider Laurian’s challenge (1989: 8) regarding the impossibility of translating the following quip into any other language: The world is so full of problems that if Moses came down Mount Sinai today, two of the tablets he would be carrying would be aspirins. The ‘impossible’ pun is, of course, the item ‘tablets’ which, according to Laurian, it would seem, only in English can refer both to slates of stone, rock or marble as well as to drugs. What Laurian together with many others probably means by the term untranslatable is based on the fact that the item ‘tablet’ is only paranomastic in English and that consequently a semantically identical translation into another language would be impossible. Thus the following literal translation into Italian is simply not a joke : Il mondo è talmente pieno di problemi che se oggi Mosé scendesse dal Monte Sinai, due delle tavole che porterebbe sarebbero aspirine. However, a feasible Italian translation below ignores the pun on ‘tablet’ but nevertheless creates a good line by retaining a significant slice of the ST invariant core i.e. insufficiency and medication. Il mondo è talmente pieno di problemi che se oggi Mosé scendesse dal Monte Sinai, anziché contenere i 10 comandamenti, le due tavole dovrebbero prescrivere una serie di medicinali. ‘The world is so full of problems that if Moses came down Mount Sinai today, instead of the 10 commandments the tablets should prescribe a list of medications.’ However, examples of such a high degree of lingua-cultural specificity are plentiful. “According to Freud, what comes between fear and sex?” the answer is clearly: fünf. Again, the joke only works in English which happens to have two words that are the homophones of two German numbers, which in turn, just happen to be connected with Freud’s well known preoccupation.

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

589

In conclusion, as with the issue of equivalence, at the end of the day translatability is a question of linguistic and cultural compromise. If a translation of VEH is necessary, it seems only fair that the means should justify the functional ends of attempts to amuse even if formal equivalence is compromised. 3.  VEH and multimedia translation Complex as they may appear, the issues examined so far are pretty straightforward when compared to the intricacy of having to translate an instance of VEH embedded within a multimedia text. As the term itself suggests, a multimedia text is both created and received via a  number of different technological media. Thus, a  film, which is produced with cameras, recording equipment and computers and is then perceived by audiences audio-visually is a typical example of a multimedia text, as are conference interpretations and automatic translations. As we shall see, such texts require extra attention in the translation process, as we are no longer simply translating a written text in Language A into a written text in Language B. Characteristically, the process of an audiovisual translation such as a film, as opposed to traditional translation, also requires matching the visual and verbal codes of the original product to the verbal codes of the target language – bearing in mind that the visual code remains the same. Multimedia translations include the linguistic mediation for a vast assortment of text-types which span from automatic and on-line translations to theatrical products (plays, musicals, opera, etc.); audio-descriptions available in museums and art galleries; films for cinema and dubbed, subtitled and ‘voiced-over’ products for television, video cassettes, DVDs, computer games and mobile phones. Screen translations are normally oral texts based upon the translation of written scripts, in the case of dubbing, dubbing-scriptwriters need to bear in mind the tricky question of lip-synchronization and of matching the new script to the lip movements of the TT (Paolinelli and Di Fortunato 2006). If subtitling is the chosen mode of translation, operators need to bear in mind issues regarding condensation of the message and the timeliness of the words on screen, in other words, they must ensure that audiences have enough time to read the subtitles and follow the action of the movie at the same time (see Ivvarson 1992). Thus, screen translation is concerned with spoken texts which are totally dependent on a visual code. For example, a hypothetical episode of a typical US soap or sitcom regarding a ‘baby shower’ will re-

590 

Delia Chiaro

quire some sort of extra linguistic mediation for the average Italian, French or German viewer who will need some gentle nudging to be able to put two and two together and understand a North American custom which is clearly illustrated on screen but for which no word exists in the respective target languages. Translating VEH on screen Since a film is a complex semiotic entity communicating verbal signs acoustically (dialogue), visually (written texts, such as letters, newspaper headlines etc.) coupled with non-verbal signs acoustically (music, background noises etc.) and visually (actor’s movements, facial expressions, setting of the film etc.) the translator’s intervention is limited to only one of these aspects – the dialogue – leaving all the other features unchanged. In a comedy which may well rely on many of these features simultaneously in order to create the desired effect, the verbal code is the only area which can be manipulated to aid the target culture in capturing the humour. Thus, most translational problems which regard VEH on screen are similar to those which regard written texts but multiplied several times owing to the restrictions which the visual code impose upon the translation. Selbst jene Übersetzer, die in der absoluten Treu zum Original (wie auch immer definiert und praktiziert) ein Dogma sehen, müssen in solchen Fällen entweder kampflos das Feld räumen (und damit auf Komik verzichten) oder ihren Prinzipien untreu werden und selbst neue, andere komische Elemente erfinden und einbringen, über die auch das ZS-Publikum lachen kann. (…) Gerade bei der Bearbeitung von Filmmaterial, das zur Erheiterung des Publikums gemacht worden ist, sollte die vielbeschworene’treu zum Original’ hinter dem Bemühengen zurück stecken, auch das Zielpublikum lachen zu machen.  (Müller quoted in Whitman-Linsen 1992: 141). Those translators who see absolute translation as a dogma must, field in such cases, either abandon the field (and give up translating comicity) or betray their principles and find humorous ideas elsewhere in the text so that the target audience can laugh too.(…) it is indeed in the elaboration of a screen text, created to amuse the public that ‘fidelity to the original’ should be relegated to second place behind attempts to make the target audience laugh.  (My translation)

Let us begin with a straightforward example taken from the British comedy A Fish called Wanda (Charles Chrichton, 1988, UK). This film is highly de-

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

591

pendent on audiences’ recognition of the stereotypes and many cultural references too. Denton (1994) reports Wanda, who, commenting on the stupidity of her ‘ brother,’ Otto declares: “He’s so dumb he thought that the Gettysburg Address was where Lincoln lived.” This joke is both linguistic and cultural. Italian has no polysemy attached to the term ‘address’ and Italian audiences are likely to be unaware of the episode in the American Civil War with which British and American audiences are familiar, so in the Italian version we find: “È così stupido, credeva che Piccadilly Circus fosse un circo equestre.” (Literally “He’s so dumb he thought Piccadilly Circus was actually a circus”) The core component of Otto’s stupidity is maintained through the reference of an internationally recognized landmark. Furthermore the pun on Circus/ circo is, in a way, similar to the pun on ‘address’. However, this is a relatively simple translational problem to solve as the visuals on screen simply present the characters conversing hence making lip synch the only serious difficulty. Bosinelli (1994: 17) provides the following example from the Italian translations of Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977, USA): ORIGINAL

ITALIAN DUB

BACKTRANSLATIONS

“Did you eat yet, or what […]” “No, didchoo? Not ‘did you’, di dchoo eat? Jew? Not did you eat, but Jew eat? Jew Jew eat?”

Io sono per la concisione […] No, ma davvero, tu, non ci credo, ma dai, per la concisione, vorrai dire per la circoncisione[…] C’è la vendita speciale di Wagner Street, Signore, ne resterà inebriato. ITALIAN SUBTITLES Ti vedo un po’ giù…deo

I’m for conciseness […] No, really, you, I don’t think, go on, conciseness, you must mean circumcision […] There’s a special sale in Wagner Street, Sir, you’ll get drunk. You look down Jew.

The original wordplay based on the assonance between ‘did you’ and ‘Jew’ is replaced by wordplay between concisione/conciseness & circoncisione/ circumcision and an extra compensatory line which includes a  corrupted

592 

Delia Chiaro

i­nebriato/drunk which becomes inebreato which incorporates the item ebreo = Jew. The semantic core of Judaism is retained by sacrificing formal equivalence while in the subtitled version (literally: ‘you seem a bit down Jew’ giù = down/ giudeo = Jew) vice-versa occurs. However, as in the example from Wanda, the absence of close up shots and visuals tightly linked to the words allow for such translational freedom. This is not always possible. Furthermore, for purely technical reasons linked to the speed of the screen utterance and the time necessary for the audience to read the translation, the subtitled version is extremely short and highly reduced in comparison to both original and dubbed versions. Thus, generally speaking, as with written texts, it would appear that in the event of puns on screen, translators and dubbing scriptwriters tend to go for one of the following four options: a. leave the pun unchanged in the SL; b. replace the SL pun with a TL pun; c. replace the SL pun with an idiomatic expression in the TL or d. ignore the pun altogether 3.1.1.  Leaving the pun unchanged Presumably dubbing-scriptwriters are forced to keep the original pun in the SL when they have no other option. The plot of comedy Blame it on the Bellboy (1991, Mark Hermann, UK) hinges on a bellboy at Gabrielle’s Hotel in Venice who misunderstands the names of three English clients – Mr Melville Orton who is in Venice to buy some property for his boss, Mr Maurice Horton who is there on a blind date and Mr Michael Laughton a hired killer. The close homophony of these names, all of which contain the traditionally confusing ‘l’ and ‘r’ sounds make up a rhetorical device which is frequently used for humorous means – the homeoteuleuton. When the bellboy, who is unable to distinguish the three names gives each guest the wrong message, we have all the necessary ingredients for an Anglo-Italian farce for which no translation is required. 3.1.2.  Replacing the SL pun with a TL pun This solution is the most difficult and consequently the less frequently adopted of all and dependent on the dexterity of the translators and dubbing-scriptwriters, at least one aspect of the original pun may still be captured. Natu-

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

593

rally, this is the most satisfying solution for audience. A good example occurs in Four Weddings and a  Funeral (1994, Mike Newell, UK) when novice priest Rowan Atkinson botches-up one of the four ceremonies by missing out certain sounds in the litany. The Italian dubbing-scriptwriters solved the problem by adding syllables to the Italian litany thus creating an equally irreverent effect: ORIGINAL

DUB

BACKTRANSLATION

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Goat… …to be your awful wedded wife…

Nel nome del Padre, del Figlio e dello spiritoso Santo… …la tua illegitima sposa…

In the name of the Father and of the son and of the lively ghost your illegitimate wife

However, here too, apart from lip-synch, we are still not facing really tricky screen translation problems of the calibre of the classic scene in which dean of faculty Groucho Marx signing a  document in Horse Feathers (Norman McLeod, 1932, USA) asks someone to give him a seal, Harpo quite typically produces an animal. In Italian the item ‘seal’ sigillo is monosemous so the film’s dubbing-scriptwriters were faced with running the risk of puzzling spectators with a word to word translation. Long before the days of digitalisation, the visual code could not be modified in any way and by a stroke of luck, the dubbing director came up with Focalizziamo as a solution meaning literally, ‘Let’s focus on it’. Although different in formal terms, a claim for equivalence can easily be made not only in terms of communicative function (i.e. it is clearly a joke) but also because a portion of the ST core meaning is retained through the stem foca which denotes the animal ‘seal’. The Italian translations of Marx Brothers’ films are a never-ending source of inspired solutions to puns on screen. In Monkey Business (Norman McLeod, 1931, USA) we find the following exchange: groucho: Columbus was sailing on his vessel… chico: On his what? groucho: Not on his what, on his vessel. Don’t you now what a vessel is? chico: Sure I can vessel (He whistles a tune). The pun is based on the weak homophony between ‘vessel’ and ‘whistle’. There is no way the translator can escape the pun as Chico is seen ­unambiguously

594 

Delia Chiaro

whistling in a lengthy close-up shot. In Italian a vessel is a caravella phonetically similar to caramella denoting a sweet or a candy. groucho: Ma Colombo, bordeggiando con le sue caravelle… chico: Le sue cose? groucho: Bordeggiando con le sue caravelle. Non sai cosa sono le cara­ velle? chico: Cioccolate, caravelle (whistles) “Cioccolate, caramelle” followed by whistling was the familiar cry of vendors in Italian cinemas in the thirties and forties. Thus Chico actively whistling into the camera creates little mismatch between the visual code and the dialogue. 3.1.3.  Replacing the SL pun with an idiomatic expression in the TL Once again the Marx Brothers offer an interesting example, in Duck Soup (1933, Leo McCarey, USA). Groucho (Firefly) is president of Freedonia and Chico and Harpo are two incompetent spies: trentino (President of Sylvania): “But I  asked you to dig up something I  could use against Firefly. Did you bring his record? (Pinky pulls out a gramophone record from his coat.) Once again we have a typical screen translation dilemma as the object of the joke is clearly visible to audiences. Ignoring a reference to a record would simply create a non sequitur. The problem is resolved by replacing the polysemous ‘record’ with an idiom: cambiare disco = ‘ to change the subject’ (literally ‘change the record’ in which the word disco denotes a disc/record). trentino: “Volete rispondermi a tono una volta per tutte! Cambiate disco per Bacco!” 3.1.4.  Ignoring the pun altogether Interestingly, when a pun is ignored, one is never sure whether the omission is a deliberate translation strategy or the lack of recognition of the pun in the

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

595

original text. An example of an unchanged pun occurs in The Big Chill (1983, Lawrence Kasdan, USA) when Sam (Tom Berenger) is reluctant to father Meg’s (Sarah Kay Place) child : Sam : “You’re giving me a massive headache!” Place: “Your’re not gonna use that old excuse, are you? You’ve got genes!” In response, Berenger, typecast as a good looking imbecile, looks down at his trousers and touches them bemused. The Italian version becomes hai dei buoni geni but the literal translation of the original, the Italian word geni, is monosemous and can only refer to chemically patterned information. Furthermore, it bears no phonological resemblance to the universal word for denim trousers, jeans. Thus Italian audiences must have wondered why Berenger should touch and glare at his jeans as he does (see Chiaro 1992). 3.2.  Between success and failure Dubbed comedies in many European countries tend to receive harsh criticism from ever more discerning audiences who are aware that jokes and quips do not always work in their translated versions. Nevertheless, several British comedies, A Fish called Wanda, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Full Monty (1997, Peter Cattaneo, UK), Notting Hill (1999, Roger Mitchell; UK) and The Diary of Bridget Jones (2001, Sharon Maguire; UK&USA) have been huge box office successes worldwide despite inevitable linguistic and cultural barriers which tend to make humour so difficult to export and consequently appreciate. Interestingly, these comedies contain very few puns and therefore present fewer difficulties in translation than comedies which are denser in terms of word play. Could density of wordplay, and consequently difficulty in translation, be the reason why so many comedies are destined to flop outside their country of origin? Yet the Marx Brothers, whose films were an endless concatenation of what are frequently visually dependent puns, were popular the world over too, although it could be argued that Hollywood monopolized the cinema at the time. On the contrary, Italian film comedian Totò contemporary of the Marx Brothers whose style was not so different did not make it beyond Italy despite excellent subtitled versions.12 On the other hand, it would appear that much VEH on the big screen tends to be based on irony rather than punning, yet, as Zabalbeascoa13 observes,

596 

Delia Chiaro

if the viewer has no access to the cultural presuppositions behind the irony, despite a straightforward translation which apparently presents no particular culture-specific or linguistic difficulties, the humour involved may well be lost. Zabalbeascoa considers the opening monologue of the film Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996, UK): Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family, Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a  Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life. I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who need reasons when you’ve got heroin?

Linguistically basic and undemanding in terms of interlingual translation, the irony appears to come across equally well outside the UK. The contradiction in the text does, of course, depend upon the monologue with the constant repetition of the item ‘choose’ coupled with a gripping visual text in which we witness heroin addicts Renton and Spud firstly being chased by the police and then lying on the ground motionless and drugged in a filthy and squalid environment. The ironic ‘choose’ – the slogan of countless advertising campaigns and the banner of Thatcherism – jars against the detailed mockery of the middle class British dream which is depicted on the screen. Neither Renton nor Spud has chosen the life they disparagingly criticize but total squalor instead. Apart from requiring the knowledge of a culture in which homes are furnished with three piece suites and men indulge in DIY at weekends, the viewer also needs to understand the opposing script (Raskin op. cit.) in which, by choosing heroin, what is being disparaged by the speaker is replaced by the dismal underworld of drugs. The fact that, in this case, such recognition is not a only a linguistic skill but a question of cognitive competence in which the visual code plays an imperative role, may well be the reason why the humour succeeds cross-culturally. In fact, box office takings prove that the films mentioned previously have been to the taste of audiences world wide. Yet we can never be cer-

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

597

tain whether audiences appreciate the films in the same way from culture to culture. For example, watching the same film, do Italian audiences laugh in the same places as British audiences? And does this depend on a different sense of humour or could it depend upon the translation? The character of Charles (Hugh Grant) in Four Weddings and a Funeral comes across very differently in the Italian version precisely because of the translational choices adopted (Chiaro 2000c). In the original, he is a dithering, overgrown ex-public schoolboy who is unable to get his act together with cool American beauty Carrie (Andie McDowell). His sexual insecurity is reflected in his speech as he stumbles through his lines in a stereotypically British way. A glance at any electronic corpus of spoken British English will reveal a  high frequency of hesitations, repetitions and general verbal treading of water. Thus Charles’s speech contains endless examples of vague language such as ‘sort of…’; ‘…or something…’; ‘…and anything…’; ‘…and everything…’ ; ‘you know…’; ‘sort of…’ etc. In translation this vagueness is lost as dithering Charles is transformed into assertive Charles and consequently he becomes less amusing. Do you think…you might agree not to marry me, and do you think not being married to me may be something you might consider doing for the rest of your life? I do, do you? Italian Charles is far more self confident: Tu credi che…tu saresti d’accordo di non diventare mia moglie? E credi che il fatto di non sposarmi è una possibilità che potresti valutare, voglio dire per il resto della tua vita? Vuoi? Such subtleties require investigation. If culturally diverse audiences do laugh in different places, how far does this depend upon culture-specific presuppositions and how far on the quality of translation. Comic films are successful in more cultures yet for different reasons (Chiaro 2003). Translation must surely play an important role. However, even if we may quite safely hypothesize that quality of translation can either break or make a comedy, it is however one single factor among many which contribute to a film’s success. Even if we could provide sufficient data to show that quality of translation is a significant variable in the success of a comic film, let us not forget other variables such as the actors, screenplay, script, other films on the circuit at a particular moment in time, socio-economic factors regarding audiences, advertising campaigns

598 

Delia Chiaro

Success

Flop

‘Source’ nation

‘Dubbed’ nation

Figure 5.

and the psychological state of spectators themselves. Thus it would be quite hard to discern exactly why so many imported comedies flop in their translated versions. A matrix such as Figure 5, in which the success of a film in two countries is compared could be helpful (Chiaro 2000). The variable which is of interest is represented by the arrow which cuts across the graph in which the constant of quality is clearly implicated. Films which place themselves in the two upper squares would obviously be well dubbed, those in the bottom right hand square are patently flops. What would be interesting to find out is how far the language variable is responsible for the non-success of a film outside its country of origin. Investigations could show us why, how and to what extent quality of translation influences the success of a film. 4.  The role of translation in Humour Studies Being an inter-discipline, translation could well play an important role in empirically grounded cross-cultural research within the field of Humour Studies. While much cross-cultural research so far has dealt with descriptions of national styles of humour (Ziv 1988; Davies 1998) there is no research which investigates humour as an individual difference variable across more cultures (see Ruch 2002).

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

599

There is, in fact, a growing feeling among scholars of a certain lack of interdisciplinarity14 within the field, one which is itself still wanting in a definition of the very term with which it is concerned. Apart from attempting to understand what different cultures find humorous and why, we are still unaware of exactly what is understood by the term humour in all cultures. A pilot psycholexical investigation carried out via the World Wide Web sought, amongst other things, to establish humour related terms in as many languages/cultures as possible.15 This laudable first step, however, involved the administration of a questionnaire which was couched in the English language. Linguistic imperialism apart, the pre-suppositions underlying the English term in the first place may well differ greatly from the equivalent term in another language and culture. Thus psychologists and lexicographers would do well to work hand in hand on such projects. And beyond the theories of equivalence and translatability of jokes and quips discussed at length in this chapter, surely such a  new and unexplored area within Humour Studies is exactly where Translation Studies can be most beneficial. Some steps in this direction are beginning to bear their fruits. Special issues dedicated to humour and translation of prestigious journals have underscored the need for interdisciplinarity and have included studies on areas such as dealing with humour in conference interpreting and perception of humour in screen translation (Vandaele 2003; Chiaro 2005). Furthermore, recent empirical studies carried out in the field of screen translation in Italy show that translation does indeed have an impact on the positive humour response of foreign audiences (Antonini et al 2003; Chiaro 2004, 2007; Antonini 2005; Bucaria 2006; Bucaria and Chiaro 2008). Based on Ruch’s 3WD Test (1992, 2001) which originally set out to measure personality and sense of humour, the quoted studies all aim at measuring the humour response to VEH in translation in comparison to the response of the same attempts at humour in the TL. And results clearly show that, bearing in mind Ruch’s strait-trait variable, while humour responses are very similar both in Italian, US and UK audiences in the case of non-verbal humour, less positive are responses when interviewees are faced with instances of VEH in translation. Furthermore, when the VEH in question is complex, the positivism and degree of the response appears to depend on the quality of the translation (Chiaro 2007, 2008). Naturally, there is a need for more studies on robust samples in numerous language combinations before any kind of generalization can be made.

600 

Delia Chiaro

Conclusions This chapter has attempted to provide an overview of the chief issues traditionally connected to the translation of VEH, namely equivalence and translateability. While these two concerns render the actual translation of humorous discourse difficult, shared language and encyclopaedic knowledge between perpetrator and recipient of VEH are paramount for it to be conveyed successfully. As we have seen, the field of translation of VEH is a particularly interesting one in terms of scope of research as a  better understanding of humour responses to translated VEH can provide significant insight into the whys and wherefores of sense of humour and to the extent of its culturespecificity.

Notes 1. A distinction first made by Roman Jakobson, intralingual translation refers to a process of rewording in which the verbal signs in a language are re-interpreted into the same language, interlingual translation, or translation proper, refers to when the verbal signs are interpreted into another language while intersemiotic translation, or transmutation refers to verbal signs which are interpreted with signs outside the verbal system such as books adapted into films, plays, musicals etc. (1959: 232–9) 2. The term ‘multimedia translation’ refers to translations which are perceived by the recipient via more than one channel; e.g. a subtitled film which can be simultaneously seen, read and heard or an interpreted lecture which can be followed visually and at the same time aurally in the source language as well as through headphones in the target language. Such translations are also defined as being multimedia because they are produced via the implementation of several technological devices e.g. dubbing a film into a foreign language requires the use of sophisticated audio-visual equipment; automatic, on-line translations of hypertexts require the implementation of electronic parsers etc. 3. The Skinhead Hamlet is available on-line at http://sa.rochester.edu/drama/skinhead.html. The ‘Google’ search engine provides automatic interlingual translations which unwittingly illustrate many of the issues discussed in the present chapter . 4. For a  full discussion of the Italian version of The Nanny see Chiara Frezza (1998) The Adaptation of an American Sitcom: the case of The Nanny/La Tata and Francesca Maccario (2005) Humour e riferimenti culturali: il caso di ‘The Nanny.’ Unpublished dissertations, SSLiMIT (Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators) University of Bologna at Forlì, Italy.

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

601

5. Following the word-for-word translation of the script, it is the job of dubbingscriptwriters to adapt the new text to the visual code on screen by, for example, ensuring that actors’ lip movements are synchronized to the target language, a task which inevitably results in linguistic distortions. It is also their job to ensure that the translated dialogues sound like naturally occurring Italian. 6. Cicero was the first to speak in support of translations ad sensum as opposed to translations ad verbum, followed by Horace who advised the translator to be faithful to “the meaning and not the word order” (Steiner 1975: 236). However, the Middle Ages favoured word for word translations of the Bible and the practice of ‘interlinear’ translation in which the translated words were inserted above the original text was quite common as it was thought that the order of words was divinely ordained. Moreover, two famous Bible translators St.Jerome and Martin Luther aimed at producing more readable versions for their audiences. In his Ein Sendbrief von Dolmetzchen Martin Luther argues that his rendering of the Bible in German could be understood by people in the marketplace. Of course, Luther thought that he had been divinely inspired to interpret the Bible for the people, nevertheless, his TT audience oriented approach was extremely modern for the 16th century. By this time however, scholars had begun to favour translations in which the author’s intentions were given preference over the words themselves although at the same time there was a strong feeling that translations had to remain faithful to the aesthetics of the originals (e.g. the translations of the classics of Etienne Dolet; Joachim Du Bellay and George Chapman. See also Steiner 1975: 8).   This French pre-eminence in translation theory reflects the centrality of the French language and culture following the decline of Latin. Although audience oriented like Bible translators, the French were mainly concerned with translations of literary, and especially poetical texts, thus the desired effect was no longer didactically oriented and aimed at giving their readers pleasure (see Ulrych 1992: 17–18). Such thinking was followed by the moderate view which began to emerge in the Age of Reason. The English essayist Dryden proposed a middle ground between a “faithful” and a “free” translation. He categorized the translation process in English dividing translations into three basic types: two extreme methods; metaphrase, a literal and word-for-word translation and imitation, an extremely free translation which was loosely modelled on the ST. In Dryden’s third alternative paraphrase, the true sense of the original was to be rendered in acceptable TL. However, reasonable as this may sound, it was more easily said than done. Many 17th century French translators began to take great liberties when translating the classics, radically adapting them to suit the linguistic and literary tastes of the time. Such translations were so divorced from the originals that they gave rise to the term les belles infedèles. Steiner labels this trend “mimetic freedom” (1975: 262).   Worthy of note is Göethe’s strikingly modern view of translation (1819). In his taxonomy he speaks of one type of translation which acquaints the reader

602 

Delia Chiaro

worth the source culture, another which enters into the spirit of the target culture and a third which absorbs the sense of the ST but reconstructs it without radically altering the original. 7. Rewritings refer to adaptations of source texts. For example, how far can West Side Story be considered an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and how far can it be considered a translation? 8. Of course I have provided a translation thus rendering the term ‘untranslatable’ a contradiction in terms. However, what is commonly meant by the term refers to the transfer of meaning across two or more languages without undergoing radical changes. 9. As Davies points out, most carabinieri traditionally come from Southern Italy where unemployment is high and joining this military police force is a guarantee of a regular income, so in a sense, these police officers do belong to an ethnically marked group. 10. ‘Barracks’ would be a more adequate translation because carabinieri are to all effects a military force. 11. Interestingly, during such breaks, nowadays coffee is probably drunk as much as tea! 12. Interestingly, at the turn of the 21st century, Toto’s films are undergoing a process of reappraisal both in Europe and the USA – Totò Stars and Stripes, a tour of 15 of the comedian’s films subtitled by Gordon Poole have been successfully reviewed not only in Italy but also in the UK and across the USA from New York to San Francisco . 13. Lecture entitled Translating Audiovisual Irony. On the nature of the audiovisual text and the semiotic factors of its translation delivered in May 2002 at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in Languages, Translation and Cultures, University of Bologna at Forlì on the occasion of the conclusion of the Department’s Postgraduate Course in Multimedia Translation. 14. The presidential address ‘Humour Research’ given by Willibald Ruch at the 14th International Conference of the International Society of Humour Studies (ISHS) held in Bertinoro, Italy in July 2002 while describing the state of the art within the field also contains a clear appeal for a more interdisciplinary approach. Victor Raskin in his keynote speech preferred the term ‘multidisciplinarity’ to point out that such a vast area of research be constrained to individual landlocked disciplines. 15. Questionnaire elaborated by Willibald Ruch and administered to ISHS members via web in May–June 2002.

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

603

References Addison, Joseph, and Richard Steele 1982 (1709–1712) Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator of Steele and Addison. In Angus Ross (ed.) Harmondsworth: Penguin. Alexieva, Bistra 1997 There must be some system in this madness: metaphor, polysemy, and wordplay in a cognitive linguistics framework. In Dirk Delabastita (ed.), Traductio: Essays on Punning and Translation. Manchester/Namur: St. Jerome. Antonini, Rachele 2005 The perception of subtitled humor in Italy. In: Delia Chiaro (ed.), Humor, International Journal of Humor Research Special issue of Humor and Translation 18 (2): 209–225. Antonini, Rachele, Chiara Bucaria, and Alessandra Senzani 2003 “It’s a priest’s thing, you wouldn’t understand”: Father Ted goes to Italy. Antares Umorul- O Noua Stiinta 6: 26–30. Attardo Salvatore 1994 Linguistic Theories of Humor. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ballard, Michel 1996 Wordplay and the didactics of translation. In: Dirk Delabastita (ed.), 333–​346. Bassnett, Susan 1980 Translation Studies. London: Methuen. Bolettieri Bosinelli, Rosa Maria 1994 Film dubbing: Linguistic and cultural issues. Il Traduttore Nuovo XLIV: 7–28. Bucaria, Chiara, and Delia Chiaro 2008 End-user perception of screen translation: The case of Italian dubbing. In: Eliana Franco (ed.), Tradterm. Special issue of Screen Translation 13: 91–118. Bucaria, Chiara 2006 The perception of humour in dubbing vs. subtitling: the case of ‘Six Feet Under’. ESP Across Cultures 2: 36–4. Burge, Tyler 1978 Self-reference and translation. In Franz Guenthner and GuenthnerReutter (eds.) Meaning and Translation: Philosophical and Linguistic Approaches, 137–153. London: Duckworth. Chesterman, Andrew (ed.) 1989 Readings in Translation Theory. Helsinki: Oy Finn Lectura Ab.

604 

Delia Chiaro

Chiaro, Delia 1992

The Language of Jokes: Analyzing Verbal Play. London: Rout­ ledge. 2000a Review of Dirk Delabastita (ed.) 1996 and 1997 Target 12 (1): 161–​ 166. 2000b “Servizio completo?’ On the (un)translatability of puns on screen. In: Rosa Maria Bolettieri Bosinelli, Christine Heiss, Marcello Soffritti, and Silvia Bernardini (eds.), La traduzione multimediale. Quale traduzione per quale testo?, 27–42 Bologna: CLUEB 2000c “The British will use tags, won’t they?” The case of “Four Weddings and a  Funeral”. In: Giulio Soravia and Christopher Taylor (eds.), Tradurre il cinema. Trieste: Università degli Studi di Trieste. 2003 The implications of the quality of Verbally Expressed Humour and the success of screen comedy. Antares Umorol-O Nouva Stiinta, 14–20. 2005 Humor. International Journal of Humor Research. Special issue of Humor and Translation 18 (2). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 2004 Investigating the perception of Verbally Expressed Humour on Italian TV. ESP Across Cultures 1: 35–52. 2006 The effect of translation on the humour response: The case of dubbed comedy in Italy. In: Yves Gambier, Miriam Shlesinger, and Radigundis Stolze (eds.), Translation Studies: Doubts and Directions, 138–152. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 2008 Issues of quality in screen translation: Problems and solutions. In: Delia Chiaro, Chiara Bucaria, and Christine Heiss (eds.), Between Text and Image: Updating Research in Screen Translation, 198–210. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, Chiaro, Delia (ed.) 2005 Humor. International Journal of Humor Research. Special issue: Humor and Translation 18 (2): 198–210. Cicero 1965 De Oratore/On the Orator trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, Cice­ro in Twenty-eight volumes. Vol 14; London: Heinemann. Davies, Christie 1998 Jokes and Their Relation to Society. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. De Beaugrande, Robert 1978 Factors in A  theory of Poetic Translation. Amsterdam: van Gorcum. Delabastita, Dirk 1993 There’s a Double Tongue. An Investigation into the Translation of Shakespeare’s Wordplay, with special reference to ‘Hamlet’. Amsterdam/Atalanta: Rodopi.

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

605

Delabastita, Dirk (ed.) 1996 The Translator 2 (2) Special issue: Wordplay and Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome/Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur. 1997 Traductio: essays on Punning and Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome/Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur. Denton, John 1994 How “A Fish Called Wanda” became Un Pesce di Nome Wanda Il Traduttore Nuovo XLIV: 29–38. Golden, Sèan 1996 No-man’s land on the common borders of linguistics, philosophy & sinology: Polysemy in the translation of Ancient Chinese texts. In: Dirk Delabastita (ed.), 277–304. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von [1819] 1977 The three epochs of translation, from the notes to West-Östlicher Divan, trans. André Lefevere, 35–37. Gutt, Ernst-August 1991 Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context. Oxford: Blackwell. Humboldt, Wilhelm von 1786/1868 Brief an A. V. Schlegel vom 23 juli 1796. In: Anton Klette (ed.), Ver­zeichnis der von A. W. v. Schlegel nachgelassen Briefsammlung: Nebst Mittheilung ausgewäter Proben des Briefwechsels mit den Gubrüdren von Humboldt, F. Scleiermacher, B. G. Niebur u. J. Grimm. Bonn (no publisher), v–vi. Ivvarson, Jan 1992 Subtitling for the Media. Stockholm: Ljunglöfs Offset AB. Jakobson, Roman 1959 On linguistic aspects of translation. In: R. A. Bower (ed.), On Translation, 232–239. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Koller, Werner 1979 Einführung in die Ubersetzungwissenschaft. Heidelberg and Wiesbaden: Quelle und Meyer. 1989 Equivalence in translation theory. In: Andrew Chesterman (ed.), Readings in Translation Theory. Helsinki: Oy Finn Lectura Ab. Kristeva , Julia 1968 Poésie et négativité. L’homme VIII (2): 36–63. Le texte du roman. The Hague: Mouton. Laurian, Anne-Marie 1989 Humour et traduction au contact des cultures. In: A. M. Laurian and D. Nilsen (eds.), Meta 34 (1): 5–14. Laurian, Anne-Marie, and Don Nilsen (eds.) 1989 Meta 34 (1) Special issue: Humour et Traduction. Humor and Translation.

606 

Delia Chiaro

Lausberg, H. 1967 Elemente der Literarichten Rhetorik. Munich: Max Hueber Verlag. Lefevère, André 1975 Translating Poetry, Seven Strategies and a  Blueprint. Amsterdam: van Gorcum. 1992 Translation, Rewriting and Manipulation of Literary Frame. London: Routledge. Mateo Martinez-Bartolomé, Marta 1995 La traducción del humor: Las comedias inglesas en español. Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo. Mounin, Georges 1963 Les problèmes théoriques de la traduction. Paris: Gallimard. Nash, Walter 1985 The Language of Humour: Style and Technique in Comic Discourse. London: Longman. Neubert , Albrecht 1994 Competence in translation: A complex skill, how to study and how to teach it. In: Mary Snell-Hornby, Franz Pöchhacker, and Klaus ­Kaindl (eds.), Translation Studies: An Interdisipline. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nida, E. A. 1964 Towards a Science of Translation. Leiden: E. J. Brill. 1969 Science of translation. Language 45: 483–498. 1975 Language Structure and Translation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Newmark, Peter 1982 Approaches to Translation. Oxford: Pergamon. 1988 A Textbook of Translation. New York : Prentice Hall. 1991 About Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Paolinelli, Mario, and Eleonora Di Fortunato 2006 Tradurre per il Doppiaggio. Rome: Hoepli. Pavesi, Maria 1994 Osservazioni sulla (socio)linguistica del doppiaggio. In: Raffaella Bac­co­lini, Rosa Maria Bolettieri Bosinelli, and Laura Gavioli (eds.), Il Doppiaggio. Trasposizioni Linguistiche e Culturali. Bologna: CLUEB. 1996 L’allocuzione nel doppiaggio dall’inglese in italiano. In: Christine Heiss and Rosa Maria Bolettieri Bosinelli (eds.), Traduzione multimediale per il cinema, la televisione e la scena. Bologna: CLUEB. Pisek, Gerhard 1996 Wordplay and the dubbing/subtitler. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 1: 37–51.

Verbally expressed humor and translation 

607

Popovič, Anton 1976 A Dictionary for the Analysis of Literary Translation. Dept of Comparative Literature, University of Alberta. Pym, Anthony 1992 Translation and Text Transfer. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. 2000 Negotiating the Frontier: Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing. Raskin, Victor 1985 Semantic Mechanisms of Humour Dordrecht: D:Reidel. Ruch, Willibald et al. 1991 Cross-national comparisons of humor categories: France and Germany. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 4: 391–414. Ruch, Willibald 1992 Assessment of appreciation of humor: Studies with the 3WD humor test. In: Charles D. Spielberger and James N. Butcher (eds.), Advances in Personality Assessment, 27–75. Vol. 9. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 2001 The perception of humor. In: Alfred W. Kaszniak (ed.), Emotion, Qualia and Consciousness, 410–425. Tokyo: World Scientific. 2002 Humor. In: Christopher P. Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman (eds.), Values in Action (VIA) Classification of Strengths. Washington: APA/ New York: Oxford University Press. Sapir, Edward 1956 Culture, Language and Personality. Berkely/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Snell-Hornby, Mary 1988 Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Snell-Hornby, Mary, Franz Pöchhacker, and Klaus Kaindl (eds.) 1994 Translation Studies: An Interdiscipline, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Stecconi, Ubaldo 1994 Semiotics in translation teaching. Paper presented at conference Problems and Trends in the Teaching of Interpreting and Translation, Misano Adriatico, September 28–30. Steiner, George 1975 After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: London University Press. Toury, Gideon 1980 In Search of a Theory of Translation. Tel Aviv: Porter Institute. 1985 A  rationale for descriptive translation studies. In: Theo Hermans (ed.), The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation. London: Croom Helm.

608 

Delia Chiaro

Trevor, William 1976 The Children of Dynmouth. London: Bodley Head. Ulrych, Margherita 1993 Translating Texts. Rapallo, Cideb Editore. Vandaele, Jeroen (ed.) 2003 The Translator 8 (2). Special issue: Humour and Translation. Vermeer, Hans 1989 Skopos and commission in translational action. In: Andrew Chesterman (ed.), 173–187. Whorf, Benjamin Lee 1956 Language, Thought and Reality. Ed. J. B. Carroll. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ziv, Avner 1988 National Styles of Humor. Westport CT: Greenwood.

Visual humor

Cartoons: Drawn jokes? Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson Introduction Visual humor is, of course, humor, and cartoons are to visual humor what jokes are to verbal humor: the prototypical case that we should be able to account for before we venture out to other forms. This chapter1 will outline the state of the art and open issues in cartoon research. For the orientation of the reader, we will use a comparative perspective to verbal humor and a focus on the essential differences and similarities. Humor, as this primer proves, is a multidisciplinary field. But researchers formulate their humor theories most often for verbal humor, in particular, verbal jokes. Lowis and Nieuwoudt (1995) correctly state that cartoons are often used in humor research, with an implicit assumption of their full compatibility with verbal humor (e.g., Paolillo 1998, Coulson 2001), but that few researchers have touched on the specific phenomenology of cartoon humor or motivated their use of cartoons rather than jokes. Redlich, Lewine, and Sohler (1951) are among the exceptions, in that they explain the dual nature of cartoon humor: the pictorial representation (“iconic character”) and the symbolic nature, both of which need to be understood in order to “get the joke”. The question is whether assumptions about verbal humor are simply transferrable to visual humor. Not many studies focus on cartoons for their specific qualities, but usually rather for the convenience of the material in psychological studies or for the thematic contents. That the cartoon as a field of humor has been neglected can also be illustrated, for example, by van Alphen’s (1996: 217) reduction of humor to aggression in her statement that it is a verbal weapon. She claims that humor, jokes, gags, irony, sarcasm and black humor are all expressed through verbal means, completely ignoring cartoons. For Behrens (1977) as well “visual wit” is hardly visual at all: Cartoon drawings and comic strips are considered verbal humor embellished with a picture, and the pictures by themselves as not humorous. Obviously, these observations, while often true for mixed textual/pictorial humor, clearly overlook purely pictorial cartoons that have no verbal elements at all.

610 

Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson

One could claim that the trend to focus on verbal humor is fostered by the linguistic dominance of humor research. But the reality is rather that linguists do what linguists do, namely, use their well-developed array of theories and methodologies on texts. This leaves pictorial humor in its peculiarity for fields that are underdeveloped scientifically, or simply do not care for this peculiarity of their material, but only for the contents, like the field of cultural studies. Psychologists or sociologists also usually don’t much care if the humorous material used in their studies was verbal or pictorial (e.g., Ruch 1992; Rothbart and Pien 1977), but – as we will try to show – they probably should. For example, while Suls (1972) focused on jokes and explicitly on verbal cartoons, nonverbal cartoons were not integrated in his work and it remains unclear if they would have changed his results. Social studies is the application of humor research that tells us something about the users of humor, while theoretical research is development of humor theory, telling us about humor itself. Both avenues are necessary and benefit from each other, but the focus of this chapter is to outline humor theory for research on visual humor. It is not intended to provide a complete historical overview of cartooning through the ages and cultures, but to provide the reader with the tools to carry out research, either of the social, historical, cultural kind, or, in the vein of the work that is the focus here, theoretical, cognitive, linguistic, psychological research. Thus, content issues will be largely ignored. Structurally, what should prove helpful is that the distribution of the essential humor elements in the stimulus is not as restricted and forcedly linear as in verbal humor. The interaction of verbal and visual parts in mixed cartoons provides a good starting point for such research, for example to distinguish the phases of humor cognition, such as a setup, incongruity detection, and (partial) resolution. An additional emphasis can be the difference between cognition (joke recognition) and appreciation (­funniness). The themes and characters of humor are in principle independent of the semiotic medium, that is, if they are verbalized or (partially) drawn. Contentrelated distinctions in verbal humor migrate easily to the domain of visual humor. Even subgroups like punning are found in both domains (see below). Thus, as indicated, content issues will be largely ignored. The visual domain,2 in which symbols necessarily have to resemble that what they stand for, has relevant peculiarities, as this chapter will show. One important difference between jokes and cartoons falls outside of our expertise and will only be mentioned briefly here: jokes usually have no authors, are folkloristic products, while cartoons usually do have an author with a distinct drawing style and topical preferences who also signs his or her work.3

Visual humor 

611

This entails that we should not expect to find spontaneous cartooning in analogy to conversational joking. Again, we oversimplifyingly claim that cartoons are jokes that convey part of the necessary information through pictures rather than text. So, for now, assume that all that you have read in this primer about verbal humor holds for cartoons as well. This chapter will indicate where different assumptions are warranted. They are most obvious in the formal domain, where the encoding of humor into purely pictorial – or an interaction of pictorial and verbal – symbols offers different formal and aesthetic possibilities than in purely verbal ones. We also assume this stimulus difference to have an effect on cognitive processing. Thus, from our contrastive perspective, there are two main differences between verbal, linguistic jokes and pictorial, visual cartoons: The aesthetic (formal) difference and the different loci (and probably modi) of cognitive processing, both surfacing as formal differences. Aesthetics is, shall we say, a wide field, and field markers are few and far between. Most existing work, and consequently the larger part of this chapter, will address cognitive aspects. In sum, one can distinguish between the content of the humorous text, its meaning, and its formal pictorial or verbal representation, the material aspect of the stimulus. This distinction is artificial, as the processing of a stimulus and the surface properties of a stimulus determine each other, but it is useful for structuring the discussion. Content elements can be anything that is available as a script to potential audiences and can be brought into opposition and overlap in the material stimulus. As this introduction tries to outline, we won’t focus on content elements of humor, but rather on specific cognitive aspects of cartoon processing and, to some degree, aesthetic elements of the material cartoon stimuli. For this, we propose the following categorization of studies on cartoon humor, in order to then pick groups that have chosen the same purview: 1. Studies that use cartoons in order to address research questions derived from humor theories. In such studies, reactions to cartoons (evaluated funniness, laughter) are dependent variables in tests of humor theories. Examples are studies by Shultz (1976), Suls (1972), or Hirt and Genshaft (1982), who investigated the effect of incongruity and complexity on the perception of humor. 2. Studies that focus on the content of cartoons, such as gender stereotypes (Herzog 1999, Love and Deckers 1989; Thompson and Zerbinos 1995), social stereotypes (e.g., Bogardus 1954; Anderson and Jolly 1977), political and social aspects (e.g., Abe 1998), or sexual themes in cartoons

612 

3.

4.

5.

6.

Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson

(e.g., Brodzinsky and Rubien 1976; Felker and Hunter 1970, Derks 1992; Herzog and Hager 1998). Giarelli and Tulman (2003) provide useful approaches for methodological issues (sample selection, data collection and data analysis) to investigate such questions. Studies that use cartoons to address research issues that are not directly related to humor or humor theories, and, for example, investigate memory processes (Schmidt and Williams 2001) or neuronal activation patterns evoked by cartoons in which one has to ascribe mental states to characters (Theory of Mind, e.g., Gallagher et al. 2000; Marjoram et al. 2006), or Theory of Mind and schizophrenia (Corcoran, Cahill and Frith 1997, Marjoram et al. 2006). Research on cartoonists. For example, Fisher and Fisher addressed the childhood of comedians (1981) and the personality structures of cartoonists (1983). Pearson (1983) found higher Psychoticism and Neuroticism scores in cartoonists. Samson and Huber (2007) found differences in the use of formal features in male and female cartoonists. Studies that investigated the influence of formal features on humor appreciation, for example aspects related to the drawing (degree of abstraction/reality, number of panels). For example, Huber and Leder (1997) investigated the effects of the number of panels or analyzed effects of the degree of reality on the humor response (Sheppard 1977, 1983). Finally, studies that explicitly address cartoons and their specificities for humor. For example, Paolillo (1998) attempted to investigate whether the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH, Attardo and Raskin 1991) is applicable to visual humor as well, but did not develop why he considers cartoons different from jokes, while Watson, Matthews and Allman (2006) investigated differences between language-dependent and picture-dependent cartoons in cognitive processes and their neural correlates.

Expanding the discussion of the last two types of research that actually address cartoons and their peculiarities, the following main part of this chapter will continue with a brief historical overview, a definition of cartoons, their general differentiation from verbal humor, an overview of studies on formal and aesthetic aspects of visual humor, and a closer look at cognitive humor processes in verbal and visual humor and studies on cognitive aspects of cartoon processing.

Visual humor 

613

Brief historical overview Depending on cultural and linguistic traditions, there is varying terminology for the multiple forms of pictorial humor. Caricatures are probably the oldest form of pictorial humor, where caricare (L.) means “to overload, exaggerate.” The main stylistic devices here are distortion and exaggeration, and the main sujet famous people. Caricatures have been documented since antiquity with a  blurry boundary between naïve-grotesque art forms and deliberate caricatures. Humor combined with visual art can already be found in Ancient Egyptian, Roman and Greek iconography (as reported by Wright 1875, see Bonaiuto 2006; Eichler 1965; Mitchell 2004), mostly based on anatomical disproportions regarding size of heads, shapes of noses, etc. In medieval times one can discern caricature-like features in so-called “shame paintings” (Schandmalereien), which were intended to be pictorial pillorying, as well as in grimacing adornments and gargoyles on churches (Eichler 1965). In the 16th century several artists used elements of caricatures, such as Holbein, Bruegel, and Bosch. In the 17th century humorous elements intended to mock the people who are depicted in them, can be found in the work of the Carraccis (Italian painters of the Bolognese School). Hogarth, and after him Rowlandson and Gillray, were famous British caricaturists of the 18th century, while the French dominated the genre in the 19th century with Gavarni, Daumier and Doré. Several journals were founded, such as “La Caricature” (1830) or “Charivari” (1832). When caricatures began to use social, political and personal satire, the art of cartoons was born (Eichler 1965). Töpffer, a French-speaking Swiss who published strip cartoons from 1831 on, is often considered the first cartoonist in the modern sense (Gombrich 1960, Kunzle and Inge 2007). By the end of the 19th century, German “cartoonists” emerged, such as Wilhelm Busch or Heinrich Zille, Thomas Theodor Heine, Rudolf Wilke, or Olaf Gulbransson. In the English literature, the first comic to be published is assumed to be James Swinnerton’s “The little Bears and Tigers” in 1892. For a more detailed overview, see Kunzle (1973). The term cartoon originally comes from the Italian word “cartone” and means a strong, heavy paper or pasteboard. It denotes a full-size drawing made on paper as a study for further drawings, such as a painting or tapestry. Cartoons were typically used in the production of frescoes to accurately link the component parts of the composition when painted onto plaster over a series of days. From this origin, cartoons came to be used to signify a line drawing in one panel done on a piece of paper (Eichler 1965). English ­satirical journal

614 

Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson

Punch applied the term to satirical drawings by publishing some parodistic drafts for frescoes (also called cartoons) and making the term’s new meaning permanent. In sum, in terms of the history of art, a cartoon can be considered a drawing, originally as an abstraction of a painting that has humorous content (Woschek 1991). Since the 20th century, cartoon is used as an umbrella term for all forms of humorous drawings, such as caricatures, gag-cartoons (i.e., a single-panel cartoon, usually including a caption), short funny stories, and later even for animated cartoons, a dominant meaning in the American context. Finally, cartoon and comic overlap in meaning, and some artists are hard to categorize, e.g., Claire Bretécher, Hogli, Robert Crumb, or Gilbert Shelton. Definition of cartoons On the basis of this brief overview, and before we can set out to outline the existing research on cartoons, it is helpful to provide a working definition as a basis of further refinements, as well as to differentiate cartoons from related forms of visual humor to clarify the purview of this chapter. Cartoons are understood as a humor-carrying visual/visual-verbal picture, containing at least one incongruity that is playfully resolvable in order to understand their punch line. Obviously, we’re starting out with a definition that would hold for jokes as well, plus the visual elements. Cartoons are jokes told in a picture (drawing, painting, etc.) comprising one or only a few panels (Nilsen and Nilsen 2000). The style of cartoons is most often characterized by simple lines, exaggerated features, as well as sketch-like and simplified figures. There are substantial differences between the formal styles of cartoonists, as can be seen from a comparison of works by different cartoonists: cartoons by Gary Larson, for example, show his typical rounded shapes, round people with small heads and white glasses which can be contrasted to the more realistic and detailed drawing style of Robert Crumb. In order to clarify what we consider cartoons, it is necessary to distinguish them from related objects, such as comics or caricatures: Comics – in contrast to cartoons – are orientated towards stories, their artwork is more detailed, more often anatomically correct, and the drawing more often closely resembles reality. Whereas a cartoon consists of one or only a few panels, comics, or graphic novels contain more panels, sometimes over several pages. In cases where a cartoon consists of several panels, the purpose of the earlier

Visual humor 

615

panels is to set up the punch line in the very last one (Meilhammer 1989). In comics, stories with the same characters can be told, whereas in cartoons, the characters are most often flat and interchangable. In cartoons, a punch line is always present, commonly with additional incongruities or funny elements. In comics it is not necessary that there are punch lines or funny elements. Whereas cartoons are most often published in newspapers, magazines (however, sometimes also in anthologies or books), comics most often come in the form of books. Obviously it is often difficult to decide whether a certain stimulus is a cartoon or a humorous comic. Cartoons can more easily be distinguished from caricatures, which are in some way their historical predecessors (see above). A caricature is a pictorial representation of an object, usually a  politician, exaggerating some of its features, in order to allow a more distinct characterization (someone with a big nose gets an even bigger one in the drawing) or metaphorical meanings (someone with a big belly is voracious in a figurative sense). Cartoons often incorporate caricatures or exaggeration as general stylistic devices. But some cartoons also portray a very realistic drawing style. The essential difference to cartoons is that besides the exaggerations of certain body parts (which sometimes stand for certain personality characteristics) there doesn’t have to be a punch line. If there is a punch line, we claim that the stimulus is a cartoon. Attempts at reducing all visual humor to a (specific form of) visual metaphor are as unenlightening as attempts to describe humor in general in terms of metaphor or conceptual blends. In recent years, the concept of ‘pictorial metaphor’ was applied to advertising (Forceville 1996) and film (Carroll 1996), in addition to cartoons (Morris 1993; El Refaie 2003). Carroll’s (1996) definition of visual metaphor is exemplary for the often underdefined and/or overspecific nature of the concepts involved: He assumes that there is a  visual fusion of elements from two separated areas into one spatially bounded entity. Visual puns One distinct subgroup of cartoons, the closer discussion of which can serve as an introduction to the distinction of visual and verbal humor well, are visual puns (Lessard 1991; Hempelmann and Samson 2007; Mitchell 2007). Visual puns have in common that one visual element signifies two meanings simultaneously, or in other words, activates two scripts at the same time. As this single visual component is related to two meanings, visual puns are difficult

616 

Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson

to transpose into the verbal domain. They are analogous to verbal/linguistic puns in the verbal domain. Linguistic symbols are arbitrary (Saussure 1916). There is no inherent relationship between the concept of knife, and the sound sequence [naif], witnessed among other things by the fact that in a language other than English a completely different sound sequence can stand for the same concept, e.g., one written as “Messer” in German. A visual symbol for the concept of knife, on the other hand, must always resemble that which it stands for, as this resemblance is how the concept is evoked. Such a symbol could not, for example, be round like a circle, but must be elongated and pointed, regardless of how much it is abstracted or may rely on context in a picture, such as a symbol for an object that is cut with the knife or a symbol for a hand that holds it. Their iconicity, that is, their visual resemblance of that which they stand for, will mean that different levels of abstraction lead to different degrees to which a visual pun is compatible with both its meanings.4 As always in the messy domain of human symbolic communication, both observations, the arbitrariness of the linguistic signs and the iconicity of the visual one are gradational and show exceptions. There are groups of linguistic signifiers that have a sound resemblance to that which they signify. This well-known phenomenon of onomatopoeia works when words denote events or objects that involve sound and thus can imitate that sound, for example animal calls. But onomatopoeia is restricted to this very small group of concepts. On the other side are conventionalized visual symbols, like traffic signs, where a red octagon may denote the concept stop, although it is usu-

Figure 1.  Example of a visual pun. Cartoon by Oswald Huber ©.

Visual humor 

617

ally accompanied by the word “stop” as well. In effect, these have become arbitrary graphemes. But while a motivated relationship is the exception for linguistic symbols, it is the rule for visual ones. Here, we will finally use the only example of a cartoon, which are always incredibly hard to get permission for.5 It is an example of a visual pun, which plays on the similarity of a flower head and its stem to a brain and its spinal cord. This visual pun might play on the idea of “growing your mind” (see Figure 1). Overview of differences to verbal humor With this discussion and after having emphasized the general similarity of jokes and cartoons so far, we are now in a position to focus on the crucial differences between verbal humor and (verbal-)visual humor, such as cartoons. We will begin this section by briefly summarizing the formal differences, some of which have already been mentioned above. Here, the first aspect is that jokes are told in a linear way, although they are not necessarily processed that way, as we know from research in reading and eyetracking experiments (e.g., Mitchell, Graesser, and Louwerse, in submission). In humor in particular, the discovery of the incongruity leads to backtracking to parts of the setup that need to be reinterpreted (cf. Attardo 1991: 140). In the picture part of a cartoon, on the other hand, usually no clear order of processing is forced in the way text does, but there are tendencies to follow a general order, which can crucially be directed by the artist creating entry points and paths in their picture (see section on aesthetic aspects below). Jokes are disclosing information very judiciously. There is no room for semantic ornament as the listener is paying close attention to any clue hinting at the expected incongruities or helping them with their playful resolutions. In cartoons the artist has more if not unlimited room to place details, which may not be related to the central elements of the humor at all or provide further non-focus incongruities. Similarly, it is more of a strain on the suspension of disbelief to place additional fully backgrounded incongruities into verbal humor than into cartoons (cf. Hempelmann and Attardo, in press). Characters in cartoons have faces, so their emotions can be depicted unobtrusively by giving them expressions, while characters in jokes would have to be explicitly described as having certain emotions or words used that reflect emotional states. As mentioned, a  general difference is that jokes work on the textual semiotic level, while cartoons use the iconic visual one, possibly with textual support.

618 

Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson

This leads to the ­possibility to distribute the key elements of humor differently in cartoons: the central incongruity can be in the picture and the resolution trigger in the text, or the picture sets up the humor while the incongruity holds between picture and text, for example. As mentioned, conversational cartooning is theoretically possible, but we should assume its rare occurrence. Conversational joking, on the other hand, is common and by some fields, e.g., conversation analysis and discourse analysis, claimed as the most frequent and important type of verbal humor, not least because canned jokes don’t fall into their purview. Finally, another enormous formal difference is, of course, iconicity as discussed in the section on visual puns. Formal differences This section will summarize how existing research has addressed formal differences so far. Several books and articles on cartooning try to define formal elements that are characteristics of cartoons. Gerberg (1989), for example, lists atmosphere, calligraphy, and texture (e.g., washed out, slightly playful, aggressive, or precise lines), cast, dialogue, gestures, background, composition and selectivity. He adds differences in silhouetting and shading: the main character can be made to stand out by contrast and brightness and more detail than the surroundings, as well as omitted background immediately around it. This is one possible attempt of describing essential formal features of cartoons. Other attempts to enumerate formal features have been published, but they tend to be unsystematic and are usually not informed by a theory (e.g., Keener 1992; Maddocks 1982; Whitaker 1994). Formal features of visual humor might be subsumed into the following groups: formal features of textual elements, the depicted characters in the cartoon, the verbal and nonverbal interaction, including the characters’ emotions; the spatial representation (e.g., of the incongruity), the drawing itself and aspects of humorous elements (e.g., incongruities or resolution enablers). The last group will be addressed in the section about cognitive aspects of cartoon processing. The existing research on formal aspects that relate to drawing styles and placement of elements in a cartoon is the focus of this section. Ring (1975) shows that the position of speech balloons influences the recall of information. Information in balloons on the right or left top are recalled more easily than those positioned below the center. Jones, Fine, and Brust (1979) tested the proportional effect of the pictorial component and

Visual humor 

619

textual components of cartoons on humor ratings. The components of cartoon humor were analyzed in order to determine the effects of caption, picture, and interaction between caption and picture on the humor rating of the whole cartoons. Cartoons were presented either complete, or with picture or caption missing. They found that the humor of the cartoon picture alone was positively related to the humor rating of the entire cartoon, particularly in the case of highly humorous cartoons. McKay and McKay (1982) compared non-captioned cartoons to captioned cartoons and to the independent ratings of the picture and captions of the captioned cartoons. Captioned cartoons were rated as significantly funnier than the independent ratings of pictures or captions. They found a difference in funniness between strictly pictorial, non-captioned cartoons and non-captioned cartoons with text in the picture in that the first were rated funnier. Herzog and Larwin (1988) studied humor appreciation for captioned cartoons as a  function of cartoon category and eight predictor variables: complexity (how complex, as opposed to simpleminded, is the humor in the cartoon), difficulty (how hard is it to understand the humor of the cartoon), fit (how well the caption fits the drawing), depth (between the surface meaning and the deeper meaning of the cartoon), visual humor, artwork (how good is the quality of the artwork in this cartoon), vulgarity, and originality. The variables fit, visual humor and artwork are specific for cartoons (in particular, the drawing or picture-text interaction), whereas the others can be judged for jokes as well, because they concern humor elements in general. Cartoons judged to have the most originality and the best fit were appreciated most. A non-metric factor analysis of appreciation ratings yielded four dimensions of cartoon categories, which were named Sexual, Incongruity, Social Issues and Marriage-Family. Interestingly, the authors also found both structural and content categories to influence humor appreciation, similar to the extended research of Ruch and colleagues (e.g., Ruch and Hehl 1998). The differences between the findings of these studies (for example the different content classes) are probably a  result of different methods or stem from the different stimuli used in their experiments. Overall, the studies summarized here are able to show that the interaction of pictures and text (e.g., the fit between the two, Herzog and Larwin 1988) increase the appreciation or funniness ratings of cartoons. Huber and Leder (1997) varied the number of panels as one aspect of a cartoon’s complexity. Contrary to their expectations, the less compact version was evaluated as funnier than the compact one. This result seems to be due to the fact that less compact cartoons are easier to understand. Woschek (1991) compared cartoons without facial expressions of the characters to ­redrawn

620 

Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson

cartoons with facial expressions (and vice versa) and demonstrated that cartoons with emotional facial expressions are rated as less funny than cartoons without. Brooks (1977) tested the hypothesis that memory for pictorial material is dependent on initial comprehension of the depicted relationships. Cartoon pictures with and without action lines indicating movement were presented to children of different age. Only older children (ninth-­graders in contrast to second- and sixth-graders) benefit from action lines as cues to the interaction between actors. The results are discussed in terms of the action (interaction) being the basis of comprehension and, consequently, picture recall. Karabas (1990) analyzed the effect of hair as one formal element in Turkish cartoons with respect to viewers’ attitude toward the persons and situations in the cartoons. The amount and shape of hair serve as formal signs to condition the viewer to expect certain personality traits and/or behavior. In the studies described so far, formal elements were always used as independent variables and their effect (e.g., on appreciation) was investigated. Samson and Huber (2007) had a  different approach: They investigated the effect of the cartoonists’ gender on the use of formal features of cartoons. They analyzed 21 formal features of cartoons, such as number of panels, text, number of words, caption, number of (speaking) characters, emotional expression, instrument (pen, brush, etc.), color, position of the punch line and type of joke (incongruity-resolution and nonsense cartoons), etc. The main results show that female cartoonists use more text, have more text in picture, speech balloons, have more words, and also draw more panels – obviously they are using a  different narrative style in telling jokes in cartoons. Furthermore, women more frequently draw cartoons with incongruity-resolution humor, whereas men prefer to draw cartoons with nonsense humor. This is not in line with previous results on humor appreciation in dependence of the perceiver’s gender regarding the preference for incongruity-resolution and nonsense humor (e.g., Ruch and Hehl 1998). Some studies considered drawing style or design elements, for example exaggeration. Sheppard (1983) compares humorous photographs to redrawn cartoons. Photographs are judged more humorous than cartoons. This may suggest that the cognitive frame established by the viewer is different for cartoons and photographs and replicates previous results by Sheppard (1977) where photographs were compared to cartoons with the same content. Thus, caricature-style exaggeration doesn’t seem to be enough to make a picture funny. But distortion or exaggeration of existing features are not the only means of cartoon drawings. So from these studies it can not be concluded that photographs in general are funnier than cartoons which can provide to-

Visual humor 

621

tally unreal scenes and situations not to be found in photographs. Dirr and Katz (1989) show that realistic illustrations were preferred over “cartoons”. However, cartoons in their study were simple line drawings of situations not containing a punch line. Therefore, the results are not generalizable for cartoons in general. The research group of Bonaiuto investigated the effect of several formal aspects in the picture. Bonaiuto and Giannini (2003), for example, show higher humor scores in humorous illustrations in their original, rounded, caricature shapes, devoid of shadow effects, in contrast to modified illustrations with angular, more realistic shapes, rich in chiaroscuro (i.e., a very realistic and detailed graphic treatment, rich in contrast). Other experiments show that reassuring and playful shapes and colors evoke higher humorous responses than the same illustrations with alarming and serious shapes and colors, presumably because playful-reassuring drawing styles facilitate humor through the avoidance of conflict overloading or excessive emotional involvement (for more details, see Bonaiuto 2006). Apart from experiments that investigate funniness or preference ratings on cartoons and realistic pictures, there are some studies that examine effects of exaggeration or simplification on recognizability. Ryan and Schwartz (1956) show that the modes of representation, such as photographs, shaded drawings, line drawings or cartoon, influence speed of perception. Cartoons facilitate processing as the visual elements are reduced to the essential information and were therefore recognized faster than line drawings, shaded drawings, and photographs. Similarly, Fraisse and Elkin (1963) show “caricatures” of common objects are recognized faster than photographs. Likewise, redrawn caricatures of faces are better recognized than the original faces (Mauro and Kubovy 1992). Rhodes, Brennan, and Carey (1987) demonstrate that computer-generated caricatures of individuals familiar to the subjects of the experiment were identified more quickly (but not more accurately) than veridical line drawings. In contrast, Tversky and Baratz (1985) using caricatures of well-known people failed to demonstrate the hypothesized superior recognizability of caricatures. Hagen and Perkins (1983) compared caricatures of unfamiliar faces to photographs and showed that photographs are more recognizable. Overall, some studies confirm the “superportrait hypothesis” (a face is more recognizable after exaggerating distinctive features than a veridical portrait) where others failed (see Table 1 for an overview). To summarize, this section provides an overview of research on formal elements of cartoon, mainly focusing on studies that considered the influence of formal elements of cartoons on cognitive and affective processing (for an overview, see Table 2). Although it is impossible to control stimulus material

622 

Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson

Table 1.  A selection of studies that investigated the abstraction level of the drawing style or degree of distortion as the dependent variable and the measured dependent variables (such as funniness ratings or preference). Further, the main results are listed Author(s) Sheppard (1977) Sheppard (1983) Dirr & Katz (1989)

Independent variable

Dependent variable

Photographs and cartoons (same content, not identical events) Photographs and redrawn cartoons Realistic illustrations and cartoons (same events)

Humorous rating Photographs > cartoons

Main results

Humorous rating Photographs > cartoons Preference Realistic illustrations > cartoons Photographs, shaded line Perception speed Cartoons > Ryan & Schwartz drawings, line drawings, (threshold for photographs, (1956) cartoons (same object) recognition) shaded line drawings > line drawings Fraisse & Photographs, cartoons (same Recognition Cartoons > Elkin (1963) object) speed photographs Rhodes et al. Computer generated Identification Caricatures > (1987) caricatures, veridical line veridical line drawings drawings Tversky & Caricatures and photographs Recognition Photographs > Baratz (1985) of famous people caricatures Hagen & Caricatures and photographs Recognition Photographs > Perkins (1983) of unfamiliar faces caricatures Mauro & Photographs of faces and Recognition Caricatures > Kubovy (1992) caricatures of same faces faces Bonaiuto (e.g. Cartoons in simple, Humor response Simple, round > 2006) round drawing style vs. chiaroscuro cartoons with shadows, in more realistic style with chiaroscuro effects Cartoons with bright, playful color > dark, serious colors

Playful, bright > dark, serious

Note: The main results are listed with < and >, which indicate whether cartoons are preferred over more realistic drawings or not (e.g., on recognition speed or humor appreciation).

Visual humor 

623

Table 2.  Overview of the studies that investigated and analyzed formal features of cartoons Categories

Formal feature(s)

Authors

Panels

Number of panels

Huber & Leder (1997), Samson & Huber (2007)

Text elements

Text (in picture: indicating text or speech balloons), caption, number of words

Samson & Huber (2007), Ring (1975)

Text & picture

Proportional effect of picture and text

Herzog & Larwin (1988), Jones et al. (1979), McKay & McKay (1982), Carroll et al. (1992), Watson et al. (2006)

Drawing, picture

Degree of abstraction/ reality

Ryan & Schwartz (1956); Sheppard (1977, 1983), Fraisse & Elkin (1963), Hagen & Perkins (1983), Tversky & Baratz (1985), Rhodes, Brennan & Carey (1987), Dirr & Katz (1989), Mauro & Kubovy (1992)

Degree of partial distortion (Tendenzselektion, Woschek 1991)

Samson & Huber (2007)

Characteristics of the drawing style: details, color, brightness, style, lines, background

Bonaiuto (see 2006), Samson & Huber (2007)

Localization of the punch line

Samson & Huber (2007)

Visual artwork

Herzog & Larwin (1988)

Logical mechanisms Characters, Emotions

Paolillo (1998), Samson, Zysset & Huber (2008), Tsakona (in press) Number of (speaking) characters

Samson & Huber (2007)

Hair

Karabas (1991)

Action-lines

Brooks (1977)

Expressed emotions

Woschek, (1991), Samson & Huber (2007)

624 

Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson

Table 2.  (cont.) Categories

Formal feature(s)

Authors

Other

Theory of Mind

Gallagher et al. (2000), Corcoran et al. (1997), Marjoram et al. (2006), Samson et al. (2008)

Note: Some of the studies mentioned in this table will be discussed in the chapter about cognitive processes on humor as they manipulated formal elements. Although Logical Mechanisms are strictly speaking not purely formal aspects, studies that analyzed cartoons with respect to their Logical Mechanisms are listed as well (see section on cognitive aspects of cartoon processing).

for all those formal elements that might influence humor processing, humor scholars working with cartoons need to keep them in mind and try to control as many as possible (e.g., choosing humorous cartoons randomly from a large pool of stimuli, using only non-verbal cartoons instead of captioned and non-verbal, controlling the number of pictures or degree of reality). Some formal features that are mentioned in books on cartooning haven’t been investigated at all, for example, “composition” or “selectivity”. Further research might address such elements. It would also be interesting to find the humorously optimal level of exaggeration or simplification of a drawing or if the position of the punch line influences the processing of cartoons. For example, are cartoons funnier if the punch line is on the right side of the picture, as Gerberg (1989) proposes. Similarly, Woschek (1991) assumes that eye movement from left to the right predicts order of processing. He also postulates that in cartoon processing several cognitive schemata are simultaneously activated, because of the high capacity of visual symbols. Accordingly, we suppose in pictorial humor there may potentially be more incongruities than in verbal humor. And, as Samson and Huber (2007) show, there are several locations for the incongruity: text, picture, or between text and picture. There are several interesting open research issues here. Aesthetics aspects Aesthetics can be seen as an affective experience that is based on affective preference and cognitive selection and evaluation (Kunst-Wilson and Zajonc 1980). We claim that visual aesthetics are different from verbal aesthetics, for example, providing access to emotions differently. But again, only intui-

Visual humor 

625

tive attempts to describe aesthetic characteristics of cartoons or mechanisms that are used in cartoons (and which are – sometimes – restricted to visual humor) exist. For example, Woschek (1991) supposes that exaggeration and simplification are not the only properties of satirical drawings, and lists additional ones: simple contrasts (distorted proportions, e.g., a person is very tall which might refer to his rank in society, partial distortion (Tendenzselektion), bisociation, or substitution (e.g., an object is in an untypical environment). Similarly, Behrens (1977) sought to categorize different (visual) mechanisms in visual humor. Ramachandran and Hirstein (1999) propose in their theory of artistic experience eight laws that influence aesthetic appreciation – some of them might be relevant for cartoon processing: One of these principles is a  psychological phenomenon called the peak shift effect and describes the stronger reaction towards stimuli that are constructed (e.g., drawn) with the important characteristic illustrated in a  more exaggerated manner than its prototype. Ramachandran and Hirstein suggest that caricatures as ‘supranormal’ stimuli evoke activation more strongly in some areas in the brain than natural stimuli. Another artistic law relevant for cartoons might be that stimuli with stronger contrasts evoke stronger reactions (with respect to cartoons: simple line drawings vs. a realistic, detail-oriented drawing style). However, the influence of aesthetic aspects of visual humor on affective and cognitive processes is difficult to investigate, not least because aesthetic elements are hard to be measured objectively. Visual artwork (understood as the subjective evaluation of the quality of the drawing) is investigated in one study by Herzog and Larwin (1988) only, but unfortunately many other dimensions or means of representations and their influence on cognitive and affective processes have not been addressed yet. However, if aesthetic aspects are broken down to formal elements, such as, for example, rounded shapes vs. realistic drawings, they can be made more easily accessible and operationalizable. Some of the above-mentioned aesthetic characteristics of cartoons were investigated as formal elements (see, for example, Bonaiuto 2006). It has been shown that the drawing style can create or provoke a certain atmosphere and increase or decrease the humorous experience. Aesthetic properties can also facilitate the recognition that something is meant to be funny (e.g., simple lines and rounded shapes can indicate that a  picture is meant to be humorous). However, aesthetic, formal and cognitive elements of cartoons are difficult to separate and because of the complex interaction between these levels, an attempt to distinguish them might be artificial. There seems to be a lack of studies – and also theories – that approach the influence of aesthetic aspects

626 

Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson

on humor processing. Most enumerations of aesthetic/formal/cognitive elements are not theory-driven and not (all) of these elements have been systematically investigated yet. In psychological research methods have found ways to operationalize several aspects of aesthetics, such as the mere exposure or familiarity (see studies by Leder, e.g., 2003; Leder, Belke, Oeberst, and Augustin 2004). Further studies on the influence of aesthetic aspects on humor processing have much room to develop. In summary, aesthetic aspects of visual humor remain largely unexplored, not least because of difficulties of quantifiability and operationalizability and the difficulty to separate them from formal elements and cognitive mechanisms. Furthermore, we claim that aesthetic elements are non-essential to humor, which is a cognitive experience that definitely can be enhanced by aesthetic factors, but is in principle independent of it. Aesthetics of humorous stimuli may have a high impact on affect: the drawing itself may not alter the core elements of humor (i.e., incongruity, incongruity-resolution), but may increase or decrease the humor response in dependence on whether the drawing style is appreciated or not. Cognitive aspects As repeatedly mentioned above, the implicit assumption in previous research (e.g., Suls 1972) has been that the cognitive-semantic processes involved in cartoon humor are generally compatible to those posited for purely textual humor, which are, we believe, most thoroughly formalized by the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH, Attardo and Raskin 1991) outlined elsewhere in this primer. Because of the fundamental identity of semiotic processes, we share this assumption of far-reaching adaptability of the humor cognition theories developed for verbal humor to visual humor. Thus, a brief overview of the research on verbal-humor cognition will form the backdrop against which we will develop the final section presenting open research issues for cartoon humor cognition. One crucial benefit for general theories of humor cognition is that in cartoons, the triggers for the various stages of cognition are distributed not strictly linearly as in joke texts, but are spatially arranged, even across the modes of picture and text. Thus, we assume that the processes may be more easily teased apart operationally and, consequently, empirically into various constellations of stages and their successions than it is possible in verbal humor. A crucial tool for experiments in both areas will turn out to be an eyetrack-

Visual humor 

627

er but also neuroimaging methods such as functional magnetic resonance ­imaging (fMRI). A representative paper from the early heyday of cognitive humor research in the 1970s is Suls (1972). He explicitly equates jokes and captioned cartoons in the respects he intends to address, as they present “a sequence of ideas” (82). This implies linear processing for both, and in the case of captioned cartoons a sequence that begins with the picture and then moves on to the caption, and also requires an additional assumption, namely that the picture present the incongruity and the caption the resolution. The latter, while common, is obviously not necessarily always the case, witnessed, not least, in cartoons without text. In contrast to models that consider incongruity alone to be sufficient for humor (e.g., Nerhardt 1970), Suls posits two stages: In the first, an expectation is disconfirmed (which tacitly assumes a preceding stage in which the expectation is built). This creates the incongruity. The second stage includes the search for (and identification of) a  cognitive rule, the resolution. Note that Suls does not distinguish problem-solving and general logic from its playful pseudo-logical variant. Similarly, McGhee, Ruch, and Hehl (1990) describe the salient features of incongruity-resolution humor (INC-RES) as being characterized by punch lines in which the surprising incongruity can be completely resolved. They distinguish the INC-RES type of humor from nonsense (NON) humor as follows: The other consistently emerging structural factor is nonsense humor, which also has a surprising or incongruous punch line, exactly as in incongruity-resolution humor. However, ‘... the punch line may 1) provide no resolution at all, 2) provide a partial resolution (leaving an essential part of the incongruity unresolved), or 3) actually create new absurdities or incongruities.’ (McGhee et al. 1990: 124) In nonsense humor the resolution information gives the appearance of making sense out of incongruities without actually doing so (see also Rothbart and Pien 1977).

We would like to remark that with respect to full, partial, and no resolution, we take a different and more careful position: In line with most current humor theories, we assume resolution to be always partial, as the logic that enables it is always playful, or faulty. Thus, incongruity-resolution humor should be considered one extreme, namely one closest to but distinct from full resolution, while nonsense humor takes up the opposite extreme, closest to no resolution, but at least pretending to having one. This latter position, again, corresponds closely to that of Rothbart and Pien (1977: 37).

628 

Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson

Shultz (1972), together with Suls (1972) and Jones (1970) another proponent of the revival of incongruity-resolution in the early 1970s, describes experiments based on the assumption that there are distinct incongruity​ ­(‑triggering) und resolution(-triggering) elements, which are thus individually removable (cf. also Shultz and Horibe 1974; Jones 1970). This assumption is problematic, as Pien and Rothbart (1976) point out. But if those triggers are discernible, we assume that it may be easier in cartoons with or without text as there is a distribution over more symbol material and across semiotic boundaries (text/picture). On this basis we can now formulate the central issues in terms of general humor cognition and specific cartoon cognition that has been addressed in previous research on humorous cognition in cartoons. After introducing the extant work, we will be in a position to formulate the remaining central desiderata for research on the cognition of cartoon humor. In the following, some exemplary studies on cognitive aspects of cartoon processing shall be outlined. Several authors attempted to describe mechanisms that make a visual cartoon funny, for example homomorphic rhyme, metamorphic rhyme, homomorphic pun, radical juxtaposition, displacement, hybridization, paradox, exaggeration, part/whole substitution, parody, exaggeration, simplification, simple contrasts bisociation, substitution, etc. (see, for example, Behrens 1977; Gombrich 1978; Woschek 1991; Morris 1993). The question is whether these mechanisms are specific for visual humor or not. As these attempts are not theory-driven, we suggest to operationalize underlying mechanisms that influence cognitive humor processing by means of one of the parameters described and defined by the GTVH: the Logical Mechanisms (LMs). LMs describe the relation of two opposed scripts, or the cognitive rule that has to be recognized in order to understand the punch line. Attardo, Hempelmann and DiMaio (2002) described at least 27 LMs such as juxtaposition, substitution, role reversal, exaggeration, etc. Two studies showed that besides other parameters of the GTVH such LMs are applicable to visual humor and therefore describe the underlying cognitive mechanisms of cartoon humor (Paolillo 1998; Tsakona in press). Although we suggest to use LMs to describe the underlying cognitive rules, further research might compare the above mentioned intuitive attempts to describe mechanisms in visual humor with the LMs in order to find out which describe identical and which different mechanisms. The groundbreaking study by Carroll, Young, and Guertin (1992) already mentioned above uses eyetracking to investigate processing stages in cartoon perception. In the 36 captioned single pictures used in this study the text as

Visual humor 

629

well as the picture were necessary to get the joke (neither element was sufficient by itself). They were able to distinguish two processing stages: the exploratory stage (visual analysis of the picture and identification of characters and objects in the picture, shorter fixation duration, more fixations and longer saccades) and a  search-and-problem-solving stage (deeper processing, incongruity-resolution or problem solving, shorter fixations). During the search-and-problem-solving mode eye-movements come under control of top-down processes. This study shows that humor is processed at least in two stages. In a second experiment Carroll et al. (1992) investigated cartoons in which the caption did not fit the picture. In this mismatch condition subjects make more than three additional fixations and stage two processing is extended. Interestingly, the authors found some differences in what people look at first and in what order they view pictures and captions. For example, in the picture-first condition the picture is first considered, but only preparatorily, elements get memorized in order to retrieve this information during caption reading. Then they read the caption where the incongruity-resolution takes place. The authors state that appreciation is only then possible if both, text and picture was explored. Because the picture was in the beginning looked at cursorily, after reading the caption the picture was explored again. In the caption-first condition the processes happen in reverse order. Woschek (1991) assumed that this processing pattern occurs only when there is an incongruity in the text as well as in the picture. The time how long the picture is examined depends on whether the caption has been read before the picture is checked or not. The average fixation duration was significantly longer in the caption-first condition than in the picture-first condition. The first few fixations are supposed to correspond to the exploratory stage. After that the average fixation time for the picture-first condition drops quite dramatically, whereas the caption-first condition, with all of its integration activity, continues to show the long fixation times (Carroll et al. 1992). It would be most interesting to conduct further studies on cartoon processing and eye movements. We assume, for example, that in pure nonverbal cartoons fixation times could give information about processing stages and time course as well. Brain imaging studies can reveal cognitive processes underlying humor comprehension and appreciation. The earliest study with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) used strictly verbal materials which were ­presented via head phones (Goel and Dolan 2001). However, most of the

630 

Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson

fMRI studies on humor processing used visual materials such as (captioned) cartoons or short movie clips. Pure non-verbal cartoons were used for example by Wild et al. (2006) or Samson, Zysset, and Huber (2008). Generally, the humor-related processes are the same for verbal and visual humor: The activations during cognitive processes (comprehension, incongruity-resolution) can be found in a more left-sided network, e.g., in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). Affective processes are reflected in reward processing areas, also called the limbic system, for example the putamen, nucleus accumbens and amygdala. Affective correlates are independent of the stimulus mode (visual or verbal). The picture can be seen as more or less important in order to get the joke (sometimes the picture is just an illustration of the verbal joke in the caption, no further incongruities in the picture, Samson and Huber 2007). This leads to the assumption that it could be important to localize the incongruity (text only, between text and picture, picture only or both) which requires different abilities (visual vs. verbal). One attempt to do this is the study by Watson et al. (2006) who investigated explicitly the difference between more verbal or more visual dependent materials. By using captioned cartoons, they compared “sight gags”, i.e., cartoons in which the joke is based on elements in the picture (the cartoons remain funny, even if the caption is removed) to language-based humor (the cartoons are only funny when the caption is available). Visual-based humor activates more strongly areas in the bilateral higher order visual cortex, including the horizontal posterior segment of the superior temporal sulcus, the middle occipital gyrus, and the precuneus. Language-based cartoons activate more strongly the inferior and middle temporal gyrus (MTG and ITG) and the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), regions functionally defined as Wernicke’s area, Broca’s area, and the basal temporal language area, respectively. These findings indicate that the brain networks recruited during a humorous experience differ according to the type of humor being processed, with high-level visual areas more activated during visual humor and classic language areas more activated during language-dependent humor. Related to reward- and emotion-related processes no differences where found but rather a common network activated by both types of humor that includes the amygdala and regions in the limbic system. As visual puns are a special case of visual humor (see above), in which neural processes in the processing of visual puns and other visual humor materials shall be considered here. Samson et al. (2008) investigated different types of visual humor that differed regarding their Logical Mechanism (LM): Visual puns in which one visual element evokes two different meanings show

Visual humor 

631

more activation in higher-order visual areas (the extrastriate cortex). This might be interpreted as the play with two meanings evoked by one visual element or associated with visual picture play. Furthermore, this activation might be interpreted as reflecting visual adjustment processes and that more visual cognition is involved in this LM. Semantic cartoons in which the LM is based on purely semantic relations (and not visual ones) and in which several LMs were subsumed (e.g., role reversal, exaggeration) show activation in areas that were associated with the incongruity-resolution process in general, e.g., the TPJ. The third stimulus group required additionally the attribution of (false) mental states in order to get the joke, so-called Theory of Mind (TOM) cartoons. This LM was already described by Paolillo (1998). TOM cartoons reveal more activation in areas known to be important for mind reading, such as the anterior medial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, TPJ and anterior superior temporal sulcus (aSTS). This study shows that the underlying cognitive mechanisms such as LMs influence cognitive processes related to humor. Theory of Mind cartoons were already investigated by Gallagher et al. (2000): they studied brain activation in relation to TOM cartoons and non-TOM cartoons and arrived similar results as the above mentioned study. In another study that concerns cartoons with and without Theory of Mind condition were presented to patients with schizophrenia. Schizophrenic patients found the mental-state jokes significantly more difficult to understand, whereas for control subjects there was no difference between the two conditions (Corcoran, Cahill, and Frith 1997). Marjoram et al. (2006) presented the same stimulus materials to schizophrenic patients in an fMRI scanner and showed differences to a control group. Summary This chapter on visual humor provides an overview on cartoon research and some historical and theoretical background that should prove useful for readers who are interested in doing their own research on this subject. It emphasizes the general universality of the semiotic processes of humor comprehension, which concern the cognitive core elements of humor: incongruity and incongruity detection. Several studies showed that Logical Mechanisms, for example, are not only applicable to verbal humor but can be found in visual humor as well (e.g., Tsakona in press). But we expect mechanisms peculiar to the visual domain to emerge from further research soon, an instance of the second emphasis of this introduction: Despite the great overlap of the

632 

Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson

cognitive process in verbal and visual humor, there are crucial differences in cognitive as well as aesthetic characteristics, surfacing as formal differences, which can increase or decrease the affective response towards the cartoon: Several studies demonstrated that degree of abstraction and drawing style alter the humor response. Whenever it is impossible to control stimuli for all of these factors, it should be kept in mind that they can influence humor appreciation as well as the recognizability of a picture’s intended funniness (see Bonaiuto 2006). However, there are many open questions which might be addressed in further research: As we have shown, the aesthetic components are largely unexplored when they are not reduced to individual formal features. For example, how can the aesthetic dimension of cartoons be captured, how can it be distinguished from the cognitive component? Furthermore, some of the formal features are far from having been sufficiently investigated yet: the localization of the incongrous visual element in the cartoon – are cartoons funnier if the elements are on the right part of the image, as might be suggested from the reading order? Another research opportunity might be to investigate whether different locations of essential humor components may lead to easier detection by removal or alteration of incongruent elements. The method of eliminating incongruent (funny) visual elements of cartoons was already used, for example by Mobbs and colleagues (2003). In this overview we have also shown the fruitful implementation of methods such as eye tracking or fMRI in research on (non-verbal) cartoons. In the future, these methods might help to answer further questions on the semiotic processes involved in cartoon appreciation or on processing peculiarities of purely nonverbal cartoons. Here, we have covered cartoons as one possible form of visual humor. However, there are other forms of visual humor that might be (and partly already were) addressed in further theoretical considerations or experimental research, for example funny movies, funny photographs, but also humor in visual art. The latter provides an interesting and relatively new field for humor scholars for which most of the considerations presented here are valid.

Notes 1. The present text is joint work, based in particular on introductory presentations by the authors at International Summer Schools for Humor and Laughter and conferences of the International Society for Humor Studies.

Visual humor 

633

2. A seminal introduction to comics and cartoons, itself entertaining because humorous, but not focussing on humor, is McCloud (1993). 3. Asimov (1956) tells us what would happen if we found out about the origin of jokes. Obvious exceptions in verbal humor are works of humorous art and commercial entertainment, like movies, shows, books. The extremely rare exception of more or less spontaneous cartooning is office lore (Dundes 1987, 1996). 4. See McCloud (1993: 150) for a neat illustration of this. 5. We are very grateful to Oswald Huber for his generous and fast grant of the permission to use his work here.

References Abe, Goh 1998

Political and social satirical cartoons in nepal. A Collection of Treatises on Language and Literature 15: 53–70. Anderson, Ronald E., and Elaine Jolly 1977 Stereotyped traits and sex roles in humorous drawings. Communication Research 4: 453–479. Asimov, Isaac 1956 Jokester. In: Isaac Asimov. Robot Dreams, 278–294. Gollancz: London. Attardo, Salvatore 1991 Linguistic Theories of Humor. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Attardo, Salvatore, and Victor Raskin 1991 Script Theory Revis(it)ed: Joke Similarity and Joke Representation Model. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 4 (3/4): 293–347. Attardo, Salvatore, Christian F. Hempelmann, and Sara Di Maio 2002 Script oppositions and logical mechanisms: Modeling incongruities and their resolutions. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 15 (1): 3–46. Behrens, Roy R. 1977 Beyond caricature: On types of humor in art. The Journal of Creative Behavior 11 (3): 165–175. Bogardus, Emory S. 1945 Sociology in the cartoon. Sociology and Social Research 30: 139–​ 147. Bonaiuto, Paolo 2006 Art, science, and humor: The study of humorous experience at the intersection between psychology and the art world. Empirical Studies of the Arts 24 (1): 3–41.

634 

Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson

Bonaiuto, Paolo, and Anna Maria Giannini (eds.) 2003 Selezione di Contributi di Psicologia dello Humor. Rome: E.U.R. Brodzinsky, David M., and Janet Rubien 1976 Humor production as a function of sex of subject, creativity and cartoon content. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 44: 597–600. Brooks, Penelope H. 1977 The role of action lines in children’s memory for pictures. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 23: 98–107. Carroll, Noel 1996 A note on film metaphor. Journal of Pragmatics 26 (6), 809–822. Carroll, Patrick J., Jason R. Young, and Michael S. Guertin 1992 Visual analysis of cartoons: A view from the far side. In: Keith Ray­ ner (ed.), Eye Movements and Visual Cognition: Scene Perception and Reading, 444–461. New York: Springer. Corcoran, Rhiannon, Connie Cahill, and Christopher D. Frith 1997 The appreciation of visual jokes in people with schizophrenia: a study of “mentalizing” ability. Schizophrenia Research 24: 319–327. Coulson, Seana 2001 What’s so funny: Conceptual blending in humorous examples. In: Vimala Herman (ed.): The Poetics of Cognition: Studies of Cognitive Linguistics and the Verbal Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derks, Peter 1992 Category and ratio scaling of sexual and innocent cartoons. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 5 (3): 19–330. Dirr, Karen L., and Alice A. Katz 1989 Cartoons vs. realistic illustration: Picture preference of adolescent patients. Journal of Biocommunication 16 (4): 2–7. Dundes, Alan, and Carl R. Pagter 1987 When You Are Up to Your Ass in Alligators... More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. 1996 Sometimes the Dragon Wins: Yet More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Eichler, Richard W. 1965 Die tätowierte Muse: eine Kunstgeschichte in Karikaturen [The tattooed muse: a history of art in caricatures]. Essen: blick + bild Verlag. El Refaie, Elisabeth 2003 Understanding visual metaphor: The example of newspaper cartoons. Visual Communication 2: 75–95.

Visual humor 

635

Felker, Donald W., and Dede M. Hunter 1970 Sex and age differences in response to cartoons depicting subjects of different ages and sex. Journal of Psychology 76: 19–21. Fisher, Seymour, and Rhoda L. Fisher 1981 Pretend the World Is Funny and Forever: A Psychological Analysis of Comedians. Hillsdale, NY: Erlbaum. 1983 Personality and psychopathology in the comic. In: Jeffrey H. Goldstein and Paul E. McGhee (eds.), Handbook of Humor Research. Vol. 2: Applied Studies, 41–60. New York: Springer. Forceville, Charles 1996 Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising. London/New York: Routledge. Fraisse P., and E. H. Elkin 1963 Étude génétique de l’influence des modes de présentation sur le seuil de reconnaissance d’objects familiers [Genetic study of the influence of presentation modes on the threshold of familiar objects]. L’Année Psychologique 63: 1–12. Gallagher, Helen L., Francesca Happé, Nicola Brunswick, Paul C. Fletcher, Uta Frith, and Christopher D. Frith 2000 Reading the mind in cartoon and stories: An fMRI study of “Theory of Mind” in verbal and nonverbal tasks. Neuropsychologia 38: 11–21. Gerberg, Mort 1989 Cartooning: The Art and the Business. New York: William Morrow & Co. Giarelli, Ellen, and Lorraine Tulman 2003 Methodological issues in the use of published cartoons as data. Qualitative Health Research 13 (7): 945–956. Goel, Vinod, and Raymond J. Dolan 2001 The functional anatomy of humor: Segregation cognitive and affective components. Nature Neurosciences 4: 237–238. Gombrich, Ernst H. 1978 The cartoonist’s armoury. In Ernst H. Gombrich (ed.), Meditations on a Hobby Horse, 127–142. 3rd ed. New York: Phaidon. 1960 Art and Illusion. Berlin: Phaidon. German edition, 2002, Das Experiment der Karikatur. In Gombrich, E. H. (ed.). Art and Illusion, 280–303. Berlin: Phaidon. Hagen, Margaret A., and David Perkins 1983 A refutation of the hypothesis of the superfidelity of caricatures relative to photographs. Perception 12: 55–61. Hempelmann, Christian F., and Salvatore Attardo In press Resolutions and their incongruities: Further thoughts on logical mechanisms. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research.

636 

Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson

Hempelmann, Christian F., and Andrea C. Samson 2007 Visual puns and verbal puns: Descriptive or false analogy? In: Salvatore Attardo and Diana Popa (eds.), New Approaches to the Linguistics of Humor, 180–196. Galati, Romania: Dunarea de Jos. Herzog, Thomas R. 1999 Gender differences in humor appreciation revisited. Humor: International Journal for Humor Research 12: 411–423. Herzog, Thomas R., and Andrew J. Hager 1995 The prediction of preference for sexual cartoons. Humor: International Journal for Humor Research 8 (4): 385–405. Herzog, Thomas R., and David A. Larwin 1988 The appreciation of humor in captioned cartoons. The Journal of Psychology 122: 597–607. Hirt, Michael, and Judy Genshaft 1982 The effects of incongruity and complexity on the perception of humor. Personality and Individual Differences 3: 453–455. Huber, Oswald, and Helmut Leder 1997 Are more compact cartoons more humorous? Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 10: 91–103. Jones, James M. 1970 Cognitive factors in the appreciation of humor: A  theoretical and experimental analysis. Doctoral dissertation, Yale University. Jones, James M., Gary A. Fine, and Robert G. Brust 1979 Interaction effects of picture and caption on humor ratings of cartoons. The Journal of Social Psychology 108: 193–198. Karabas, Seyfri 1990 Hairy Turkish cartoons. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 3 (2): 193–215. Keener, Polly 1992 Cartooning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Kunst-Wilson, William R., and Robert B. Zajonc 1980 Affective discrimination of stimuli that cannot be recognized. ­Science 207: 557–558. Kunzle, David 1973 The Early Comic Strip Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kunzle, David, and M. Thomas Inge 2007 Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Leder, Helmut 2003 Familiar and fluent! Style-related processing hypothesis in aesthetic appreciation. Empirical studies of the arts 21 (2): 165–175.

Visual humor 

637

Leder, Helmut, Benno Belke, Andriens Oeberst, and Dorothee Augustin 2004 A model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments. British Journal of Psychology 95: 489–508. Lessard, Denys 1991 Puns and cartoons. Semiotica 85 (1/2): 73–89. Love, Ann Marie, and Lampert H. Deckers 1989 Humor appreciation as a function of sexual, aggressive, and sexist content. Sex Roles 20: 649–654. Lowis, Michael J., and Johan M. Nieuwoudt 1995 Use of a cartoon rating-scale as a measure for the humor construct. Journal of Psychology 129 (2): 133–144. McCloud, Scott 1993 Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton: Tundra Press. McGhee, Paul E. 1972 Development of the humor response: A  review of the literature. Psychological Bulletin 76: 328–348. McGhee, Paul E., Willibald Ruch, and Franz-Josef Hehl 1990 A personality-based model of humor development during adulthood. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 3: 119–146. McKay, T. D., and M. E. McKay 1982 Captioned and non-captioned cartoons: Effects of structural properties on ratings of humor. Perceptual & motor skills 54: 143–146. Maddocks, Peter 1982 So You Want to be a Cartoonist? London: Unwin. Marjoram, Dominic, Dominic E. Job, Heather C. Walley, Viktoria-Eleni Gountouna, Andrew M. McIntosh, Enrico Simonotto, David CunninghamOwens, Eve C. Johnstone, and Stephen Lawrie 2006 A visual joke fMRI investigation into theory of mind and enhanced risk of schizophrenia. NeuroImage 31 (4): 1850–1858. Mauro, Robert, and Michael Kubovy 1992 Caricature and face recognition. Memory & Cognition 20 (4): 433–​ 440. Meilhammer, Tonie 1989 Fast alles über Cartoons. [Almost everything about cartoons]. Ravensburg: Meier. Mitchell, Alexandre G. 2004 Humor in Greek vase-painting. Revue Archéologique 1: 3–32. 2007 Ancient Greek visual puns: A case study in visual humor. In: Salvatore Attardo and Diana Popa (eds.), New Approaches to the Linguistics of Humor, 197–216. Galati, Romania: Dunarea de Jos. Mitchell, Heather H., Arthur C. Graesser, and Max M. Louwerse In subm. The effect of context on humor: A constraint-based model of verbal jokes.

638 

Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson

Mobbs, Dean, Michael D. Greicisu, Eiman Abdel-Azim, Vinod Menon, and Allan L. Reiss 2003 Humor modulates the mesolimbic reward centers. Neuron 40: 1041–​ 1048. Morris, Ray 1993 Visual rhetoric in political cartoons: A structuralist approach. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 8: 195–210. Nerhardt, Göran 1976 Incongruity and Funniness: Towards a new descriptive model. In Anthony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (eds.), Humor and Laughter: Theory, Research, and Applications, 55–62. London: John Wiley & Sons. Nilsen, Alleen Pace, and Don L. F. Nilsen 2000 Encyclopedia of 20th Century American Humor. Phoenix Arizona: Oryx Press. Paolillo, John C. 1998 Gary Larson’s Far Side: Nonsense? Nonsense! Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 11: 261–290. Pearson, Paul 1983 Personality characteristics of cartoonists. Personality and Individual Differences 4: 227–228. Pien, Diana, and Mary K. Rothbart 1976 Incongruity and resolution in children’s humor: A  reexamination. Child Development 47: 966–971. Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and William Hirstein 1999 The science of art. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (6/7): 15–​ 51. Redlich, Frederick C., Jacob Levine, and Theodore P. Sohler 1951 A  mirth response test: Preliminary report on a  psychodiagnostic technique utilizing dynamics of humor. American Journal of Ortho­ psychiatry 21: 717–734. Rhodes, G., S. Brennan, and S. Carey 1987 Identification and ratings of caricatures: Implications for mental representations of faces. Cognitive Psychology 19: 473–497. Ring, Erp 1975 Eine Fehlerquelle bei Bildern als Textvorlage. Zeitschrift für experimentelle und angewandte Psychologie 22: 89–93. Rothbart, Mary K., and Diana Pien 1977 Elephants and marshmallows: A theoretical synthesis of incongruityresolution and arousal theories of humour. In: Anthony J. Chapman and Hugh C. F. (eds.), It’s a Funny Thing, Humour, 37–40. Oxford: Pergamon.

Visual humor 

639

Ruch, Willibald 1992 Assessment of appreciation of humor: Studies with the 3WD humor test. In: Charles D. Spielberger and James N. Butcher (eds.), Advances in Personality Assessment. Vol. 9. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 27–75. Ruch, Willibald, and Franz-Josef Hehl 1998 A two-mode model of humor appreciation: Its relation to aesthetic appreciation and simplicity-complexity of personality. In: Willibald Ruch (ed.), The Sense of Humor: Explorations of a Personality Characteristic, 109–142. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ryan, T. A., and Carol B. Schwartz 1956 Speed of perception as a  function of mode of representation. The American Journal of Psychology 69: 60–69. Samson, Andrea C., and Oswald Huber 2007 The interaction of cartoonist’s gender and formal features of cartoons. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 20 (1): 1–​25. Samson, Andrea C., Stefan Zysset, and Oswald Huber 2008 Cognitive humor processing: Different logical mechanisms in non-verbal cartoons: An fMRI study. Social Neuroscience 2 (3): 125–​140. Schmidt, Stephen R., and Alan R. Williams, 2001 Memory for humorous cartoons. Memory & Cognition 29: 305–​ 311. Sheppard, Alice 1977 Developmental levels in explanations of humour from childhood to late adolescence. In: Anthony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (eds.), It’s a Funny Thing, Humour, 225–228. New York: Pergamon. 1983 Effect of mode of representation on visual humor. Psychological Reports 52: 299–305. Shultz, Thomas R. 1972 Role of incongruity and resolution in children’s appreciation of cartoon humor. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 13 (3): 456–​ 477. 1976 A cognitive-developmental analysis of humour. In: Anthony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (eds.), Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research, and Applications, 11–36. London: John Wiley. Shultz, Thomas R., and Francis Horibe 1974 Development of the appreciation of verbal jokes. Child Development 45: 100–105. Suls, Jerry M. 1972 A two-stage model for the appreciation of jokes and cartoons: An information-processing analysis. In: Jeffrey H. Goldstein and Paul E. McGhee (eds.), The Psychology of Humor: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues, 81–100. New York: Academic Press.

640 

Christian F. Hempelmann and Andrea C. Samson

Thompson, Teresa L., and Eugenia Zerbinos 1995 Gender roles in animated cartoons: Has the picture changed in 20 years? Sex Roles 32: 651–673. Tsakona, Villy In press Language and image interaction in cartoons: Towards a multimodal theory of humor. Journal of Pragmatics. Tversky, B., and D. Baratz 1985 Memory of faces: Are caricatures better than photographs? Memory & Cognition 13: 45–49. van Alphen, Ingrid C. 1996 Wie die Jungen das Lachen lernten – und wie es den Mädchen wie­ der verging [How boys got the ability to laugh – and how girls lost it]. In: Helga Kotthoff (ed.), Das Gelächter der Geschlechter. Humor und Macht in Gesprächen von Frauen und Männern [Laughter and gender. Humor and Power in conversations of females and males], 217–228. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag. Watson, Karli K., Benjamin J. Matthews, and John M. Allman 2006 Brain activation during sight gags and language-dependent humor. Cerebral Cortex 17: 314–324. Whitaker, Steve 1994 The Encyclopedia of Cartooning Techniques. East-Roseville: Simon & Schuster. Wild, Barbara, Frank A. Rodden, Alexander Rapp, Michael Erb, Wolfgang Grodd, and Willibald Ruch 2006 Humor and smiling: Cortical regions selective for cognitive, affective and volitional components. Neurology 66 (6): 887–893. Woschek, Bernard P. 1991 Zur Witzigkeit von Karikaturen [On the funniness of caricatures]. Moers: Aragon. Wright, Thomas 1875 A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art. London: Chatto & Windus.

Index of authors Aarne, Antti  192 Abadie, Ann J.  255 Abe, Goh  160, 167, 611 Abelson, Robert  107 Abrahams, Roger  120, 187, 189 Abramis, David  460–461 Accoce, Jeannine  74, 319 Adams, Bruce  159 Adams, Douglas  250 Adams, Katherine  553, 554 Adams, Scott  472 Addison, Joseph  221, 587 Adler, Christine M.  482 Aharonson, Haim  69 Aiello, J. R.  310 Al-Khatib, Mahmoud A.  131 Alarcon, Christy  553 Alberts, J. K.  549, 550 Alexander, Richard D.  79, 307, 413, 528, 533 Alexieva, Bistra  579 Allard, Louis-Paul  163, 163 Allen, M.  309 Allik, Jüri  72, 73 Allman, John M.  612 Allport, Gordon W.  38, 456–457, 486 Alpern, Lynne  461, 462 Alsua, Carlos J.  61 Altfreder, Olga  54, 54 Alves, Julio  311 Ammons, Elizabeth  252 Anderson, Bonnie P.  408 Anderson, Craig A.  505 Anderson, Ronald E.  611 Andor, Jozsef  131 Andrew, Christopher  170, 246, 258–259 Andries, Lise  103 Anthony, Susan  29, 249, 307, 315

Antonini, Rachele  599 Antonopoulou, Eleni  116–117, 127, 129 Apte, Mahadev L.  6, 32, 73, 184, 303–306, 310–311, 316–317, 319, 361, 365, 379 Apter, Michael J.  32 Araki, Kenji  125 Archakis, Argiris  117 Aristotle  24, 29, 102–103, 214–218, 225, 298–299, 306, 310, 313, 363, 399–402, 525, 548 Arnoult, Lynn H.  505 Arora, Sanjay  28, 315 Asimakoulas, Dimitris  113 Asimov, Isaac  530, 541, 633 Attardo, Salvatore  4, 7, 28, 50, 101–113, 115–117, 119, 121–124, 127–130, 157, 178, 308, 310, 314, 319, 336–338, 342, 345–346, 348, 352, 356, 363, 412, 425–426, 433, 524, 536–539, 580, 582, 612, 617, 626, 628 Atwill, Janet M.  430, 432 Aubouin, Elie  117 Augustin, Dorothee  405–406, 626 Babad, Elisha Y.  44, 44 Babcock-Abrahams, Barbara  189 Bachorowski, Jo-Anne  24, 79 Bailly, G.  337 Bain, Alexander  307, 310, 313, 460 Bainum, C.  460 Baker, Katherine H.  251, 288, 493 Baker, Russell  251, 288, 493 Bakhtin, Mikhail M.  189–190, 377, 385, 417, 420, 526–527, 531 Ballard, Michel  570, 572 Balshine, Sigal  79

642 

Index of authors

Banc, C.  159, 168 Banfi, Emanuele  131 Bänninger-Huber, Eva  21, 22 Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua  347 Baratz, D.  621–623 Bariaud, Françoise  65, 74, 319 Barnes, Gordon E.  301, 484 Barnet, K.  310 Barreca, Regina  243, 251, 259, 263, 266, 301, 311, 409, 411, 413–414 Barrett, Tracy  316 Barron, William L. III  33 Barsoux, Jean-Louis  463 Bartels, Mathias  63 Barthel-Hackman, T. A.  550, 554 Bassnett, Susan  569, 575 Basso, Bob  463 Basso, Keith H.  119, 191 Bateson, Gregory  194 Batts, John S.  316 Bauman, Richard  187, 200–201, 203–204 Baumgartner, Jody C.  257 Bausell, R. Barker  489 Baym, Nancy  125 Beattie, James  226, 308 Bechterew, Wladimir Michailowitsch von  18 Beckmann, Petr  159 Bedford, Anthony P.  299 Beeman, William O.  119, 120 Beermann, Ursula  28, 47, 54, 62, 64 Behrens, Laurence  423 Behrens, Roy R.  609, 625, 628 Beit-Hallahmi, Benjamin  503 Belke, Benno  626 Bell, Michael J.  203, 244 Bell, Nancy J.  118, 128, 507 Bell, Steve  169, 592 Ben-Amos, Dan  174 Bender, Amanda  47, 59 Bendix, John  188 Bendix, Regina  430

Bennett, Barbara  251, 259 Benton, Gregor  369 Bergen, Doris  65 Berger, Arthur Asa  417, 548–549 Berger, Peter  1, 367, 378 Berger, Phil  300 Bergmann, Linda S.  419–420 Bergson, Henri  4, 228–229, 235, 253, 261, 265, 299, 303, 305–307, 310, 313, 364–365 Berk, Lee S.  450, 453, 468–469, 490, 492 Berk, Ronald A.  430 Berlyne, Daniel E.  18 Bermant, Chaim  311 Bete, Tim  417 Bethea, Lisa Sparks  554 Betts Van Dyk, Krista K.  421 Bier, Jesse  283, 299, 311 Bihrle, Amy M.  53 Bilger, Audrey  409–412 Billig, Michael  103, 365–366, 382–383, 385 Binsted, Kim  124, 336–337, 340, 354 Bippus, A. M.  549 Birden, Lorene  54 Bizi, Smadar  503 Blair, Walter  169, 172, 251, 283, 299 Blissett, Sonia E.  505 Blount, Roy  251 Blumenfield, Esther  461 Boatright, Mody C.  252 Boden, Margaret A.  124 Boeke, W.  18 Bogardus, Emory S.  611 Boland, R. J.  549 Bonaiuto, Paolo  613, 621–623, 625, 632 Bonanno, George A.  488 Bönsch-Kauke, Marion  63, 65 Booth, Wayne C.  411–413, 418, 431 Booth-Butterfield, Melanie  550 Booth-Butterfield, Steven  550

Index of authors  Bormann, Ernest G.  561 Boskin, Joe  283, 299, 301 Bostdorff, D. M.  430 Botkin, B. A.  252 Bouchard, Thomas J., Jr.  76 Bouché, Thérèse  102 Bowen, Barbara C.  402, 406, 408–409 Boyd, Rosangela K.  454, 474 Bradbury, Thomas N.  249, 253, 507 Bradford, Arthur L.  418 Bradney, Pamela  365 Branner, Rebecca  117 Brdar, Ingrid  75 Bremmer, Jan N.  102–103, 550 Brennan, Susan  28, 621, 623 Bressler, Eric R.  79 Brice, C.  424 Bricker, Victoria Reifler  188 Bridgeford, Tracy  430 Briggs, Charles L.  62, 203 Brodzinsky, David M.  44, 310, 612 Bronner, Simon J.  187–188, 201 Brooks, Mel  112, 260, 293 Brooks, Penelope H.  620, 623 Brown, Mary Helen  554 Brown, Renee  549, 554, 558 Brown, Robert L.  411 Brown, Stuart B.  78 Brown, T. Graham  18, 53, 78 Browne, Stephen H.  412–413 Brownell, Hiram H.  53 Bruehl, Steven  482 Brunswick, Nicola  300 Brunvald, Jan Harold  159 Brust, Robert G.  77, 554, 563, 618 Brutsche, Martin H.  63 Bryant, Chad  166 Bryant, Gregory A.  123 Bryk, Anthony S.  505 Brzozowska, Dorota  131 Brône, Geert  129 Bstan-’dzin-rgya-mtsho, Dalai Lama XIV  562

643

Bucaria, Chiara  107, 127, 599 Buchowski, M. S.  489 Buckman, Elcha Shain  457 Budd, Louis J.  231–232, 241, 256, 291 Buela-Casal, Gualberto  51–52, 59 Burgdorf, Jeff  78 Burge, Tyler  164, 249, 582, 586 Burke, Kenneth  416, 421 Burma, John  371–372 Burns, Inger H.  201–202 Burns, Thomas A.  201–202 Burroughs, W. Jeffrey  495 Buscaldi, Davide  125 Buttny, Richard  117 Byron, Stuart  300 Cady, Edwin H.  256 Cahill, Connie  612, 631 Camarena, Phame  311, 496 Cambell, N.  121 Camfield, Gregg  252, 263 Campbell, Donald T.  39, 58 Campbell, George  407 Campbell, N. 116 Cancian, Francesca  186 Cantor, Joanne R.  29–30, 307 Carey, Susan  28, 594, 621, 623 Carlson, Charles R.  482 Carlson, Richard S.  252 Caron, James E.  78 Carpenter, R.  313 Carrell, Amy T.  4, 36, 38, 55, 63–64, 70, 115, 319, 356 Carretero-Dios, Hugo  51–52, 59 Carroll, Lewis  244, 249, 570–571 Carroll, Noël  203, 615, 623 Carroll, Patrick J.  623, 628–629 Carstensen, Laura L.  507 Carver, Charles S.  503 Cassell, Justine  336 Cattani, Adelino  417 Cattell, Raymond B.  45, 59 Ceccarelli, Fabio  101

644 

Index of authors

Cerf, Bennet  251 Chabanne, Jean-Charles  319 Chafe, Wallace L.  79, 104, 116, 121, 125 Chang, Mei-Jung  19, 70, 301, 550, 555 Channon, Shelley  27 Chapel, Gage William  554 Chapman, Anthony J.  18, 65, 68, 73, 311, 317, 544, 549, 601 Charland, Maurice  431 Charles, Lucille Hoerr  188 Charney, Maurice  246, 246 Charpentier, Hélène  102 Chen, Guo-Hai  40, 61, 75, 553–554 Chen, Huey-Rong  553–554 Chen, K. Y.  489 Cheriff, Adam D.  492 Cherkas, Lynn  75–76, 78 Chiaro, Delia  5, 127, 570, 574, 595, 597–599 Chlopicki, Wladysław  109, 121, 131 Chomsky, Noam  5–6, 337 Chornovol-Tkachenko  131 Churchill, Elizabeth  169, 428 Cicero  102, 216, 218–219, 225, 227, 306–307, 313, 402–406, 408–409, 576, 582, 601 Clark, Kimberley C.  299 Clark, William Bedford  299 Clarke, Danielle  408, 414 Coan, James  507 Cochran, Robert  159 Cogan, Dennis  493 Cogan, Rosemary  493 Cohan, Catherine L.  507 Cohen, Sarah Blacher  257, 262–263, 284, 300 Cohen, Sheldon  483, 507 Coleman, James S.  172, 178 Coleman, Robin  388 Coleman, Stephen  370 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  344, 344 Collins, Randall  386

Collins, Sharon M.  418 Colston, Herbert L.  122–123 Connors, Robert J.  424 Consalvo, Carmine  310 Cook, Guy  127 Cook, Mark  484 Cooper, Colin  58 Corbin, Suzanne  47, 59 Corcoran, Rhiannon  612, 624, 631 Corduas, Marcella  112, 121, 131 Corrigan, Robert W.  252 Cosentino, Donald  190 Coser, Rose  365–366, 368, 375 Coulson, Seana  103, 126, 128, 609 Cousins, Norman  311, 316, 451–453, 479, 496 Cox, Donald S.  482 Cox, Harvey  228, 231–232 Cox, Joe A.  310, 406, 430 Craig, David M.  262, 299 Craik, Kenneth H.  35, 40–43, 45, 53, 61–62, 317, 485 Crawford, Mary  120, 375, 387, 425 Crile, J. W.  313 Cronbach, Lee J.  57, 58 Crosbie, John S.  252 Crowley, Daniel J.  190 Crystal, David  127 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly  19 Culler, Jonathan  252 Culpeper, Jonathan  121 Cunningham, Michael R.  507 Cunningham, William A.  27, 44 Curcò, Carmen  129–130 Cutica, Ilaria  126 Cutler, Howard C.  562 Dahlberg, W. A.  430 Daiute, Collette  415, 422 Dale, Iain  169 Dale, J. Alexander  503 Dance, Kathryn A.  482 Danielson, Larry  190, 190

Index of authors  Danzer, Amy  503 Darwin, Charles R.  17, 24, 75, 77–78, 103, 297 Daum, Irene  613, 27 Davidson, Karina  493 Davidson, Richard J.  21 Davidson-Katz, Karina  311 Davies, Catherine Evans  118, 128 Davies, Christie  4, 24, 73, 157–160, 163, 167–168, 172, 174–175, 177–178, 194, 196, 202, 301, 311, 317, 369, 372, 379–381, 383–384, 387, 583–584, 598, 602 Davies, Patricia  24 Davies, Sarah  170 Davis, D. Diane  416, 421, 425 Davis, Dineh  4, 553 Davis, Jessica Milner  73, 131, 243, 262, 264, 267 Davis, Murray  363, 376–378 De Beaugrande, Robert  571 Dean, Kevin W.  287, 293, 554 Deckers, Lampert H.  25, 28, 32–34, 315, 611 Defays, Jean-Marc  131 Dekker, Rudolf  382, 387 Delabastita, Dirk  127, 570 Deloria, Vine, Jr.  258 Deneire, Marc  127 Denton, John  591 Deren, Veronica  319 Deriabin, Peter  170 Derks, Peter  27–28, 44, 51, 126, 310–311, 315, 502, 507, 511, 612 Descartes, René  102, 219–220 Desclos, Marie-Laurence.  102 Dews, S.  122 Diener, Ed  47, 66, 73 Dillon, Kathleen M.  493, 493 Dimitrovsky, Lilly  319 Dirr, Karen L.  621–623 Dixon, Norman F.  503 Dobbin, James P.  316, 505

645

Dobi, Shobi  453 Dohrenwend, Bruce P.  482 Dolan, Raymond J.  125–126, 629 Donaldson, Toby  124 Donawerth, Jane  408 Dore, Margherita  127, 255 Doty, William G.  253 Dougherty, L. M.  23 Douglas, Mary  112, 171, 186, 189, 246, 250, 363, 431, 433 Downe, Pamela J.  117, 120 Drack, Phillip  24 Draitser, Emil  311, 372 Drennan, Robert E.  252 Dresner, Zita  256, 259, 301, 311, 412–413 Drew, Paul  119 Droz, Marilyn  465, 465 Duckworth, George E.  102 Dudden, Arthur  283, 299, 301 Duffey, Nelda S.  29–30, 507 Dunbar, Robin  79 Duncan, Jack W.  310 Dundes, Alan  158–159, 162–163, 168, 178, 187, 193–195, 202–203, 300, 367, 372, 633 Dunn, M. L.  106, 256 Durgnat, Raymond  300 Durkheim, Emile  178, 386 Dworkin, Earl S.  34 D’Zamko, Mary Elizabeth  311 Edwards, Carol  200 Edwards, Janis L.  553–554 Efran, Jay S.  34 Eggins, Suzanne  117 Ehrenberg, Tamar  310, 311 Ehrenstein, Walter H.  28 Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenäus  79 Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi, Gabriella  192 Eichler, Richard W.  613 Eisner, Joel  300 Eisterhold, Jodi  118–119

646 

Index of authors

Ekman, Paul  21–24, 75, 315, 337, 488, 490 El Refaie, Elisabeth  615 Elitzur, Avshalom C.  319 Elkin, E. H.  255, 621–623 Ellis, Bill  196 Ellis, Lori  456, 465 Ellis, Yvette  121 Elshtain, Jean Bethke  408, 414 Emerson, Joan  374, 374 Emmons, Robert A.  47 Epskamp, Kees P.  311 Erb, Michael  22, 38 Erdman, Manny  172, 172 Ermida, Isabel  131 Ernst, Gordon E., Jr.  256 Ertel, Suitbert  28 Esler, Murray D.  482 Espy, Willard  252 Esser, Claudia  43, 62 Etgen, Mike  310 Everts, Elisa  118, 120 Eysenck, Hans-Jürgen  26, 48, 71, 73 Fabrizi, Michael S.  44 Fahnestock, Jeanne  424, 424 Falk, Robert  254 Falkenberg, Irina  63 Farb, Peter  252 Fay, Allen  455 Fedo, Michael  255 Fein, O.  122, 433 Feinberg, Leonard  253, 254 Feingold, Alan  45, 484 Feldman, Ofer  431 Feleky, Antoinette  18 Felible, Roma  466 Felker, Donald W.  612 Fellbaum, Christiane D.  356 Ferguson, Mark  383 Feyaerts, Kurt  129 Filby, Ivan  374

Fillmore, Charles  107, 117 Fine, Elizabeth C.  203 Fine, Gary A.  361, 366, 374, 618 Finney, Fail  259 Finney, Gail  414 Fisher, Rhoda L.  202, 265, 317, 456, 612 Fisher, Seymour  202, 265, 456, 612 Fisher, W. R.  544 Fiske, Donald W.  39, 58 Flashner, Graham  255 Fleet, F. R.  545, 545 Fletcher, Doug  453 Fletcher, M. D.  254, 453 Flexner, Stuart Berg  252 Fogel, Alan  24 Folkman, Susan  482 Foot, Hugh C.  18, 73, 317, 549 Forabosco, Giovannantonio  25, 27, 53, 64, 73–74, 311 Forceville, Charles  615 Ford, Thomas  171–172, 355, 383 Fortunato, Eleonora Di  589 Forward, Susan  307 Fowler, Dorreen  255 Fox Tree, Jean E.  123, 123 Fraisse, P.  621 France, A.  415–416 Frank, Mark G.  22, 247, 258, 315 Frankl, Viktor  251, 286, 455–456 Franzini, Louis R.  311 Frater, J.  416, 417 Fredrickson, Barbara L.  482 Freedman, Jim  186, 188 Freeman, Derek  159, 160 Freiberg, Jackie  474 Freiberg, Kevin  474 Freud, Sigmund  29, 38–39, 48, 60, 103–104, 158, 170–171, 175, 177, 193, 198, 202–203, 222–225, 233, 253, 261, 265, 299, 303–304, 309–310, 362–364, 389–390, 410, 454, 479, 486, 503, 534, 588

Index of authors  Fricke, Harald  121 Friedman, Bruce J.  254 Friedman, Bud  291 Friedman, Howard S.  497, 500 Friesen, Wallace V.  21–22, 337, 488 Frijda, Nico  33 Frith, Christopher D.  612, 631 Fry, P. S.  499 Fry, William F.  104, 303, 305–306, 308–312, 316, 449, 452, 456, 468, 488–490 Frye, Northrop  250, 252–253 Frymier, A. B.  554 Fuller, Katherine L.  27 Fuller, Linda  388 Führ, Martin  60, 65 Gabora, Liane  103 Gadish, Orit  319, 507 Gajda, Stanisław  131 Galanter, Marc  381 Gale, Steven H.  243, 245, 256, 265–267, 299 Galiñanes, Cristina Larkin  121, 130–131 Gallagher, Helen L.  490, 612, 624, 631 Galligan, E.   250 Galloway, David  254 Gamble, Jennifer  78 Gander, Fabian  64 Gans, Eric  411 Ganter, Granville  414, 430–431 Gardner, Howard  53 Garland, Ron  256, 267, 299, 301, 463 Gasquet-Cyrus, Méderic  119, 120 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.  258, 343 Gedda, Luigi  75 Geffcken, Katherine A.  402, 404 Gehring, Wes  284, 300, 317 Geismar, Maxwell  255 Gelkopf, Marc  311 Genshaft, Judy  611 Gerberg, Mort  618, 624

647

Gervais, Matthew  78–79, 104 Giannini, Anna Maria  621 Giarelli, Ellen  612 Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr.  119, 122–123, 411, 418 Gibney, Frank  170 Gibson, Donald E.  311, 452 Giles, H.  117 Gillooly, Eileen  414 Gilmore, David D.  189 Giora, Rachel  122–123, 126, 128, 433 Glauser, Nadine  54 Glazer, Mark  187 Glenn, Cheryl  408, 411, 414 Glenn, Phillip J.  117, 120 Gluckman, Max  188 Goddard, Cliff  123 Godkewitsch, Michael  28 Goel, Vinod  125–126, 629 Goffman, Erving  374, 386, 390 Goldberg, Ken  43, 125, 224, 292, 294, 341 Golden, Sèan  382, 570 Goldstein, Donna  370, 377 Goldstein, Jeffrey H.  18, 26, 29, 283, 299, 315, 456, 479, 507 Goldstein, Kalman  247 Gombrich, Ernst H.  613, 628 Goode, C. Edward  423 Goodenough, Florence L.  78 Gordon, Dexter B.  169, 256, 263, 266, 301, 414, 456, 602 Gossen, Gary H.  191 Gottman, John M.  507 Gouin, Rachel  370 Graban, Tarez Samra  4, 402, 412 Graesser, Arthur C.  617 Graff, Richard  267, 399 Grant, Mary  597 Grauer, Neil A.  263 Grawe, Paul H.  243, 259–260, 266–267 Gray, Jeanette  38

648 

Index of authors

Gray, Jonathan  379, 388 Greenbaum, Andrea  415, 417 Greenfeld, Anne  316 Gregory, J. C.  194, 291, 309, 421 Greig, J. Y. T.  303–304 Grice, H. P.  108, 115, 129, 539 Griffin, Sharon  47 Grimes, Wilma H.  555, 555 Grimshaw, Melissa  62 Grodd, Wolfgang  22, 38, 53 Gross, Alan  399, 424 Grotjahn, Martin  175, 309, 454 Gruchala, Pawel  131 Grumet, Gerald W.  28 Gruner, Charles R.  30, 103, 383, 399, 544, 546, 549–550, 555–556 Guertin, Michael S.  628 Guidi, Annarita  105, 106 Guiraud, Pierre  104 Gulotta, Guglielmo  131 Gundelach, Peter  372 Gupta, Dhruv  125, 341 Gurewitch, Morton  263 Guth, Hans P.  415 Gutt, Ernst-August  578 Günther, Ulrike K.  120, 125 Haakana, Markku  119 Habermann, Günther  24 Habermas, Jürgen  377 Hackman, M. Z.  550–551, 554–555 Haddad, Jay  372 Haellstroem, Tore  484 Hagen, Margaret A.  621–623 Hager, Andrew J.  612 Hager, Joseph C.  22 Haggerty, Susan  311 Haig, Robin Andrew  311, 549 Haiman, John  122 Hale, Constance  318, 423 Hall, George Stanley  18 Hall, Phil  418 Hallett, Ronald A.  316

Hallowell, A. Irving  191 Hampes, William P.  501, 507 Hamrick, Phillip  129, 129 Hannah, T. Edward  55, 499, 505 Hanse, Joseph  165 Hansen, Kristine  415 Harlow, Ilana  188 Harmon, William  244, 253 Harper, Donna A. S.  258 Harris, Anne C.  27 Harris, Charles B.  254 Hartwell, Patrick  415, 424 Haselton, Martie G.  27 Hasenoehrl, Ruediger U.  63 Haskins, Ekaterina V.  411 Hauptman, Don  252 Hauschild, Thomas  372 Hausmann, Franz Josef  346 Hay, Jennifer  117–120, 125, 203, 268, 374–375 Hayden, Bradley  261 Hayworth, Donald  79 Hazlitt, William  226–227, 231, 235, 307 Hecker, Erich  18 Hegel, Georg W. F.  307, 313, 421, 424 Hegelson, Candace  424 Hehl, Franz-Josef  18, 20, 29, 49, 51, 64–66, 74, 485, 619–620, 627 Heitler, M.  18 Helgason, Asgeir R.  484 Hembree, E. A.  23 Hempelmann, Christian F.  4–5, 7, 49–50, 106, 123, 339–340, 343, 345, 351–352, 536, 615, 617, 628 Hener, Tamar  494 Herzog, Thomas R.  27, 611–612, 619, 623, 625 Hewitt, John Alexander  79 Heymans, Gerardus  18 Hickman, William C.  187 Hicks, Brian M.  76 Hieatt, Arron C.  495

Index of authors  Hill, Carl  104 Hill, Hamlin  251, 283, 299 Hiller, Harry  370 Hillhouse, Joel J.  482 Hillson, Tim R.  28 Hilscher, Matthew B.  63 Hiltebrand, Damian  64 Hinrichs, Kim T.  61 Hirsch, Rolf D.  63, 70 Hirstein, William  625, 625 Hirt, Michael  611 Hislop, Ian  169 Hobbes, Thomas  30, 103, 219–220, 226, 233, 235, 299, 306–307, 310, 313, 363, 368, 527 Hochberg, Fran  75 Hoffman, R.  102, 549 Hofstadter, Douglas  103 Hofstede, Geert  73, 74 Hogan, Walter  257 Holcomb, Christopher  125, 316, 415, 430, 432–433 Holcomb, Kathleen  407 Hollingworth, Harry Levi  18 Holman, C. Hugh  244, 253 Holmen, Jostein  499, 500 Holmes, Janet  117–118, 120, 125, 252, 367, 375 Hols, Edith J.  430 Holt, Dan G.  299, 311 Homer, Brian  169, 252, 525 Honeycutt, James M.  549, 554, 558 Honeyman, A. M.  187 Hopkins, Chris  316 Horibe, Francis  628 Hornby, Peter  172 Horowitz, Jeannine  102 Howe, Norman E.  79 Howell, Tes  129 Howitt, Dennis  384 Hsu, Hui-Chin  24 Huber, Oswald  612, 619–620, 623–624, 630, 633

649

Huber, Tania  21–22, 24, 47, 49 Hubert, Walter  492 Huffman, Lois E.  417 Hughes, Joseph J.  258, 263, 293, 402, 404 Hulstijn, Joris  123–124, 354 Humboldt, Wilhelm von  581 Humes, James C.  308 Hunt, L.  313 Hunter, Dede M.  612 Hurley, Kathleen Ann  430 Hutcheon, Linda  255, 413, 419 Hyers, M. Conrad  231–232 Hymes, Dell  203 Hynes, William J.  253 Hösli, Karin  62 Inge, M. Thomas  201, 256, 299–300, 613 Isen, Alice M  460 Islam, Asad  24, 175, 230 Ivvarson, Jan  589 Iwase, Masao  126 Izard, Carol E.  23, 23 Izzett, Christin D.  411, 418 Jablonski, Carol J.  554 Jakobson, Roman  600 James, Ann  454, 613 James, William  18 Jandorf, Lina  482 Janes, Leslie M.  508 Jarvie, I. C.  186 Jaskanen, Susanna  127, 127 Jefferson, Gail  116, 178, 295, 300, 374 Jefferson, Gail  374 Jenkins, Ron  370 Jhally, Sut  388 Johansen, Ruthann Knechel  255 Johnson, Ben  248 Johnson, Kathy E.  104 Johnson, T. R.  421 Jolly, Elaine  611

650 

Index of authors

Jones, James M.  73, 253, 410, 528, 534, 595, 618, 623, 628 Jordan, G.  197, 418 Joubert, Laurent  102, 408 Jung, Wonil Edward  78–79, 250, 560 Jurich, Marilyn  259 Kalland, Steve  310 Kallen, H. M.  313 Kamei, T.  492 Kant, Immanuel  26, 103, 226, 261, 308 Karabas, Seyfi  319, 620, 623 Karasik, V. I.  131 Kashdan, Todd B.  76 Kasriel, Judith  75 Kataria, Madan  479, 481 Katz, Alice A.  621–623 Katz, Jack  381, 386, 621–623 Kaufer, David  409, 411, 425 Kaufman, Gloria  311 Kawahara, Shigeto  106 Kazanevsky, Vladimir  311 Kazarian, Shahe S.  40, 61, 75 Keener, Polly  618 Kehl, D. G.  243, 260–261, 267 Keim, Inken  120 Keinan, Giora  319, 503 Keith-Spiegel, Patricia  24, 27, 307, 310, 313 Keller, Dan  256, 455, 474 Kelly, Fred C.  255, 289, 454 Keltner, Dacher  22, 488, 508 Keough, William  257 Kercher, Stephen  301 Kerkkanen, Paavo  483 Kerr, M. E.  257 Kerr, Sarah T.  507 Keysar, Boaaz  553 Kierkegaard, Soren  227–228, 231, 457 Kiley, Frederick  254, 256 Killingsworth, M. Jimmie  424, 424 King, Cynthia M.  212, 255, 290, 423, 555, 558, 586

Kiniry, Malcom  419 Kirsh, Gillian A.  43, 62 Klein, Allen  311, 454 Kline, Paul  29, 57 Klingman, Avigdor  69 Klinkowitz, Jerome  255 Klions, Herbert L.  503 Klosek, Judi  463 Klügel, Kilian  63 Kobler, James B.  126 Kochman, Thomas  120 Koestler, Arthur  25, 103, 250, 253, 265 Kolasky, John  159 Kolberg, Karen  465 Koller, Marvin  366 Koller, Werner  576 Koponen, Maarit  127 Koppel, Mark A.  44 Korotkov, David  55, 499, 501, 505 Kotthoff, Helga  104, 116, 119–120 Kowal, Sabine  117, 117 Kraepelin, Emil  18 Krantzhoff, Erhard U.  63, 69 Krikmann, Arvo  129, 159 Krinsky, David  300 Kristeva, Julia  571 Kronenberger, Louis  547, 547 Kropscott, Laura S.  27 Krueger, Robert F.  76, 265 Kubie, Lawrence  454 Kubovy, Michael  621–623 Kueneman, Karen  311, 493 Kuhlman, Thomas  456 Kuiper, Nicholas A.  43, 62, 316, 387, 482, 483, 500, 501, 502, 504 Kuipers, Giselinde  4, 6, 52, 157, 196, 372, 375, 380–381, 383, 385, 387–388 Kumano, H.  492 Kunst-Wilson, William R.  624 Kunzle, David  613, 613 Kushner, Malcolm  311, 462 Kutas, M.  126

Index of authors  Kyrston, Victor H.  418 Köhler, Gabriele  28, 33–34, 37–38, 44, 46, 52–53, 55–56, 59, 63, 317 LaFave, Lawrence  372 Labov, William  120, 187 Lampert, Martin D.  40, 317, 485 Lang, Candace  1, 108, 252, 258, 262–​ 263, 266, 292, 319, 334, 354, 412, 417, 420, 425, 587, 589, 600, 602, 630 Lanham, Richard A.  423, 426–428 Larsen, Gwen  38 Larsen, Randy J.  47 Larwin, David A.  619, 623, 625 Lasswell, Harold  549 Latta, Robert L.  25 Lauer, Jeanette C.  507 Lauer, Robert H.  507 Laurian, Anne-Marie  127, 569–570, 575, 588 Lausberg, H.  587 Lawler, Donald  255 Lazarus, A. L.  255 Lazarus, Richard S.  482 Le Goff, Jacques  102 LeMaster, J. R.  256 Leach, Jerry W.  187 Leacock, Stephen  251 Leary, James P.  187 Leder, Helmut  612, 619, 623, 626 Lederer, Richard  415, 424 Lee, Judith Yaross  255 Leeds, Christopher  311 Lefcourt, Herbert M.  40, 52, 59–60, 311, 316, 469, 480, 482, 485, 488, 493, 496, 501, 504–505, 507 Lefevère, André  571, 578 Legman, Gershon  158, 158 Leite, Catherine  62 Lemeunier, Thierry  125 Lessard, Denys  615 Lessard, G. M. Levison  124

651

Leung, Kwok  72 Levasseur, David G.  554, 554 Levenson, Robert W.  507, 507 Levine, Jacob  59 Levy, Barbara  263 Levy, Jonathan  415 Lewis, C. S.  249 Lewis, Jerry  260, 269, 293, 294 Lewis, Paul  243, 264–265, 268, 370–371, 378, 382–384, 388, 571 Liao, Chao-Chih  120 Lim, Daniel  164, 300, 532, 546, 562 Limon, John  300 Limón, José E.  203 Lincoln, Kenneth  258, 430, 591 Linderman, Frank B.  258 Lippman, Louis G.  106 Lipps, Theodor  18, 27 Lipset, Seymour Martin  172, 178 Littman, D. C.  123 Liverpool, Hollis V.  73 Lloyd, Sally A.  30, 292 Lockyer, Sharon  370–371, 373, 384–385, 388, 430 Loehlin, John C.  76 Loehr, Dan  337 Lohman, John  190 Loomis, Diane  465 Louwerse, Max M.  617 Love, Ann Marie  527, 611 Lowe, John  301, 414 Lowis, Michael J.  70, 609 Lucariello, J.  123 Lucas, Teresa  127 Luck, Michael  336 Ludovici, Anthony M.  307, 313 Lundell, Torborg  310 Lundy, Duane E.  507 Lunsford, Andrea A.  408, 416–417, 423 Lyman, Bernard E.  20 Lynn, Kenneth  251, 423, 461

652 

Index of authors

McAndrews, Kristin M.  259 McClelland, David C.  492 McCloud, Scott  633 McCluskey-Fawcett, Kathleen A.  65 McCoy, K.  507 McCrae, Robert R.  72–73 McCroskey, James C.  63 McCubbin, James A.  482 McCue, Melissa  493 McDavid, Jr.  251 MacDonald, Dwight  255, 586 McDonald, Skye  122, 256 McDonald, Walter  256 McDonough, Craig J.  339 McDougall, W.  313, 452 McDowell, John Holmes  252, 597 McEntire, Nancy Cassell  187 McGhee, Paul E.  18, 20, 23, 26–27, 29–30, 32, 36–38, 44, 49, 52–53, 55–56, 63, 65–66, 70–71, 78, 228, 283, 299, 310–312, 450, 456, 467, 488, 507, 544, 549, 556, 558–559, 627 MacGregor, Alex J.  75 McGuire, Francis  454 McKay, M. E.  619, 623 McKay, T. D.  619, 623 McMahon, Maureen  418 Maas, Cliff  63 Macaulay, M.  424 Machline, Vera Cecilia  399 MacHovec, Frank J.  555 Macklin, Pat  172 Maddocks, Peter  618 Madini, Mongi  131 Mahony, Diana L.  495 Makarius, Laura  188 Malinowski, Bronisław  177–178, 191 Manke, Beth  76 Mann, Brenda  377 Marc, David  300 Mardiganian, Aurora  175 Maria, Rosa  410

Marjoram, Dominic  612, 624, 631 Marra, Meredith  118, 120 Martin, David  178 Martin, Leslie R.  484, 498 Martin, Lillian J.  18 Martin, Rod A.  3–4, 18, 20, 23–24, 28, 38–40, 48, 52, 55–56, 59–61, 63, 68, 75, 79, 309, 311, 316–317, 450, 454, 468–469, 480, 482–485, 487, 489, 492, 499–502, 504–505, 510 Martineau, William  367 Maslow, Abraham  479, 486–487 Mast, Gerald  300 Masten, Ann S.  311 Masumura, S.  492 Matthews, Benjamin J.  612 Mauro, Robert  621–623 May, Rollo  479, 503 Mazlack, Lawrence J.  124, 340 Mazzella, Ronald  45, 484 Mbangwana, Paul  311 Mead, Margaret  159–160 Meilhammer, Tonie  615 Menache, Sophia  102 Ménager, Daniel  103 Merbaum, Michael  485 Meredith, George  253, 259 Mervis, Carolyn B.  104 Metcalf, C. W.  466 Meunier, Raymond  18 Meyerhofer, Nicholas J.  316 Mey, J. L.  123 Meyer, John C.  549, 553–554 Michell, Gillian  425 Michels, Robert  172 Middleton, Russell  372 Mihalcea, Rada  124–125, 340 Mill, John Stuart  177 Miller, Geoffrey F.  47, 79 Miller, Nancy Weitz  416 Miller, Susan  419 Mills, Brett  387

Index of authors  Minchoff, Brian  493 Mindess, Harvey  47, 59, 104, 306, 313, 317, 456 Miner, Horace  546 Minois, Georges  102–103 Minsky, Martin  107 Mintz, Lawrence E.  4, 250, 299, 318 Mitchell, Alexandre G.  613, 615 Mitchell, Heather H.  617 Mitchell, William E.  189 Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia L.  120 Mitrokhin, Vasili  170 Mitz, Rick  300 Mobbs, Dean  126, 632 Moller, M.  492 Monro, D. H.  311 Moody, Raymond A.  267, 452, 479 Moore, Mark P.  261, 296, 554 Morain, G. G.  127 Moran, Carmen C.  503 Moran, Joseph M.  126 Morgan, Marcyliena  120 Morkes, John  125, 336 Morreall, John  4, 216, 224–227, 235, 239, 299, 311, 318, 361–362, 371, 399, 450, 463, 548, 558 Morris, Jonathan S.  257 Morris, Linda A.  301, 414 Morris, Ray  615, 628 Morrison, Monica  187 Morrow, P. D.  367 Moulin, Francis  124 Mounin, Georges  584 Mowrer, Donald E.  311 Mulder, Matthijs P.  336 Mulkay, Michael  79, 367, 374–375, 377–378 Mullany, Louise  118 Mullen, Patrick B.  204 Müller, Ralph  104, 121, 131 Muller, William Edward  131, 417 Mundorf, Norbert  310 Murray, Robert P.  293, 416, 484

653

Murstein, Bernard I.  77, 554, 563 Muschard, Jutta  130 Myers, David G.  66 Myers, Greg  417 Nack, Frank  356 Nardini, Gloria  117, 120 Narváez, Peter  187–188 Nash, Walter  261, 585 Neale, John M.  482 Nelms, Jodi  123, 127 Nelson, Arvalea J.  40, 317, 485 Nelson, T. G. A.  121 Nerhardt, Göran  627 Neroni, Lydia  75 Neubert, Albrecht  578 Nevo, Ofra  69–70, 316, 319, 372 Newman, Michelle Gayle  506 Newmark, Peter  576 Nezlek, John B.  502, 507, 511 Nezu, Arthur M.  505 Nezu, Christine M.  505 Nickels, Cameron  298 Nicholl, Sorrel  500 Nichols, Robert C.  76, 249 Nida, E. A.  576, 582 Nieuwoudt, Johan M.  70, 609 Nijholt, Anton  123–125, 336, 340, 354 Nikiforidou, Kiki  129 Nilsen, Alleen P.  4, 250, 257, 268, 299, 417, 614 Nilsen, Don L. F.  4, 127, 250, 256, 257, 268, 284, 298, 299, 317–318, 415, 417, 570, 614 Nirenburg, Sergei  5–7, 348 Noppa, Henry  484 Norrick, Neal R.  116, 119, 204 Norrick, Neill  375 Novak, William  174, 257 Nwokah, Evangeline E.  24 O’Brien, J.  122–123 O’Connell, Daniel C.  117

654 

Index of authors

O’Connell, Walter E.  456, 487 O’Donnell-Truijillo, Nick  553–554 Oakley, T.  128 Obrdlik, Antonin J.  166, 368–369 Oeberst, Andriens  626 Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie  117, 412 Olinger, L. Joan  482, 504 Olsen, Lance  250, 430 Olson, Clark D.  430, 432 Olson, James M.  508 Olson, Kathryn M.  430, 432 Olson, Kirby  317 Olson, S. Douglas  102 Oring, Elliott  4, 25, 159, 161, 170, 174, 178, 184, 186, 188, 191–192, 194–197, 199, 202, 204, 300, 308, 311, 344, 361, 363, 367, 380–381, 383–384, 387, 389 Oshima, Kimie  372 Ott, Christiane  74, 319 Overholser, James C.  505 Owusu-Bempah, Kwame  384 Owren, Michael J.  24, 79 Oxford, G. S.  117 Ozawa, Fukujiro  126 Özkök, Bora  187 Page, Tim  255 Pain, Helen  493 Palmer, Jerry  112–113, 299, 363, 367, 370, 383–384 Panksepp, Jaak  75, 78 Panoutsopoulou, Theodora  311 Pantic, Maja  337 Paolillo, John C.  609, 612, 623, 628, 631 Paolinelli, Mario  589 Park, Nansook  47 Partington, Alan  116, 122, 125 Partnow, Elaine  545 Paton, George  361, 367, 369, 374, 379 Patton, David  484 Paulos, John Allen  103, 555

Paulson, Terry  462 Pavesi, Maria  572 Payne, David A.  554 Pearce, S.  122 Pearson, Paul  61, 612 Pearson, Terry R.  61, 612 Pennebaker, James W.  499 Pepicello, William J.  105, 417 Perez, Cristino  51–52, 59 Perkins, David  621–623 Perry, Stephen D.  549, 554–555 Peterson, Christopher  19, 46–47, 60 Peterson, L.  417, 419 Peters, Tom  458, 460 Petrenko, Maxim S.  7 Pexman, Penny M.  411 Pickering, Michael  371, 373, 383–385, 388, 430 Pickering, W. S.  178 Pien, Diana  25, 49, 312, 610, 627–628 Pieper, Gail W.  430 Pinsker, Sanford  254, 256 Pisek, Gerhard  570 Pizzini, Franca  365 Plato  29, 103, 213–215, 235–236, 261, 298, 306, 310, 313, 356, 363, 399, 401, 548 Platt, Tracey  54 Pollard, Arthur  254 Pollio, Howard R.  44, 460 Polounine, Slava  561 Popovič, Anton  571, 577 Porcu, Leide  120 Porteous, Janice  104 Porterfield, Albert L.  499, 501, 505 Porter, James  416 Posen, I. Sheldon  188 Poveda, Daniel  128 Powell, Chris  59, 75, 365–367, 369, 379 Powell, Falvey C.  311, 485, 501 Powelson, John A.  53 Praeger, Charles  250

Index of authors  Pratt, Alan R.  254, 419 Preuschoft, Signe  75 Priego Valverde, Béatrice  117 Priest, Robert F.  62, 77 Propp, Vladimir  107, 113, 541 Provine, Robert R.  117, 120–121, 260, 366, 385 Proyer, René T.  47, 53–54, 62, 74 Pughe, Thomas.  255 Puhlik-Doris, Patricia  38, 505, 508, 511 Pulman, Stephen  125, 340 Purdie, Susan  121 Purdy, Jedediah  254, 413, 418 Pym, Anthony  578 Quintilian  102, 215, 402, 404–405, 408 Rackl, Lorilyn  479 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R.  185–186, 364 Radday, Yehuda  311 Rader, C.  309 Rahman, Jacquelyn  120 Ramachandran, Vilayanur S.  79, 625 Ramani, S.  311 Ramsay, Edward Bannerman  161 Rapp, Albert  307, 313 Rapp, Alexander M.  22, 38 Raskin, Victor  1, 5–7, 11–12, 25, 32, 50, 52, 103, 107–109, 115, 121, 123, 127, 170, 178, 250, 303, 305, 308, 310–311, 314, 317–318, 336–338, 342, 344–345, 347–349, 351, 353–355, 363, 372, 425, 427, 524, 534–536, 539, 581, 596, 602, 612, 626 Rath, Sigrid  20, 22, 51–52, 317 Raudenbush, Stephen W.  505 Raulin, Jules M.  18 Raz, Tal  494 Read, Raymond L.  310 Redfern, Walter  252

655

Redlich, Frederick C.  59, 609 Reeves, C.  415, 417 Reuters News Service  561 Rhodes, Gillian  28, 621–623 Richler, Mordecai  251 Riemann, Rainer  76 Rim, Yalom  504 Ring, Erp  618, 623 Risden, E. L.  316 Rishel, Mary Ann  416 Rissland, Birgit  63 Ritchie, David  409, 433 Ritchie, Graeme  106, 124, 337–338, 340, 408–409, 433 Ritchie, Joy  408 Roberts, Paul  239–240, 423, 426–428 Robinson, Dawn  365, 367, 374–375 Robinson, Vera  453 Rodden, Frank A.  22, 38, 53 Roeckelein, Jon E.  20 Rogerson-Revell, Pamela  117 Romero, Eric J.  61 Ronald, Kate  408 Roodenburg, Herman  102–103, 550 Rose, Mike  419 Rosenberg, Erika L.  22–23, 501 Rosen, Leonard J.  423 Rosenheim, Eliyahu  319 Rosier, Laurence  131 Ross, Alison  121, 417, 425–426 Ross, Bob  462 Ross, Charles  316 Rosso, Paolo  125 Rosten, Leo  257 Rothbart, Mary K.  25, 33, 49, 265, 312, 610, 627–628 Rotton, James  23, 494, 497 Rourke, Constance  257 Rouzie, Albert  421–422 Rowland, Robert C.  431 Royot, Daniel  243, 260, 268 Rubien, Janet  44, 612 Rubin, Louis D., Jr.  250, 284, 300

656 

Index of authors

Ruch, Willibald  3, 6, 18, 20–24, 26, 28–29, 33–34, 36–38, 44, 46–56, 58–60, 62–66, 70, 73–76, 109, 178, 284, 310–311, 315, 317, 319, 336–337, 363, 385, 469, 482, 484–488, 490, 495, 499, 502, 540, 598–599, 602, 610, 619–620, 627 Ruiz Moneva, Angeles  130 Rusch, Sandra  71 Russell, David  167, 251, 287, 416 Rust, John  75, 507 Ruszkiewicz, John J.  417 Rutter, Jason  120, 284 Ryan, Cynthia A.  311 Ryan, T. A.  621–623 Ryff, Carol D.  502 Sacks, Harvey  200 Safer, Elaine B.  243, 245, 255, 268 Safranek, Roma  485 Salameh, Waleed A.  53, 309, 311, 456 Samson, Andrea C.  5, 21, 49, 612, 615, 620, 623–624, 630 Sanborn, Kate  409–410 Sapir, Edward  586 Sarmany-Schuller, Ivan  501 Saroglou, Vassilis  40, 43, 61–62 Sassenrath, Simone  37, 63–64, 70 Savin, William  306, 309–311, 316 Sayre, Joan  365 Scariot, Christel  40, 61 Schaaf, Barbara  256 Schank, Roger C.  107 Schaub, Thomas H.  255 Scheff, Thomas  367, 385–386 Schegloff, Emanuel A.  117 Schill, Thomas  485 Schirmer, Otto  18 Schmidt-Hidding, Wolfgang  43, 46, 71 Schmidt, Stephen R.  612 Schmitz, J. R.  127 Schmitz, Neil  250 Scholl, Peter A.  255 Schopenhauer, Arthur  226, 308, 310

Schulz, Max F.  254, 289 Schutz, Charles E.  311 Schwartz, Carol B.  621–623 Schwartz, Shalom H.  73 Schwarzwald, Joseph  494 Schwitalla, Johannes  120 Schwoebel, J.  122 Scogin, Forrest R.  485 Scott, James  259, 369 Scott, John R.  188 Scott, Nina M.  316 Sears, Richard N.  48 Seaver, Paul W., Jr.  258 Sechrest, Lee  44 Secor, Marie  424 Seitel, Peter  203 Seligman, Martin E. P.  19, 46–47, 60 Selzer, Jack  424 Semino, Elena  121 Shalit, Gene  251 Shats, Mark  494 Shelley, Cameron  123–124 Shepherd, Jean  255 Sheppard, Alice  612, 620, 622–623 Sherman, Lawrence W.  311 Sher, Phyllis K.  78 Sherwood, Steve  418 Sherzer, Joel  192 Shibles, Warren  299 Shiffman, Limor  370, 381 Shinohara, Kazuko  106 Shloss, Carol  255 Shultz, Thomas R.  25, 312, 611, 628 Shuttleworth, J. M.  254 Sifianou, Maria  116–117 Sigal, Marcia  311 Simmons, John  540 Simon, Jolen M.  501 Simpson, Paul  121 Siporin, Steve  187 Sirc, Geoffrey  420 Sjöbergh, Jonas  125 Skowron, Justyna  131

Index of authors  Skrobocki, Eugeninez  159 Slade, Diana  117 Sloane, David E. E.  243, 262–264, 269, 299–300 Smith, Alden Clarke  415, 417, 430 Smith, Jane E.  507 Smith, K. C. P.  32 Smith, Mary R.  86 Smith, Seba  286, 287 Smith-Lovin, Lynn  365, 367, 374–375 Smoski, Moria J.  24 Snell-Hornby, Mary  578 Snieder, Harold  75 Snodgrass, Mary Ellen  254 Sohler, Theodore P.  59, 609 Sommer, Karin  37, 62 Sonnichsen, C. L.  252 Sontag, Susan  266 Spector, Tim D.  75 Speier, Hans  368–371 Spencer, Gary  311 Spencer, Herbert  17, 222–223, 362 Sperber, Dan  115, 122, 129, 409 Spinath, Frank M.  76 Spradley, James  377 Sroufe, L. Alan  33, 78 Staley, Rosemary E.  27 Stanton, Annette L.  482 Stecconi, Ubaldo  578 Steffens, Dean  424 Steger, Michael F.  76 Stein, Mary Beth  430 Steiner, George  575, 601 Stephenson, Richard  365 Stevens, Markus F.  63, 474 Stewart, Donald  432–433 Stocking, Holly  372 Stock, Oliviero  124, 336, 339, 354 Stoft, P. E.  309 Stokker, Kathleen  369–370 Stoller, Paul  189 Stolz, Heidi  71 Stone, Arthur A.  482, 506

657

Stone, Laurie  300 Stopsky, Fred  465 Strapparava, Carlo  124, 336, 339–340 Strebeigh, F.  417, 419 Streeck, Juergen  120 Suh, E. M.  73 Sully, James  452 Suls, Jerry M.  25–27, 29, 31, 49, 103, 228, 313, 315, 610–611, 626– 628 Sutcliffe, Rebecca  408 Sutherland, Christine Mason  408 Svebak, Sven  32, 45, 317, 485, 499–​ 500 Swearingen, C. Jan  401, 405–406, 431–​432 Sykes, A. J. M.  186, 365 Szameitat, Diana P.  24 Szende, Thomas  127 Takahashi, Yumiko  316 Takizawa, Osamu  124 Tallman, Richard S.  187, 204 Tan, Josephine  450, 453, 468–469, 490, 507 Tannen, Deborah  118, 125 Tanner, Stephen L.  316 Tan, Stanley A.  450, 453, 468–469, 490, 507 Tavarelli, Paola  188 Taylor, Dean  124, 340 Taylor, Frederick  457 Taylor, Shelley E.  482 Tecucianu, Frederique  319 Tedlock, Dennis  203 Tepper, Inbal  494 Teshimovsky-Arditi, Mina  319 Theibaux, Marcelle  408 Thein, Melinda Taylor  62, 77 Thompson, Richard  63 Thompson, Stith  192 Thompson, Teresa L.  611 Thorelli, Irene M.  33

658 

Index of authors

Thorson, James A.  59, 75, 311, 485, 501, 503 Tijus, Charles-Albert  124 Tilton, John W.  254 Tinholt, Hans Wim  125, 340 Titze, Michael  53–54, 74 Todt, Dietmar  119, 121 Tollefson, Donald L.  59 Toombs, Sarah Eleanor  256 Totten, Mary C.  493 Toury, Gideon  577–578 Tower, C.  415, 418 Trachtenberg, Stanley  256, 299 Tragesser, Sarah  106 Trédé, Monique  102 Trembath, David L.  507 Trevor, William  577 Triezenberg, Katrina E.  4–5, 7, 12, 129, 355, 537 Trouvain, Jürgen  116, 121 Tsakona, Villy  110, 117, 623, 628, 631 Tsur, Reuven  319 Tucker, Joan S.  256 Tulman, Lorraine  612 Tümkaya, Songül  40, 61 Turek, Joy  47, 59 Turner, W. Craig  299 Tversky, B.  621–623 Tyler, Kathryn  286, 296 Uberoi, J. Singh  165 Uekermann, Jennifer  27 Ulea, V.  266 Ulrych, Margherita  601 Unger, Lynette S.  311 Utsumi, Akira  122–123 Vaid, Jyotsna  78, 104, 126–127 Vaillant, George E.  486 Valdimarsdottir, Heiddis  482 van Alphen, Ingrid C.  609 Van Auken, Philip M.  310

Van Giffen, Katherine  310 van Hoof, Jan A. R. A. M.  77 van de Vijver, Fons  72 Vandaele, Jeroen  113, 127, 570, 599 Varma, V. S. R. D.  311 Vasey, George  489 Veale, Tony  129 Velker, Barbara  488, 495 Verdon, Jean  102 Vermeer, Hans  577 Vettin, Julia  119, 121 Viana, Amadeu  117 Vickers, Scott B.  259 Viikberg, Jűri  159 Viktoroff, David  303–305 Vitanza, Victor  415, 421 Vives, Juan Luis  258, 408 Volpe, Michael  402 Wagg, Stephen  371, 379 Wagner, Jane  292 Waldoks, Moshe  174, 257 Waldorf, V. Ann  507 Walford, Geoffrey  178 Walker, Nancy A.  259, 263, 283, 299, 301, 311, 410–411, 414 Wallace, Ronald  254, 261 Walle, Alf H.  199, 374 Waltz, William  493 Walzer, Arthur  409 Wanzer, M. B.  554 Wanzer, Melissa Bekelja  554 Ward, John  414–415 Ward, Stephen  370 Ware, Aaron P.  35, 40, 42–43, 45, 61–62 Warnick, Barbara  412 Warren, Rosalind  299, 311 Waters, Everett  33, 78 Waters, Janet C. E.  20 Watkins, Mel  120, 258, 284, 301 Watson, David  499 Watson, Karli K.  612, 623, 630

Index of authors  Weber, Alan  415, 422–423 Weber, Marco  76 Weber, Max  380 Wechsler, Robert  255 Weiner, E. Judith  128 Weinstein, Matt  464 Weir, Kelly  38 Weisberg, Robert W.  105 Weisenberger, Steven  263 Weisenberg, Matisyohu  494 Weisfeld, Glenn E.  79 Weiss, Elizabeth  300 Weiss, R. L.  509 Weizenbaum, Joseph  355 Wells, H. G.  162 Welsch, Roger L.  193 Wernblad, Annette  255 Wertheimer, Molly Meijer  408 Whitaker, Steve  618 White, E. B.  243, 530 White, Katherine S.  243, 530 White, Sabina  311, 496, 503 Wickberg, Daniel  382, 387, 486 Wicker, Frank W.  33 Wiget, Andrew  258 Wild, Barbara  22, 38, 53, 63, 75, 474, 630 Willard-Holt, Colleen  311 Williams, Alan R.  612 Williams, Dana A.  120, 126 Williams, David  415, 424 Williams, Joseph M.  415, 423 Willis, Amy C.  33 Wills, Thomas A.  483, 507 Wilson, Christopher P.  28, 33 Wilson, David Sloan  75, 78–79, 104 Wilson, Deirdre  104, 115, 122, 129, 409 Wilson, Glenn D.  75, 78 Wilson, James D.  256 Wilson, Steve  464 Wilson, Thomas  406–407

659

Winkel, Mark  315 Winner, E.  122 Winston, Mathew  254, 299, 428 Wisse, Jakob  402–403 Withalm, Gloria  112 Withers, Carl  252 Womack, Deanna F.  431 Wonham, Harry  263 Wood, James  250 Wooten, Patty  452–454 Woschek, Bernard P.  614, 619, 623–625, 628–629 Wrench, Jason S.  63 Wright, Elizabethada A.  412–413 Wright, Thomas  613 Wu, Ying Choon  126 Wyss, Tobias  64 Yacowar, Maurice  255 Yan, Gao  255 Yip, Jeremy. A.  63 Yokogawa, Toshihiko  124 Young, Jason R.  628 Yurchak, Alexei  159, 168 Yus Ramos, Francisco  115, 130 Zajdman, Anat  319 Zajonc, Robert B.  624 Zelvys, V. I.  319 Zerbinos, Eugenia  611 Zerkowitz, Judit  121, 131 Zigler, Edward  44 Zijderveld, Anton  361, 376, 378–379, 385 Zillmann, Dolf  29–31, 307, 372 Zinsser, Judith P.  408, 423 Ziv, Avner  45, 73, 258, 311, 317, 319, 507, 598 Zucker, Wolfgang  189 Zurawik, David  285 Zweyer, Karen  66, 488, 495 Zysset, Stefa  49, 623, 630

Subject index acronym, 196 adjacency pair, 116, 119 adoxography, 531 aesthetics, 18, 47–52, 65, 188, 203, 204, 601, 611, 624–626 aggression, 28, 29, 61, 76, 104, 119, 166, 175, 176, 177, 188, 193–194, 305–306, 307, 313, 363, 368–369, 375, 382–385, 390, 527, 531, 535, 536, 545, 562, 609 agon, 531 allegory, 404, 535, 536 ambiguity, 11, 102, 105, 240, 246, 373, 374, 376, 378, 384, 401–​ 404, 426, 470, 531, 541, 548, 553 anaphoric, 340, 341 quasi, 345–346 American (see also Black) 298–301 Humor Studies Association, 262, 268, 269, 298, 301, 317 political cartoons and comics, 246 anachronism, 531 anagogy, 535 anaphora resolution, 341 antaclasis, 531 anthropology, 4, 37, 73, 183, 203, 298, 548 anti-masque, 531 antiphrasis, 531 apprenticeship novels, 247 archetypal characters, 248, 260, 264, 560–562 Arizona State University, 252, 267, 268, 318 aspects aesthetics, 624–626 cognitive, 626–631

audience, 2, 5, 41, 115, 117, 118, 119, 200, 215, 216, 225, 238, 246, 264, 282, 285, 288, 289, 291, 292, 303, 304, 305, 307, 308, 310, 312–315, 363, 374, 384, 400, 401–402, 404, 406–407, 411–413, 416, 417, 419, 424, 425, 428, 430, 431, 432, 433, 450, 451, 527, 531, 537–539, 553, 559, 561, 590, 592, 593, 601 Audience-Based Theory of Verbal Humor, 310, 314 backtracking, 11, 617 bathos, 531 bawdy, 525, 526, 527, 528, 531, 532 Belles-Lettres, 244 Bible, 212, 213, 216, 229, 230–232, 258, 303, 419, 535, 586, 601 Bildungsroman, 247 blending, 103, 128 bona-fide communication, 539 Borscht Belt, 290 braggadocio, 531 Broadway variety show, 290 Broca’s area, 126, 630 burlesque, 188, 221, 222, 246, 264, 290, 292, 412, 531, 548 caricature, 258, 263, 264, 613, 615, 620, 621 carnival, 189, 190, 365, 377, 526, 527 cartoon, 26, 28, 48, 52, 58, 59, 69, 75, 169, 222, 224, 263, 285, 388, 609–640 cartoonist, 613 censorship, 158, 263, 264, 383, 528

662 

Subject index

cheerfulness, 24, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 55, 56, 62, 63, 66, 77, 482, 485, 487, 497, 498 Christianity, 216, 228, 229, 231, 232, 241 clown, 188, 189, 261, 449, 451, 452, 453, 454, 527, 531, 532, 533, 548, 561, 562 co-reference, 11, 523 cognitive process, 24–28, 342, 344, 632 comedies of manners, 247 comedy African-American, 120, 284, 413 Black, 254, 531 high, 246 history of, 229–230, 247–248, 290, 454, 538, 548 Irish, 247 New Comedy, 214, 525 new wave stand up, 290, 291 physical, 262, 292 queer, 246 romantic, 292, 533 screwball, 293, 300 sick, 28, 41, 43, 48, 52, 179, 193, 195, 196, 367, 534 situation (sitcom), 283, 388, 530, 570, 573, 589, 600 television, 109, 111, 295, 297, 300 Spanish, 247 stand-up, 245, 300, 417, 486, 490 television, 245, 284, 292, 294, 296 comic strip, 281, 284, 285, 288, 289, 300, 472 highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow, 282, 283, 528, 531 film newspaper comic, 288 performance studies of, 283 comic theater, 292 commedia dell’arte, 264 communication mediated, 125, 387, 422, 557–558 studies, 4, 388, 400, 548

comparative -historical approach, 378–382 method, 158, 162, 163, 167, 168, 172, 174, 175, 177, 178 competence, 7, 44, 114, 115, 116, 119, 335, 355, 356, 410, 418, 483, 507, 596 composition contact zones in, 419, 429 humor as critical expression in, 415 humor as disciplinary enculturation in, 416 humor as disciplinary negotiation in, 1, 6, 184, 188, 301, 316, 317, 319, 334, 362, 376, 384, 415, 416, 417, 423, 424, 425, 429, 548, 555 humor in first-year, 416–418, 419–420, 426, 429 pedagogy of, 415–430 professional and business writing in, 423, 429, 430 textbooks and handbooks in, 18, 251, 400, 426 writing tutorials in, 418 computer databases, 298 conceit, 536, 587 concept, 8, 25, 33, 35–37, 40, 43, 46, 53, 54, 58, 60, 73, 103, 104, 107, 108, 110, 120, 123, 128, 183, 211, 223, 226, 232, 246, 258, 260, 266, 282, 283, 308, 316, 335, 336, 341, 345, 348, 352, 384, 416, 421, 484, 501, 543–548, 550–559, 563, 570, 577, 578, 580, 581, 582, 588, 615, 616 connector, 106, 107, 333 consumption, 282, 284, 335, 483, 489, 585 contrast, 44, 49, 103, 122, 123, 165, 173, 174, 176, 220, 240, 286, 368, 377, 529, 535, 578, 614,

Subject index  618, 620, 621, 627 conversation analysis, 116, 125, 618 coon caricature, 264 coon songs, 264 cooperative principle (CP), 108, 115 coping, 39, 40, 55, 60, 61, 65, 68, 70, 73, 195, 289, 316, 454, 482, 485, 487, 502, 503, 504, 505, 506, 509, 510 coping humor scale (CHS), 40, 60, 70, 485, 502 CORHUM, 131, 318 corpus, 117, 119, 120, 123, 125, 132, 426, 597 cross-cultural perspectives, 71–75 cross-national perspectives, 71–75 cultural differences, 123 culture, 4, 35, 37, 72–74, 131, 159, 165, 175, 183, 190–192, 238, 246, 256–259, 262, 263, 266–268, 281–294, 296–301, 311, 335, 374, 375, 379, 387, 399, 418, 431, 432, 459, 463, 473, 538, 547, 550, 552, 562, 572, 573, 575, 576, 579, 580, 583–587, 590, 596–602 democracy, 169, 171, 172, 176, 178, 286 derision, 30, 39, 103, 117, 313, 385 diction, 536, 538, 539 disambiguation, 11, 105, 106 discourse analysis, 115–118, 119, 123, 131, 412, 424, 618 disjunctor, 106, 107 disparagement, 29, 30, 31, 39, 103, 307, 310, 313, 372 dissoi logoi, 402, 409, 412, 421 distancing, 195, 504 distribution, 61, 110, 111, 112, 131, 282, 284, 610, 628 doggerel, 261 double entendre, 296, 536

663

dozens, 120, 187, 236, 290, 291, 297, 318, 452, 460, 465, 526 drawing style, 610, 614, 615, 620, 622, 623, 625, 626, 632 driving schools, 466 Duchenne display, 21, 496 dyadic tradition, 188 economy, 103, 104, 224, 309, 460, 463 eiron, 531 eironeia, 401 embarrassment, 2, 22, 117, 132, 365, 383, 385, 386, 596 embodied computational agent (ECA), 336–337 emotion, 19, 39, 51, 77, 78, 160, 161, 213, 224, 233, 235, 236, 237, 307, 336, 385, 386, 389, 405, 406, 480, 481, 482, 485, 491, 493–496, 510, 536, 559, 562, 630 enthymeme, 532 environment, 75, 76, 77, 192, 418, 453, 459, 462, 469, 473, 532, 547, 549, 550–552, 555, 561, 583, 596, 625 equivalence, 65, 570, 571, 572, 574–580, 582, 589, 592, 593, 599, 600 ethos, 400, 402, 403, 404, 405, 417, 431 evolution, 6, 77–79, 229, 237, 307, 308, 310, 318, 432, 537 exclusion, 175, 303, 364, 366, 383, 385 eye tracking, 632 fabliau, 532 facetiae, 402, 406, 408, 409 and vir bonus, 404 Facial Action Coding System (FACS), 22–24, 337, 481, 488, 495–496, 510 factor analytic studies, 48, 51, 54–57, 486

664 

Subject index

familiarity, 101, 119, 261, 282, 538, 539, 626 fantasy, 232, 250, 253, 254, 259, 289, 544, 561, 562 farce, 247, 262, 264, 425, 532, 533, 548, 592 film comedy, 267, 284, 292, 293, 294, 300 criticism, 266 flyting, 532 folklore, 73, 160, 167, 192, 197, 200, 249, 252, 281, 286, 297, 299, 300, 379, 560 studies, 4, 183, 184, 203 fool, 212, 213, 248, 290, 307, 527 vs. jester, 532 wise, 286–287, 295 formal features, 571, 612, 618, 620, 624, 632 formalism, 8, 334 frame, 7, 19, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 38, 52, 56, 126, 186, 200, 265, 298, 306, 374, 375, 409, 421, 433, 546, 576, 620 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 627, 629, 630, 631, 632, 627, 629 functionalism, 366, 367 gelotophobia, 53, 54 gender, 30, 66, 120, 132, 187, 259, 263, 310, 349, 361, 375, 377, 379, 381, 399, 424, 425, 430, 465, 544, 549, 551, 556, 558, 559, 560, 562, 611, 620 issues 561–563 genre, 108, 112, 119, 157, 166, 185, 191–192, 247, 249, 250, 252, 254, 261, 262, 264, 266, 267, 282, 283, 288, 290, 291, 292, 296, 300, 301, 380, 381, 387–​ 388, 400, 411, 416, 417, 420,

423, 424, 426, 431, 532, 533, 540, 550, 558, 559, 572, 573, 613 God, 189, 212, 213, 217, 230, 231, 247, 252, 261, 356 grotesque, 250, 253, 260, 377, 531, 532, 613 hahacronym, 124, 339 heritability, 75 hierarchy, 109, 187, 262, 341, 363, 365, 366, 367, 368, 425 Horatian satire, 249 hospitals, 69, 240, 318, 319, 365, 449, 452, 453, 454 hostility, 61, 103, 104, 166, 174, 175, 177, 188, 193, 194, 212, 219, 238, 239, 246, 249, 307, 313, 362, 367, 368, 369, 372, 380, 383, 384, 455, 462, 471, 488, 545, 558, 562 human–computer interface (HCI), 336, 339 humor analysis of automatic, 374, 569, 589, 600 and aggression, 28, 29, 61, 76, 103, 104, 119, 166, 175, 176, 177, 188, 193, 194, 305–309, 313, 363, 368, 369, 375, 382–384, 390, 527, 531, 535, 536, 545, 562, 609 health advocacy, 3, 451–457, 468–471 hierarchy, 109, 187, 262, 341, 363, 365, 366, 367, 368, 425 hostility, 61, 103, 104, 166, 174, 175, 177, 188, 193, 194, 212, 219, 238, 239, 246, 249, 307, 313, 362, 367, 368, 369, 372, 380, 383, 384, 455, 462, 471, 488, 545, 558, 562

Subject index  non-seriousness, 373, 374, 378, 382, 383 power, 64, 74, 168, 170, 175, 176, 193, 217, 220, 238, 252, 288, 306, 338, 344, 353, 363, 368, 369, 370, 375, 384, 409, 411, 412, 413, 415, 418, 420–429, 433, 452, 454, 472, 531, 551, 552, 556 psychology, 3, 6, 17, 18, 19, 23, 44, 46, 57, 69, 73, 77, 108, 177, 185, 220, 228, 240, 265, 298, 299, 315–316, 317, 334, 355, 449, 450, 452, 454, 456, 460, 461, 465, 467, 548, 549 resistance, 188, 189, 196, 361, 367, 368, 369, 370, 377, 410–417, 456, 469, 583 social structure, 184, 186, 187, 366 appreciation, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 44–48, 51, 52, 55, 56, 59, 64–67, 69, 70, 73–78, 124, 203, 227, 228, 239, 251, 261, 282, 298, 310, 312, 315, 372, 381, 387, 388, 418, 469, 484, 485, 487, 507, 546, 563, 610, 612, 619, 620, 622, 625, 629, 632 as art, 203–204 catharsis, 367, 385 as a character strength, 19, 35, 46–47, 76 coping mechanism, 39, 73, 506 cultural production, 400, 414, 430–433 rhetorical device, 400–408, 412, 425, 426, 432, 587, 592 social activity, 303–306, 416 temperament, 35, 36, 37, 38, 44, 45, 46, 55, 482, 485, 487

665

virtue, 46, 47, 77, 214, 215, 217, 218, 401, 561, 579 as an ability, 43–46 aesthetic perception, 47 behavior, 17, 23, 27, 32, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 44, 46, 52, 55–59, 61, 64, 69, 72, 75, 77, 116, 158, 186, 200, 204, 229, 283, 292, 303, 305, 312, 313, 316, 355, 377, 401, 405, 407, 409, 415, 422, 454, 456, 467, 485, 526, 528, 534, 550, 559, 620 Black, see comedy, Black children’s, 65, 184, 246, 311 comparative, 4, 131, 157–163, 166–168, 172, 174–178, 194, 197, 202, 203, 301, 362, 364, 378, 379, 380, 382, 383, 569, 609 competence, 7, 44, 114–116, 119, 335, 355, 356, 410, 418, 483, 507, 596 computational, 5, 123–125, 333–354 contexts, 196–203 conversational, 375, 384, 387 creation of, 36, 52, 56, 335 death, 114, 170, 174, 179, 189, 196, 217, 230, 249, 252, 261, 449, 453, 454, 500, 526, 531, 541, 551, 562 dark side of humor, 42, 46, 382, 383 development, 65–68, 389, 610 disaster, 196 enhancer, 537, 538 ethics of, 237, 238, 239, 268 event, 9, 11, 20, 22, 36, 113, 119, 195, 196, 200, 201, 304, 305, 315, 351, 363, 411, 432, 474, 534, 592 failed, 405 feminist vs. feminine, 413–415 gender-based, 263, 558

666 

Subject index

humor (contd.) generation of, 3, 6, 34, 67, 124, 170, 223, 333, 335, 336, 337, 339, 340, 347, 348, 352, 353, 386, 418 automatic Hispanic, 203, 258 history of, 230, 538, 548 in advertising, 294, 297, 388, 474, 596, 597, 615 church, 190, 213, 216, 407, 526, 527, 528 education, 464–466, 472–473 song, 190, 213, 423, 465, 471, 474, 531, 571 the workplace, 118, 125, 195, 310, 318, 369, 429, 450, 451, 457–464, 466, 467, 470–472 instruments 57–65 3 Witz-Dimensionen (3WD), 64, 76, 599 Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ), 39, 40, 55–56, 61, 487, 502, 506, 508–511 State-Trait Cheerfulness Inventory (STCI), 34, 62, 63–64, 70, 74, 482, 487, 510 Humor Behavior Q-Sort Deck (HBQD), 40, 42, 55–56, 61–62, 74 international conference on, 73, 258, 316- 319, 602 Internet, 2, 12, 161, 257, 297, 387, 450, 479, 506, 511, 558 Jewish, 174–177, 191, 192, 198, 199, 202, 203, 217, 255, 257, 258, 263, 269, 285, 290, 369, 372, 381, 384, 573, 574 literary, 4, 5, 243, 244, 245, 246, 249, 250, 251, 259, 260, 266, 267, 301, 409, 523, 524, 529, 534, 537

literature, 5, 18, 19, 20, 33, 38, 41, 43, 44, 53, 60, 101–120, 123, 126, 184, 191, 192, 211, 221, 226, 232, 243, 244–246, 248, 250–268, 281, 283, 284, 288, 290, 295, 298–300, 316, 368, 408, 417, 451, 454, 457, 461, 473, 480, 488, 490, 523–533, 536, 537, 539, 540, 541, 548, 549, 555, 556, 557, 613 medical benefits of, 452 nonsense, 27, 49, 64, 66, 67, 74, 78, 485, 620, 627 performance, 44, 65, 115, 335 political, 299, 301, 368, 369, 370, 371, 373, 410, 412, 430–433, 554 production, 43, 44, 70, 76, 365, 496 Quotient Test, 259 referential, 345, 346 research, 310–311 multidisciplinary, 2, 7, 316, 609 first-timers in, 1, 2 part-timers in, 3 response, 17, 20–23, 29, 32, 40, 48, 51, 54, 59, 60, 72, 78, 116, 124, 126, 176, 195, 211, 227, 230, 232, 237, 263, 265, 297, 315, 364, 374, 385, 387, 403, 406, 418, 422, 425, 484, 485, 534, 552, 556, 563, 595, 599, 612, 622, 626, 632 ritual, 173, 185, 188–191, 365, 379, 386, 585 scholarship, 116, 131, 178, 263, 264, 298, 300, 316, 362–364, 385, 387, 388, 389, 400, 403, 410, 415, 422, 429, 430, 431, 563 sense of, 3, 32, 35–47, 52, 55, 56, 58–71, 74–78, 159, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 259, 307, 316, 317, 336, 379, 381, 382, 409, 410, 459, 462, 464, 467, 469,

Subject index  473, 479, 481–488, 492, 493, 496–510, 544–547, 550, 552, 559, 562, 563 sick, 48, 193, 196, 367 social functions of, 367, 389 styles, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 53, 55, 61, 62, 73, 74, 379, 381, 483, 486, 487, 502, 505, 506, 508, 509, 510, 511 support, 117, 119, 374 taboo, 42, 120, 188, 293, 374, 379 talk show, 283, 296, 297 television, 169, 195, 196, 245, 246, 257, 266, 281, 283, 284, 285, 290, 292, 293, 294, 296, 299, 300, 387, 486, 524, 530, 556, 559, 573, 589, 596 therapeutic, 306, 309, 311, 319, 449, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456, 479, 481, 482, 483, 503 theory of audience-based theory of verbal humor, 310, 314–15 conflict, 25, 27, 73, 166, 174, 177, 185, 186, 240, 268, 288, 296, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 367, 368–373, 377, 378, 380, 383, 390, 421, 422, 423, 461, 463, 487, 621 disparagement, 29, 30, 31, 39, 103, 307, 310, 313, 372 functionalist, 165, 166, 362, 364–368, 374, 377, 383 general theory of verbal humor (GTVH), 7, 50, 104, 108–117, 121, 124–131, 310, 314, 338, 341, 342, 425, 536, 537, 541, 612, 626, 628 incongruity, 104, 211, 215, 219, 221, 225–229, 231, 233–236, 240, 311–313, 363, 389, 463 phenomenology, 373, 424, 609 processing, 20, 27, 31, 32, 35,

667

110, 122, 125, 126, 128, 333, 334, 339, 363, 377, 611, 612, 617, 618, 621, 624, 625, 626, 627, 628, 629, 630, 632 release, 103, 104, 211, 221, 222, 223, 224, 233, 264, 304, 309, 310, 313–314, 362, 415, 450, 453, 468 relief, 221–225, 233, 235, 313–314, 362, 368, 378 script-based semantic ­theory (SSTH), 7, 25, 107–109, 114–115, 126–128, 310, 314, 338, 339, 341, 342, 343, 347, 353, 537, 541 verbal humor, 314 superiority, 24, 29, 30, 31, 39, 103, 211, 212, 214, 215, 220, 221, 225, 228, 229, 233, 234, 246, 249, 305, 307, 310, 313, 362, 363, 368, 381, 383, 384, 389, 390, 399, 531 verbal, 5, 7, 36, 45, 50, 55, 63, 108, 120, 234, 294, 310, 338, 342, 347, 399, 417, 425, 534, 536, 609, 610, 611, 612, 615, 617–618, 624, 626, 631, 633 verbally expressed (VEH), 569–608 visual, 5, 204, 260, 419, 429, 431, 559, 570, 589, 590, 593, 594, 596, 600, 601, 609–632 HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research, 2, 262, 267, 268, 298, 316 humorlessness, 34, 38, 52–54, 56, 65, 215, 218 humorology, 6, 316–319 humorous characters, 35, 245, 248 genres, 119, 370, 381, 387, 417 mode, 377, 385 plot, 112 poetry, 261

668 

Subject index

humorous (contd.) triple, 532 humours, 248 hyperbole, 532 inclusion, 303, 385 incongruity, 17, 20, 24–28, 31, 33, 48–51, 53, 64–67, 73, 74, 77, 102–108, 121–123, 126, 129, 130, 170, 211, 215, 219, 221, 223, 225–229, 231, 233–237, 240, 246, 260, 308, 310–312, 315, 344, 345, 362, 363, 389, 411, 421, 431, 463, 480, 541, 545, 553, 610, 611, 614, 617–620, 624–631 incongruity resolution, 27, 31, 48, 49, 50, 51, 64, 66, 67, 73, 74, 77, 129, 130, 246, 620, 626, 627, 628, 629, 630, 631 individual differences, 19, 24, 27, 29, 30, 36, 45, 48, 68, 69, 485, 550, 555 intent, 558 interdisciplinary scholarship, 264–266 interlingual translation, 570, 571, 575, 583, 585, 596, 600 International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS), 2, 262, 267, 268, 298, 301, 316–319, 602, 632 intervention programs, 69–71 invariant core, 577, 578, 584, 588 inventio, 400, 406 ironic tone, 123 irony, 21, 34, 102, 104, 118, 119, 122–123, 126, 128, 131, 199, 228, 245, 246, 248, 254, 255, 259, 318, 376, 400, 401, 404–413, 418, 423–433, 531–534, 548, 570, 574, 595, 596, 602, 609 frame-shifting in, 409, 433 relevant inappropriateness in, 123,

412, 425, 433 isotopy, 101, 104, 106 disjunction model (IDM), 107 jab lines, 110, 112, 114 Japanese kyògen, 264 JAPE, 124, 337, 338, 340, 548 jester, 341, 532, 548 Jewish characters in prime-time television, 285 joke as genre, 108, 112, 119, 157, 166, 185, 191, 192, 247, 249–254, 261, 262, 264, 266–267, 282, 283, 288, 290–292, 296, 300, 301, 380, 381, 387, 388, 400, 411, 416, 417, 420, 423, 424, 426, 431, 532, 533, 540, 550, 558, 559, 572, 573, 613 Auschwitz, 193 blonde, 194, 195, 202, 380, 381, 562 cycles, 185, 192–196, 202, 203, 251, 265, 372, 384 dead baby, 193 disaster, 11, 179, 195, 196, 367, 387 elephant, 193, 194, 199, 244, 471, 535 ethnic, 4, 28, 30, 48, 157, 158, 166, 167, 178, 192, 194, 238, 255, 263, 264, 268, 284, 294, 295, 296, 299, 301, 311, 313, 368, 371, 372, 373, 379, 380, 381, 383, 384, 424, 453, 551, 556, 583 Jewish–American Princess, 202 lawyer, 246, 289, 381, 462 Polish, 131, 162, 165, 172, 193, 194, 195, 199, 202, 238, 384, 404 role of, 190, 373, 375, 378, 400, 480, 503, 508, 549, 554 quadriplegic, 193 script, 557, 562 stupidity, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171,

Subject index  172, 173, 174, 178, 179, 194, 195, 202, 231, 234, 238, 379, 380, 583, 591 teller, 200, 202, 239, 303, 304, 305, 313, 314, 315, 333, 335, 346, 363, 384 under Socialism, 169, 171, 178, 179 Yekkes, 381 joking practical, 187, 381, 548, 552 relationships, 68, 184, 185–188, 303, 304, 306, 364, 365 journalism, 281, 283, 286, 288, 295 kairos, 404, 408, 416, 417 knowledge resource language (LA), 108, 114, 294, 425, 536 logical mechanism (LM), 50, 108–111, 114, 129, 314, 341–​ 347, 352, 425, 536, 537, 539, 540, 630, 631 narrative strategy (NS), 108, 50, 108, 109, 114, 314, 425, 426, 427, 536, 539 script opposition (SO), 50, 108, 110, 114, 123, 314, 341, 342, 345, 346, 352, 353, 425, 535, 536, 537, 538, 539, 540, 541 situation (SI), 108, 114, 425, 536 target (TA), 108, 114, 425, 536 lampoon, 251, 293, 297, 532 language rules of, 11 laugh tracks, 559 laughable, 23, 119, 120, 131, 226, 304 laughter, 23–24, 120–121, 385–386, 488–500 grades of, 260 types of, 488 lexicon, 8, 33, 338, 348, 352 liberation, 103, 104, 367

669

light verse, 261 limerick, 532 linguistics, 4, 5, 6, 101–105, 120, 131, 185, 188, 268, 298, 299, 339, 341, 400, 424, 569 cognitive, 107, 128–129 computational, 7, 334–337, 354–355 relevance theory in, 115, 121, 129–130 literary ballad, 244 enhancer, 537–539 fairytale, 107, 541 literary terms, 530–534 low comedy, 246 social order, 366, 166, 187, 189, 364, 365, 367, 372, 377, 417 maintenance of social order, 366 malaprop, 532 malice, 214, 235, 239, 305, 306, 307, 313 mass media, 170, 281, 292, 554, 555, 559 meaning, 2, 7, 8, 9–11, 36, 46, 47, 53, 60, 106, 114, 122, 171, 189, 195, 196, 221, 245, 246, 248, 252, 262, 287, 290, 292, 335, 340, 344–349, 355, 356, 374, 376, 382–384, 387, 388, 389, 390, 401, 406, 419, 433, 486, 525, 530–536, 553, 570, 577, 578, 580, 587, 593, 601, 602, 611, 614, 619 meaning making, 367 text-meaning representation (TMR), 9 media, 66, 68, 125, 170, 178, 195, 196, 238, 257, 281, 284, 292, 297, 362, 371, 387, 388, 479, 486, 489, 490, 509, 524, 534, 552, 554, 555, 559, 561, 589

670 

Subject index

Menippean satire, 532 message type, 557 metaphor, 190, 404, 530, 536, 557, 558, 578, 615 methodology, 5, 6, 18, 60, 106, 184, 354, 376, 400, 491 Middle Comedy, 525 mime, 533 minstrel shows, 290 mock, 21, 222, 265, 286, 381, 401, 424, 433, 546, 571, 613 epic, 269, 533 heroic, 533 modality, 10, 575 mode adoption, 119 mood, 31–38, 43, 52, 55, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 70, 188, 304, 454, 469, 491, 495, 501–506, 544, 550, 551, 563 morale-boosting, 4, 369, 370 motivational processes, 21, 28–31, 70, 450, 462, 464, 495 narrative functions, 107 narratology, 106 Native American, 251, 259 literature, 258 trickster tales, 247 natural disambiguation mechanism, 11 natural-language processing (NLP), 333–336, 339, 340, 347–354, 355, 356 neural correlates, 612 neurolinguistics, 125–126, 132 non-seriousness, 373, 374, 378, 382, 383 Old Comedy, 214, 525, 531 ontological semantics, 7–12, 336, 347–​ 350, 353, 354 ontology, 8, 347, 348, 351, 356 oxymoron, 282, 536

pain tolerance, 316, 479, 482, 493, 494, 495, 496, 509 paraprosdokian, 533 parody, 250, 254, 255, 262, 263, 388, 400, 408, 410, 411, 412, 413, 415, 418–420, 423, 424, 427, 428, 531, 533, 539, 548, 570, 572, 628 as social critique, 383, 416–418, 423, 433 pathologies of humor and laughter, 52–54 performance, 35, 43, 44, 47, 54, 56, 59, 64, 65, 115, 116, 187, 200, 203, 262, 281–285, 290, 291, 292, 294, 334, 335, 340, 341, 355, 381, 420, 485, 504, 531, 561 personality, 3, 17, 18, 35, 36, 40, 46, 47, 48, 54, 57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 72, 73, 75, 76, 202, 484, 527, 532, 550, 560, 599, 612, 615, 620 phenomenology, 373, 376–378, 424, 609 philosophy, 1, 4, 5, 17, 18, 121, 176, 213, 215, 227, 229, 232, 237, 240, 263, 362, 400, 407, 450, 458, 463, 548, 549 philosophy of science, 5 phonetic distance, 105, 106 picaresque novels, 253 play serio-ludic, 422 playfulness, 19, 32, 33, 36, 37, 55, 56, 63, 64, 68, 70, 71, 218, 232, 241, 383, 386, 464, 471, 472, 473 pleasure, 41, 42, 43, 48, 214, 218, 221, 224, 225, 226, 228, 234, 236, 238, 303, 304, 309, 401, 421, 601 po-faced reaction, 119 poetics, 102, 131, 214, 401, 525

Subject index  politeness, 118, 130, 532 popular culture, 4, 190, 191, 246, 257, 258, 262, 263, 266, 281–298 theater, 287, 290, 294 power, 166, 168, 170, 175, 176, 188, 220, 238, 252, 288, 363, 368–​ 370, 375, 384, 409, 411–422, 426, 428, 429, 433, 454, 472, 525, 551, 552, 556, 558 black power, 193 power differences/divisions, 370, 375 power distance, 74 power relations theory, 168 therapeutic power, 306, 311 pragmatics, 115, 116, 118, 120, 122, 129, 417 principle of least disruption, 118 production, 43, 44, 70, 76, 78, 117, 174, 176, 200–201, 284, 304, 337, 365, 399, 400, 402, 414, 430–433, 495, 496 pronoun, 340 prototypicality, 128 psychology, 3, 6, 17, 18, 19, 23, 44, 46, 57, 69, 73, 77, 108, 177, 185, 220, 228, 240, 265, 298, 299, 317, 334, 355, 449, 450, 452, 454, 456, 460, 461, 465, 467, 548, 549 pun, 105–106, 335, 338, 339, 341–347, 352, 356, 385, 531, 533, 536, 571, 572, 587–589, 591, 592–595, 628 cratylistic syllogism, 344–345 imperfect, 342–344 perfect, 342–343 pseudopunning, 345–346 taxonomy, 106 visual, 615–617 punch line, 28, 49, 51, 109, 110, 111, 112, 130, 222, 308, 529, 537,

671

539, 557, 563, 614, 615, 620, 621, 623, 624, 627, 628 Purdue University, 318 radio, 171, 290, 292, 294, 297, 383 rationality, 174, 195, 213, 228, 229, 236, 237, 239, 380 reception, 284, 285, 388, 552 recipient/audience, 2, 5, 26, 29, 31, 41, 48, 49, 52, 115–119, 200, 215–216, 225, 238, 246, 264, 282, 285, 288–292, 303–315, 363, 374, 384, 400–407, 411–​ 419, 424, 425, 428, 430–433, 450, 451, 527, 531, 537–539, 549–554, 559, 561, 573, 575, 581, 583, 584, 590, 592, 593, 600, 601 relief, 29, 33, 189, 247, 309–310, 313, 314, 366–367, 369, 385, 452 repartee, 41, 45, 529, 533 repertoire, 116, 201, 372 repetition, and variation, 105, 245, 315, 539, 570, 596 research, ethnographic, 285 resolution, 25–27, 31, 48–51, 64, 66, 67, 73–74, 78, 103, 106, 108, 121, 126, 129, 130, 228, 233, 234, 246, 294, 295, 312, 345, 541, 610, 618, 620, 626–631 anaphora resolution, 341 Restoration comedy, 533 rhetoric, 199, 215, 298, 399–433, 463, 548, 554 ribaldry, 533 riddle, 108, 193, 337, 557, 575, 576, 580 rogues, and picaros, 248, 253 sacred, 188, 230, 232, 547, 574, 575 salience, 27, 29, 49, 128, 433 sarcasm, 21, 34, 39, 216, 249, 254, 418, 426, 427, 428, 486, 533, 548, 609

672 

Subject index

satire, 21, 48, 169, 232, 247, 250, 252, 253, 254, 263, 264, 288, 290, 291, 293, 370–371, 400, 408, 413, 415, 418, 431, 486, 525–​ 529, 532, 533, 548, 570, 572, 613 Juvenalian, 249 social criticism in, 410, 417, 539 stereotypes in, 66, 72, 239, 245, 348, 410, 538, 539, 561, 562, 591, 611 scalability, 124, 335, 355 scatology, 188, 533 script, 7, 25, 50, 107–109, 121, 123, 126, 127, 128, 170, 310, 314, 338, 341, 342, 345, 346, 347, 350–353, 379, 380, 410, 425, 531, 534–541, 557, 562, 589, 596, 597, 601, 611 script opposition, 50, 108, 123, 314, 341, 342, 346, 352, 353, 425, 535–541 good/bad, 11, 351 normal/abnormal, 11, 114 real/unreal, 11, 25 sense of humor, 3, 32, 35–47, 52, 55–​71, 74–78, 159, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 259, 307, 316, 317, 336, 379, 381, 382, 409, 410, 459, 462, 464, 467, 469, 473, 479, 481–488, 492, 493, 496–510, 544–547, 550, 552, 559, 562, 563 measurement, 3, 23, 35, 40, 52, 57, 58, 60, 62, 480, 484, 485, 487, 577 humor scale (SHS), 63, 36, 40, 47, 59–64, 68, 70, 485, 501, 502, 508 sex, 7, 12, 25, 29, 49, 50, 64, 76, 170, 178, 179, 186, 195, 201, 202, 203, 222, 282, 287, 293, 351, 363, 411, 413, 496, 531, 533, 535, 551, 561 signifier, 105, 194, 195 and signified, 260, 345

signifying, 120, 258 smart allusions, 245 smile, 17, 21, 22, 24, 32, 41, 46, 55, 218, 247, 305, 315, 366, 459, 461, 481, 485, 487, 545 smiling, 21–23, 24, 38, 51, 75, 77, 78, 79, 184, 240, 249, 254, 315, 385, 488, 495, 545 social cohesion, 366 control, 188, 364, 365, 383 sciences, 5, 211, 298, 364, 548 sociology, 361–398 comparative research in, 157, 162, 379 conversation analysis in, 116, 125, 618 ethnography of, 370 experiment in, 29, 30, 418, 459, 587, 621, 629 historical analysis in 306–310 interview in, 53, 171, 201, 473 methodology of, 5, 6, 18, 60, 106, 184, 354, 376, 400, 491 survey in, 35, 41, 101, 123, 128, 130, 184, 196, 284, 285, 286, 296, 300, 459, 461, 499, 561 sophistication, 13, 178, 246, 340, 381, 389, 404, 410–413, 416, 418, 422 levels of, 12, 249 source language (SL), 570, 571, 572, 575, 576, 578, 584, 592, 594 text (ST), 169, 216, 217, 226, 256, 318, 452, 571, 572, 573, 574, 575, 576, 577, 578, 579, 581, 582, 583, 584, 588, 593, 601, 602 spoonerism, 534 squib, 534 stack, 111 statistics, 354

Subject index 

673

stereotype, 71, 203, 238, 258, 259, 410, 427, 538 strand, 111, 112, 114 stress, 36, 39, 40, 52, 55, 60, 61, 63, 64, 70, 74, 247, 316, 449–454, 458–459, 462–470, 482–483, 487, 488, 490, 492, 500, 503–511, 558, 563 stylistics, 129, 400, 419 sublimation, 103 superiority, see power symbol, 193, 194, 421, 616, 628 symbolic interactionism, 373–376, 390

multimedia translation, 589–598 triumph, 103, 225, 370, 531 trope, 534

taboo, 42, 120, 188, 293, 374, 379 target language (TL), 570, 571, 573, 575, 576, 579, 582, 592, 594, 599, 601 text (TT), 571, 572, 574, 575, 576, 577, 578, 579, 581, 582, 583, 584, 589, 601 teasing, 39, 54, 185, 291, 307, 465, 473, 486, 508, 550, 552 tension management, 367 text world representation, 110 -meaning representation (TMR), 9, 11, 348 textual studies, 284 theory of mind, 612, 624, 631 Tom Swifties, 124 tragedy, 18, 102, 195, 196, 227, 240, 261, 404, 525, 527, 546, 547, 562, 572 traits, 19, 32, 35–41, 49, 56, 58, 59, 62, 66, 72, 73, 76, 77, 231, 255, 336, 340, 484, 485, 560, 563, 620 transgression, 382–385 translatability, 126–127, 570, 580–582, 589, 599 translation studies, 569, 574, 599 equivalence, 574–580 sociocultural issues, 582–587

Western Humor and Irony Movement (WHIM), 318 wit, 28, 42–46, 54, 59, 71, 75, 76, 78, 214, 218, 220–221, 224, 227, 232, 245, 246, 249, 253, 254, 267, 306, 308, 366, 370, 371, 400–410, 433, 486, 527, 528, 534, 543, 547, 548, 582, 587, 609 Greek views on, 53, 75, 102, 117, 212, 213, 215, 216, 231, 247, 248, 313, 401, 523–527, 530, 531, 533, 613 Renaissance views on, 102, 103, 405, 406, 408, 412, 420, 525, 526, 536 Roman views on, 102, 215, 216, 247, 249, 313, 402, 526, 527, 533, 575, 600, 613 women humor and morality arguments, 413 for mixed audiences, 410 humorists, 301, 408–415 WordNet, 12, 339, 356 wordplay, 160, 249, 333, 336, 345, 346, 379, 418, 571, 577, 591, 595 Workshop Library World Humor (WLWH), 317, 318

university presses, 263 untranslatability, 571, 580, 582, 588 validity, 39, 45, 51, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 68, 166, 170, 511 vaudeville, 290, 291, 292, 294 verbal abuse, 307 verbal dueling, 187, 191

young-adult novel, 247