"Gags and games. Wittgenstein and his relation to jokes"

InVisible Culture

The speaker on serious themes, who's going to use humor to help him pace, lighten and highlight his talk, has got to take that as another fundamental-he's got to be sure his humor never overwhelms his subject. Humor is an adjunct-an aid. It's Worcestershire sauce and good, sharp mustard. It's never the meat and potatoes!"1 What stands out in this reading of the aim of humor is its dramatic opposition to the way in which humor is deployed by Lacan. Not only do jokes not help Lacan lighten and highlight his talk, but it also seems as if he deliberately employs them in order to confuse and confound the reader. Whereas a more conventional author or presenter explains the major point that she has been developing, Lacan almost never concludes his discourses without a decisively nonilluminating joke or comic twist. The result is rarely "satisfying" in any standard sense of the word. Of course, Lacan was quite conscious of the confusion he created. Indeed, he offers one

Journal of Pragmatics, 2005

16. Uluslararası Dil, Edebiyat ve Kültür Araştırmaları Kongresi Tam Metinleri, 2022

Jokes are funny stories that are usually narrated with the intention of creating amusement or laughter in everyday life which makes them a significant part of oral tradition as well as culture. Even though jokes are primarily considered to be used as a form of entertainment, many jokes-especially those with a specific theme, like race, religion, or politics-serve a deeper purpose by subtly criticizing society. In this regard, it is possible to divide jokes into two categories as the jokes only aiming at eliciting laughter and those disguising their criticism behind humour. In the jokes of the second category, criticism of certain delicate matters frequently relies on generalizations, stereotypes and stock characters which makes them the target of accusations of debasing particular ideals or adopting racist viewpoints. Contrary to general accusations, however, jokes do not degrade sensitive matters but rather avoid using debasing expressions while criticising de facto thoughts and conventional bias of society through the use humour as well as indirection. As a result, by mainly utilizing "puns," "ambiguities," "repetition," and "stock characters or stereotypes," as well as stylistic methods such as foregrounding, deviation, implicature, assumption, and presupposition jokes succeed in both alleviating their criticism and being a source of amusement. Using a stylistic approach, which is essentially the analysis of the way an author constructs his or her words, sentences, or context, this study will not only look at the structures, themes, and literary techniques of the jokes, but also the way they use humour to mitigate their criticism. The study thus seeks to demonstrate that jokes, in particular the thematic jokes like political, religious and ethnic jokes, essentially address issues that go beyond the scope of language and stylistic analysis will aid in exposing their criticism which is covered and mitigated by the humour and entertainment.

English Literature and Linguistics, 2003

The study of literature tends towards the serious, even from ancient times. Aristotle, in his poetics states clearly that comedy is a lesser art than tragedy, and this perception of comedy, or humour, as being intrinsically lacking in value, persists stron-ely to the present day. Serious writing is metaphorically 'deep', 'heavy' or 'dark'. The deep and the dark hold secrets that can be hunted out and discovered, and 'wei-eht' is inextricably entwined with the concept of 'value'. Humour, by contrast, is often seen as 'shallow', 'bright' or 'light' (as in lacking weight). Shallow, in literary terns, is as close as you can get to an insult without swearing. 'Bright' can mean 'obvious', 'visible', 'easy to understand'. And 'light' in terms of weight is 'unimportant', 'lacking in value' or 'lacking in substance'. In all academic fields; in philosophy, in psychology, in linguistics as well as in literature, study of humour is noticeably under-developed, and this is perhaps a reflection of the 'lightweight' or 'trivial' status that humour seems to have accrued. It is no wonder then, that humour in fiction is awarded a lower status than the serious, and that criticism of humorous works is equally lacking. Even within that marginalised area of literary study that is called 'children's literature', an area where a major proportion of the most famous works are praised for their use of humour, humour is not a major point of analysis. Perhaps the old adage still holds, that to explain a joke is not only futile, but is the height of poor taste - an unforgivable social lapse. Humour may, or may not be, intrinsically of less value or interest than the serious, but this is not a question that needs an answer. It is sufficient to note that humour is an important part of literature, especially in work for children, but also in work for adults, and as such deserves serious attention.

Journal of Pragmatics, 2018

Salvatore Attardo's Handbook of Language and Humor is part of the Routledge series of handbooks devoted to topics in Linguistics. As Attardo himself acknowledges in his introduction, this handbook could not have been possible three decades ago, when he started researching humor (p. 3). However, the turn of the century has demonstrated that times are now ripe for this comprehensive collection devoted to such a multifaceted and overarching phenomenon as humor. This handbook comprises 35 chapters which have not been grouped into specific subsections. However, its general structure is meaningful and well organized around a series of topics. Due to space limitations, I have concentrated on those chapters that are more likely to be of interest to the readers of this journal, and left some others aside (e.g. Raskin's 'Script-Based Semantic and Ontological Semantic Theories of Humor', L opez and Vaid on 'Psycholinguistic Approaches to Humor', Chen et al.'s 'Neurolinguistics of Humor' or Taylor's 'Computational Treatments of Humor'). Chapters 1e5 offer compelling summaries of humor theories by discussing punning in particular. Larkin-Galiñanes's 'Overview of Humor Theory' provides a thorough yet concise overview of Superiority and Disparagement, Release and Incongruity Theories. Her reflections on the way humor and laughter were denied by Christianity because they were associated with frivolity, vulgarity and sin are worth reading (6e7; cf. Trouvain and Truong in this volume for an extensive discussion on laughter). Guidi's 'Humor Universals' concentrates on humor as a universal mode of communication, which is used and/or manipulated for specific purposes (e.g. persuasion, legitimation, etc.). Recurrent patterns of phonetic similarity and their violations are shown to be markers of potential humor, which corpus-based studies can detect in a well-defined manner. Hempelmann's 'Key Terms in the Field of Humor' reviews the way terms such as 'humor' and 'wit' have come to be used in English. Moreover, corpus-based research on parallel corpora from original and translated texts can be used to show how these concepts are conveyed across language and culture (cf. also Helmpelman and Miller's 'Puns. Taxonomy and Phonology' in this volume for a similar approach). Attardo and Raskin's 'Linguistics and Humor Theory' is certainly an engaging piece of reading in its poignant defense of both Raskin's SSTH and Attardo's GTVH. The criticism of both theories arguing that script oppositions also apply to non-humorous texts is dismissed by a straightforward explanation that 'each theory comes with a purview, and it applies only to the phenomenon within this purview' (p. 52) and not all texts belong to the humor purview. Chapters 6e8 also review the main tenets of important theories of humor by looking at punning as a verbal and/or nonverbal (i.e. visual) realization of humor. Aljared's discussion of 'The Isotopy Disjunction Model' is engaging but not always easy to follow due partly to the fact that information is not well presented and signposted. That said, its value certainly lies in the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic application of IDM to a set of Arabic jokes. The findings are then compared to previous studies using IDM in American, German and Italian jokes to verify whether some similar or dissimilar characteristics can be detected. This approach can certainly reveal interesting insights on how different languages and cultures construct jokes and what their marked and unmarked features are in humor creation. Aarons's 'Puns and Tacit Linguistic Knowledge' is a clear and well-structured explanation of the mechanism at work in punning and how tacit knowledge is required to process it. A wealth of examples makes this a fitting contribution to the handbook, providing a sound overview of the issue at hand, especially when it demonstrates that ambiguity and overlapping are indeed necessary features of humorous texts like jokes. Attardo's 'The General Theory of Verbal Humor' offers the reader a sound discussion of the development and application of this theory 25 years on. Most notably, Attardo defends the validity of his theory by clarifying those concepts that, probably, were not well comprehended by fellow scholars (e.g. narrative strategy and logical mechanisms among the six Knowledge Resources informing the theory; p. 130e133). Although Attardo only briefly comments on the fact that 'Target' is sometimes a difficult knowledge resource to pinpoint within as humorous text, I am inclined to think that it deserves more attention, especially when investigating the perception of humor in texts such as (political) cartoons (Tsakona, 2009) or controversial advertising (Dore, 2018b). Chapters 11e14 consider humor from different angles, which are clearly interconnected by the approaches proposed in Stylistics and Pragmatics. Chłopicki's 'Humor and Narrative' draws on narratology and humor research to deal with the issue of detecting humor in texts longer than jokes. Simpson and Bousfield offer a concise but well-presented summary of the main

Language, 1996

This is a research into the concept of humor as it manifests itself in linguistic activities^that more often than not also appear in writing (such as puns and jokes). The author starts off with a discussion of the unsuccessful attempts at definitions of humor and ends up with an analysis of certain humorous texts (mainly jokes, with the exception of chapter 8), i.e. of their semantic structure and their functions in a wider situational context. Attardo distinguishes 3 different approaches to the concept of humor, viz. an essentialist that would enumerate the necessary and sufficient conditions of a text or action to be humorous, a teleological^ that investigates the aims of humor, and a substantialist that deals with the contents of humorous actions. Chapter 1 gives a survey of the literature on the subject, ranging from Plato down to Freud and-of course-Raskin. Among others the author touches on the work of such illustruous personalities as Theophrast,

Journal of Late Antiquity, 2017

2010

Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 2008

The interdependence between humour and the Cooperative Principle (CP) (Grice 1975(Grice /1989b(Grice , 1978(Grice /1989b(Grice , 1989a appears to be a bone of contention in pragmatic studies on verbal humour. The wellentrenched approach advocated by Raskin and Attardo is that jokes (and also other forms of intentionally produced humour) constitute the non-bona-fide mode of communication standing vis-à-vis the Gricean model and governed by a humour-CP (). The aim of the article is to shed new light on the interdependence between humour and the CP with a view to substantiating that the authors who regard humour as an independent communicative mode and as an intrinsic violation of maxims and the CP appear to labour under a serious misapprehension. It will be argued that the Gricean model of cooperative rationality does allow for humorous verbalisations, which normally rely on maxim flouts.