138 Salvatore Attardo
corresponding to the ‘genre’ of the text (e.g. question and answer, knock-knock joke, etc.), and the Logical Mechanism, which is the mechanism whereby the SO is introduced and may correspond to the ‘resolution’ phase of the processing (see a suggestion to that effect in Forabosco 1992: 59). Most of Attardo and Raskin (1991) is dedicated to ranking the various KRs to determine which ones affect more directly the perception of similarity among jokes. The final ranking is (from most to least significant) SO, LM, SI, TA, NS, LA. Empirical support for the GTVH is presented in Ruch et al. (1993) and Forabosco (1994). Extensive debate and critical assessment of the SSTH/GTVH can also be found in the papers collected in Attardo (ed. 2004).
3.3 ‘Longer’ texts
The SSTH and GTVH have been so far primarily confined to jokes (with some exception, e.g. (1987). Attardo (1994: 254–270; 1996) presented some analyses and a call for further research, respectively. This area of research appears particularly difficult because of the intersection of fields of research as disparate as narratology, natural language processing, literary criticism and text linguistics, not to mention humor research. Recent work has seen the development of an extension of the GTVH directly tailored to the analysis of long humorous texts (Attardo 2001, 2002a; see also Tsakona 2003; an alternative approach is presented in Chlopicki 1997, 2001).
4. The cooperative principle and humor
4.1 Grice and Gricean analyses
All jokes involve violations of one or more of Grice’s maxims. The claim that jokes could be viewed in terms of flouting of conversational maxims dates back to Grice himself, who considers irony (as an example of implicature), and a (complex) pun. A review of the applications of Grice’s insight to humor analysis can be found in Attardo (1994: 272 ff.). An analysis of irony in Gricean terms would be out of place in this context (but see Attardo 2000 for a literature review), but puns fall squarely under the realm of humor.
4.2 Humor as non-bona-fide communication
Raskin (1985: 100–104) brought a new concept to the analysis of the pragmatics of humor: by defining humor as a non-bona-fide (NBF) mode of communication he excluded the possibility of accounting for it straightforwardly within the realm of ‘serious’ non-humorous language. Essentially, Raskin distinguishes, as does Grice, between a bona-fide type of communication, in which the speaker is committed to communicating in the most effective way, as clearly as possible, etc., in short follows
Humor 139
the CP. Humor, just as lying, involves a different mode of communication which does not abide by the CP (i.e. is NBF). In the case of jokes, the perlocutionary goal of the speaker is not to convey information but rather to elicit a humorous reaction in the hearer. It can be overt or consist merely of the hearer’s recognition of the speaker’s intention. Note that the use of ‘hearer’ and ‘speaker’ does not imply that these remarks are limited to spoken language(s).
Raskin, to better illustrate the difference between NBF modes (such as humor) and other modes governed by Grice’s CP, provided a set of ‘maxims for joke-telling’ directly paraphrased from Grice (“Give as much information as is necessary for the joke”). Raskin immediately proceeded to deny any theoretical interest in these maxims: they “do not really provide an explicit account of the semantic mechanisms of humor” (1985: 103–104). Despite this explicit warning, the four joking-maxims have been widely quoted at face value in the literature.
The fundamental insight of Raskin’s discussion is that jokes do not merely flout but violate a maxim. When the joke teller introduces a first script he/she deliberately misleads the hearer into believing that that script is central to the processing of the text, only to reveal again deliberately at the end of the text that the script was in fact incompatible with the one introduced by the script-switch trigger/disjunctor.
Attardo (1994: 271–286) has systematized this approach, for example by showing that violation of any maxim can produce a joke, and has argued against two possible strategies that deny that any ‘real’ violation of the CP takes place in jokes by arguing that the violation is only mentioned, and not actually performed in the text (cf. Yamaguchi, below).
This approach to humor as CP violation runs into an obvious problem: jokes are often perceived as not being totally devoid of communicative effect, while the violation theory would seem to predict that no communicative import could follow a violation of the CP (Attardo 1994: 274–275). The apparent paradox is solved when one considers that jokes communicate on the basis of the presuppositions that the text may have independently of its humorous nature, on the basis of metamessages (of the kind, “I think that it is an appropriate situation to be facetious”), or on the basis of the suppression of the incongruity (i.e. the hearer takes the joke at face value, refusing to interpret it as non-cooperative; this is common in teasing, cf. Drew 1987).
4.3 Relevance-theoretic approaches to humor
Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) Relevance Theory (RT) has been one of the most successful post-Gricean approaches to pragmatics. Relevance theoretic accounts of humor necessarily have to contend with the basic awkwardness of the postulate that the principle of relevance (RP) is exceptionless (Sperber & Wilson 1986), since humor is based on a violation of the CP or the RP.
140 Salvatore Attardo
For example, Yamaguchi (1988) acknowledges that jokes violate Grice’s conversational maxims. He then proposes the ‘Character-Did-It’ hypothesis, based on the ‘mention theory’ (Sperber & Wilson 1981), which places the responsibility for the violations of the CP (at least in part) on one of the characters in the text (Yamaguchi 1988: 327). This hypothesis has been refuted in Attardo (1994: 278–282), but Yamaguchi’s work is interesting in his elaborate description of the strategies used. Yamaguchi notes also that the violation of the maxims is hidden away in the text in a paradoxical attempt at dissimulation bound to failure, since the joke will inevitably foreground the violation so laboriously dissimulated in the text. In this respect, Yamaguchi joins the research on the ‘unsaid’ in humor (see below).
Jodlowiec (1991) presents an IR theory of jokes recast in relevance theoretic terms. While her model does not depart significantly from other IR models, she emphasizes that the interpretation of the second sense is done on the basis of the principle of relevance, just like the first one. She also emphasizes the fact that some jokes rely more than others on implicit information. Unfortunately, Jodlowiec’s work is uneven and some of her claims are patently incorrect (such as those that no ‘generalizations’ can be found about verbal jokes or that jokes do not ‘breach’ the CP). On Jodlowiec’s work see also Chlopicki (1994).
Curcó’s work (1995, 1996a, b, 1998) is much more carefully presented. She also presents a two stage IR 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). By noting that the target assumption “typically represents an attributable thought” (1996b: 62), Curcó manages to connect her theory of humor to RT’s ‘echoic’ (formerly known as ‘mention’) theory of irony. As mentioned above, Curcó’s theory is carefully hedged and she calls attention to the fact that in its present state it is not meant to account for all humorous utterances.
A recent account of RT-based accounts of humor can be found in Yus 2003. Yus also presents his own IR approach, which is however general, i.e. applies to all types of humor. Yus is aware that RT cannot accept the idea of a violation of the principe of relevance, which is axiomatically unviolable, he therefore claims that no violation of the principle of relevance takes place. This apparently contradictory claim (since incongruity could only follow by the presence of irrelevant – i.e. RP violating – material)
is salvaged by the claim that the speaker of a joke, for example, first uses the RP to induce the hearer to interpret the joke in a given way and then again uses Relevance to bring about the second interpretation. With Yus’ account, any difference between RT accounts and other IR accounts based on pragmatic inferences (such as the SSTH – pace claims to the contrary) disappears. Yus’ work consists largely of numerous wellcrafted analyses of how different types of assumptions can be retrieved in various contexts. His is by far the most accomplished RT account of humor.
Humor 141
Let us note that, as one would expect, all RT accounts place more emphasis on the process of interpretation than on the text itself. Finally, attention has been drawn on the ‘metarepresentational’ aspect of irony (i.e. the idea that irony involves a representation of another representation (Curcò 2000; Colston & Gibbs 2002).
4.4 Informativeness approach to jokes
De Palma and Weiner (1990, 1992), Weiner and De Palma (1993), Weiner (1996, 1997) have developed an account of humor (in riddles, but the model is extensible to many other types of humor), which is in part based on the SSTH, and assumes the basic IR model, but seeks to enrich it with the idea of ‘accessibility’ based on the notions of prototypicality (à la Rosch 1973), salience (for example, a salient feature of chairs is that they are used for sitting), and of parallelism (i.e. the tendency to continue in the same ‘frame’ be it semantic, syntactical or pragmatic once one has been activated). The first ‘script’ is highly accessible and based on a neutral context, whereas the second script is much less accessible and strongly context dependent. Once the first script has been activated the tendency to parallelism will tend to keep the hearer/reader within the first script until this becomes impossible because of the occurrence of the punch line. This account improves the SSTH’s ‘oppositeness’ requirement by making it more specific (high vs. low accessibility, neutral vs. specific context) and by dispensing with the list of ‘hardwired’ oppositions.
Independently from De Palma and Weiner’s work, and in part against it, since she is critical of the oppositeness requirement of the SSTH, Giora (1991) sets out to explain the ‘surprise effect’ of humor. Her theory states that a well-formed text should start with the least informative material and gradually introduce more informative material. Informativeness is defined in terms of reduction in the number of alternatives. Great informativeness will thus correspond to least predictability and hence surprise value. Furthermore, Giora introduces the concept of ‘marked informativeness’ to design the marked members of a set (those that fit less well a particular category). Thus, if, after declaring that one has seen a bird, one specifies that one saw a penguin one is being not only informative, but markedly so.
Giora can then define jokes as texts that do not gradually introduce more informative material but that in fact end with a markedly informative element. The rest of Giora’s model corresponds more or less to the IDM, although Giora stresses the ‘abrupt’ passage from the first to the second sense/interpretation of the text (471). If one ‘fills in’ the gap between the two interpretations with information that gradually brings about the second one, the joke is no longer perceived to be funny (475).
This point has great significance because it may provide a tool to solve the notoriously complex issue of how to distinguish humor from other types of texts which also include a ‘punch line’ and the ensuing IR effect but are nor perceived as humorous