MINISTRY OF HIGHER AND PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION RF

TYUMEN STATE UNIVERSITY

Manuscript

Elena Vladimirovna MIKHALKOVA

PRAGMATICS AND SEMANTICS OF INVECTIVE

IN MASS MEDIA DISCOURSE

(on the basis of comedy TV-shows – Russian “Comedy Club” and American “Saturday Night Live”)

Major # 10.02.20 – comparative, typological and contrastive language study

Thesis for Candidate’s Degree

Supervisor: Ph.D. N. N. Belozerova

TYUMEN – 2009

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1. CATEGORY OF HUMOR AND ITS INVECTIVE NATURE

§1.1. Semantics of humor through the theory of archetypes

§1.2. Invective nature of humor

§1.2.1. Pragmatic aspects of invective in derision

§1.2.2. Structure of invective names as the basis for a comparative study Conclusion (first chapter)

CHAPTER 2. PRAGMATIC AND SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF INVECTIVE NAMES IN COMEDY TV-SHOWS

§2.1. On the notion of ‘discourse’

§2.2. The specifics of mass-media discourse

§2.3. Comedy genres on modern American and Russian television

§2.4. Pragmatics of a humorous situation in stand-up show “Comedy Club” and sketch show “Saturday Night Live”

§2.4.1. Invective of physical deficiencies

§2.4.2. Invective of intellectual deficiencies

§2.4.3. Invective of age

§2.4.4. Invective of social status

§2.4.5. Invective of animal nature

§2.4.6. Invective of deviant social behavior

§2.4.7. Invective of destructive nature

§2.4.8. Invective of unusual sexual likes

§2.4.9. Invective of strange food preferences

§2.4.10. Invective of origin and family connections

Conclusion (second chapter)

COROLLARIES

PRIMARY SOURCES

CITED WORKS

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INTRODUCTION

Modern Russian mass media discourse researchers (Вакурова, Московкин

1997; Корконосенко 2004; Науменко 2003; Карасик 2000; Кибрик 1994, and others) note that one of the main features of this discourse is its target to manipulate mass consciousness. Comedy TV-shows, created with the purpose of diversion, use intensive technologies of manipulation to attract audience. In these shows humor, being one of such technologies, may seem harsh, vulgar. Western researchers (Stebbins 1990) assign this fact to the origin of shows from the genre of variety that became popular in night clubs and music-halls in the end of the XIX c. On the other hand, the modern culture often allows humor not only in everyday communication, but also in a number of institutional discourses, where historically it was prohibited. V. I. Zhelvis (Жельвис 2000, 2001), S. V. Doronina (Доронина

2002), O. V. Sarzhina (Саржина 2002), V. N. Kaplenko (Капленко 2002) and others study manifestations of invective in juridical, political, and mass media discourse. They often put accent on the conflictogenic character of derision that is unacceptable in a court trial or a critical review. Does this rule work for comedy TV-shows? Their language is sometimes vulgar; they create an illusion of easiness in communication between the audience and the artist; the conflict between the artist and the object of his or her derision is playful, not serious. Nevertheless, many journalists and comedians, striving to retain the traditions of Soviet television – A. G. Gordon (Гордон 2008), A. V. Maslyakov (Масляков 2006), M. M. Zhvanetsky (Жванецкий 2006) – note that modern comedy TV-shows lack inner censorship. Does the problem lie in a premeditated abuse with the aim to become closer to the viewer, or does this phenomenon reflect archaic functions of invective in the humorous discourse?

Even today comedy remains one of the most mysterious categories of human domain. Linguistic studies of comedy often go across the interdisciplinary scope in cultural and social studies, aesthetics, psychology, etc. (see in Kristeva 1966,

Гуревич 2004, Козинцев 2007). Nevertheless, some theories and models of humor can be called purely linguistic: the narrative model suggested by V. Morin

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on the basis of theory of isotopy-disjunction by A.-J. Greimas (Attardo 1994: 86), semiotic model by J. Dorfles (Attardo 1994: 176), based on the theory of ‘estrangement’ by V. Shklovsky (Шкловский 1984), script-based theory of verbal humor by S. Attardo and V. Raskin (Attardo 1994), P. Grice’s theory of broken maxims (Grice 1989; Attardo 1994: 272), and some other. Creating pragmatic and semiotic models, linguists try to find universal components of meaning in humor. These are either reflected in the language notions of what is funny (concepts, archetypes, lexical-semantic groups), or universal language mechanisms, with the help of which any content can be presented in a humorous sense.

Nowadays the sphere of linguistic studies of invective nature of comedy in the discourse of comedy TV-shows is still problematic, as well as the question of universal components in the semantics of humor. This research is an attempt to present the linguistic nature of comedy through the prism of invective. Humor is observed in speech through the realization of five pragmatic rules (Searle 1965): rule of proposition, rule of communicative strategy of the speaker and hearer, rule of illocution (aim), rule of perlocution (expected effect). In a humorous situation the main component of proposition is an invective name, and the communicative roles that the speaker and hearer take upon themselves are roles of the trickster and cultural hero (Jung 1972; Фрейденберг 1997, 1998; Мелетинский 2000). Invective semantics is most obvious in the speech act of derision, which is close to invective, but does not provoke a serious conflict. In a comedy TV-show pronouncement of invective is aimed to entail a hearer’s reciprocal pseudoaggression, which is perlocution in derision.

The object of study in the present research is a genre, belonging to the mass media discourse – comedy TV-shows (a stand-up show and a sketch show) – the text of which is often composed of rehearsed (narrative) jokes, put in such order, so as to make a canvas of a routine and bring a narrative character into it. In such texts it is easy to state the borders of a joke, which narrows the search area of invective semantics. Moreover, the discourse of comedy TV-shows is not conflictogenic, and for the comedians it presents a professional sphere. That is why

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it is more likely that the pragmatic rules of invective are followed here without mistakes.

The subject of study is the invective name which the addresser ascribes to the addressee directly (with the help of performative verbs of naming) or indirectly (giving irreal conditions, hyperbolizing the actual situation, etc.). The invective name1 is a number of features and characteristics that in the process of naming differ from the addressee’s real name, so that it lowers down his or her status, finding some guilt in his or her behavior (for example, breaking public order). An invective name can be put as a formula: “Н(earer) is not Н, but d”. The shortened version of it will be: “Н is d”, where “d not-Н”. In the text an invective name can be represented with one word or phrase that serves in the research as the unit of study. Often it is an unusual characteristic, given to an object, and an explanation, following it, that reveals to a third party (audience) why the addresser gave this name to the addressee. This explanation – part of the invective name – is usually intended to provoke laughter in the audience.

The material for study was found in texts of two comedy TV-shows – Russian “Comedy Club” and American “Saturday Night Live” (further referred to as SNL). The two TV-shows belong to close genres (sketch show and stand-up show, accordingly). SNL is one of the oldest programs of such genre in the US (first broadcast in 1975), and Comedy Club is a recent copy of the American format with obvious borrowings from SNL. For the analysis, using random sampling, we chose 35 performances from Comedy Club and 35 from SNL. They were researched and analyzed in the form of printed scripts. In these texts we singled out 563 invective names.

The aim of this research is to define pragmatic rules of usage and semantic specifics of invective names in the discourse of comedy TV-shows – Russian “Comedy Club” and American “Saturday Night Live”.

The stated aim required fulfillment of the following tasks:

1 To avoid ambiguity, it should be noted that “name” here is not an onomastic term and is not a proper name, assigned to an object of nature or a person. The combination “invective name” should not be split, as it serves to denote a single linguistic phenomenon.

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1.To investigate semantics of humor in the speech act of derision;

2.To define, what roles the communicants take on in a humorous situation;

3.To define the pragmatic rules of formation of an invective name, its structure and markers of its presence in the text;

4.To single out invective names in the scripts of comedy TV-shows – Russian “Comedy Club” and American “Saturday Night Live” – and define their specific features;

5.To determine the common archetypical component of all the invective names, and state differences in their semantics;

6.To compare semantics of invective names in discourses of two TVshows.

In the hypothesis it is assumed that semantics of comedy has an invective character. Its permanent component is an invective name, the speech use of which is regulated by five pragmatic rules. These rules define the roles that the speaker and the hearer assume and the communicative aims they follow.

The scientific novelty of the present research lies in the suggested theory of invective names that unites the pragmatic understanding of humor (S. Attardo, P. Grice, V. Morin) and the Russian school of mythopoetics (В. В. Пропп, Е. М.

Мелетинский, О. М. Фрейденберг) where humor is treated through the theory of archetypes. The invective name, as a structure, consisting of words and wordphrases, can be treated as a phenomenon of language. At the same time it also belongs to the sphere of conceptual categories: it is a universal semantic module that roots in the ritual practice of killing a totem through mortification and of making it alive again through invocation (Фрейденберг 1997). Such practice helps the society to regulate some harmful elements – social groups, classifications of which are found in books by I. P. Smirnov (Смирнов 2001), V. I. Zhelvis (Жельвис 2001), J. Baudrillard (Baudrillard 1976): old men, women, children, ill, disabled, intellectuals, perverts, mad, poor, etc. On the basis of semantic analysis of cases of derision with invective semantics, aimed to ridicule these groups or

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their representatives in the analyzed texts of comedy TV-shows, we could suggest the following classification of types of invective: invective of physical deficiencies, intellectual deficiencies, age, social status, animal nature, deviant social behavior, destructive nature, unusual sexual likes, strange food preferences, origin and family connections.

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CHAPTER 1.

CATEGORY OF HUMOR AND ITS INVECTIVE NATURE

Nowadays there exists a wide spectrum of theories of humor2, but the problem of universal nature of humor still remains. The most problematic side of it is why do people of different nations, cultures, statuses, ages, heights, and weights laugh at the same universal things, regardless of what form these things are put in. If this was only an issue of a person’s sense of humor, there would not be millions of people, laughing at the same episode of a world-known comedy TV-show.

The philosophy tackles this question through multiple explanations of the essence of the category of Comedy. The word ‘comedy’ comes from the Old Greek word komos – singers at the Dionysus’ fest. With the rise of author’s literature the word ‘comedy’ acquired the meaning of a genre and put an opposition between the writers of tragedy and the writers of comedy. This phenomenon was discussed in Plato’s dialogue “Symposium” (Plato 1985: 223), Plato himself being most likely against this opposition.

A more essential approach to this category is found in Aristotle’s treatise “On Poetics”, where comedy is defined as an imitation of lower people, but a selective imitation that leaves out their pain and harm (Aristotle 2002: 14). Comedy as a category here is included into another category of aesthetics – hideousness.

Lev Losev, a Russian philosopher, studied Aristotle’s (and said to be Arictotle’s) works about comedy, like “On Poetics” and “Tractatus Coislinianus”, and came to the conclusion that this distraction from pain and harm is the distraction from the life itself, and such distraction is characteristic of art that forwards one particular side of life, leaving everything else in the shadow (Лосев

1975: 520-521). Thus, comedy exists in a union with the tragedy, both of them belonging to the sphere of art. Consequently, comedy is more elevated, than a

2 See their detailed description in (Attardo 1997).

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simple imitation of vulgar speech or a drunk person’s gait, because it is appropriate, sophisticated, aimed to educate, and correctly communicated.

The modern philosophy offers two directions in understanding the category of comedy. In works of contemporary Russian philosophers (Каган 1997; Исупов

2001) comedy is like a predator that destroys obsolete forms of culture – traditions, rituals, taboos, social positions, that lost their importance and are not influential any more. Opposed to it is a classic modernist approach (Cassirer 1944: 163; Nietzsche 1872: 36) that offers an idea that comedy helps to take a look at this world from aside and to come over its vices and deficiencies. Looking at the actuality through the prism of comedy helps to cognate new things about the world, to understand it more. The first direction describes the modern tendency of culture to ridicule traditions and taboos, as it has a utilitarian aim – it draws public attention to the source of this destruction which is often a product of mass media that wants to be sold. The second (cognitive) approach has more of an ideological value. It can be used by different social, political and cultural institutes to introduce new realia.

Unlike philosophy, stylistics pays more attention to the language forms of comedy. There are long lists of means of expression and stylistic devices that render a humorous meaning in the text. But in the way they are conducted an idea can be traced that comedy has two main types – humor and satire. This idea is discussed in M. Bakhtin’s work “Rabelais and His World”: “This is one of the essential differences of the people’s festive laughter from the pure satire of modern times. The satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it. (…) The people’s ambivalent laughter, on the other hand, expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it” (Bakhtin 1984: 12).

The modern culture tends to mix these two types – philosophical/satirical and people’s/humorous. For example, in the Monty Python’s movie “Life of Brian” (1975) we find forms of humor (‘folk humor’ according to M. Bakhtin): masquerade (an actor can play several roles), substitution of top and bottom (the

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main character Brian is a simple ignorant folk who then becomes a messiah by mistake and dies on the cross), universal character (everybody in the movie is part of the topsy-turvy world: there are no “serious” dramatic characters); and forms of satire: the movie discusses philosophical issues of Biblical interpretation (in the beginning, a crowd is trying to hear what Jesus is saying on the mountain, but they start a row and end up unaware of what was happening) and diversity of religions (there is an episode, when a couple of “messiahs” are trying to convey their religious beliefs to the crowd).

§ 1.1. SEMANTICS OF HUMOR THROUGH THE THEORY OF

ARCHETYPES

Let us now turn to the problem of meaning in comedy, which is commonly tackled with the help of different theories of humor. These theories were generally composed to answer the question “What is comic?” The answers go as follows: “old, obsolete”, “worse, lower than me”, “makes me laugh”, “ugly, but not dangerous”, etc. In fact this question surfaces the problem of the universal semantics of humor. In his book “Sense as it is” the Russian linguist, semiotician I. P. Smirnov puts a supposition that “the multitude of humorous meanings… is elimination of contrast between the Culture and the Nature” (Смирнов 2001: 285). This supposition is based on the observation of typical features in all comic situations. In them there acts “a bearer of Culture…, who:

Meets his biological needs (feast, intercourse, physiological functions);

Loses material attributes, ascribed by the social norm (nakedness in sauna; when bathing; has his clothes stolen);

Loses ability to consciously regulate his actions or does not have this ability (alcoholic intoxication, madness, oligophrenic behavior);

Feels pain (at the doctor’s);

Steps on the border between human and animal worlds (zoo), etc.” (Смирнов 2001: 285).

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