One basic issue to be clarified is whether we are dealing with spoken or written language, or both. It is obvious that each of these modes are commonly used to convey jokes, but the consequences for any attempt at formalization must be made explicit. In considering the verbal mode of a joke, it is important to distinguish these separate issues (as Dienhart (1999:
Section 6) does not):
(a) Which mode(s) of linguistic communication (spoken or written) allow the humorous effect to be achieved?
(b) Which mode(s) of linguistic communication (spoken or written) allow the humorous effect to be achieved most effectively?
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(c) In stating abstractly the humour-relevant relationships within a joke, which levels (spoken or written) are essential?
(d) Which linguistic knowledge does the joke rely upon?
When a pun is included in a joke book, it is conveyed in writing, but the humour-relevant relationships are defined on the phonetic form of the words (see Chapter 9 for fuller discussion), and hence the written version is dependent on the reader knowing how to pronounce the written forms.
(6) Do you believe in clubs for young people?
Only when kindness fails.
(Attardo 1994: 97) On the other hand, the joke (6) – which appears in some form or another in various articles, including Pepicello and Weisberg (1983) and Shultz (1976) – could be conveyed equally well phonetically or in writing, as its central ambiguity is present in both spoken and written forms. No pronun-ciation knowledge is required, and the humour-relevant relations could be defined equally well on the phonetic or orthographic representations.
The same will be true for the (large) class of jokes where there is no language device involved (referential jokes – see Section 2.7). This also means that we should, to be rigorous, distinguish between a particular telling (instance) of a joke, and the joke itself. The same joke could be told in written form on one occasion, and in spoken form on another. In the interests of simplicity, we have not stated our analyses in terms of a joke-telling or joke-instance. Instead, we have analysed jokes in the abstract, assuming a particular medium. This can be viewed as abstracting across all tellings which use that medium (i.e. making a type/token distinction (Cherry 1970) ).
Consider a joke which hinges on an ambiguity of the spoken form which is not present in the corresponding written form, such as some of the examples in Dienhart (1999: Section 5.3), or (7). (As noted earlier, text between forward slashes, such as /rεd/, is a written approximation to a phonetic form, using, as far as possible, the International Phonetic Alphabet.)
(7) What is black and white and /rεd/ all over?
A newspaper.
In (7), either orthographic form (read or red) destroys the essential ambig-uity, and so it is arguable that this joke cannot be told in orthographic form; it certainly cannot be used effectively in that medium. Also, the humour-relevant relationships are statable perspicuously in terms of the phonetic form, but much less neatly in terms of a written version.
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As far as linguistic knowledge is involved, the joke relies on knowledge of pronunciation. Catherine Watson (personal communication) has pointed out that there is a similar issue involving intonation. In certain ambiguity-based jokes, the two readings correspond to different intonations. Hence, if the joke-teller chooses a particular prosodic contour, this rules out one of the possible interpretations of the text. Example (8) may be such a joke.
(8) Why do birds fly south in winter?
It’s too far to walk.
(9) Jean Harlow kept calling Margot Asquith by her first name, or kept trying to: she pronounced it Margot. Finally Margot set her right. ‘No, no, Jean. The t is silent as in Harlow.’
(Matthews 1974) It is clear that the original form of (9) was spoken, but it is unclear what written form is most suitable for reporting this joke, even though the cited version settles for one particular way of conveying the final word.
This joke relies on the hearer’s knowledge of spelling (as do some of the riddles in Dienhart (1999: Section 6) ), but the phonetic form, where there is no spelling, is most appropriate to convey this wording. Either phonetic or orthographic form would suffice for a variant in which the punchline ended in . . . as in your surname instead of . . . as in Harlow. That variant both avoids the issue of representation and demonstrates how the joke differs from jokes like (1) and (2): although it relies on linguistic know-ledge, it is not crucially dependent on the exact linguistic form of the delivery (it is propositional rather than linguistic, in the terminology of Section 2.7). On the other hand, Cerf (1946) quotes a poem which mocks the multiple pronunciations of -ough in English, by rhyming words such as bough and cough, or trough and the invented scough. Crystal (1995) quotes a poem about a pterodactyl in which several words customarily starting with t are spelt instead with pt. For both these examples, the appropriate medium of communication is the written form, but they rely upon know-ledge of pronunciation for their effect. Such items are unusual, and are of a slightly different genre from the types of verbally expressed humour that we will be focussing on.
(10) There are 10 kinds of people in the world – those who understand binary numbers and those who don’t.
Although example (10) is definitely a verbally expressed joke, it is hard to deliver purely phonetically, since either choice of pronunciation for the symbol 10 (/tεn/ or /tυ/) loses the essential information about the text.
The relevant knowledge concerns binary numerals, where 10 encodes the 11
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number two. As with spelling/pronunciation based jokes, the knowledge concerns the encoding method used in the text, but it could also be seen as extra-linguistic real-world knowledge (about binary arithmetic). Although knowledge of pronunciation and spelling is so closely involved with language that we might regard it as qualitatively different from world knowledge, it is not obvious that this is the case from the viewpoint of its role in joke comprehension.
Crystal also offers (11) as a joke which is hard to convey in spoken form:
(11) TOO MUCH SEX makes you shortsighted.
(Crystal 1995: 406) For this example, we need to go beyond having an orthographic level of representation, and to include some level where typeface (font size) infor-mation is available. There is a phonetic counterpart to (11), namely (12).
(12) Too much sex [voice drops to a whisper] makes you hard of hearing.
This, conversely, does not work well in written form, except insofar as it can simulate the phonetic delivery by relying on knowledge of stage-directions, as here.
Crystal gives (13) as a joke which is easier to deliver phonetically, although an attempt can be made to simulate the effect typographically:
(13) Airline passenger: Where does this door go to-o-o-o. . .
(Crystal 1995) Surprisingly, Crystal also says that (14) works only in the written mode.
(14) What did one sheep say to the other?
I love ewe.
(Crystal 1995) However, there are many puns like this which are passed around orally, relying on the hearer’s ability to spot a potential homophone in the spoken text. Crystal may be confusing some of the questions listed above: what knowledge (of words, etc.) is needed to interpret the joke, in which mode can the joke be conveyed, and in which mode can the joke be conveyed most effectively. The spelling ewe may make the joke clearer to the recipient – consider the difficulty of comprehending a written version using the spelling you (similar comments apply to some of the examples in Dienhart (1999: Section 5.5) ).
Notice the contrast between (14) and (7). Because the ambiguous word or phrase occurs in the punchline of (14), the ambiguity need not 1
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be maintained, and indeed must be seen by the audience (hence the spelling may influence the effectiveness of the telling). On the other hand, in (7) it is essential that the ambiguity in the question misleads the audience; hence, the possible means of delivery are limited. conveyed either pictorially or linguistically, widening further the issue of which communicative mode is to be assumed in an analysis.
For these reasons, we will not stipulate whether verbally expressed humour is in the form of spoken or written texts. In an analysis of some particular joke, or class of jokes, it may be appropriate to specify that a particular mode will be assumed as the basic level. That is, if the natural generalizations about certain forms of puns are phonetic, then assuming a phonetic level as the representation of the text may be a more insightful descriptive approach, with the written form being used merely as a secondary representation which can be used to convey the more apt phonetic form. In other cases, it may be sufficient to adopt one of the modes while indicating that either level is equally effective.
Hence, when proposing a detailed formal analysis of some class of jokes, one essential step is to specify the set of atomic items which, when strung together into a linear sequence, will constitute the humorous item. In keeping with the discussion above, this first level of units may be phonetic or orthographic, or indeed any other suitable level that the analyst posits (e.g. Braille, Morse code). This symbol system out of which the linear form of humorous items ( jokes) are to be composed could be called the commu-nicative alphabet. Each joke will, in its most basic form, consist of a sequence of elements of this alphabet. If we wish to model the spoken transmission of jokes, for example, then this alphabet could be phonemes or similar phonetic/phonological segments.
The communicative alphabet is canonical only in the sense that it is the most basic level of representation – it does not purport to capture central properties in any definitive way. For example, if a joke is conveyed in writing or in speech, these two tellings of the joke would have to be analysed with different communicative alphabets, but this does not embody a claim that two different jokes are involved. For many jokes, it would be quite feasible (and even desirable) to develop analyses which show that the written and spoken form are in some sense ‘the same’ joke.
We shall adopt the term text to describe the sequence of symbols of the communicative alphabet which represent the joke at that level. This term is to be regarded as neutral, with no connotations of the joke being written rather than spoken.
As this book is in written form, all the illustrative examples will be conveyed in writing, even where this is an inappropriate medium, but we shall try to make it clear what form of the joke is intended.