Before I attempt to do so myself, it will be useful to see how incongruity as an analytical concept tends to be applied to humorous discourse. Lewis claims that because “incongruity is an element of structure, it has been most clearly isolated and studied by psychologists who manipulate joke structures in their research. Such manipulation demonstrates that, stripped of its incongruity, a joke is no longer a joke” (9). By and large, most of the textual “manipulation” that Lewis refers to here centers around “punch- line” humor.38
For instance, in an attempt to put forward a general “technique” of joking,
38
This is not to suggest that only these kinds of analyses utilize the term “incongruity,” which is far from the case. However, most of the time, the folks who employ these ideas as a critical methodology for discourse analysis are engaged in close, text-based “script” comparisons and interpretations. In most other instances where incongruity is a topic, it tends, itself, to be a point of discussion, but not necessarily a strategy for examining humor.
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Freud spends the first half of Jokes in an extended formal analysis of linguistic joking
mechanisms. Much like in The Interpretation of Dreams,Freud’s theories in Jokes
follow from his close-readings of a multitude of specific examples, and the vast majority of these employ humor based on some sort of linguistic incongruity, or what Cicero calls “the unexpected turn” (202). E.M. Dadlez argues that incongruity, in general, springs from such a turn: “It is the exposure, the whipping off of masks and concealments, that is startling and unexpected. This is where the incongruity lies. And the startlement and unexpectedness are enjoyable or satisfying because they involve a revelation or insight” (13). The moment of incongruity “exposure”—we might reuse my term “collision”—is ultimately important in the overall trajectory of humorous discourse, from this
perspective at least, because if the punch-line fails to land, if the mask of incongruity is fumbled with rather than “whipped off,” then the whole humorous enterprise fails as well.39
In current humor scholarship, the so-called Semantic Script Theory of Humor
(SSTH) is probably the most regularly employed linguistics-based incongruity theory.40
Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, two of the most prominent names in humor studies, are the main promulgators of this theory, and their analytical schemes continue to be cited and used to analyze humorous discourse. Describing the SSTH, Attardo writes that “SSTH shares its ontological foundation with transformational generative grammar: the
39
This concept aligns fairly elegantly with Jeffrey Walker’s definition of “modern enthymeming” as “a stylistically intensified argumentative turn that serves not only to draw conclusions but also, and decisively, to foreground stance and motivate identification with that stance” (55). What else is laughter if not an “identification” with the stance of a humorist on the funniness of a joke?
40This method, and system-based humor studies in general, are more common in Europe than the United States. The most significant humor studies association and its affiliate journal, Humor, are centered in Europe as well, though the journal regularly features articles by Americans and about American subjects.
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SSTH is meant to account for the native speaker’s humor competence” (196). That is, the whole aim of the SSTH enterprise, examples of which tend to be tedious to parse, is to explain, with as much precision as possible, the linguistic origins and operations of verbal humor—why a particular combination of words might be funny to someone, in other words. The basic explanatory premise of SSTH is that all “joke-carrying-texts” must be “compatible, fully or in part, with two different [and opposing] scripts” (197). By “scripts,” Attardo means the context-based understanding of a word or phrase that a person brings to text; thus, “script” is a shorthand way of saying “the way/s a person might interpret a text.” These analyses tend to begin by quoting a joke text, then proceed by breaking it down into its opposing scripts to see how these scripts lead to a potentially
humorous resolution in the punch-line.41 As Attardo notes, however, the SSTH is limited
to analyzing the linguistic potential for humor; it cannot be used to assess the value or “quality” of a joke text (214). He writes: “For the SSTH, a good joke and a bad one were indistinguishable” because the methodology only recognizes linguistic incongruity; it has no means for judging the relative success of that incongruity for humor creation (214).
Though they are fairly few and far between, there are scholars who attempt to build from and extend the scope of the common linguistic theories of humor by applying these theories to aspects of humor beyond, or in addition to, the punch-line. Chief among these writers is Neal Norrick, whose several recent articles use the SSTH as a starting
41
Because most of the jokes examined in these studies are not very funny, and because I know a joke that works well for this kind of analysis, I will use it here. First, the joke: Louis XIV says to one of his court jesters, “Make a joke about me”; the jester responds, “Je suis désolé, mais le roi n’est pas un sujet.” (I’m sorry, but the king is not a subject.) The jester, understanding the precariousness of his position, creates a job-saving (and perhaps head-saving) joke/non-joke by invoking two different “scripts” for the concept of a “subject.” In the literal sense, a king is technically not a subject (to another’s authority), and, thereby, is also not an appropriate subject for a joke (a kind of discursive authority). However, by invoking the pun, the jester does fulfill the king’s request by making a joke about him, or at least about the concept of kingliness.
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point for discussing other aspects of humor. One article, “Toward the Conversational Performance of Narrative Jokes,” discusses “timing” in narratives jokes because this aspect of humor not only goes unaccounted for in standard script-theory analyses, but is completely unnoticed. In another, “Laughter Before the Punch Line,” Norrick examines how narrative joking creates laughter “anywhere besides just after the punch line” (75). In a very similar study, Villy Tsakona uses the term “jab lines” to label discourse elements that inspire laughter outside of punch lines in narrative jokes. Both writers point out that laughter, and therefore humor, in narrative joking occurs at various points in a text, some of which contain linguistic incongruities and some of which apparently do not. They also reveal that while “jab lines” can be structured similarly to the “whipping off,” revelatory form of most punch lines, they do not have to be, which suggests the need for a more inclusive and flexible approach for using incongruity as a means to examine humor. Also, the shared focus on narrative jokes in these texts implicitly argues that these sorts of jokes require a different lens for study and, perhaps, also offer the opportunity for a more complex, nuanced portrait of incongruity and humor. This possibility will be of particular importance in the following analysis of southern sitcom humor, because even though a sitcom is not strictly a narrative genre (but is, instead, a dramatic one) much of its humor springs from sources of incongruity beyond the normal scope of the SSTH, in ways very similar to those in narrative-based joking.