11.4.1 Reinterpreting questions
Examples (4) and (28) may not at first appear to be FR jokes, but it is arguable that they conform to this pattern.
(4) What’s black and dangerous and sits in a tree?
A crow with a machine gun.
(28) What is grey, has four legs, and a trunk?
A mouse on vacation.
In these, the set-up (question) seems to have a natural answer (an elephant for (28), a panther or similar animal for (4) ), but instead a different reply is supplied. In (28), the alternative answer corresponds naturally to a rein-terpretation of the set-up, particularly the phonetic-lexical ambiguity of trunk. In (4), the nature of the reinterpretation is less clear, but it could be viewed as a higher-level ambiguity concerning the possible referent(s) of a phrase, what might be termed semantic-referential ambiguity.
This class of joke seems to be structurally similar to a style of joke often used by comedians and satirists, in which a verbal description is given which seems to be talking about one person, group, situation or event, but is suddenly revealed to be about something else. This form has often been used on topical comedy shows on BBC Radio such as Weekending and The News Huddlines; (177) is a typical example, delivered in a context where bribery and corruption of international cricket teams was being discussed.
(177) The police have been investigating a group of people hell-bent on preventing the England cricket team from winning. But there is not much they can do about the selection committee.
(The News Quiz, BBC Radio 4, 17/18 September 1999) It is not at once obvious where these jokes manifest what we have called
INAPPROPRIATENESS. In (4) and (28), the answer (punchline) seems to con-tribute some ABSURDITY, although it could be argued that the integrated interpretation of the (reinterpreted) question and the answer is ABSURD, as in the general FR situation. In (177), there is no ABSURDITYin the punch-line itself, but the humour may come from the (sudden) comparison of the two targets of the description, the initially implied one and the eventually revealed one. That is, this class of joke may involve what we called, in Chapter 5, CONTRAST. Or there could be some INAPPROPRIATENESS in the integrated interpretation of the whole text.
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11.4.2 Riddles
There are other classes of joke (or puzzles) to which the notion of a ‘descrip-tion’ is central. These texts have a clear concrete division into set-up and punchline, often in the form of question and answer, or posed problem and solution. As with (4) or (28), the ‘description’ (a set of attributes or characteristics of some entity) is supplied by the set-up (typically a ques-tion) and the punchline (typically an answer) supplies some entity or situation which matches, or is alleged to match, that description.
The clearest and simplest example of this is the riddle. Riddles, partic-ularly their linguistic aspects, have been widely discussed (Pepicello and Green (1984) give a typical review), but there is no accepted definition.
Dienhart offers this ‘working characterization’:
A riddle can be viewed as a discourse class involving a two-part struc-ture: an initial ‘text’ (the ‘precedent’) in which the riddler supplies a series of clues (generally insufficient or misleading) from which a second text (the sequent) is to be surmised by the riddlee. The precedent is often, but not necessarily, expressed in the form of a question.
Together, the precedent and the sequent make up the riddling text as a whole. This text establishes a link or (‘bisociation’) between two
‘scripts’ (or ‘frames of reference’). The riddler, through the precedent, deliberately plays up one script and then, through the sequent, awakens the riddlee’s awareness of a second script.
(Dienhart 1999: 104) This is both a delimitation of the set of data and a suggestion of how the forms work: the first three sentences of this passage outline the data, but the final two sentences are more in the nature of a theoretical analysis (which seems heavily influenced by Raskin (1985), and adopts essentially what we have called the forced reinterpretation process). It is not clear that all of the ‘riddles’ which Dienhart subsequently discusses accord with the analysis he sketches, although it is a very plausible account of some question–answer jokes, such as (8) or (142).
Discussions of riddles generally identify them as question–answer forms, but Dienhart’s characterization (above) points out that an initial question is not necessary. Although the initial part may not be a question syntactic-ally, a riddle poses a problem, and so is in a sense a question, even if indirectly.
To some extent, there is a continuum of how humorous these question–
answer discourses are intended to be. Some are genuine problems of a
‘brain-teaser’ nature, such as the traditional item (178).
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(178) In spring I am gay, In handsome array;
In summer more clothing I wear;
When colder it grows, I fling off my clothes;
And in winter quite naked appear.
(solution: a tree)
(Dienhart 1999) or the simpler (179).
(179) What has a mouth but cannot eat?
A river.
(De Palma and Weiner 1992) This style of riddle appears to have been a common form in Western culture. Maranda (1971) discusses the structure of examples from Finnish.
Because of the tendency to treat the question–answer format as a defining characteristic of riddles, some humorous texts which are not truly prob-lems to be solved are often classed as riddles. Raskin (1987: 446) refers to
‘the conundrum – the punning riddle, the one the hearer can never solve’, but (surprisingly) he offers (6) as the typical example of this. Pepicello and Weisberg (1983) say (31) is merely a parody of a riddle, but Dienhart offers (180) (which can be seen as an FR joke) as a riddle:
(180) What is a cloak?
The mating call of the Chinese frog.
(Dienhart 1999) In such examples, a particular form of verbal interaction which has tradi-tionally been associated with problem-posing has been borrowed (some might say subverted) in order to achieve humorous effects. It could be argued that many of these examples are not truly riddles, a term which should perhaps be reserved for the genuine problem-posing texts (even if they are not humorous).
11.4.3 Describing absurdity
Sometimes a question–answer joke requires an answer which depicts some particularly strange situation, as in (181).
(181) What goes cluck-cluck bang?
A chicken in a minefield.
(Dienhart 1999) 11
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The situation may even be completely bizarre, as in (182).
(182) What goes ninety-nine clop?
A centipede with a wooden leg.
These jokes are arranged as follows. There is a situation, preferably rather odd. There is a description of that situation, which may itself be rather peculiar. There is no ambiguity or punning. The order of presentation is also important, as the variants (183) and (184) barely work as jokes.
(183) A chicken in a minefield goes cluck-cluck bang.
(constructed item) (184) A centipede with a wooden leg goes ninety-nine clop.
(constructed item) 11.4.4 Summing up
This leaves us with various questions:
(a) Are examples such as (178) to be classed as humorous texts, and there-fore to be accounted for by any complete theory of jokes?
(b) If not, how do they differ from more obviously humorous examples such as (28), (142), and (180)?
(c) Do extremely absurd examples, such as (181) and (182), operate in the same way, or are they yet another subclass?
(d) Is the difference just a matter of degree, with all these examples sharing a basic form, varying in the extent to which some humour-inducing factor(s) (e.g. ‘incongruity’) are involved?
(e) What does the question–answer structure contribute, and how vital is it?
As noted above, examples where there seems to be an obvious or natural answer ( (4), (28), (180) ) could be viewed as FR jokes; that is, part of the humour may come from the discrepancy between the predictable answer and the one supplied in the punchline. On the other hand (178), (179), (181) and (182) would normally not bring to mind an obvious answer, resulting in them acting like a ‘puzzle’ (albeit a near-impossible one in some cases). (179) could also be analysed in FR terms, since the punch-line forces a reinterpretation of mouth (and hence the whole question set-up), even though (unlike (28) ) it does not have an apparently obvious answer. Similarly, (178) could be seen as an FR example, if we include the reinterpretation of words such as clothing and naked in metaphorical senses.
This would mean that we were classing as FR jokes both question–answer 1
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pairs where the ‘reinterpretation’ involves the meaning of the question and those where it is the inferred ‘natural’ answer which is found to be wrong.
The remaining questions without obvious answers – (181), (182) – do not fit so neatly into the FR category, nor into any of the other presen-tational classes in Chapter 8, nor any of the classes of puns in Chapter 9. We shall propose a further subclass of jokes to contain them, albeit a rather narrow class. A description-based joke consists of these ingredients:
(a) a description, D
(b) a scenario or set of entities, S
(c) a statement, explicit or implicit, that D describes or is true of S (d) the relationship between D and S is sufficiently unobvious that D would
not normally evoke S
(e) S is in some way strange or absurd.
A possible further factor is that D may be strange or absurd, though the notion of absurdity for verbal descriptions is rather unclear. Puzzle-style riddles such as (178) or (179) meet the first four of these conditions, but not the requirement that S is absurd.
Notice that (4), which we have already analysed in FR terms, would fit neatly into this class.
(4) What’s black and dangerous and sits in a tree?
A crow with a machine gun.
Indeed, in a particular telling of the joke where the audience did not notice the ‘obvious’ answer to its question (i.e. they perceived it as being a completely open question), it could not, on that occasion, function in FR terms. However, it could still be comprehended as a joke by virtue of its membership of the class of description-based jokes. Similar remarks would apply to (28). This might seem to imply that we have an example which meets the structural requirements for more than one of our subclasses of joke. However, closer consideration shows that this is not the case. The membership of the text in a joke class is dependent on properties which are relative to the knowledge and perceptions of the joke-audience. Hence, if the audience’s knowledge, beliefs, and attention are such that the ‘obvious’
answer is not noticed, then the classification of the text is, for that audi-ence at that moment, not an FR joke. If the audiaudi-ence does notice the obvious meaning, or has it pointed out afterwards, then the joke will be, relative to that state of knowledge, an FR joke.
To speculate further, examples like (4) or (177) may suggest that an audience finds it pleasurable to discover that a descriptive text can refer to two very disparate entities in an unforeseen way.
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