Nancy Bell We Are Not Amused Humor Research
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Nancy Bell We Are Not Amused Humor Research Editors Victor Raskin Willibald Ruch Volume 10 Nancy Bell We Are Not Amused Failed Humor in Interaction An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libra- ries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. ISBN 978-1-5015-1052-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-0158-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0164-7 ISSN 1861-4116 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Berlin/Boston/Munich Typesetting: PTP-Berlin, Protago-TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Acknowledgements My deepest appreciation goes first to Salvatore Attardo, without whose encour- agement this work would not have been undertaken. Victor Raskin and Willibald Ruch provided essential feedback that helped me sharpen my arguments and broaden the scope of my perspective. Many other colleagues in humor studies were similarly helpful, sharing comments, questions, insights, and examples that allowed me develop my thinking. Of special note are Christie Davies and Moira Smith, who were particularly generous and encouraging. My husband, Mark Anderson, deserves recognition for having both the knack and the patience for wading through YouTube videos to identify examples of failed humor. Nicole Houser also collected data, although here the gratitude is really due to Barb Houser, whose attempts at humor (along with her sense of style) have earned her her own Facebook fan page. Finally, many thanks to Emily Farrell and Marcia Schwartz for shepherding me through the publication process with lots of laughs along the way. Preface Conan Doyle’s Silver Blaze story, while a relatively minor component of the Holmes’ canon, contains a memorable expression, namely “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” The curious incident turns out to have been that said dog did not bark, while a race-horse was being stolen. Holmes deduces from this negative fact that the dog knew the perpetrator of the crime and proceeds to unravel the mystery. Holmes does well to emphasize the importance of negative facts. Probably the biggest lesson of the Chomskian paradigm, cheerfully ignored by linguists of all persuasions, is that what sentences your grammar does not generate matters as much as those that it does. This applies particularly well to humor. To inves- tigate what humorous texts do not succeed as such, and why, will both advance and complement our understanding of how humor works in a way that other studies, however good, cannot match. It has been said that humor research suffers from an optimistic bias, so that researchers focus on the positive aspects of the phenomenon, ignoring, rela- tively speaking, its darker, negative aspects (Billig 2005). Billig’s discussion is not without its flaws, but one point about which he is unquestionably correct is that the field of humor research had, until recently, systematically favored suc- cessful humor, humor that goes off as planned, that achieves, as I described it with a catchy definition, its perlocutionary goal. Very little attention had been paid to humor that somehow fails to achieve its perlocutionary goal, i.e., to elicit amusement or at the very least the detection of the intention on the speaker’s part to do so. In fact, in Attardo 2008, I had noted that failed humor was one of the areas of humor research that was badly under-researched and for no good reason, as the topic hid some interesting theoretical issues, as witnessed, for example, by Janet Holmes’ (2000: 163) lucid and coherent throwing in of the towel on the matter. I myself, did little more than waving said towel in the air, but Nancy Bell has taken the towel, washed it, dried it, folded it, and put a little sprig of lavender on it. In all seriousness, we have now a treatment of failed humor that is definitive, comprehensive, and un-avoidable. Young scholars have now taken the habit of simply side-stepping research they don’t like. To avoid this book on failed humor would be such an obvious mistake that it seems safe to predict that this will not happen. Bell ties in the topic of humor failure with the more general category of mis- communication and shows convincingly and in painful detail that humor may fail at every level of communication (linguistic and not). This is a significant theoretical move, as it anchors the descriptive work and imbues it with explana- Preface vii tory power. Humor fails because communication fails and the latter fails because systems powerful enough to express what humans need to express cannot be fail- safe (i.e., they have to rely on input from the speakers/hearers). Bell’s book encompasses also the reactions to failed humor, or as she terms it its “management.” The term is inspired because failed humor turns out to elicit a gamut of reactions ranging from the polite to the aggressive. Here Bell has recourse to face theory, the politeness approach that sees speakers “man- aging” their face (perceived social standing). Finally, Bell addresses how social variables affect the management of humor failures, with particular emphasis on social status and degree of intimacy. Bell’s work is thorough and detailed, and she must be congratulated for this, but where her dedication goes off the scale, in my opinion, is in one daring meth- odological innovation she introduced, i.e., the elicitation of responses to failed humor by exposing herself (and later her students—it builds character) to the willing humiliation of producing deliberately bad humor in order to record the reactions of the hearers. Much like the pioneers of vaccination research, who often inoculated themselves with their tentative concoctions, risking their health or worse their lives, Bell, in the spirit of science, risked her reputation as a funny person. As with all good research, this study opens more questions than it closes. For example, now that we know that humor may fail at any level of the communica- tive edifice, it will be interesting to see how those who used laughter or smiling as the identifying feature of humor will deal with the fact that their methodology has a gaping hole at every level of the communicative gamut, since obviously some failed humor will not be accompanied by laughter or anything like explicit comments along the lines of “well, THAT attempt at humor failed!” Salvatore Attardo – Texas A&M University-Commerce Attardo, Salvatore 2008. Semantics and pragmatics of humor. Language and Linguistics Compass 2(6). 1203–1215. Billig, Michael. 2005. Laughter and Ridicule. Towards a Social Critique of Humour. London: Sage. Holmes, Janet. 2000. Politeness, power and provocation: How humour functions in the workplace. Discourse Studies 2(2). 159–185. Table of Contents Acknowledgements | v Preface | vi 1 Introduction | 1 1.1 Introduction | 1 1.2 What is failed humor? | 3 1.3 Why study failed humor? | 5 1.4 Background | 6 1.4.1 Language and interaction | 7 1.5 Discourse analysis and the study of (failed) humor | 16 1.6 Structure of the book | 19 2 Conceptualizing Failed Humor | 21 2.1 Approaches to failed humor | 21 2.1.1 Superiority/hostility theories | 21 2.1.2 Release theories | 23 2.1.3 Incongruity | 24 2.2 Competence, performance, and failed humor | 26 2.2.1 Failed humor and humor competence | 27 2.2.2 Failed humor and humor performance | 29 2.3 Identification of failed humor | 33 2.4 Data set | 38 2.5 Summary | 41 3 Failed Humor as Miscommunication | 43 3.1 Introduction | 43 3.2 Defining miscommunication | 43 3.3 Sources of miscommunication | 44 3.4 Failed humor as misunderstanding | 49 3.4.1 A framework for understanding failed humor | 49 3.5 Structure of miscommunication and repair | 56 3.6 Summary | 60 Table of Contents ix 4 Triggers of Failed Humor | 61 4.1 Introduction | 61 4.2 Locutionary problems | 61 4.3 Linguistic rules | 66 4.3.1 Phonology | 66 4.3.2 Morphosyntax | 67 4.3.3 Semantics | 69 4.4 Ambiguity | 72 4.5 Pragmatic force | 76 4.6 Message form | 77 4.7 Framing/keying | 80 4.8 Summary | 83 5 Triggers of Failure Specific to Humor | 85 5.1 Introduction | 85 5.2 Joke incongruity | 85 5.3 Joke appreciation | 91 5.4 Joke (meta)messages | 97 5.5 (Appropriate) humor support | 102 5.6 Summary | 106 6 Managing Failed Humor in Interaction | 108 6.1 Introduction | 108 6.2 Speaker management of failure | 108 6.2.1 Preventing failure | 109 6.2.2 Managing failure | 113 6.3 Audience management of failure | 119 6.3.1 Responses to failure due to lack of understanding | 120 6.3.2 Responses to failure due to lack of appreciation | 125 6.3.3 Taking offense to humor | 131 6.4 Final remarks on negotiation of failed humor | 134 6.5 Summary | 139 x Table of Contents 7 Failed Humor and Society | 140 7.1 Introduction | 140 7.2 Failed humor and social action | 142 7.2.1 Humor for solidarity | 143 7.2.2 Humor, power, and subversion | 147 7.2.3 Failed humor and social norms | 156 7.3 Deliberately failed humor | 159 7.4 Summary | 162 8 Conclusion | 164 8.1 Summary of findings | 164 8.2 Implications for the study of language and humor | 166 8.3 Future research | 168 Appendix A: Transcription Conventions | 169 References | 170 Index | 183 1 Introduction 1.1 Introduction Years ago, on a trip to Portland, Oregon, I was travelling downtown via the city’s light-rail system.