Humorous Texts: A semantic and pragmatic analysis Salvatore Attardo Youngstown State University c 10 pt Times version “This has to be the least funny book one has ever read” (Opening sentence of a review of Attardo 1994) To Gaia Preface This book presents a methodology to extend the analyses of the General Theory of Verbal Humor to all texts, regardless of length. It also presents a number of more or less long and comprehensive applications to texts taken from a variety of literatures, media, situations, and historical periods. It is also an update of the GTVH, a decade after its first proposal. The book has existed in many forms: in 1997, I used in a course on “humor on television” a collection of work-in-progress pieces. These were reworked in an early draft for a seminar on humorous narratives in the spring of 1999. Part of the seminar consisted in the analysis of some sections of Wilde’s story, in ch. (8). It was radically overhauled over my year-long sabbatical at ITC-IRST, in Trento. This work is certainly not the last word on the issue of “long texts” in humor research. Its goal is to explore some aspects of this field, hopefully setting some markers that will be used by other researchers to further our knowledge. The same goes for the actual analyses. I say this because so much in what follows is tentative, hesitatingly put, or plain speculative that I considered changing the title to Out on a Limb. However, in a sense I knew what I was doing; this is the lot of those who venture outside charted areas: they run into lions. 0.1 A cautionary tale In 1966, Violette Morin published—in the famous issue of Communications which popularized the structuralist analysis of texts—a short article on jokes, in which she postulated a tripartite organization of the joke text. This approach gathered a sub- stantial following among European scholars (see Attardo 1994: 85-92). However, ulterior research showed that, far from being unique to jokes, a tripartite structure is common to all narrative forms. Therefore, instead of having discovered a defining feature of jokes, Morin had merely rediscovered the truism that jokes are narratives (consider that a good definition of joke could be “a short narrative text which is funny”). This is not to say that all humor is narrative, but merely that jokes are a type of text which is a subset of narratives (in French, this is clearer as joke translates as histoire droleˆ , i.e., funny story). vii viii The moral of the story above is that one must be very careful about what one is studying, because just looking at one’s object of study and analyzing any of its given features may or may not result in a fruitful avenue of research. Let me emphasize again that noone is claiming that Morin’s work wasn’t interesting; but only that is was interesting as an analysis of narratives, not as an analysis of jokes. The present work is faced with the same problem, insofar as this work is con- cerned with narratives (not exclusively, in fact, as we will see). I set out to investigate humorous narratives (and by that I mean other than jokes, taking length as a defining feature of this genre, see Attardo and Chabanne 1992). However, I do not intend to analyze narratives per se but only narratives as they are humorous. In other words, I am interested in how and why certain narratives are humorous and others are not. The focus of the analysis is on the humorous nature of the texts, not on their narrative status. In this sense, this work is not a standard narratological work. However, obviously enough, the narrative structure of the text itself may be humorous, and therefore we may have to cross over in the domain of narratology proper to investigate that aspect of humorous narratives. Furthermore, some aspects of the narrative structure of the text (first and foremost, its plot) will be relevant to the establishment of that humorous nature of the text; and, in this sense, this is then a work within the purview of narratology. I believe this work to be a sound application of linguistic (primarily semantic and pragmatic) methodology to the field of humor research and secondarily of narratology. As all sound applications of one field to another, the applied field (here, linguistics) provides the methodology, while the fields applied to (here, humor research and narratology) provide the questions. The central question that this book tries to answer is precisely the one mentioned above: how do narrative texts longer than jokes function as humorous texts? The chapters in the book work up to the answer. Chapter one presents an introduction to the linguistically based humor research applied in the rest of the book, namely the Semantic-Script Theory of Humor and the General Theory of Verbal Humor. The second chapter is a review of the scant literature on the topic of humorous narratives. Chapter three introduces the semantic and pragmatic tools necessary to model the text, while chapter four begins to ramp up to long texts by considering “intermediate” texts which share some of the features of longer and short texts. Ch. five introduces the tools specifically needed to handle the humorous aspects of long texts. The next chapter deals with diffuse disjunctors, i.e., humorous texts that do not have a clear cut punch line. Irony and register humor are the examples chosen to illustrate this type of humor. Finally, the book is capped off by two chapters col- lecting a number of case studies that exemplify the method described in the text (ch. 7), as well as a longer analysis of an Oscar Wilde’s text (ch. 8). They range widely across genres (poetry, short stories, novels) and somewhat across languages (En- glish, French, Italian) and historical periods (1600 to date). The last chapter sums up the discussion and opens a new venue, in the quantitative analysis of text, a look at 0.2. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix the frequency of humor within the text. It is a new approach, which may have some significant outcomes. The texts analyzed in the book and not just quoted in passing are referred to with four letter codes, listed below: CAND Candide (Voltaire) CBTD Chuckles Bites the Dust (Mary Tyler Moore Show) HEHA Headlong Hall (Thomas Love Peacock) NIAB Nightmare Abbey (Thomas Love Peacock) HRCI Han Rybeck ou le coup de l’etrier´ (Alphonse Allais) KUGE The Kugelmass Episode (Woody Allen) LASC Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (Oscar Wilde) MDMT A Merry Discourse of Meum and Tuum (Henry Peacham) ROSE Il nome della rosa (Umberto Eco) TSTF The System of Dr. Tarr and Dr. Fethers (Edgar Allan Poe) TRAN Transformations (Anne Sexton) Some informative notes are given for the authors. These should be intended as helpful hints for those not familiar with the given author, not as exhaustive treatments of their literary significance. With the more famous authors the notes are minimal, since widespread knowledge of their work is assumed. 0.2 Acknowledgments 0.2.1 Publications The discussions of the linguistic tools for the analysis of humor and the literature review are largely based on my previous treatment of these issues, updated as nec- essary. In some cases, the revisions have been major and the present text supersedes previous treatments of the same subject. This is especially significant in the treat- ments of script oppositions and logical mechanisms. The precursor of much which appears in this book was an invited paper I pre- sented at the first conference on the computational treatment of humor. It appeared as: Humor Theory Beyond Jokes: The Treatment of Humorous Texts at Large, in J. Hulstijn and A. Nijholt (eds.) (1996), Automatic Interpretation and Generation of Verbal Humor. Enschede, NL: University of Twente. 81-94. The material discussed in section 4.2 had been presented at the 1988 Interna- tional Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Zagreb, at the 1993 Georgetown Roundtable on Language and Linguistics, Pre-session on Discourse Analysis: Written Texts and at the First Symposium on Humor and Linguistics, at the 1994 International Conference on Humor Research, in Ithaca, NY. Parts of section 6.2, on irony, appeared originally in the Journal of Pragmatics (2000: 32). A small part of the Peacock case studies in ch. 6 appeared in Attardo x (1994). The analysis of the Voltaire passage appeared first in Attardo (1986), then in Attardo (1994), and in Attardo (2000b), the proceedings of the stylistics conference held in Opole, Poland, the previous year. Each version is slightly different (hopefully better). The analysis of Peacham’s text was presented in March 2000 at the Univer- sity of Bergamo. In fact, I owe my interest in that text to that occasion. The analysis of the Mary Tyler Moore episode in 7.1 appeared in HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 11:3. 1998. 231-260. The analysis of Alphonse Allais’ tale was originally my presentation at the first conference on Allais, held in 1996 in Liege,` Belgium. A fragment of the tale was already analyzed in Attardo (1986). It later ap- peared, in French, as Mecanismes´ linguistiques de l’humour d’Alphonse Allais dans ‘Han Rybeck ou le coup de l’etrier’´ In J.M. Defays and L. Rosier (eds.) Alphonse Allais, Ecrivain. Actes du premier colloque international Alphonse Allais. Saint Genouph: A.G. Nizet, 1997. 77-87; it too has been seriously revised. The analysis of the poem,Cinderella, by Anne Sexton, is part of a forthcoming paper co-authored with Cynthia Vigliotti.