Kent Academic Repository Full text document (pdf) Citation for published version Eyre, Shona Ruth (2015) It’s A Funny Old World: The Construction of Possible Worlds in Jokes and Stand-up Comedy. Master of Arts by Research (MARes) thesis, University of Kent,. DOI Link to record in KAR https://kar.kent.ac.uk/47908/ Document Version UNSPECIFIED Copyright & reuse Content in the Kent Academic Repository is made available for research purposes. Unless otherwise stated all content is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. Versions of research The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record. Enquiries For any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: [email protected] If you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html It’s A Funny Old World: The Construction of Possible Worlds in Jokes and Stand‐up Comedy. Master of Arts ‐ Linguistics School of European Culture and Languages The University of Kent Shona Ruth Eyre December 2014 Word Count: 37,040 Abstract Though there exists a wide range of research surrounding theories of humour and the structure of jokes, very little academic attention is given to stand‐up comedy, despite its popularity within modern culture and appreciation as a type of performance. Stand‐up comedy’s audience cognitively process highly creative discourse at great speed and reach the intended instances of humour created by the performer. This thesis seeks to address the inabilities of current linguistic theories of humour when applied to stand‐up comedy, by proposing a new model of humour (the Possible Worlds Model of Humour). The most prolific of the linguistic theories of humour, the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), has been scrutinised for under‐definition within the parameters of the model, and providing an analysis with a lack of focus into the cognitive processes that bring an audience to laugh. In creating a new linguistic model for the analysis of humour, cognitive stylistics (cognitive poetics) has been chosen to achieve cognitive insight into stand‐up comedy as a text through logic based possible‐world approaches to fiction. Appropriate incongruity, textual universes and their textual actual worlds, scripts, accessibility relations, and the alternative worlds in a comedian’s jokes can be used in defining an individual style attributed to a particular stand‐ up comedian. Analyses are carried out on two extracts from British stand‐up comedians (Milton Jones and Stewart Lee) to show the abilities of the proposed model when considering this type of text. Table of Contents 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 2. Literature Review ................................................................................................................. 4 1. Theories of humour .......................................................................................................... 5 1. Incongruity theories of humour ............................................................................... 5 2. Linguistic theories of humour ........................................................................................... 8 1. Grice’s Cooperative Principle and the NBF Communication Mode .......................... 8 2. SSTH ........................................................................................................................ 11 3. GTVH ....................................................................................................................... 15 4. Criticisms of the GTVH ............................................................................................ 22 3. Humour theory and stand‐up comedy ............................................................................ 26 4. Cognitive approaches ...................................................................................................... 31 1. Possible worlds ....................................................................................................... 32 3. The Proposed Model of Humour (Possible Worlds Model of Humour) ........................... 38 1. Aspects of the model ...................................................................................................... 38 1. Appropriate incongruity ......................................................................................... 38 2. Basic structure ........................................................................................................ 38 3. Scripts in more detail .............................................................................................. 40 4. Ryan and possible worlds ....................................................................................... 43 1. Modal structure of worlds .............................................................................. 43 2. Accessibility relations ................................................................................. 49 5. Principle of minimal departure and intertextuality ................................................ 51 2. Bringing the threads of the model together in more detail ............................................ 52 1. Definition of terms ................................................................................................. 52 1. Jokes ........................................................................................................... 52 2. Short single‐joke texts ................................................................................ 53 3. Extended jokes ............................................................................................ 53 4. Textual actual world ................................................................................... 53 5. Actual world ................................................................................................ 53 6. Audience ..................................................................................................... 53 3. The Possible Worlds Model of Humour in use ................................................................ 54 4. Analyses ............................................................................................................................. 59 1. Method of analysis .......................................................................................................... 59 2. Milton Jones analysis ...................................................................................................... 60 3. Stewart Lee analysis ........................................................................................................ 70 5. Discussion ........................................................................................................................... 81 1. Comparison of comedians’ worlds .................................................................................. 81 2. Summary of individual styles .......................................................................................... 86 3. Triumphs of the proposed model ................................................................................... 88 4. How the Possible Worlds Model of Humour avoids criticism ......................................... 89 6. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 94 References ............................................................................................................................. 99 Appendices ........................................................................................................................... 106 A. Milton Jones transcript with analysis summary of each joke ........................................... 106 B. Stewart Lee transcript with analysis summary of each joke ............................................ 112 1. Introduction A lot of people say to me, “Hey you” […] “What are you doing in my garden?”[…] For once, the audience is made to use its own imagination. There are no clues, or helpful pointers. The line has little in common with most of the material of other ‘alternative’ stand‐up comedians of the time; It doesn’t ask us to share an experience, as when three of the same bus come at once; It doesn’t contain any easy cultural signifiers, such as references to 1970s television or the forgotten play‐ground rituals and newsagent confectionery of childhood; it isn’t ‘about’ anything. The everyday phrase ‘hey you’, is disrupted and made bizarre by being followed by the unexpected ‘what are you doing in my garden’. It is, to invoke a now wasted phrase, a moment of pure comic genius. (Lee 2010, p.137) Humour is a common occurrence within everyday discourse. Often we laugh in response to an utterance, or aim to produce one for others to find amusing. Instinctively we know how, and find it relatively simple to produce humour, yet are unaware of the exact impact on the recipient’s cognition or the mechanisms of what we have achieved. The prevalence and frequency of humour in everyday conversation