Key Terms
Ambivalence theory – Theories that maintain humor arises from the perception of two contrasting feelings.
Appropriateness – Deciding when to use humor rather than give a serious response.
Atomania – Craze for the future.
Bathtub effect – Visual analogy of someone lying in a bathtub with his/her head and feet sticking out.
Canned joke – A joke which has been told before the time of utterance in a form similar to that used by the speaker; standardized humor packages.
Communicative dynamism – Amount to which a given element of a sentence contributes to the ‘advancing process of communication.’
Competing script – An alternative interpretation of the story.
Conversational jokes – Situational or spontaneous jokes.
Cooperative principle – Assumes a commitment to the truthfulness of the speaker’s utterance.
Corpus-bound data – Data coming from one corpus; further research would compare several corpora of data to establish whether conclusions are extendable to all puns.
Defunctionalization of language – The use of language for play, not for communication.
Eye-dialect – Factoring in the “distance” between the graphemic renditions of two words.
-”For instance, the perception of rhyme has been found to be sensitive to spelling.”
Icons – Symbols that never lose their currency.
Jewish joke – A joke which uses a specifically Jewish script to establish a script opposition, but presents in the text references to Jewish characters or customs.
Linguistic iconicity – Sign that is iconic with the reality it represents. E.G.: the words “big” “bigger” “biggest” are literally big, bigger, biggest. see also “proportionality”
Local logic – Justification that occurs after experiencing a joke.
Mention theory – Assumes that any ironical utterance is the mention of another utterance.
Menu propos – ‘Conversations’ between two or more often unidentified characters. These conversations are completely disjointed and it appears impossible to identify a common thread which would unite the various remarks at a semantic level. The only requirement seems to be that the first line uttered by a character rhyme with the last line of the previous character.
Parody – Art of imitating a serious subject in a nonsensical or ridiculous manner.
Paronomasias – The use of a word in different senses or the use of words similar in sound to achieve a specific effect, as humor or a dual meaning; punning.
Potential humor – The context of the telling of the joke (its performance) is irrelevant to its humorous nature.
Proportionality – Implied by iconicity.
Registers - Language varieties associated with a given situation, role, or social aspect of the speakers’ experience. CATFORD – “a variety correlated with the performer’s social role on a given occasion.
Register humor – Humor caused by an incongruity originating in the clash between two registers.
Second-degree humor – Consists of humorous texts which ‘fail to deliver’ the expected punch line and become funny precisely because of the failure to do so.”
Script – An organized chunk of information about something in the broadest sense. It is a cognitive structure internalized by the speaker which provides the speaker with information on how things are done, organized, etc.
Script-switch trigger – The element of the text that causes the passage from the first to the second script actualized in the text. This element is the analog of the disjunctor.
Suggestive pun – Combining two or more unrelated references and conveying two or more meanings.
Tractatus coiscinianus – Divisions of the types of humor
Transition relevance place – Requires that the speaker relinquish the floor and thus that he/she stop speaking.
Visual cliche – Something seen so often, and therefore so immediately understandable that it does not require translation or interpretation.
