Semantic Mechanisms of Humor

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Semantic Mechanisms of Humor

• Caitlin Tweedy
• February 2, 2007

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Different people will not necessarily find the
same things funnymany things which will strike
one group as funny may bore another group some
jokes are private or individual...
but the ability to appreciate humor is
universal and shared by all people --Victor
Raskin
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Raskin Laughter is a way of human communication
which is essentially and exclusively
human. vs. Rapp Do animals have a sense of
humor?
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What do we laugh at?According to Hazlitt

• Absurdity
• Deformity
• Dress of foreigners, and they at ours
• One dressed in the height of fashion
• One quite out of it
• Mischief
• What we do not believe
• To show satisfaction with ourselves
• To show contempt for those around us
• To conceal envy, ignorance

• Fools
• Those who pretend to be wise
• Extreme simplicity
• Awkwardness
• Hypocrisy
• Affectation

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What characterizes the humor act?

• Human participants
• Speaker and one or more hearers
• Writer and one or more readers
• Person on television and one or more viewers
• A stimulus
• Life experience of an individual
• 4. Psychological type of individual
• 5. Certain physical environment/Situation
• - provides context
• 6. Society
• - cultural context

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Laughter is seen as

• ( )
• Pleasure giving/pleasurable
• Purposeless movement expressing joy
• Freedom
• Release of aggression
• Healthful
• A reflex
• i.e. ticklingcan trigger other reflexes
  WATCH OUT
• Telling of society

• ( - )
• Sinister
• i.e. The Bibleno jokes here
• Concealing state of mind
• i.e. shame, shyness, anger
• Cowardly
• A detriment to mankinds progress
• Born out of hostility
• Ridiculing

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Is humor good or bad?

• Other undefined phenomena in this way
• Love
• Happiness
• Marriage
• Faith
• Success
• The electoral college
• Donald Trumps comb-over

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A good verbal joke is

• Not too long
• Not too short
• Not too trivial
• Not too hard to understand
• Has an element of surprise ?
• Not given away too early
• Has adequate amount of detail
• Known to be a joke
• Accompanied by gestures, facial expressions
• JUST RIGHT!

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Advice from Fry

• For the presenter to laugh occasionally and to
  be mildly amused by his or her own joke
  increases the power of its humor.

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Advice from Fry (cont.)

• For the presenter to laugh immoderately and to
  be obviously carried away by his own joke spoils
  the joke for the recipient

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Semantic Theory

• Seeks to model the semantic competence of the
  native speaker
• Script-based contextual semantics
• Cannot account for ALL meanings of every sentence
  in every possible setting
• No sentence occurs in isolation (context!)
• One needs semantics (knowledge of language) and
  pragmatics (knowledge of world) to correctly
  calculate the meaning of a word in a context

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Elements of Contextual Semantics

• (1) Lexicon to model the native speakers
  knowledge of the meaning of words
• Extra lexical info
• Ex Mary saw a black cat and immediately turned
  home.

• (2) Combinatorial Rules to model the native
  speakers ability to combine the meanings of the
  words which make up the sentence into meaning of
  the whole
• Usefulness of a dictionary?
• Ex The bill was large.
• The bill was large, but we paid it anyway.
• Ex She could not bear children.

• Script-based lexicon
• Script a large chunk of semantic info
  surrounding the word or evoked by it
• - Represents native speakers knowledge of a
  part of the world
• - Common sense
• - Basic situations

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A Lexical Script

• DOCTOR
• Subject Human Adult
• Activity gt Study Medicine
• Receive patients - patient
  comes or doctor visits
• - doctor listens to complaints
• - doctor examines patient
• Cure Disease - doctor diagnoses
  disease
• - doctor prescribes treatment
• (Take patients money)
• Place gt Medical School
• Hospital or doctors office
• Time gt Many years
• Every day
• Immediately
• Condition Physical contact
• Where gt stands for past and stands for present

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Importance of Scripts inUnderstanding Semantics
of Humor

• It is obvious that our entire civilization is a
  large number of scripts, that the more scripts
  one has internalized the deeper ones
  comprehension, which could be amply illustrated
  by jokes, literary allusions, and other texts
  inaccessible to the non-initiated.
• --Victor Raskin

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How Semantics Work to Create Humor

• Script overlap
• ex Is the doctor at home? the patient asked
  in his bronchial whisper. No, the
  doctors young and pretty wife whispered in
  reply. Come right in.
• DOCTOR and LOVER
• Script oppositeness
• - Script 1 vs. Script 2
• ex Who was that gentleman I saw you with last
  night?
• That was no gentleman. That was a
  senator.
• Senators are gentlemen vs. Senators are not
  gentlemen
• ex The first thing which strikes a stranger
  in New York City is a big car.
• Collision vs. Impression

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Three Types of Script Opposition

• ACTUAL SITUATION vs. NON-EXISTENT SITUATION
• He used such nautical terms.
• Yes, sailors always talk dirty.
• Hes a man of letters. He works at the Post
  Office.
• NORMAL, EXPECTED STATE OF AFFAIRS vs. ABNORMAL,
  UNEXPECTED
• Should a person stir his coffee with his right
  hand or his left hand?
• Neither. He should use a spoon
• When is a joke not a joke? Usually.
• PLAUSIBLE SITUATION vs. IMPOSSIBLE, OR LESS
  PLAUSIBLE SITUATION
• His teeth have so many cavities, he talks with an
  echo.
• Common aspirin cures my headaches if I follow the
  directions on the bottle Keep Away from
  Children.

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Classification of Humor

• Ridicule
• Deliberate ridicule
• Humor at speakers own expense
• Riddle
• Conundrum
• Pun
• Suppression/Repression
• Wisecrack
• Epigram