Linguistic theories of humor, 2

This series of (unfunny) blog posts will attempt to distill parts of certain articles (see part 1) on "humor theory" into something interesting and intelligible to someone like me without a degree in English. No joke, it's harder than you might think to abstractly explain humor from the perspective of a linguist (which I'm definitely not). This part will discuss incongruity theory.

We use the references from part 1.
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Roughly speaking, the idea explained in my how-to books on joke writing is you need a setup and a payoff. The payoff should be incongruous relative to the setup. This is the basic idea behind incongruity theory. It is more general than that (eg, it explains the humor of some word puns), as we'll try to explain below.

Historically, the theory seems to have first arisen in the 1700s and 1800s in the writings of various philosophers (Francis Hutchenson, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kant) and poets (James Beattie).

A precise version of this theory can be given in terms of pragmatics, which is (roughly speaking) the linguistic explanation of the rules of conversation and dialogue). Specifically, we recall Grice's cooperative principle.

Cooperative principle: Make your contribution as required by the accepted purpose of the conversation in which you are engaged.

This is often broken down into 4 components [A05].

• Maxim of quality: Your contribution should be true.
  
  In particular, don't say what you believe is false, and don't make a statement for which you lack adequate evidence.
  
• Maxim of relevance: Only make statements relevant to the conversation.
  
  
• Maxim of manner: Only make concise, clearly expressed and easily understood statements.
  
  In particular, Avoid obscure or ambiguous statements. Be brief and avoid over-explanation and/or repetition.
  
  
• Maxim of quantity: Be as informative as required.
  
  In particular, don't omit necessary details. Conversely, don't give unnecessary details or provide more information than is required.
  
  

In other words, when conversing, we try to be correct, relevant, clear and concise, and informative.

A joke, according to the incongruity theory of humor, is the description of a conversation or situation that violates one of Grice's maxims of cooperation. to paraphrase Krikmann [K06]: A joke is assumed to involves two different planes of content (sometimes called 'frames of reference,' 'isotopies,' 'schemas,' or 'scripts.'). These two contexts are mutually incompatible, but also include a certain common part which makes the shift from one to another possible. When
another interpretation that has so far remained hidden is found, a feeling of surprise and satisfaction arise, causing the reaction of laughter.

Example 1: A joke of Steven Wright fits into this (I'm going on memory here, so the words may not be exact):
"The other day I used spot remover on my dog. He disappeared."
The setup explains the first "plane of content": somehow, something was spilled on his dog's fur and he's trying to clean it off. The payoff
explains the second "plane of content": His dog is named Spot and we heard "spot remover" (a cleaning product) but what he said was "Spot remover." On the other hand, superiority theory would explain we are laughing at the dog owner for not knowing what Spot remover meant.

Neither of these theories (at least, as I've explained them) work to explain humor very well. Just because you violate one or more of Grice's maxims doesn't mean you are funny. While it does provide an observational language in which we can discuss jokes, it fails to define "funniness" in a precise way. In the next post, we look into a theory due to Victor Raskin [V79] which at least attempts to be even more precise.