Linguistic theories of humor, 3

This series of (unfunny) blog posts will attempt to distill parts of certain articles (see part 1 and part 2) 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 Victor Raskin's semantic script theory.

We use the references from part 1. Some, such as Krikmann [K06], regard Raskin's theory as a refinement of incongruity theory (discussed in part 2), while others regard it as a separate theory.

Agree or disagree, there is no question in my mind that the most interesting aspect of Raskin's theory is that he claims his theory can characterize what makes a joke funny.

“Ideally, a linguistic theory of humor should determine and formulate the necessary and sufficient linguistic conditions for the text to be funny” - V. Raskin

This is something lacking in the previously proposed theories. We'll try to delve into his theory in more detail below.

But first, who is this Victor Raskin? Is he a failed comedian who got a PhD and escaped into academia? I have no idea. According to wikipedia, Raskin was born in 1944 in the Russian town of Irbit, which lies about 1200 miles (2000 km) due east of Moscow. He got his Ph.D. in "Structural, Computational, and Mathematical Linguistics" from Moscow State University in 1970. About 3 years later he emigrated to Israel, and 10 years after that to the US. He is now a distinguished professor of linguistics at Purdue.

Raskin's theory, the first formal linguistic analysis of humor [R79], is nicely explained in Abdalian [A05] and Krikmann [K06].

Raskin believed that certain cognitive structures are stored in our mind along with some "common sense" associated words/phrases describing this structure. Roughly speaking, this is the context of a conversational topic. For example, if "marriage" is the cognitive structure we associate to it words such as "husband", "wife", "happy couple", "loving couple", "father", "mother", "home", and so on. If "plumber" is the cognitive structure we associate to it words/phrases such as "water leak", "broken toilet", "pipes", "plunger", "man in a workman's uniform", and so on. Raskin calls such a structure, along with their typical narratives, a script.

Following Krikmann [K06], we summarize Ranskin's theory as follows:

A text can be characterized as a joke if both of the following are satisfied:

• The text is compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts.
  
• The two scripts with which the text is compatible are opposite in some sense.
  

The two scripts with which the text is compatible are said to overlap fully or in part on this text. To my understanding, this is a more precise and rigorous version of Incongruity Theory. This doesn't diminish Raskin's work, just places it in context.

Example 1: I don't know where I heard the following joke which mixes a doctor-patient script with a frog script.

A naked man with a frog on his head stands in an examination room in front of his doctor. The doctor gently touches the frog. It seems to be stuck where it is.
Doctor: What's the problem?
Frog: I need you to get this man off my butt.