The Principle of Cooperation in the Humorous Short Story.
The Language of Comic Narratives: Humor Construction in Short Stories, by Isabel Ermida. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008. 261 pp. $161.00.Since its humble beginnings in western literary criticism as "Aristotle's missing definition," comedy and its serious study have fared well with scholars attempting to define, categorize, explicate and complicate the term from multiple disciplinary directions: literature, linguistics, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and cultural studies, to name a few. Since humor is so singular and varied even in its limited western canon, humor theoreticians preach to the choir with few bridges built between varying disciplinary approaches. Isabel Ermida's The Language of Comic Narratives is an impressive addition to one self-contained mode of enquiry: the linguistic school of humor research. Starting with linguist and humor theorist Victor Raskin, who supervised Ermida's doctoral dissertation on humor, and his Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH), primarily "script opposition," Ermida adds foundational notions from discourse analysis, pragmatics, and speech-act theory, particularly the Gricean principle of conversational maxims, presuppositions, and implicatures. Ermida proposes a "hybrid" analytical model to describe how the longer comic text works-her corpus is the comic short story-in both its illocutionary form as well as its perlocutionary effect, though the latter is not the true focus of her study. The result is a valuable addition to humor research, particularly in Ermida's thorough efforts to describe and collate the ways that seemingly idiosyncratic postulations in the serious study of humor actually complement each other.
The first four chapters of this seven-chapter study are devoted to explicating the very notion of humor, and discussing in depth the various competing linguistic theories that explain what happens when we write, read, listen to, or interact with a humor text. I enjoyed Ermida's discussion of taxonomic overlaps between humor and various humor-related phenomena such as laughter, wit, and irony in the first chapter. I also enjoyed Ermida's fine exposition, in the second chapter, of the humor potential of structural constituents of language: the sound, the word, the sentence, the meaning. In these early chapters, Ermida reviews the classical theories of humor, broadly divided into disparagement theories, release theories, and incongruity theories, and she explains the linguistic strategies of humor, from sound to sentence and the syntactic/semantic unit of the joke. In rigorously examined steps, her exposition is aimed at systematically leading us towards humor as text and communicative act.
In Chapter 3, Ermida moves from the humor potential of structural constituents to the discursive, cognitive, and communicative contexts of the longer humor text, the "joke." Ermida identifies three broad theoretical approaches to linguistic analysis of a joke, the one humor text consistently studied by scholars: Raskin's Semantic Script Theory of Humor with its necessary conditions of semantic script overlap and script opposition; the adaptation and expansion of this model in Raskin and Attardo's General Verbal Theory of Humor (GVTH), which studies the degree of variation between jokes through examination of "knowledge resources" (90); and Rachel Giora's Cognitive Joke model that borrows from cognitive psychology and pragmatics to describe the "well-formedness" of jokes based on the sociolinguistic concept of "markedness," or the ability of jokes to "surprise" us. While Ermida finds much that is useful in these three models, and she bases her own analytical model on them, she also finds limitations in their ability to explain the illocutionary intent and perlocutionary effects of longer humor texts. Ermida finds the following Raskin and Attardo GTVH postulation too reductive to describe the humor potential of complex narratives: "The study of humorous texts reduces then to the location of all lines (jab and punch) along the text vector (sic) i.e. its linear presentation" (109). The Language of Comic Narratives is Ermida's corrective to this theoretical shortcoming:
Although a linear approach along Attardo's lines helps to uncover some specificities of the humorous narrative ... it is essential that a supra-sequential approach be applied, so as not to reduce the text to a succession of autonomous joke-like structures. In this sense, the narrative text ought to be understood at a structural (vertical and horizontal) level, but also at a pragmatic one ... (111).
While the humor text as a coherent instance of pragmatic interaction is the focus of Chapter 5, Ermida elucidates these discursive mechanisms only after careful consideration and rejection of the structuralist paradigm that informs many contemporary narratological theories applied to longer literary texts. Despite the usefulness of elucidating the micro and macrostructures of the narrative texts, Ermida's specific reservation revolves around the normative rigidity of structuralist analysis in matters of ambiguity, which rules humor texts.
Context appears to be the remedy for structural rigidity, and in Chapter 5, "Pragmatics of the humorous narrative," Ermida studies the pragmatic context of humor narratives: the sender (the narrator), the receiver (the reader), the message, the presuppositions and implicatures, the norms and conventions, and the flouting of norms and conventions that rule the conversational and discursive practice of reading a comic text, where "writing choices and reading processes function dialogically" (169). Ermida argues "both at a linguistic and pragmatic level, then, literary humor lies in the gap that separates the rule-abiding recipient from the rule-infringing sender" (142.). This chapter splendidly applies Grice's conversational maxims and the
Cooperative Principle of conversational discourse to what happens between the humor text and its interlocutor:
If, at first sight, humor is a phenomenon that seems not to obey the principles of truth that rule over bona fide communication - and it does so by infringing norms, subverting values and ignoring conventions - it is clear that this is not gratuitous, but targeted at specific communicative objectives. Actually, producing ambiguity, confounding the recipient and provoking error are intentional strategies that aim at producing comic effects. (167)
The experience of "humor" as a cooperative construction between the narrator/sender and the receiver/reader based on pragmatic presuppositions, implicatures, cognitive informativeness, and markedness underlies Ermida's hybrid model entitled "Hypothesis." The Hypothesis operates on five principles:
1. The Principle of Script Opposition and Shadow-scripts
2. The Principle of Hierarchy of Scripts (supra-scripts and infra-scripts)
3. The Principle of Recurrence of the supra-script by the infra-scripts along the textual axis
4. The Principle of Informativeness: an abrupt and unexpected supra-script inversion creates the humorous effect
5. The Principle of Cooperation: the sender's comical intent
Ermida demonstrates operation of the five principles in extended analysis of Woody Allen's comic short story "A Lunatic's Tale," as well as a small corpus of other selections from humorists: Corey Ford's "The Norris Plan," Evelyn Waugh's "On Guard," Dorothy Parker's "You Were Perfectly Fine," Graham Greene's "A Shocking Accident," and David Lodge's "Hotel des Boobs." In Waugh's "On Guard," the supra-script oppositions, ENGAGEMENT and INFIDELITY, recur through the tightly plotted story's infra-scripts: they not only create false expectations that are eventually toppled, leading to humorous effect, but also validate the principle of cooperation that extends the comic contract between narrator and reader through shared presuppositions and unsaid implicatures.
Ermida's monograph is a valuable contribution to humor research, particularly to humor in longer narratives, but one wonders about the claim of universality for Ermida's Hypothesis model. Beyond an optimum length, would her five principles cease to produce the necessary comic cohesion and interaction? Does a comic short story have a critical duration? Equally important, how confidently can we say that humorists are aware of such principles when they write stories? Another important question that goes to the heart of Ermida's (and Raskin's and Attardo's) model is the conceptual and theoretical similarity that semantic terms, such as "script overlap," "super-scripts" and "infra-scripts," bear to the structuralist, Saussurean concept of a "paragram," later adapted and reconceptualized as a "hypogram" by French literary theorist Michel Riffaterre in his discussion of a structuralist poetics of text production. Riffaterre argued that a poetic text is structured with a necessary recurrence of the same invariant, which gives the text its exemplary character. He called this invariant the semantic nucleus of the text, or the hypogram, which recurs by overdetermining itself through conversions and expansions. Perhaps Ermida's claim of universal applicability rests on the existence of such a hypogram for humor in a text as much as it does on semantic-pragmatic conditions.
Reviewed by Gayatri Devi, Lock Haven University
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| Title Annotation: | The Language of Comic Narratives: Humor Construction in Short Stories |
|---|---|
| Author: | Devi, Gayatri |
| Publication: | Evelyn Waugh Studies |
| Article Type: | Book review |
| Date: | Sep 22, 2012 |
| Words: | 1368 |
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