Edited by Salvatore Attardo, The Routledge Handbook of Language
and Humor (2017) is a rigorous and rather dry study of funniness.
Nº1 •
Analysing Jokes
Linguists Attardo and Raskin posited in their 1991 revision to the semantic script theory of humour (SSTH), named the general theory of verbal humour (GTVH), that:
Joke: {LA, SI, NS, TA, SO, LM}
LA –language
SI – situation
NS – narrative strategy
TA – target
SO – script opposition
LM – logical mechanism
Or as E. B. White famously paraphrased fifty years earlier: ‘Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.’ Despite the valiant efforts of philosophers, psychologists, linguists, comedians and even mathematicians over the years to analyse jokes, with gut-busting explanations such as superiority theory, incongruity theory, benign violation theory and even, wait for it, wait for it, the ontic-epistemic theory of humour [APPLAUSE], only one thing seems to be for certain – you cannot learn how to be funny from reading a peer-reviewed article in The International Journal of Applied Linguistics.
I do, however, love the names social scientists give for each micro-twist of a joke: script-switch triggers, focal and background incongruities, faulty implicature, etc. In the mid-1990s in New York, when I was performing joke-adjacent material in stand-up venues associated with the nascent ‘alternative comedy’ scene, one of my characters was Professor Kiffy, a humour researcher, who’d often present a lengthy analysis or contextualisation of the inscrutable joke he was about to tell, sometimes never getting to the joke itself since he’d get lost on a nerdy tangent. This led to a long-term interest in humour theory and even some collaborations with humour theorists in Belgium, the Netherlands and Poland.
Nº2 •
Jokes that Open their Mouths Too Early and Close their Ass Too Late
One might think that there’s an endless variety of types and topics of jokes, but current thought views the range as much more limited. One night in Svalbard after the final session of the 2014 International Society of Humor Studies Conference had concluded, a group of narratologists and I resolved to compile the definitive taxonomy which follows: Dropped jokes, broke jokes, pause jokes, tone jokes, jokes that touch each other in the dark, jokes too dark to touch each other, jokes that sit in the corner wheezing, jokes that begin with one man moaning and end with one man moaning and nothing in between, jokes that stick their fingers in other men’s jokes and their necks out from the weeds, jokes that strangle each other to sleep, jokes about ducks, jokes about ducks which rely upon bombast, jokes about ducks whose bombast is a mask for dissensus, jokes about Mrs Dissensus and her three ethical ovens, jokes about dicks in ovens, butt jokes, tit jokes, mistake jokes, tit jokes which talk like butt jokes and forget which way to love, container jokes, jokes that have contained or will contain an entire new discourse, jokes that start like paintings and end like divorces, jokes that sound like dirges and leave you in the mud, jokes that function like two sticks of mud in a shit-storm, jokes that are interpreted before they are created, jokes that are impervious to interpretation because they are peopled by impervierts*, jokes that hold their own against dance because they deplete dance’s tonal porridge, jokes that do what only jokes can do but leave more casualties, jokes that divide a system into two parts – the heavy and the light ones – and only move the light part, jokes that unite traditionally incompatible subsystems by removing arising contradictions, jokes set in underspecified locations with nearly specified agents, jokes that ask: who else instead? what else instead?, jokes that ask: what else is like this? what other idea does this suggest?, jokes that make us think everything is an instrument, jokes that open their mouths too early and close their ass too late, jokes that say ha ha ha NO!, jokes that don’t let you into the room, and finally jokes with too many people in the room and nothing ever becomes of them.
* Do you know people who are impervious + perverts?
Nº3 •
The Parts of Jokes: Not Sexy, Sexy
I was one of the most vocal opponents of Attardo and Raskin’s GTVH when they first shared the concept over the deafening roar of a cigarette boat in the Gulf of Mexico running contraband jokemeats. Equating cognitive linguistics (not sexy) with drug smuggling (sexy) is funny because, as you can see within the parentheses, one is sexy and the other isn’t. ‘Jokemeats’ are funny because jokes are words and not flesh, and because one pictures some endangered meat like koala bear short ribs which makes you cackle when you chew it. My objection harped on their failure to identify some of the most salient features of jokes, namely the jokint (from Middle English joke + cunt) and the knose (from Midtown East English joke + nose, see later section on the ‘k’ sound). Let’s start with the knose. As we all know, the nose is the first thing to enter a room. It is also the first thing to smell the room to detect toxins and chicken skewers (again, that ‘k’ sound, very very funny, to be explained). So, what is the knose? Well, the knose is the very loud part in the text which announces the joke’s arrival, like a heraldic trumpet. Think of it as the set-up to the set-up. For example: AAAAAA! (terrified, panting) No, no, please! (shielding the face as if being attacked). Not the funny stuff! (running out of the room, then pause, bounding back into the room with a big smile). So! Two rabbis (only say this joke if you’re Jewish, like me) are gargling a bunch of foreskins they just gnawed off the wee wees of a pack of eight-day old Jewish boys.
Here, the knose is very big. It warns the listener, ‘Get ready, ruptures of logic and propriety are forthcoming, and maybe something with foreskins.’
Nº4 •
Oyster Fricassee
There are less obtrusive, quieter knoses, of course, more Christian ones, you could say. This next joke was emailed to me repeatedly over the course of three months by a colleague of mine in the Department of Urology and Urologic Folklore. I didn’t open the email since it contained an attachment whose filename was ‘OUCH.exe’. My colleague finally phoned me very hurt that I’d never replied, and said I might find the joke quite apropos to my research. (Clear throat, reach into pocket, pull out a piece of paper.) So, I’ve printed it out, and I’ll read it here for the first time. (Clear throat again.)
Two rabbis are gargling a bunch of foreskins they just gnawed off the wee wees of a pack of eight-day old Jewish boys. Now that we understand the knose, what is the jokint? Well, the jokint is a hairy little creature which lurks in the shadow directly preceding the punchline. It doesn’t look or sound like the rest of the joke. You can think of it like the bridge of a pop song. It’s there to distract and seduce you for a moment and build tension so that the punchline hits you with the force of a charging bison. [Start with a knose which extensively details the evolution and provenance of the joke, its revision history, the cities and institutions where it was presented, the lawsuits filed against the author, etc. Follow with the set-up concerning a curator of 18th century Virginian outhouses, chamber pots and close stool chairs, preparing an exhibition.] There are placed stanchions with elastic cords surrounding each stool chair, to discourage any unsightly interventions by museum-goers. Now, I imagine you’re all famished from that long set-up! Ha ha! Would you like to sample a typical 18th century supper of oyster fricassee and mush that the reprehensible American colonists ate before they shat their brains out into one of those stool chairs? [Walk downstage left to the heat lamp and scoop some fricassee from the saucepan onto earthenware plates and distribute to the audience. Once everyone has one, let the period cutlery drop from the magnetic plate on the ceiling over the aisles. As everyone starts to dig into the fricassee, yank the cutlery recall lever, sending all the forks flying back up to the magnetic plate.] And that’s when the curator said, ‘I fucking quit! My talents would be much better renumerated at Outhauser & Wirth!’ [Hand out an apology to the audience, explaining that the punchline is still being workshopped and will be ready by the end of the tour, to be included in the televised version.] Formally, this jokint is unassailable. It’s cute, it’s juicy, and it contains oysters, which are an aphrodisiac. The audience will be so thoroughly woozied by the fricassee fracas that the keratinous horns of the punchline will impale their diaphragms and drag them howling through the theatre.
Author Arthur Koestler is best-known for his novel Darkness At Noon (1940).
Nº5 •
What Jokes Do or Don’t Do to the World
Both art and comedy are supposed to be enlightening, critical and temporarily bewildering. Potential agents of revolution, they may also reveal aspects of human experience which are otherwise hidden or off limits. The only difference is that comedy is supposed to make us laugh, while art is supposed to make us think. We ask a lot of art these days. Art must generate crowds and be Instagrammable yet anti-spectacular, universal yet site specific, topical yet timeless, political yet poetic. Art must touch on everything and with its magical MacGyver fingers make everything better. Stand-up teachers often tell their students that the most important question for a comedian to ask when writing jokes is: ‘What’s wrong?’ What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with the world? What’s wrong with X?
In 1970, Arthur Koestler wrote, ‘Dictators fear laughter more than bombs.’ Arthur Koestler did not write, ‘Dictators are very, very afraid of a research-based political artwork in a regional art centre which investigates, interrogates and a bunch of other words cribbed from the TV show Law & Order.’ (Although this might have been because Law & Order didn’t premiere until September 1990.)
In fact, Canadian sociologist Dr Willa Heim from McGill University put the consequentiality of political art to an empirical test. In 2015 she undertook a three-year study of social practice art in Berlin situated within major contemporary art spaces as well as within the public arena. Her research assistants watched and filmed the engagement of viewers with the artworks, conducted exit interviews with them about their experiences, and did three follow-up interviews spread out over a year afterwards. The findings should give MFA programmes and funding bodies major cause for doubt about the ameliorative claims of socially engaged art. The average viewing time of an individual social practice artwork, including videos, was 25.3 seconds, slightly less than the 27 seconds identified in a 2017 study of viewing time for ‘great works of art.’ When asked about the relatively short time of engagement, over three-quarters of the viewers said the works were less aesthetically appealing than other types of art. 81.9% of the viewers didn’t understand the point of the artwork, and 65% had no idea what the artwork was even about. Out of the 19.1% who understood the point of the artwork, 72.3% said the argument was facile and that the cause could have been better served with activism or an op-ed piece. In 95.2% of viewers, their attitudes concerning the issues and topics addressed by the artworks showed no change whatsoever over the course of three years. 87.6% of viewers never thought about the artwork again. And 93% of viewers laughed for a full 29 seconds (longer than they had viewed the art) when the exhibition text describing the claims of the artworks was recited to them.
Regarded as one of the most influential standup comedians of all time, Richard Pryor used humour to speak truth to power, highlighting police violence against black Americans.
Nº6 •
The Quickest Way to Shake up the Soul is through Laughter
What about the political efficacy of jokes? The amazing thing about jokes, as opposed to art, is that jokes actually fix things! Richard Pryor was the first comedian with a mass audience to direct a spotlight on brutally racist policing. The obscenity trials against comedians Lenny Bruce and George Carlin paved the way to statutory changes in the law allowing an expansion of free speech over the airwaves. The satirical Iraqi news show Albasheer Show, with tens of millions of viewers, had a major influence upon the protests of 2019–21. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a profound believer in the utter inutility of art, and a card-carrying defender of its right to exist in a plane of its own where higher forms of irrationality freely circulate and suck each other off behind a radioactive dumpster. The primary reason these comedians had an actual effect upon the world was because they had incomparably larger platforms than visual artists. But I side with Aristotle in thinking that the quickest way to shake up the soul is through laughter. Comedy is an incredibly powerful delivery mechanism to inject ideas into the system, especially when those ideas might be too hard to digest in a less sparkling form. The main purpose of this section has been simply to throw some salt on that slug which has been sliming up the thought waves of the artworld with the idea that ‘serious’ art does things and needs to do things, and entertainment is, well, just
entertainment.
Nº7 •
The ‘K’ Sound: Fuck, Suck, Crap, Cunt, Cock
There’s been much discussion about the intrinsic comedic value of hard consonants such as the letters ‘c’ and ‘k’, and how the ‘k’ sound in words is this little spike, which, depending on its housing and application, can either traumatise or tickle. Some of the English language’s most sexually explicit and offensive words contain this sound – fuck, suck, crap, cunt, cock; ethnic slurs – spic, kike, chink, gook; and, as a prominent playwright pointed out, some of our silliest words – pickle, chicken and cucumber; and even the word ‘joke’ itself. A 2004 study at the University of Hertfordshire found that, in jokes, the duck is the funniest animal. Evolutionary psychologists explain that the ‘k’ sound is the most frightening because it is closest to that of objects being struck – lightning, rocks against bone – and connotes impending danger. And perhaps laughter occurs when a threat is realised to be fake. This aligns perfectly with the benign violation theory, which I didn’t bother explaining before because you all can Google it.
We’ve initiated a contest here at Extra Extra to see who can come up with the funniest joke which ends with the word ‘kayak.’ The winner will be announced in the next issue, and will win a kayak-shaped vibrator. Please email your results to kayakjoke@extraextramagazine.
Nº8 •
What is an experimental joke?
What is experimental comedy or, more specifically, the experimental joke? First, let’s establish what the experimental joke is not. An experimental joke is not simply an anti-joke, whose humour is derived from intentionally not supplying a typically funny punchline or resolution. An experimental joke is not a deskilled joke, by which we mean something in which the joke teller presents a critical and/or superior posture to the basic craft of joke telling, the underlying belief being that the concept, perspective or ‘voice’ of the comedian is more important than the delivery, and so either by faux-naivete or true lack of skill, the comedian tells wink-wink sloppy, casual or lazy jokes, impressions, etc. The experimental joke is also distinct from the meta-joke, i.e. the joke which comments upon its construction and mechanics. So, what then is the experimental joke?
The experimental joke is one which conducts an experiment on the form, content, presentation/performance and/or affective outcome of the joke and/or joke-act. I’ve described it before as ‘the injection of the sublime, the blatantly inscrutable, the abstract, the primal, the choreographic, the theoretical, the improbable, the generative, the post-rhythmic, the turbo-stupid, etc., into the frame of stand-up.’ There are, of course, degrees of experimentality in jokes as in any art form, as well as experiments which generate illuminating, consequential, pleasing results and those which don’t. While covering an electric guitar in antelope tartare and feeding it to a pack of jackals might be a new way to produce sound, it is not necessarily interesting to listen to. Just as telling a joke where every other word is cartilage might be linguistically novel, it cartilage does cartilage not cartilage make cartilage for cartilage a cartilage fun cartilage night cartilage out.
In The Act of Creation (1964), Arthur Koestler delivers a luminous commentary on the processes of imagination and creativity in humour, science and the arts. While the more contemporary The Humor Code (2014) by Joel Warner and Peter McGraw aims, through social experiment, to shed light on what makes us laugh and why.
Nº9 •
The Difference between jokes, poetry and invention
Hedy Lamarr, Austrian film star of the 1940s, drafted inventions in her spare time, one of which, ‘frequency hopping,’ ended up being indispensable to modern-day wireless communication. She was not known for being a particularly funny woman; however, the tools of the comedian are very similar to those of the inventor. Both the inventor and the comedian look at the way the world works and then fiddle with its variables until it either works easier or stranger. They use thought tools or heuristics like exaggeration, reversal and feature addition, applying the logic of one situation to that of another, to make either smart phones or banana phones.
Discussing Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation (1964) in their 2014 book The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny, authors Warner and McGraw write that Koestler believed the ‘clash of two mutually incompatible codes’ wasn’t just about making jokes. He saw it as the recipe behind many other forms of human creation, from scientific innovation to artistic genesis. As he writes, when two planes of reasoning intersect, ‘the result is either a collision resulting in laughter, or their fusion in a new intellectual synthesis, or their confrontation is an aesthetic experience.’ This aligns with Lautréamont’s famous line about ‘the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella,’ which was one of André Breton’s favourite examples of the mechanics of Surrealism. Both poetry and humour employ incongruity as a device. I used to think the difference was that in jokes incongruity is the focal device and is typically resolved at the punchline, whereas in poetry ambiguities are allowed to proliferate. However, psychologist Rod Martin, author of The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach (2006), writes, ‘Punch lines are a mechanism in jokes that allow another schema to be activated. You have these two incompatible schemas activated at the same time, and you have to look at the same situation from two different points of view.’ So, then, does the difference come down to the amount of incompatibility, and the degree to which that incompatibility violates propriety and sense? Is a rose is a rose is a rose is a cartilage hack job in the back seat of a kayak?