Paul Aimard, Pedopsychiatre, Universite Claude Bernard, Lyon, France

 Humor is iconoclastic whenever it tackles the mighty ones, the great ones, the power or sacredness and its pictorial representations. Humor is the weapon used by the weak or the oppressed people who manage to meet more than their match without endangering. This is the way for the humble folk to cock a snook at the great one. We define our question as follows: at what stage of the infant development can one detect the premise of this iconoclastic humor? We can discover its traces since the first year of life before its manifestations become more dicernible from 18 to 20 months of age through ambivalent behavioral interactions. In aggressive-devensive responses, the infant throws down the habits, jeopardizes the cultural corner-stones to become, for a short while, the master of the game. The smallest one, the one who must obey or is supposed to do so, may also appear the cutest one, as in fables and tales. We follow the developing stages of this "humor - art of living" for Virginie (8 months old), Baptiste (15 months old), Etienne (18 months old) and Elsa (20 months old).

Richard John Alexander, Trier University, Germany

The analysis of verbal humour presented in this paper is situated within a framework which views language as a sociosemiotic system (Halliday 1978). Humour potential at language users' disposal is determined by the specific options of the sociocultural system into which they have been socialized. Despite such a seeming 'limitastion' part of the paper addresses the analytical necessity for a common denominator in cross-cultural studies of humour. Humans are capable of acquiring and appreciating humour patterns from 'outside their social semiotic'. This is a desirable educational objective (Alexander 1982). In the first part of the paper English-language material is illustrated and allocated to different lexico- grammatical levels. The close interlocking with sociocultural parameters is evident so that much humorous discourse seems comprehensible purely from within the human and social sociosemiotic where it is generated. The second part compares and contrasts German material with English. In conclusion, claims for the universality of humour have to be relativized: clearly, different peoples and speech communities laugh at different things and their humour proceeds in different ways. At the same time, by adopting a 'linguistic' vantage point, features of humour which might be thought to be linguistically specific to a language like English can be shown to have a more general application and to be present in other speech communities. So it appears as though we can, after all, have our cake and eat it.

 References:

 Alexander, R.J. 1982. Verbal humour: it's implications for the second
language teacher and learner. Grazer Linguistische Studien 10, 7-16.

 Halliday, M.A.K. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic. London:
Edward Arnold.

Nina Moller Anderson, University of Copenhagen

 Danes are often accused of using irony that is incomprehensible to foreigners. Is this typical for Danes, or is the problem intercultural? By using Bachtin's foreign word theory I want to find an answer to this question. Irony is constituted on ambiguity, and this ambiguity can be explained through Bachtin's theories about the dialogic word. An important (and in literary criticism often underestimated part of the dialogic word) is the foreign word (cuzoe slovo). I want to show that the key to understanding why we misinterpret irony is the different interpretations of the other's (in the Bachtinian sense) foreign words. I will illustrate this theory with examples from classic Danish literature (H. C. Anderson), comparing them with their translations.

Salvatore Attardo, Youngstown State University, Department of English, Youngstown Ohio, USA
 
 

The paper will review the advances in linguistics-based humor research, primarily in the last decade, but with some discussion of earlier research, and then, based upon the evaluation of these contributions to humor research, it will assess the position of linguistics-based humor research as a gateway in the interdisciplinary field of humor. The discussion will be concerned with various functions of linguistics in humor research:

• 1) as a methodological guideline (for example in the study of ambiguity-based humor or in puns), in which its function is that of preventing unsuspecting scholars from committing methodological errors that may affect the validity of their conclusions in fields other than linguistics.
• 2) as the promulgator of significant theoretical claims, which other disciplines have to either accept or challenge, but to which they cannot remain indifferent, since they define a paradigm of research (for example the Semantic Script Theory of Humor, and its recent broadened revision the General Theory of Verbal Humor, with its potential implications for disciplines ranging from literature to folklore).
• 3) as a player in the arena, on equal footing with other disciplines, in a give-and-take of theoretical and methodological suggestions (for example the studies on the taxonomy of humor).

Anna Banana, Banana Productions

 Because the thrust of mail art is communication and exchange rather than the creation of art-historically correct or saleable art objects, mail art is more issue oriented than much "gallery art." Given these motivations, mail art is "outsider art," critical, outspoken, playful, irreverent. Mail artists address themselves to many issues; environment, racism, war, consumerism, sexism, as well as the art establishment itself. While some lean in the direction of serious critique, many poke fun at their targets through visual humor, parody and satire. There is often an element of simply "having fun" in mail art: something that is barely tolerated in the big A art world. This practice both creates and reflects a change in attitude about art making. One that could effectively be applied in many walks of life, as becomes obvious as the beneficial effects of humor are charted in both business and healing communities. While mail art has been practiced for 30+ years, it is little known outside its field of practitioners (several thousand internationally at any given time) because of its modus operandi; the exchange, via the mail of letters, postcards, collages, rubber-stamped art, publications, etc. i.e., a network of artists finding an inter-active audience for their works outside the gallery system, outside the market place. Mail art shows are occasionally reviewed, wth the press often belittling the activity as mere pen-palism, considering it of no more significance than a hobby. Although mail art is pursued without thought of financial gain, practitioners believe it to be an art form because they are engaged in creative, often critical expression, free from the restraints one knuckles under to, when vying for recognition in the capital A art world. Mail art emerged out of the Fluxus movement and Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence School, both of which were influenced by Black Mountain College and the conceptual, Dada and Futurist movements. Major trends or values in mail art are inclusiveness, process over product, communication, spontaneity, collaboration, and the appropriation of business technologies such as photo copy, instant print, rubber stamps, stickers, computers, fax and networking. Business identities and popular cultural forms are often parodied, with artists using names like the "Buey Scouts of Amerika," FILE, VILE, BILE, and SMILE Magazines, A-1 Waste Paper Co, N.W. Mounted Valise, etc.

Robert Barshay, Prince George's Community College

 An overview of a law school education from the vantage point of a middle-aged, educated man, one cognizant of good and bad teaching, and appreciative of the role of wit and irony in all things, is bound to be humorous, given the inherent constraints of legal thinking and legal writing. As one who went back to school to earn a Juris Doctor at the age of 44, I will write about some of the most absurd lectures I have heard, some of the most silly encounters I have experienced, some of the most grandiose hubris I have witnessed, and some of the poorest teaching techniques I have observed perpetuated on some of the most abused students I have sympathized with. In the process of condemning with a light touch many egregious abuses that commonly occur at a typical law school, I will attempt to suggest that law schools fail at good teaching and good lawyering most frequently when they take themselves too seriously, when they lack a sense of humor, and when they lose what they boast so proudly that good legal thinking is all about, a sense of proportionality.

John S. Batts, English Department, University of Ottawa, OTTAWA, Ontario, Canada.

This paper will explore the ways in which the humor of a radio-comedy artist translates into literary humor (British style) mainly through an examination of Sir Harry Secombe's autobiography, Arias and Raspberries (1989). This versatile member of Britain's long-running and once enormously popular BBC-radio programme, "The Goon Show," is the focus of a comparison which explores the similarities and gaps between the aural humor of the Fifties' broadcasts and the ostensible literary humor of his autobiographical work. The primary materials include some BBC tapes of the original "Goon Show" which featured the voices and characterizations of Secombe (for examples, as Major Bloodknock, and Neddy Seagoon); then in addition to his autobiography there are to be surveyed other prose works of a humorous kind, such as Goon for Lunch (1975) and Goon Abroad (1982). The standard and changing repertoire of his humorous ploys will be examined alongside the prose strategies for generating humor.

Barbara Hall Baxter, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

 This presentation is designed as an overview of comic cartooning, an area of purposely expressed humor, with special regard to female creators in this particular field. The comic cartooning field has historically been male dominated. We ask, "Why?" Is it because in the beginning days of comic cartooning, cartooning required the extra physical strength usually attributed to the male members of society? Did mega muscle power enable beefy boys to manuever mighty black ink pens over sheets of virginal white paper, while the "little woman" stayed home steaming broadcloth shirts with a mangle iron? Perhaps the current day workforce woman has increased her strength through aerobic classes and female muscles have now bulked up enough to rise to the call of comic cartooning thus showing their female flex as they bench press black felt tip markers and hoist paper, sheet by sheet, onto the drawing board. While early on in male dominated society some fields of endeavor like, raising the drawbridge, chariot races or stretching someone on the rack, required brute strength, I believe it's safe to assue comic cartooning was not based on biceps. Far better to assume the dearth of female comic cartoonists is because until the 20th century women in any fine art medium went unrecognized. When, in the 1900's, women's art was recognized, women weretypically serious in their study and execution of subject matter through portraits, still life, pastoral scenes, and sculpture. Some few exceptions existed, including world famous female pottery artists from Rookwood Pottery who on occasion decorated the pottery with dancing frogs. Female comic cartoonists owe some of their rise to more women being in power positions of choosing cartoons to buy in the newspaper and magazine industry. Major features syndicates have also picked up on bringing women comic cartoon artists onboard. At this point the personal and professional lives of female comic cartoonists will be explored for information on how they got their jobs, why they got their jobs and the subject matter of their comic cartoons. The cartoonists include Dale Messick (Brenda Starr), Cathy Guisewite (Cathy), Nicole Hollander (Sylvia), Lynda Barry (Ernie Pook's Comeek), Kathryn Le Mieux (Lyttle Women), Gail Machlis (Quality Time), Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For), Barbara Brandon (Where I'm Coming From), Roz Chast (Bad Housekeeping), Mary Gauerke (Cartoons of the Hippies 1960's-1970's), Marisa Acocella (She), Nancy Drew (The Real Nancy Drew), Barbara Baxter (Yours Truly), and others. This overview of female comic cartoonists will conclude with a summary of the presented information.

Doris Bergen, Department of Educational Psychology, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio USA

 Previous study of young children's humor (Bergen) has indicated that the types of humor expressed follow stages that parallel development of cognitive structues (as outlined by Piaget and McGhee) and social-emotional strategies (as described by Freud). Young children's discovery of humor resulting from cognitive incongruity follows four stages of development and their ability to use humor as a facade for playful hostile, or sexual meansings begins in the preschool years. This presentation described the changes in these dimensions of humor gained from longitudinal study of seven children (4 male, 3 female) observed at two different time periods, three to five years apart. The differences in types of humor and in the structures and stategies used to express humor will be described and compared. Both observational and interview methods have been used to collect the study data.

Kim Binsted, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of
Edinburgh, Room C17, 80 South Bridge, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH1 1HN
E-mail: KIMB@AISB.EDINBURGH.AC.UK

The principal goal of the project is to explore the syntactic and semantic regularities underlying certain types of riddles by attempting to construct a program which can mechanically produce (a limited set of) riddles from a suitable knowledge base. Preliminary study of question-answer jokes (riddles) suggests that there are a number of definable subclasses of riddle which display a certain amount of regularity in the way that either the words/phrases or their meanings are related. We have selected four of these types as potentially feasible for algorithmic formalisation, and intend to explore these possibilities. The general strategy will be, initially, to attempt to show how existing examples display these patterns, by developing a small knowledge base, lexicon, and set of rules (and/or a sequential algorithm) which could in principle lead to the construction of these examples. Also, we shall start with one of the simpler classes, moving on to other subtypes depending on the findings there. Thereafter, the exploration will involve extending the knowledge base and lexicon, with a view to refining the rules and possibly generating novel examples. It is anticipated that the generation mechanism for each class will consist of some basic algorithm to which heuristic information can be added to guide the selection of lexical items or concepts. This work is very much intended to be experimental, in the AI sense --- we do not have a full theory of these phenomena, and the program design will be very much an exploratory exercise.

Jeannette A. Boman, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

 Folk wisdom has long held that laughter is beneficial to physical and psychological well being. However, humorous experience is a contextual issue where for any one particular time, place, and person, it can either be perceived as appropriate or inappropriate humor. Humorous experience perceived as being appropriate carries with it a positive connotation while that which is inappropriate, a negative one. In that humor can be a positive or negative phenomenon, all humorous experience will not necessarily be beneficial. In order for there to be physical and psychological benefits from humorous experience, it must first be perceived as being appropriate humor. However, perceptions regarding what constitutes appropriate humor vary and therefore it is not easy if even possible to predict how a particular humorous event will effect any one person at any one time. In spite of the ambiguity associated with the meaning and experience of appropriate humor, the therapeutic promise of appropriate humorous experience is appealing. Many health care practitioners in general and nurses in particular suggest that humor be "deliberately" cultivated and used as a health care intervention strategy. Given that humorous experience is often viewed as a spontaneous, intuitive activity, the question then becomes, "How does one deliberately plan for humorous experiences in health care settings?" The nursing literature addresses some of the philosophic issues associated with the production and appreciation of humor but more often than not most attention is paid to the use of practical techniques and props as triggers of humorous response. On one level this may seem an appropriate way for nurses to deliberately plan for humor in their practice care setting. However, an overemphasis on such humor-producing strategies can trivialize the meaning of humor as a therapeutic phenomenon and undermine the complex manner in which such experiences come about. With this concern in mind, in-depth interviews were carried out with five (5) nurses who by reputation were known to make effective use of humor in their practice. Life history methodology was employed as a way to explore their perceptions about their ability to effectively use humor in their interactions with others. The study findings are presented in the form of the common themes uncovered from the life stories and how they in turn relate to what is currently known about the development of humor production and appreciation abilities.

Ronald A. Bosco, State University of New York at Albany, USA

 Drawing evidence largely from his journals and topical notebooks, this paper proposes that Emerson not only possessed a sense of humor, but consciously sought out opportunities to define himself, illustrate his elusive thought, and embellish the character of his friends, intellectual and religious adversaries, and family members through expressions of wit and humor. In Notebook OP Gulistan, for example, Emerson collected over many years witty anecdotes by and about his large circle of friends--persons such as Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau, and the poets Jones Very and Ellery Channing--which survive as his means to humanize subjects who, in the 1850s as well as today, arguably test the patience and good will of many readers. Although OP Gulistan is rare for the purpose for which Emerson kept the notebook, in many formerly private writings contained in the JOURNALS AND MISCELLANEOUS NOTEBOOKS and TOPICAL NOTEBOOKS series, Emerson extended his practice to serve as a commentary on himself and his thought. RONALD A. BOSCO is Distinguished Service Professor of Amercian Literature at the State University of New York at Albany, and editor of volumes in the editions of Emerson's JOURNALS AND MISCELLANEOUS NOTEBOOKS, COLLECTED WORKS, COMPLETE SERMONS, and TOPICAL NOTEBOOKS.

Marlena Braester, Haifa Unviersity, Israel

 In this paper we examine two phenomena: irony - that is not an essentially verbal phenonemon - and language, through their "interference" and reciprocal impact in discourse. Irony will be exclusively analyzed within language mechanisms. We focus our analysis on the role of language structures in the functioning of irony as well as on the effect of irony on the creative power of language itself. Since irony is not only a "figure of thought," but also a "figure of speech," irony analysis is a way of exploring the possibilities of the language from the point of view of its expressiveness. We found that language structures play a decisive role in the ironic discourse. Using irony, we make, in fact, a non-conventional use of the language. In other words, we make a rhetoric use of both language and irony. In most cases, the purpose of ironic discourse is derision, which is obtained by means of a distorted argumentation process. We bring evidence that irony is this misleading, distorted kind of argument structured by linguistically distorted mechanisms. Concepts like "ironic sign," "lexical antilogy" are discussed and we find that irony is not always a lexical antilogy but it always is an argumentative antilogy. A shift in the definition of irony is therefore necessary from the strictly lexical field to the argumentation strategies field. The word play (on a phonetic, or a morpho-syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic basis) illustrates in the most colorful way the language/irony interaction.

Mitzi Brunsdale, Mayville State University, Mayville, ND

 Women writers have successfully created detective fiction since the genre began, and today, women write about one-third of all mystery novels published. The publishing rage of the '90s is "cozy" murder fiction, preferably starring canny female protagonists, graced with delicious - and often wicked - humor. The popularity of women's mystery fiction derives from its ability to give readers what they want. As the contemporary story evolves from a puzzle of time, place, motive, and opportunity, to a puzzle of character, many women writers stress social comedy, "the ambiguities and oddities of human behavior" over "the strict attention to plot that was necessary" in earlier detective fiction. An examination of exemplary works by Charlotte McLeod, Joan Hess, Jane Haddam, and Elizabeth Peters indicates that as responses to an increasing complex and threatening society, humorous mystery fiction written by women with an optomistic world view succeeds through the female ability to observe and weld tiny and multitudinous detail into a satisfying whole; to sublimate female aggression, more subtle and more verbal than the male variety; and to exorcise female fears by laughing at them and the forces that cause them; in novels which celebrate with salvific humor "some living pattern of rightness that fits our time."

Pieter De Bruyn, Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education (afnpsdb@puknet.puk.ac.za)

 Jokes are special types of texts. They do not communicate something about the real, existing world like some types of texts do, because they are worlds in themselves. These units of discourse consist of two components: a build up and a punch line, the latter being the source of humour, mainly because it possesses elements of surprise. Although mostly fiction, jokes do make use of an element of truth, or at least some common knowledge. Jokes are speech acts, acts of humour with the perlocutionary effect in mind to amuse. When applying characteristics of a successful text, jokes are recognised as fitting the description. As in the case of other literature, jokes can be described as fiction because they are also special expressions with well-defined conventions. These special types of texts are spontaneously recognized for what they are. When those elements distinguishing jokes as such are removed, the effect jokes have are cancelled. These removed elements are thereby proved to be essentialities. The element of surprise, caused by the condensation of several meanings in the punch line, seems to be of vital importance here. Jokes are intended to amuse. They are consciously told with this purpose in mind and are noticed because of that. It will be argued, using appropriate examples, that these special effects are achieved by means of the principle of interest and the exploitation of pragmatic means are used to attain this.

Louis J. Budd, Duke University, Durham, NC

 One reason for Mark Twain's continuing popularity during his lifetime is that he kept adjusting his persona to fit his age as well as his actual career. So, at about the right time, he started facing up to getting old. His bankruptcy in 1894 and the deaths of a daughter in 1896 and his wife in 1904 were emotional blows with physical results. But the gala banquet for his 70th birthday in 1905 moved him to declare himself irredemably old. Though several recent biographers have presented that old Twain as semi-alcoholic, embittered and losing control privately, he publicly confronted old age with psychically supportive humor. As usual for Twain, that humor ranged widely and boldly. Defying both the ninetheenth-century stereotypes of the "beautiful death" and the rising taboo on discussing death as inevitable for everyone, he joked about physical decay. He ridiculed the making of wills that try to achieve some kind of terrestrial immortality. He yarned about prearranging a showy funeral for himself. He marketed a newspaper piece about running a contest which awarded a prize for the best prospective obituary of him. Less funereally, he developed a series of contrahumble responses to the superlative heaped upon him. Bitter over American imperialism, Twain blamed his own generation most. Though in his pose of venerable sage he condescended toward youthfull brashness, he continued to admire vitality, resilience, and energy. Four published texts contrast firmly with Twain's much discussed late writings that he left either unfinished or unpublished. "Chapters from My Autobiography" (1906-07) held a serene, drolling, and genially life affirming tone. "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Vist to Heaven" (1907) rejected a bustling physical immortality for a mellowed, always accumulating wisdom. "The New Planet" (1909) joked about the imminence of his death but also about the fallibility of supposedly seasoned experts. Published two months before Twain's death, "The Turning Point of My Life," instead of conducting a solemn retrospection, parodied the conventional pattern. By keeping much of his instinctive hilarity and remaining socially engaged, Twain offered a model for coping with old age and therefore maintained his ideal of a constructive function for humor, which he had slowly learned to regard as a self respecting genre of literature and even of analytic thought.

Dora Burton, Arizona State University

 In one of his best known and beloved short stories, "Dushechka" ("The Darling," 1898), Chekhov paints a portrait of a young, attractive and seemingly kindhearted, loving and devoted woman whose sympathetic image protects her from criticism by the other characters. In short, as seen by the others in the story, she is incapable of doing wrong. What is unique about her in Chekhov's gallery of women's portraits is her utter inability to have opinions of her own: she must depend entirely on the object of her devotion at the time. Like a sponge, she absorbs and then gives forth their ideas, however contradictory they may appear. Tolstoy and some of Chekhov's critics see this story as "the artistic miracle which turned a satirical vignette into a noble human image". Tolstoy, the great admirer of this "charming" story, belives that Chekhov, when he began to write this story, "wanted to show what a woman ought not to be," but that in the process "had to throw his beliefs overboard." Consequently, according to Tolstoy, what Chekhov viewed as undesirable in women, eveolved into a "wonderful and holy" portrait of a woman. It has been acknowledged that Tolstoy, whose views on women's emancipation ran contrary to those of Chekhov, "had an axe to grind." He may hav found this character, as he interprets it, very useful in order to proselytize his own vision of the ideal woman. Thus to Tolstoy, the most important feature of this story isthe unexpected development of a ridiculous and comic character into "a vision of beauty and truth." As we dissect the story, we may learn that Chekhov - always the doctor - may have presented in this charming tale a case of pathological dependence where the dependent character, the amiable Dushechka, "cannibalizes" her partners, the objects of her love, and at the end, comes out as a poignant figure. She is denied the joy of motherhood and is "condemned" to live in fear that the object of her last and most profound devotion, the child left in her care, may suddenly, without a warning, be gone, recalled by his mother. We guess that she would not survive his absence. Thus, a stock comic situation (as it may have appeared) acquires the dimension of human tragedy. But contrary to the opinion of Tolstoy, Chekhov - always the artist - is in complete control of his material. What Chekhov shows us is that the ridiculous may, at its core, be ruinous, pernicious, toxic, no matter how charming the owner of the trait. And the possessor of the trait may be its final, greatest victim.

Bernard Chanfrault, University of Tours, France

 I would like to analyze, from a semiotic and pragmatic standpoint, the Nouvelles en trois lignes by Felix Feneon, a French "fin de siecle" intellectual, whose biography is well known by the English-speaking public thanks to the works of Joan U. Halperin. This "small form in prose" (Florence Delay) is to be characterized by its shortness and concision, as an art of ellipsis mainly based on an implicit discourse producing humor and irony. It appears like a "minimal narrative structure," which presents some specific narrative features. I would especially examine, on the figurative level, the dominant motifs. In order to parody J. L. Austin, I would like to point out that the enunciator, playing with the polysemy of the word nouvelle in French ("short story" and "news"), is showing us how to do (plays on) words with things (i.e., the reality of the news). According to the Feneon's anarchistic vision of the world, the "fait-divers," out of context, is completely "derealized" and leads to the nonsense. I would also try to show that Feneon's humor is caused by a special treatment of the information, infringing the rules of communication (specially by an infringement of Grice'sconversational maxims about quantity, quality, relation and manner). Finally, we could verify that humor and irony, unlike the comic, are to be found mainly in the enunciation process, rather than in the utterance. They are the result of the distance instituted between enunciation and utterance, implicit and explicit, signifier and signified. Specially for the irony, that Feneon handles in a destructive way, in order to disturb the enunciatee.

Donald Casadonte, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA

 In modeling most phenomena in nature the first thing which is usually done is to define the variables (usually observable or measurable quantities) to be used in the modeling process. In humor theory such attempts have only just begun (although studies in the psychology of humor are more developed in this regard). In this paper we examine the role of physical observables in both taxonomic and nomenclatural aspects of humor. Physical observable is a term broadly used here to define any semi-quantifiable aspect of the structure or dynamics of humor. In the development of a taxonomy, most attempts in other disciplines rely on observable markers related to the structure of the objects being classified (in botany, for instance, the number of leaves per stem is such an example). In the case of humor structure, such things as the interval before the joke starts, the principal participants in the joke, the triggering event, etc., are all at least semi qualifiable aspects of a joke which may be used as markers related to the structure of a given joke, and hence used to define a taxonomy on the set of such observables. The markers involved in the dynamics behind the unfolding a joke have, to date, received no systematic nomenclature from humor experts. We shall suggest some terminologies based on the physical observable aspects of the dynamics involved in the process of humor which will hopefully be of use for the sake of both economy and scholarly discourse. Finally, when a joke or humorous event occurs, perception is split between two or more different states which involve the projection of physical observables from one "state space" to another "state space" via an automorphic operator or transformation. We shall develop a graph theoretic way to represent the "state space" and the "dual state space" inhabited by the two different states of the physical observables in a joke, resulting in a discrete structure graph for each joke. We shall comment on the classes of such joke graphs as they relate to the dynamics of different types of jokes.

Wladyslaw Chlopicki, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland.

 This is the continuation and extension of the hypothesis expressed in the paper read at the Paris conference in 1992. The project is based on the analysis of a large corpus of mainly Polish and English-language jokes, but also some German and French ones, along the lines suggested in the above paper. From the corpus I have excluded simple one-liners, and focus on more complex jokes with clearly distinguishable settings and punch lines. I believe that the world of the joke turns around human characters, which thus cannot be left out of the analysis. The General Theory of Verbal Humor advocated recently by S. Attardo and V. Raskin (1991) consists of six linearly-ordered components, called Knowledge Resources (KR's): script opposition, logical mechanism, situation, target, narrative strategy and language. While I consider this extension of the script-based theory important and valuable, I feel that in one respect the theory could be questioned. Since Attardo and Raskin claim that their theory would require revision if it turned out it needed a new KR (1991: 328), I would like to pursue this aim. The only KR which involves human characters is "target", and I would argue that the classification of a joke as Polish, Jewish etc. is sometimes not enough from the point of view of analysis, and we need to attribute the joke-initial and joke-final frames (perhaps in Minsky's sense) to the characters involved, in order to account for their dynamic, non-binary relationships. The logical mechanism is certainly helpful here, although e.g. the figure-ground reversal (even together with 5 other KR's) does not always explain the humorous switch well enough. The fact that for me the theory lacks an additional component, could stem from the orientation of my analyses towards humor reception, which seems to me to revolve around character-frame structures. I discuss primarily "social" jokes (e.g. male/female, children, doctors, policemen, mothers-in-law, bosses, lawyers, and shopping jokes), but also political and ethnic jokes. I do not want to claim that every joke is analysed best by means of character frames, but I do argue that a great number of "social jokes" and some ethnic and political ones as well lose part of their meaning when approached in the orthodox script-based fashion.

References:

Attardo, Salvatore and Victor Raskin. 1991. Script theory
revis(it)ed: Joke similarity and joke representation model.
Humor, 4(3/4). p. 293-347

Chlopicki, Wladyslaw. 1992. The complexity of verbal jokes:
Raskin's theory revisited. Paper read at 10th International
Humor Congress in Paris.

Jacqueline Chossiere, Universite de CAEN, France

 Very few studies have dealt with this question. This paper summarizes four previous experiments. It investigaes invariables and changes modifying the content and the structure of the perception of Humor in accordance with various data: the form of Humor (verbal or postural), the cultural background (USA, Quebec, France), the creativity and affinities.

Wilburn R. Clouse, Vanderbilt University &;Resources, Inc.

 This paper will report on the humor of certain administrators with identifiable administrative styles. School principals who are judged to be in effective schools will be the recipients of this research. Through the use of video tape, the observed use of humor will be compared to administrative style.

Christie Davies, University of Reading, Whiteknights, Reading, England

 Many peoples in the world are the butt of stupidity jokes told by one of their neighbors, or in the case of ethnic minorities by the majority of people. Thus the Irish are the butt of such jokes in Britain, the Newfies in Ontario, the Ukrainians in Western Canada, the Poles in the USA, the Ostfrieslanders in Germany, Portuguese in Brazil, the Gallegos (i.e., from Galacia in Spain) in Argentina, the Pastusos from Narino in Columbia, the Rashtis in Iran and so on. The Belgians, however, are a rare (though not unique) case; they are the butt of stupidity jokes in three countries, i.e., in France, in the Netherlands and in Luxembourg. The reaseons for this are not economic for Belgium has been an economically advanced country since at least the early 19th century and does not supply neighboring countries with unskilled workers. Indeed Belgium receives immigrants because of its sophisticated economy. Rather the reasons are social, or to be more precise linguistic, political-historical and religious. Belgium has no unique language of its own and is divided by the languages of two of its neighbors. Flemish is close to Dutch and the Waloons speak French. From the point of view of the Dutch and the French, the Belgians speak a "stupid" version of their own language and indeed Belgians look to the Netherlands or to Paris for the "correct," "modern," "sophisiticated" version of their own language. Even the brilliant Hercule Poirot wished to learn "proper" French. The accidental nature of Belgium's frontiers, its late creation as a nation and the tension between its two linguistic communities also reiforce the stupidity jokes as does its Roman Catholicism (in contrast to historically Calvinist Holland and the secular republicanism of France). Catholics are more likely to be the butt of stupidity jokes as in the case of the Irish, Poles, Slovaks, Portuguese, Pastusos, etc. whereas Calvinists tend to be the butt of canny (crafty and stingy) jokes as in Belgian jokes about the Dutch. It might be worth noting that the other main group to be the butt of stupidity jokes in more than one country, namely the Sikhs (Sardarji jokes), are a people defined in religious terms. I presume (and would welcome local comments) that the Luxembourgers' fondness for jokes about Belgians is largely pragmatic but congruent with the above analysis.

Jessica Milner Davis, University of New South Wales

 Among the principal comic drives, the conflict between "Youth and Crabb'd Age" is well established. But in today's permissive climate, what does youth have to rebel against? Does the joking dissipate as authority diminishes? Contemporary popular comedy presents new forms of youthful hero, and its script-writers (from Nigel Molesworth to Matt Groenig, via Australian TV comedy) reveal the secret weapons of childhood's revenge in AD 2001. Text and video will enliven this analysis, so bring your pinafores.

Peter Derks1, Lynn Gillikin2, Debbie Bartolome2 &;Edward Bogart2. (1College of William &;Mary; 2Lockheed Engineering &;Sciences Co.),
USA.

 Derks, Gillikin, and Bogart (1990) reported the electroencephalographic activity of a single individual when the individual was laughing. In keeping with the predictions of McGhee (1983) and Grumet (1989), neuroelectric potentials related to the event of laughing showed a positive wave at about 300 msec (P300) followed by a negative wave at approximately 400 msec (N400). This neural activity has been found to correspond to "attention" and the "recognition of incongruity" (VanPetten &;Kutas, 1990). The present study was an attempt to replicate and refine these results. Jokes that pivoted on the final word or phrase were selected. These jokes were presented visually with the participant controlling the presentation of the "punch line". In each of two sessions an elated or a depressed mood was induced by the Velton (1968) technique. These participants were also connected to a Cadwell Spectrum-32 topographical Brain Mapper with 21 electrodes recording electrical activity according to the international 10-20 system. At the initiation of the punch-line by the participant, an electronic marker indicated the beginning of an event-related potential response. Recordings from the zygomaticus muscle were used to estimate the occurrence of laughter. So far, nine subjects have been sufficiently responsive or have not had their data misappropriated by the computer and could be analyzed. Following depression induction, laughter tended to be less intense than following elation. The event-related potential responses differed slightly following different emotions with depression leading to an early (50-100 ms.) and slight negative wave. In either case, laughter at a joke was accompanied by the N400 incongruity wave and a joke that did not get a laugh was not.

Laura Donohue, University of East Anglia, UK

 This paper applies formalist, linguistic and reader-response methods of textual analysis to selected Bertie Wooster and Jeeves novels by P.G. Wodehouse, examining the unique character and energy ofthe textual performance and the system of narrative strategies and verbal devices which produces it. It pays particular attention to what Wodehouse called his "big scenes," where characters are "on stage" acting out theatrical and social roles, i.e., Gussie Fink Nottle's often anthologized, drunken awards-ceremony speech at Market Snodsbury Grammar School, from Right Ho, Jeeves; the village concert scene from The Mating Season; and the "clean, bright entertainment for local toughs," from "Jeeves and the Song of Songs," in Very Good, Jeeves. I examine how Wodehouse creates (1): the "performers" in these scenes; (2): the performances themselves, as parodies and pastiches of quotations, allusions, and idioms from cultural sources high and low; and (3): the internal audiences who assume the status of performers in their own right, with power to applaud or condemn what happens on stage. Wodehouse's narratives are largely linguistic performances--comedies of expression--where character is defined by voice and action is propelled by speech, and where action is, very often, verbal re-action. Dialogue, either between Bertie Wooster and other characters, or between Bertie as narrator and his "listener/spectator/reader audience," accounts for most of the foregrounded activity of the text. The dramatic structure of the narratives maximizes the occasion for verbal performance, creating, often simultaneously, the sense of both showing and telling--a live, active performance by characters "on stage," and the equally energetic performance act of storytelling by the narrator, who creates a sense of immediacy and engagement with his listener/audience through skaz. Performance in Wodehouse is a complex illusion of linguistic display, shaped within dramatic structures, which transcends some limitations of theatrical and oral performance through techniques of the written text. In seeking to define performance and theatricality in this comic writer's fiction, this paper adopts a position between reader and text in order to explore not only how the texts are made, but how an awareness of a reader-audience motivates how they are made. Modern narratology argues that all texts, even those which seek to create the illusion of realism are "performances"--the "site of interactions" between reader and author. But the deliberately artificial, non-realist comic narratives of P.G. Wodehouse are performances in a far more literal sense than is generally implied by this notion of "contract" between reader and writer. Audience awareness and the dual burdens and benefits of audience expectation are at the very root of the comic form, and in Wodehouse are built into every level of the text, from covert shaping structures, to the tematising of linguistic performance, to the artfully crafted illusion of collaboration between text and reader. This paper argues that the narratives rely for their effect not only upon a display of verbal style and upon characterization and dramatic construction which maximizes the occastion for verbal display, but upon a thematic preoccupation with language and performance, so that the source of much of its comedy is not only its stylistic devices and dramatic situations, but the text's ironic commentary upon itself- the self-reflexive jokes with which it proclaims its artificiality and its artfulness. This is accomplished largely by making fiction the subject of fiction: making the conventions of comedy into the subject of comedy. The deliberately frivolous Jeeves and Wooster narratives offer comment on, not human affectation, so much as human affecttion interpreted through fictions. It is other fictions, not life, which are the platform for Wodehouse's "artificial comedy;" and comicality is served through the practice of transformation strategies which constantly remove reference from the real to the realm of language, other fictions, and performance itself, within a seemingly self-contained, but culturally embracing and culturally critiquing, theater of linguistic play and display.

Emil A. Draitser, Hunter College of the City University of New York

 In this paper, an attempt will be made to analyze contemporary Russian sexual jokelore from psychological and sociological points of view. Freud's notion that sexual jokes represent a medium of expression of deepest conscious and unconscious sexual feelings and insecurities will be accepted as a basis of this study. Russian sexual jokes, proverbs, sayings and everyday expressions will be discussed in terms of sexual behavior, the relationship between the sexes, and the problems that this relationship deals with. A sharp contrast between the elevated image of a Russian woman in Russian literature and a rather callous and denigrating depiction of her in private jokes, sayings and everyday language can be partially explained by the fact that, as a product of high culture, Russian literature by and large promotes the vital, for a matrilinal society, female image. The concept of Sacred Rus' had been kept alive through practically the whole length of Russian history. Another matter are jokes told in the privacy of all-male company; they mostly serve as an "exhaustion pipe" of the sexual and emotional frustration of Russian males. Besides primordial antagonism between the sexes, the denigrating attitude toward Russian women in these jokes also reflects male frustration over impotence due to rampant alcoholism, as well as powerlessness in a society in which, by and large, men have had power over women only. Centuries of serfdom and autocratic rule, replaced by an even more represive totalitarian regime, have forced Russian males to internalize their rage over their powerlessness; this rage is transferred on females. This also explains, in part, the proliferation or rape jokes and jokes about wife beating in contemporary Russian urban fokelore.

Hall Franklin Duncan, Director of Global Development, International Association for Humor in Motivation and Learning

 The author, Hall Duncan, has selected several effective examples of how teachers in Madang Provincial Schools are creating new instructional techniques using humour and fun to increase the learning of their pupils, particularly from remote rural areas, and who participate in multi-tribal classes. In particular, the subjects of mathematics, science, and operating a small business are discussed. The author points out some essential ways to test such teaching methods before using them in the classroom situation. Particular emphasis is made on involving a thorough understanding of sub-cultures under change in a new political and educational environment, and how humour and fun can alleviate stress in the Papua New Guinea classroom. The work for this presentation was done by Dr. Hall Duncan, who has done many years of work using humour in African literacy programmes, and served as consultant for in-service training to Papua New Guinea teachers in 1993.

We propose a paper that would show how ironic humor is key to constructing a subversive stance in the reading of patriarchal, technical discourse. A central theme in critical studies is explication of how the texts of popular culture are read. Increasingly, texts are regarded as sites of struggle, in which different readings serve ideological ends. An important dimension of reading a text is the subject position assumed by the reader in response to that text. Assumption of one subject position or another is therefore also an ideologically charged act of struggle over what texts mean. The authors are pursuing an ongoing research program of studying the ways in which spectatorship is a site of struggle over how to read televised sports, one of the most popular and motivating texts of popular culture. The authors have studied how a number of people watch televised sports, with an emphasis on football. In this paper, they propose to show a difference in the subject positions taken by two groups of spectators. One group, composed of exclusively or predominantly male spectators, appeared to take subject positions in support of a dominant ideology of patriarchy and competition when viewing televised football. A second, exclusively female group, however, actively engaged a subversive subject position for what appears to be the explicit project of undermining the preferred, patriarchal ideology of televised football. This paper is keyed to the centrality of ironic humor as the mechanism for that subversive reading. Although both groups displayed humor in their comments to one another, orin reactions to the broadcast, the types and uses of humor are clearly distinct. Nor was the heavy use of ironic humor by the all female group a defensive reaction to a program that was forced upon them; they intentionally sought out the program, evidently for the explicit purpose of subverting it with irony. The paper considers the larger implications of irony as the underpinning for a subversive subject position, particularly in struggling against readings of a technical discourse. Televised football is clearly technical; one must know, and one may display, a great deal of knowledge about the game, the players, strategies, equipment, and so forth. Irony allows the spectator to establish the credentials necessary to assume a credible subject position, yet maintains the "right" to undermine that credibility itself to serve ideological ends.

Giovannantonio Forabosco, Ravenna, Italy

 In the domain of humor the concept of complexity has been approached from various directions. Berlyne (1972) included it among the 'collective variables' together with novelty, surprisingness, ambiguity, rate of change, and incongruity, which all contribute to produce the 'hedonic value' of a stimulus. The research work by Zigler et al. (1967) led to the observation that a joke is best appreciated when there is a modern difficulty for comprehension, and to the formulation of the 'congruency principle': a higher humor response takes place when there is congruence between the level of complexity of the joke and the complexity of the receiver's cognitive strucutre. McGhee (1979) pointed out the importance of contemplating the quality of children's understanding of humor, rather than exclusively considering the approximation to a given standard. He also examined the relationship between the humor event and the developmental stage of the child. In this respect, it might be said that the complexity level of a stimulus depends on its being or not being syntonic with the stage. The concept of 'logical sophistication' (Raskin, 1990), offers an additional and particular possibility to evaluate the complexity of a joke, depending for instance on whether and to what extent it presents skipped logical links, to be reconstructed by the hearer/reader. A linguistic analysis of jokes was also introduced by Chlopicki (1992) who considered some intervening factors to establish the complexity of verbal jokes. On the basis of these previous analyses, the concept of subjective complexity is proposed to examine the issue from the perspective of the subject's congitive processing of a joke. The main points that have to be stressed are: (1) the level of subjective complexity corresponds to the degree of involvement and effort required; and this is determined by the cognitive demands posed by the joke, in relation to the cognitive abilities and conditions of the subject; (2) the involvement can be evaluated in terms of quantity and quality of the cognitive operations necessary to process the joke; (3) given the presence of the cognitive mastery by the subject (a sound, reliable, not too tiring comprehension), the higher the subjective complexity of the joke the higher the appreciation (the cognitive challenge as a source of humor enjoyment); (4) the dynamic aspects (content related) also need to be considered, as highly involving contents are likely to interfere with the information processing and render the joke more (or too) complex for a given subject.

Michael Freiss, University or Institution: Department of Physiological Psychology, Heinrich-Heine-University of Duesseldorf, Germany

In humor research there exists a great number of different methodological approaches to registrate and evaluate humor-specific reactions. This presentation will describe facial electromyography (EMG) as an elaborate and precise measurement approach for the recording of smiling and laughter. First there will be an overview of the studies of smiling and laughter utilizing facial EMG. This overview will be followed by a discussion of several methodological problems. Finally, a recent study - which demonstrates a new measurement concept - will be presented. In this experiment 18 subjects (9 males, 9 females) were exposed to 48 slides containing jokes or cartoons. The mimic reactions were registrated by the EMG-measurement of the zygomaticus major and the orbicularis oculi muscles. According to Ekman and Friesen (1978), a synchronized activity of these two muscles is typical for the "felt smile" (i.e., the only smile indicating positive emotions). Additionally, subjects rated the degree of funniness on seven point Likert scale. Several automized decision rules were developed and tested according to their ability to identify humor related EMG-patterns. The experiment yielded the following results:
 
 

• 1. There is a high reliability (gt 0.90) of the pattern recognition procedures.
• 2. The facial responses to humorous stimuli can be described very accurately by the use of new defined EMG-parameters.
• 3. Facial EMG adds some valuable facts to the knowledge about the responses to humorous stimuli (e.g., the duration of the reactions etc.).
• 4. Positive correlations between some EMG-parameters of smiling and laughter (e.g., duration and intensity) and the rated funniness emerged.

References:

 Ekman, P. &;Friesen, W.V. (1978). The Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.

William Fry, Stanford University, California.

 There are three major errors, or misperceptions, that are commonly made regarding humor. This presentation will discuss each of these errors, and will detail the ways in which the perception of humor is mistaken. The first error to be discussed is the view that humor is a gragile, emphemeral part of human life. There are many people who have both publically and privately expressed their concern that their sense of humor is weak or deficient, or that they were born without a sense of humor, or that they have lost their capacity for experiencing humor. A classic statement of that point of view was expressed by the poet, W.H. Auden, who erroneously warned that study of humor would kill it.The group of persons who consider that all humor is hostile and/or violent in tendancy, is almost as large - and certainly as mistaken - as that number with the "fragile" view. Predictably, these persons assume an inappropriately hostile attitude towards humor. In their defensive antagonism towards humor, they are dismayed and distressed by experiences in humor which are enjoyed by others not encumbered by their attitude. They are also deprived of a great source of pleasure and creativity available to others.The third sort of error commonly held, is the concept that humor and its related phenomena, mirth and laughter, are insignificant and trivial elements of life. This view, with its own special defensive quality, mistakes the quick, dynamic vitality of humor for flash-in-the pan inconsequentiality. Consequently, these persons consider studies of humor to be frivolous, and regard humor scholars as being inane or misguided dilettantes.All of these views of humor are in error, in specific and identifiable ways. These error of perception and interpretation will be detailed and examined in my presentation. Approaches to remediation of these pathologic viewpoints will be proposed.

Leonore Ganschow, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. USA

 The presenter describes the phonological difficulties experienced by children with language learning disabilities (dyslexia) and the effects this disability has on these children's perception of riddles involving phonological incongruities, such as the following: When do astronauts eat? ANS.: at launch time. The presentation also shows how phonological incongruities form the basis for much of the "disabled humor" relating to students with dyslexia. The presenter also discusses possible consequences of phonological difficulties on individuals with dyslexia. Suggestions are made for remediating the phonological deficits of individuals with dyslexia through "metalinguistic awareness" of language structure in order to assist them in appreciating humor involving phonological aincongruities, including their own mistakes.

Charles L. Geshekter.

 The British called Somalis "the Irish of Africa" for their great storytelling, love of poetry, and fierce resistance to any foreigner who tried to rule them.The Muslim Somalis are exceptionally verbal people for whom public speaking and expressive diction are preeminently important. A sense of humor, mental acuity and physical courage are skills which Somalis cultivate to cope with natural disasters and the constant mobility necessary for pastoralist success.The paper provides examples of Somali "jocular folktales" that deal with sexual indiscretions, inter-family jealousies and religious indifference. It includes urban jokes that mock nomadic naivete, nomadic stories about urban pretensions, and resistance satire and vulgar humor that flourished under the tyrannical regime of Mohamed Siyad Barre (1969-91).Bushwise and full of salty scorn, Somali humor helps nomads avoid dwelling on the uncertainties and maladies of pastoralism. It promotes a self-confidence, often indistinguishable from vanity. Somali humor praises equanimity but combines cynicism with compassion to acknowledge life's difficulties with a sense of irony and elements of twisted humor. A very disk or dying man, if simply asked "how are you?" might well respond: "I'm much better than those who are worse off than I am."The paper shows how Somalis resembled American cowboys who used humor as a form of entertainment and camaraderie for survival on isolated frontiers. A brief comparison is made with Irish humor since Somalis especially enjoy anti-authoritarian wit: "You can't tell a noble man a lie," quip Somalis, "because a noble man will not contradict you but will simply tell you a bigger lie."Given the precariousness of life in contemporary Somalia, humor is a coping mechanism amidst the daily carnage of murder, starvation and political anarchy. The paper includes Somali jokes about the recent "Operation Restore Hope."

Benjamin Guo, Communications, Simon Fraser University, B. C., Canada.

Based upon a detailed comparison of the gallery of laughing-stocks and repertoire of laughter-provoking devices employed in the comic fiction by Chinese humorist Lao She and his Canadian counterpart Stephen Leacock, this paper intends to de-mystify our conventional notion on national humour and explore possibilities for cross-cultural communication of humor. Canadian and Chinese comic fictions are chosen because they represent entirely different socio-cultural traditions and communication between the two is assuming increasing importance as a result of recent economic-political development. Stephen Leacock and Lao She are chosen because, first, they are roughly contemporaries (literally active early in this century); secondly, each is acclaimed as the greatest national humorist in his own country. To avoid hair-splitting definition or terminology confusion, an operational definition of humour is adopted: the reader's response of laughter is used as the indicator for the presence of the elusive quality, be it called "humour", "satire", "wit" or what else. The focus is on what causes laughter; questions about "how" and "why" fall beyond the scope of the present study. The terms "humour", "wit" and "satire" serve here to suggest tones, shades or ingred ients in laughter rather than separate categories. Besides, it is fully acknowledged that laughter is a psycho-physiological response, ranging from smile to grin, from snigger to sneer, and from chuckle to uproar. Naturally, laughter may also be either spontaneous or merely conventional. Employing this operational definition of humour, the representative works by the two master humorists are scanned to check their gallery of laughing-stocks and repertoire of laughter-provoking devices. Whenever possible, the opinions of both Chinese and Canadians--even strangers--are earnestly sought to help decide what is laughable. The comic fictions of both Stephen Leacock and Lao She hold up for ridicule local politicians, struggling businessmen, humble clerks and functionaries, students and scholars, priests, well-to-do housewives and their children, etc. This comes as no surprise, since, unlike the upper class and city poor, the middle class is most populous and observable. They make up the majority of the reading public, depending upon the stimulation of popular literature to relieve their monotonous life. As a rule, they tend to be more conservative in upholding prevalent social values. Critics are quick to find faults with this class of people. On the other hand, a majority of writers, humorists included, come from this world. They are best acquainted with it and to some extent still feel attached to it, thus providing the kind of ambivalence essential for humour or satire. Stephen Leacock and Lao She share basically the same repertoire of laught er-provoking devices, some of which present few problems for cross-cultural understanding, while others are all nigh impossible to convey to speakers of other languages. In order of easiness for international access, they may be arranged as pictorial caricature, dramatic farce, literary travesty, and linguistic manipulation. Detailed analysis, however, may reveal hidden variations that defy differential categorization. Besides, the categories themselves are not clear-cut or mutually exclusive as logic would demand. The study shows that the favourite laughing-stock for both Stephen Leacock and Lao She turns out to be petty bourgeoisie or middle-class, while the repertoire of laughter-provoking devices varies very little from humorist to humorist, though Lao She and Stephen Leacock may resort to different devices with different frequencies, be it pictorial caricature, dramatic farce, literary travesty, or linguistic manipulation. Thus the notion of "national humour" need to be carefully re-examined. Humour's cultural diversity seems to be manifestations of a similar essence in terms of intellectual structure and motivational dynamics. What makes it possible to put humour across cultures is e xactly this similarity in emotional charge and cognitive mechanism in provoking laughter, no matter where it is. Obstacles or pitfalls along the way of cross-cultural communication of humour have to do with several variables. First, of course, the native language--you may need no translation to enjoy caricature or farce, but to appreciate literary travesty or linguistic manipulation, a good interpreter is absolutely indispensable. And a few tricks of humour will be always beyond the reach of those who can not speak the native language. Secondly, lack of socio-cultural background knowledge prevents outsiders from sharing the bisociation, the key to humour production and reception, as notions of normalcy, incongruity or frames of reference are all culturally determined. Last but not least is our deliberate or unconscious stereotypes, prejudices and ethnocentrism.

Jennifer Haff and Michael Kline

 We believe that extended rhetorical figures are the structuring principles behind the production of laughter in Moliere's theater, and that, in the group of plays exemplified by The Bourgeois Gentleman, metaphor is the keystone of humor.Tropes and jokes share certain mechanical properties because they both operate in the domain of the incompatible. But while jokes "regularize" incompatibility, many tropes must lapse into a dysfunctional mode, refusing resolution, in order to produce humor. If metaphor is based upon relationships of resemblance in the sharing of semantic similarities, and if interpreters of metaphors make sense of them by resolving their semantic anomalies, then comic metaphors will resist this resolution because inherent in their form will be an illogical or false construction that defies resolution.Our illustration of this process begins with a non-verbal metaphor, the bourgeois gentleman's exaggerated bow to the marquise. Seen on the level of gesture as an anomalous sign, it is also a component in a failed chiasmus that provokes humor because it cannot resolve cognitive dissonance. Naturally, extended tropes are not merely limited to the gesture or word. They also define the humor of situation. In this play, comic metaphor encourages false substitutions leading to the creation of a world of fantasy and illusion that undermines situations designed to bestow learning, ennoblement, victory and ostentation. Finally, tropes contribute to the creation of theme. Comic metaphor will be seen to be responsible for the creation of illusion that must become transparent in order to engate the spectator in the moral of the play.Finally, we will round out the picture by very briefly addressing metonymy and irony, tropes that control the humor in two other groups of important Moliere plays.

Lyman B. Hagen

 A compilation and an analysis of the prevailing humor circulated in the home teritory of Just Plain Bill (Governor) and The Honorable William Jefferson Clinton (President).

Ronald Hallett, William &;Mary College, Williamsberg, VA., USA.

 Literary irony has recently been much studied and defined. Traditional irony in the novel is that produced by a narrator who is in control of the reader's reaction to the narrative and is manipulating it to bring the reader around to his or her understanding of the truth. Romantic irony is a way of dealing with the paradoxes of life and of overcoming them, for a writer like Friedrich Schlegel. For a contemporary writer like Lilian Furst, the ironic context of a novel is one in which there is no truth, no reality behind appearances. "Irony then stems not from the contrast to absolute expectations, but from the interaction of elements with each other, and these are themselves shifting." There would appear to be little chance, then, that such irony would resolve paradoxes. She continues to use the term "romantic irony," however, in her descriptions of Modernist and Post-Modernist writing, as does Lloyd Bishop in his treatment of Beckett.There is a major element of the description of the irony of Schlegel and the Romantics which is not present in the irony of Beckett: irony is intended to overcome the paradoxes that make up the dialectic of life. Beckett's irony does nothing to overcome paradox and tends to shut down life's dialectic. My intention in this paper is to examine the relationship between the comic and irony in Beckett's novels to further clarify the relationship between his use of irony and that of the Romantics. In doing so, I will take another look at the theories of Henri Bergson as well as those of contemporary theoreticians of the comic and the ironic.

Vladimir Kazanevsky, "SHOOT" Magazine, Kiev, UKRAINE.

 In the XXth century representatives of various genres of art in their creative work applied to the poem by N. Gogol "The Dead Souls."The analysis of modern illustrations to the poem, theatrical and T.V. performances, the film script and the opera created after the poem's motifs shows that the authors - the playwright, the artist - illustrator, the theatre artist, the script writer, the composer having dealt with the work of literature close as to its spirit to the theatre of absurdity, in "their" genres also used "absurdity" devices.

Alita Kelley,Pennsylvania State University, USA

 Sir William Temple's Of Poetry (1690) preempts for his country the humor then coming to the fore. Sympathetic humor is generally known in Spanish as humor britanico, but the eighteenth century British humorists whose texts reflect its mood never overlooked their debt and referred to it as Cervantene.Though an essential feature of a strain of comic literature in the Spanish language, it played little part in the modernist and postmodern novels with which Latin America moved to the forefront of world literature between 1960 and 1975. The comic is not lacking in the boom, but virtually all novelists draw on the grotesque qualities of black humor as defined by Breton. Mario Vargas Llosa, in an extremely influential critical essay, even condemned the appearance of the comic as marking the end of great literature, as he sees it.A laughter-provoking text with a tragic story line appeared at the precise moment when the modernist aestheticizing faith was giving way to postmodern despair. It undertook, by playful teasing of the reader with hidden parodying of modernistic narrative techniques and a narrative voice that provokes incessant sympathetic belly laughter, to illustrate the loss of all metanarratives by means of what initially appears to be a traditionally told story of a young boy. It has been so misunderstood as never once to have been defined by critics as a comic novel.I propose an analysis of Un mundo para Julius that will show this neglected postmodern text to form part of the humorous novelistic tradition of Cervantes, Sterne, and Leopoldo Alas (Clarin).

Gabriele M. M. Koehler, Department of Physiological Psychology, Heinrich-Heine-University of Duesseldorf, Germany.

 One of the standardised methods for the induction of humor by nontraditional stimuli in experimental situations is the WJP (Weight-Judging Paradigm) which was made use of by Lambert Deckers and colleagues in several studies (for a review, see Deckers, 1993). The present study aimed at associating this paradigm with the concept of "exhilaration" (Ruch, in press) which interpretes the responses to humor as emotional reactions that have to be studied at the levels of behavior, physiology, and experience. Specifically, it will be investigated whether the responses elicited by the weight-judging task fit to this concept. 48 female subjects compared the weight of several visually indistinguishable cylinders ("comparisons") with a standard weight. The comparisons' weight was 110 to 190g with a mean of 150g corresponding to the standard's weight of 150g. Six comparisons were used to build up an expectation about the cylinder's weight. The weight of the following "critical comparison" (CC) was 150g in he control condition, whereas the incongruous CCs weighed 600g, 1000g, and 1600g. After lifting the CC the subjects estimated at several 10-point rating scales (from 0=not at all to 9=extremely) how surprised they were, how funny they considered the lifting of the CC, how amused they were with it, and how exhilarated they were. Thus, both perception of stimulus properties and of emotional experience were assessed. Additionally, neutral and negative feelings were recorded. Subjects' facial reactions were videotaped imperceptibly through a one-way mirror. The videotapes were analyzed using the FACS (Ekman &;Friesen, 1978), an anatomically based instrument for facial measurement. Special attention was payed to the discrimination of different types of smiling, as required by Frank and Ekman (1993). The analyses of the facial reactions show that on principle they are "enjoyment smiles", i.e., created by the contraction of the zygomatic major muscle and, in most cases, of the orbicularis oculi muscle. To some extent, however, these "enjoyment smiles" were accompanied by muscle activities which indicate the existance of additional affective and cognitive processes. The results concerning the subjects' ratings show indeed that the four scales mentioned above are highly intercorrelated. However, their separate enquiry does not cause redundant results. Both ratings of funniness and of affective experience correlated with facial expression.
 

References:

Ekman, P. &;Friesen, W.V. (1978). The Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.

Ruch, W. (in press) Exhilaration and humor. In M. Lewis &;C. Malatesta (Eds.) The Handbook of Emotion. Hayworth Press.

Deckers, L. (1993). On the validity of a weigth judging task for the study of Humor. Humor, 6, 54-66.

Frank, M. &;Ekman, P. (1993) Not all smiles are created equal.
Humor, 6, 9-26.

Maxim Kronhaus, Russian State University of Humanities, Moscow

 Humor played a specific role in the USSR. At the time were prohibited all the political and social movements but the official Communist movement. Humor was actually a substitute for social and political activity. This fact has been officially recognized: humor was prosecuted equally with all other antistate activities. Nevertheless even at the most hard times there existed in the USSR a genre of short anonymous humorous stories - anecdotes, a genre of folklore. In the paper there are considered three (3) widespread types of anecdotes, compensating for lack of the corresponding types of social activities. The are: 1) "sexual anecdotes," directed against the official sanctimony; 2) "Jewish anecdotes," directed against the public anti-Semitism in the USSR; 3) "political anecdotes," directed against the system as a whole and against individual statesmen. There is one more relevant fuction of political anecdotes: they were drawing inaccessible and omnipotent statesmen nearer to an ordinary citizen including them in an ordinary life as "dear characters." That's why there was such an enormous number of political anecdotes about certain leaders in the USSR. Such were the functions of humor in the USSR. Thus could be explained the dying away of the genre of political anecdotes in the post Communism epoch (e.g., nowadays, there are almost no anecdotes about Yeltsin at all).

Ronald Landheer, University of Leyden, Leyden, The Netherlands.

 "The pun, or to use a more erudite, and perhaps more precise term - paronomasia, reigns over poetic art, and whether its rule is absolute or limited, poetry by definition is untranslatable" (Jakobson 1959; 238). This statement about the untranslatability of punning (whether or not regarded as a form of poetic language) is by no means an isolated one: "A third instance of untranslatability....concerns cases in which language is used differently from its communicative function: cases of plays on language, i.e. puns or intentional ambiguities, which are so closely tied to the semantic peculiarities of a particular language system that they cannot be translated. The English pun, Is life worth living? It depends upon the liver, is not translatable because the double reference of liver cannot, in principle, be reproduced in any other language" (House 1973: 166); "Ein Hauptmerkmal des Wortspiels... is seine Unubersetzbarkeit," Eckhardt categorically states in 1909; and a recent article by the French critic Luc Etienne (1987) starts as follows: "les jeux de langage etant par nature intraduisibles..." Indeed, there seems to be general consensus about the "untranslatability" of wordplay, punning and the like (here subsumed as forms of verbal humor), because of its inherent dependence on particular language structures and thus being by definition unrepeatable in other languages. This paper attempts to demystify this view based on what we consider as a tenacious prejudice. At least three objections must be raised against the doctrine of untranslatability of verbal humor: a) firstly, it underestimates the enormous flexibility of natural language systems (hundreds of new forms and meanings are coined every day) and it overestimates the degree of anisomorphism between them (see the numerous parallel instances of metaphor and metonymia in many languages for fire/passion, tongue/language, catch ("prendre"/"comprendre") and so on; b) secondly, wordplay is more than a "play on words." Verbal humor has a textual function and its rendering often depends more on the role it plays in the network (cf. the concept of "isotopes" developed by text semanticians as Greimas and Rastier) of semantic relations a text displays than on its verbal structure; c) thirdly, the doctrine of untranslatability is based on a too restricted, normative and perhaps outdated notion of the nature of translational equivalence, possibly influenced by the rather strict recoding process widely used in machine translation. It will be stressed that the major aim of the translation of verbal humor utterances should be a restoring of the (con)textual and pragma-rhetorical function of the punning messages, instead of an attempt to reproduce from them strictly synonymous utterances. A range of examples will illustrate this point, especially with regard to the passage from English into French, and vice versa.

Tom Landis-Schiff, Men's Resource Center of Western Massachusetts, USA.

 This paper examines humor as a part of small group culture formation processes. The first section focuses on the formation and development of culture as it pertains to groups. Group developmental processes and culture formation are delineated. Culture is described as an evolving process of adapting to perceived environmental imperatives which leads to the creation of meaning for group members. In small groups this can be seen as a process of attempting to resolve and make meaning of issues as they move into a figural position for the group. Meaning making systems produce various methods for creating, reproducing, and redefining cultural manifestations, one of which is humor. The second section provides an overview of social and psychological functions of humor. Humor is described as an evolving process related to people's understanding of the world. It functions to help create meaning and express an individual's or group's view of their connection to and position in the world. The third section examines the relationship between culture and humor. Humor is described as a component of culture. Humor helps create a sense of commonality, cohesion, and meaning while at the same time enabling people to explore the ambiguities of a cultural reality in a safe and often enjoyable manner. Humor simultaneously expresses and redefines world views and cultural assumptions. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for future research and practice in both humor and groups studies. Humor is embedded in the current state of organization, or development, of a group. It is indicative of a group's world view. Thus, in order to examine, lead, or otherwise intervene in a given group, the style of humor, the functions humor serves for the group, and the stage of development must all be taken into account.

Christopher Leeds, Universite Nancy II, Nancy, France.

 This paper falls partly within the ethnologcial, socio-anthropological and cultural aspects of humor research. The basic premise is that humor, or the ability to use humor skillfully in daily interactions is, for various reasons, closely linked with the English identity and character. This is highlighted in the paper through analysis of various aspects of mainstream English humor and the corresponding typical elements of English character and values. Examples are the links between self-disparagement humor and English traits of superiority and insularity. Another relates to links bewteen dry and wry humor and sub-traits of puritanism. Although in many ways British humor is close to English humor there are important differences between the humor of the four nationalities in the UK. There are also regional differences in culture within the basic North-South divide. Such points will be mentioned as are pertinent to the main themes of the paper. Reference will be made to the appropriate works of various writers and researchers.

Dorthy Litt, The Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, Radcliffe, USA.

 Thomas Middleton's play, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, is generally recognized as a comic masterpiece and the highest achievement of this playwright of the English Renaissance. The play is a satire of family values. There are four plots: these offer variations on the theme of perverted family values. One plot concerns a menage a trois in which the cuckolded husband boasts of his cleverness whereby he is spared earning his living, and even of the need to expend energy to impregnate his wife. The second plit concerns the Johnny Appleseed of my title, named Touchwood. He is so sexually powerful that he has destroyed an entire harvest by impregnating so many country girls. He and his wife are forced to part because they cannot afford to support any more children. The third plot exploits the sexual powers of Touchwood, when he discovers a barren couple who desperately desire to have children in order to gain an inheritance which depends on this. Touchwood aids the Kixes (the country couple with his "magical" potion, offering a bawdy solution to his own (financial) and their (inheritance) problems. There are varying kinds of humor in the play. Nomination points up various attributes of the characters, and in some cases foreshadows events to come. Beyond the biting satire, there is low comedy in sexual antics, losses of bodily fluid, and drunkenness. Although unintentional, some of the aspects of the play which were comedic at the time take on the character of satire today: these occur in the treatment of women as baby-factories and babies as disposable as rabbits. I shall explore just what the author might have intended as satire,and what we from our modern view now would include as satiric.

Greta D. Little, University of South Carolina, USA.

 Cranch is known for being a poet, translator, artist, and children's novelist, but littleattention has been paid to his humorous verses for children, despite the fact that they appeared in some of the best periodicals of the day, including ST. NICHOLAS and HEARTH AND HOME. These poems are characterized not only by story-telling skill, but by language play, word puzzles, fantasy, and puns. This paper will show how Cranch's humorous poems can be seen as part of a natural progression from the humorous aspects of his two children's novels, THE LAST OF THE HUGGERMUGGERS and KOBBOLTOZO. Greta D. Little, associate professor of English and linguistics at the University of South Carolina, has publishd widely in the field of children's literature and is co-editor of the forthcoming THREE CHILDREN'S NOVELS BY CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH.

Maria Rosa Pinto Lobo, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.

 It's necessary for expounding the basis of the humor and its categories to take into account the humorous climate as communicative conception. The first item will be the climate as play according to Freud, Bergson and Charney's studies and others. This starting point explains: 1) theoretical divergences abou the idea and reach of the humorous climate, 2) its defense in depth as idea to blend, and 3) the result or conclusion that it bears, that is to say, laugh reserach. This study concludes with the list of the principal theories about the humorous climate and the laugh.

John Lowe, English Department, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA.

 Ethnic humor has played an important role in American state comedy since Royall Tyler's The Contrast brought forward Brother Jonathan to mock British dandies in his backwoods drawl. The floodtide of immigration spawned ethnic language theatres, the multiethnic comedies of Harrigan and Hart, and stock figures such as the Stage Irishman, Stage Negro, and so forth. The minstrel shows, both black and white, played a role, too, and all these forms fed into vaudeville, and then ethnic comedy as we have known it for the last six decades. Building on this background, my paper will examine the ethnic dimension of three contenporary Broadway shows: Mule-Bone, a rolicking African American folk comedy by Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, was written in the 30s but was given a very contemporary production recently. The Heidi Chronicles, by Wendy Wasserstein, offered a comic reading of a modern Jewish woman's search for identity. Albert Innaurato's Gemini concentrates on the coming of age of an Italian-American boy, but surrounds him with other characters who represent other ethnic traditions. Using recent social science approaches to humor (particularly the work of Apte and Davies) and above all, Bakhtin's theories of carnivalization and dialogism, I will demonstrate what these three apparently dissimilar plays have in common, and show how their humor plays important, if sometimes hidden, functions, both in terms of entertainment and instruction.

Berthold Mader, Universite Jean Monnet Saint Etienne, France.

 Dans sa derniere piece, "Bauerntheatre," Franz Xaver Kroetz, pendant longtemps celebre comme le renovateur du theatre naturaliste de l'Allemagne d'apres-guerre, va jusqu'aux limites de son art dramatique en revenant d'une maniere spectaculaire et inattendue a ses origines. En effet, cette nouvelle piece qui regorge de procedes comeques en tous genres, reintroduit toutes les preoccupations anterieures de l'ecrivain, en particulier celles de sa periode "realiste: des annees 70, afin de mieux les detruire, dans un univers familial devenu morbide, glacial et sans espoir. Ainsi, les grand sujets de l'auteur comme l'harmonie familiale, l'amour conjugal et extra-conjugal, la grossesse, l'avortement et les enfants ne sont plus traites que d'une maniere faussement realiste. En effet, par des procedes humoristiques empruntes aussi bien a la comedie slapstic qu'au theatre de l'absurde, Kroetz rejoint ses origines d'ecrivain de theatre de vaudeville paysan de meme que celles de pieces absurdes. Seulement la, ou auparavant une harmonie preetablie visait a une identification du spectateur avec les caracteres dans un monde ideal, il ne reste plus que degout et desepoir. Le rire que provoque cependant la nouvelle piece prend sur la decheance et la degradation de l'organisation sociale la plus dondamentalement humaine, a savoir la famille. Au centre de la piece se trouve l'ecrivain lui-meme, en mal d'inspiration, qui ne peut que constater la dislocation du monde autour de lui. Il essaie alors, dans un ultime effort, de rassembler toutes les personnes pour une repetition, generale du sa derniere piece, un vrai pastiche du theatre paysan, et tous jouent dans une harmonie superficielle, le soir de Noel, tandis qu'autour d'eux le monde s'emiette.

John McCallum, School of Theatre and Film Studies,
University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW 2033 Australia
Kensington, NSW 2033 AUSTRALIA

One of the most unstable sites for the negotiation of power is the room in which the stand-up comic performs for a divided audience. This instability can be very useful to the oppositional or subversive comic. There is the licence of stand-up comedy; there is material which often operates on the borderline between the funny and the offensive; there is a diverse audience with different tolerances and sensitivities; there is the ambivalence which each individual audience member feels about sensitive issues; and there is the volatility of all performance, with its continually shifting relationships of dominance and submission between performer and audience. In such a situation the gaps and fissures in the discourses of power can become yawning tunnels through which the successfully ambiguous comic may charge. Comics who explore these ambiguous spaces use standard techniques of performance - hovering between self-deprecation and aggression, between mocking complicity and ironic self-assertion. Their means are familiar performance-audience interactive manipulations, such as professional performers use intuitively.

Paul McIlvenny, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland.

 The paper will sketch some preliminary ideas for the exploration of the interactive accomplishment of improvised humor in public discourse for broadcast transmission or from recorded live shows. The spotlight will focus on professional stand-up and improvised comedy. In order to begin to describe the social linguistic practices of humor and improvisation in performance, I will use conversation analysis, which has gone some way to plotting the minutiae of constitutive talk practices, from which the notions of indexicality, sequence, trajectory and routine accomplishment are most pertinent for my study. In particular the work of Sacks, Jefferson and other conversation analysts on the social organization of laughter and Atkinson's studies of interactional patterns of speaker talk and audience response in public political discourse will form the basis for the analysis presented. In stand-up and improvised comedy we find the construction of contradictory, absurd, riduculous realities in which discourses are realized in a parallel world. I will demonstrate that conversational practices which are routinely employed in the construction of senseful talk are re-ployed to generate incongruity and contradition. The non-serious mode of discourse can be seen as a release from the continual work of constructing a unitary world in serious discourse, but which itself is ordered in other ways. I will analyze how Anglo-American participant performers in improvised comedy mutually construct humor as a process rather than a product, out of materials at hand and with only an inkling of a scenario. Characters, actions, events and dialogues must be jointly constructed serially and temporally in the pursuit of laughter. Specific talk devices, techniques and opportunities for "improvising" within the spate of talk will be described.Stand-up comedy and the power of the performer.

Sophia Menache, and Jeannine Horowitz, University of Haifa, Israel.

 There is a broad consensus among scholars that preaching permeated the annals of Christianity from the time of Jesus and the Apostles on. Still, the ways in which the Christian message was presented were influenced and modified by changing historical circumstances. This paper analyzes one aspect in the evolution of the Artes Praedicandi: the use of humor in medieval sermons. Given the Church's reticence concerning laughter and humor throughout the Early Middle Ages, the humorous vein of thirteenth-century sermons cannot be regarded as fortuitous. It is our thesis that the use of humor served as a defense mechanism: it provided medieval preachers with a valuable instrument with which they might more easily ridicule and by implication impute the socio-economic changes characteristic of the Central Middle Ages which in the long run might jeopardize the Church's privileged position. In this context, our paper focuses on the attitudes toward humor and laughter reflected in essays of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Joel Myerson, University of South Carolina, USA.

 Emerson's poem "Brahma" astounded readers and critics when it was first published in the November 1857 ATLANTIC MONTHLY MAGAZINE, and again when Emerson collected it in MAY-DAY AND OTHER POEMS in 1867. Drawing heavily on Eastern and Indian philosophy, Emerson wrote a poem quite unlike those mid-nineteenth-century audiences were used to reading, as was clear from his opening lines, "If the red slayer thinks he slays, / Or if the slain thinks he is slain, / They know not well the subtle ways / I keep, and pass, and turn again." One response of the ignorant and confused is humor, and soon over one hundred parodies of "Brahma" appeared. This paper will study these parodic responses and assess what these reactions tell us about how contemporaries replied to poetic innovation in nineteenth-century America.

Michael Miles, The Fielding Institute, Santa Barbara, California, USA.

 Humor has been studied in a variety of ways from a number of social perspectives, including those guided by psychology, sociology, and anthropology. To date, there has been relatively little serious study of the content and process of humor across cultures as a tool to assist cultural interlopers to better understand the paradigmatic and socio cultural components of the new culture with which such individuals have to deal in foreign environments. This presentation/workshop builds on a model of Cultural Awareness Development conceived by Muniz and Chasnoff (1993). Starting from this theoretical base, it examines the usefulness of humor as a tool in discovering core aspects of culture. The session will explore in an experiential way the varying sets of personal and national cultural values of participants. Building on this information, participants will explore the variety of images, metaphors, and archetypes which form some of the bases to humor within their cultural experience. Through this personal data and the exploration of a sample of international humorous commercials drawn from the Cannes Festival, the group will be challenged through a structured process to develop scenarios which bring together key aspects of their national cultures and appropriate humorous vignettes. The goal of the session will be to demonstrate the power of humor as a tool in depicting and understanding core components of culture. Theory and methodology underlying the conceptualization and design of the session will be provided in the form of a summary paper.

Georges E. Muller, Luxembourg.

 In his "address on the psychology of joking" delivered in October 1887, at the opening of the Medical Society of London, Hughlings Jackson remains faithful to his physiological approach of mental activity arising from the interplay of the activities of the brain at different levels. The destruction of higher levels produces loss of higher functions and the release of lower activities. Higher levels are "least automatic" and "least deeply organized," while the simpler and more fixed activities at lower levels are "most automatic" and "most deeply organized." Thus he considers that "punning" is the least evolved system of joking, that "wit" is evolved out of punning and that "humor" is evolved out of wit. He introduces neurological analogies like "mental diplopia" and psychological notions like "play of mind" and concludes that persons who are deficient in appreciation of jocosities are, in corresponding degrees, deficiently realistic in their scientific conceptions. He illustrates his ideas by numerous examples and speculates about similarities between levels of joking and levels of "insanity."

Ardis Nelson, Florida State University, Florida, USA.

 Parodic Intertextuality or Jolly Relativity in a Revisioning of The Phantom of the Opera. I will begin with an attempt to clarify the concept of parodic intertextuality by defining some of the essential terms used by Bakhtin, such as dialogism, parody, jolly relativity, and skaz. My discussion of the humorous effect of these applications in literature will be in reference to a short story/essay by Guillermo Cabrera Infante entitled, "The Phantom of the Essoldo" (in London Tales, ed. Julian Evans, Bury St. Edmonds, Suffolk: St. Edmundbury Press, 1983). The piece begins as a travel guide to London streets and continues as a review of a film the author is seeing at the Essoldo Theatre, incorporating comments and quotes from the original novel The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux, as well as references to several of the filmic versions of the same work, creative ad libbing on its themes, and popular culture manifestations of its most famous lines. Cabrera Infante is a brilliantly irreverent writer who never passes up the opportunity to pun and play with words, and whose jolly relativity is always good for a few laughs, or at least a snicker and an occasional guffaw.

Alleen Pace Nilson, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona.

 Alvin Kernan contrasts satire with comedy and tragedy, indicating that of the three, satire is the least forgiving. Comedy exhibits a kindly tolerance for the imperfections of humanity; tragedy exhibits a profound sympathy for these imperfections; and satire tells people that they are responsible for their failings. They are the ones who brought about a negative situation and they are the ones who should work to make it right. If we take Kernan's contrast one step further, to include black humor that has developed out of satire, we would say that if there's any comfort in black humor, it is in absolving people of blame. Douglas Davis explains that black humor laughs at the absurd tragedy that has trapped us all. Max Schulz feels that the feature that most differentiates black humor from other genres is its nonjudgmental perspective. Black humorists are more concerned with tolerating than with managing life. They challenge the basic hysterias of society to expose them, not to change them for the better.
 
 

In his 1965 book entitled Black Humor, Bruce J. Friedman outlned the following characteristics of black humorists:
 
 

• 1). They continue the strong tradition of storytelling in America.

 

 

• 2). They play with the fading line between fantasy and reality.

 

 

• 3). They have a nervousness, an upbeat tempo, a near hysteria or frenzy.

Bernard O'Dwyer, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.

 Postcards, as a source of twentieth-century social history, mirror changes in lay attitudes toward medicine and other health fields. These changes are especially noticeable in humorous postcards regarding attitudes toward gender in physicians' and nurses' roles. This presentation raises specific issues about possible roles for comic postcards, especially those with medical themes. Part one of this series (presented at the 10th ISHS Meeting, 1992) looked at humor through linguistic features in medical jokes and scenes that reveal class distinction and incongruous behavior on the part of physicians. This presentation considers "lightening the spirits" through depictions of nurses on picture postcards. The paper reviews the existing literature on images of nurses and stereotyping, and asks why various issues - power relations between physicians and nurses, between patients and nurses, and cards that are increasingly offensive to women - have been commercially successful as postcard humor. Our answer raises questions about the depth of gender and body image issues within popular culture and how they are sustained by humor.

Jerry Palmer, City of London Polytechnic, London, England.

 In the study of medieval Europe, the ancient world and tribal societies we can see relationships between humour and the social structure which are fundamentally different from what obtains in the modern Western world. In customary joking relationships, in the links between clowns and religion, in the figure of the medieval fool we see a place - or perhaps a function - for humour that gives it a very different meaning from the meaning that it has in modern Western society. Whereas in our society it is difficult to maintain that humour has any metaphysical signidicance - or religious or 'spiritual' significance - it seems likely that in earlier societies it did have this dimension this observation is heavy with implications for the study of humour. Firstly, it indicates the centrality of sociological dimension of such study. Secondly, it suggests that semantic generalizatins about the structure of humour are risky. Thirdly, it suggests that psychological generalizations about the function of humor are likely to be of local relevance only.

German Payo Losa, Colegio Antonio Machado, Salmanca, Spain

 As all of us know the use of humor provides a great number of advantages in a personal level, in team work and in the atmosphere of an institution. Education is more and more difficult every day. Students have more personal and behavioral problems and teachers need good tools to cope with their job. Parents, often, don't know what to do with their children. If, as we believe, having a sense of humor is so important and it's something, like art, that we can learn up to a certain extent through special training, why isn't it part of the regular school curriculum and something that children should have the opportunity to learn? This paper presents the planification, realization and results of a program designed to investigate the uses and applications of humor with teachers of the Colegio Antonio Machado, in Salamanca, Spain, during the 1992-93 school year. As far as students are concerned, a humor workshop which, among other activities, publishes the comic Mascarada, celebrated its tenth anniversary. An analysis and research of the humor produced and most appreciated is presented. Some conclusions are drawn and projects are suggested for further applciation and research, as these activities represent a small step in one direction whose final aim is to incorporate humor into the school durriculum.

Elisabeth Pillet, Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III University, Paris, France.

 The drunkard's song or speech, a well-loved genre in folk entertainment throughout the Middle Ages (see Bakhtin) was still very popular in the french "cafe-concerts"; these were the main form of entertainment for the common people of Paris and the larger French towns, from the middle of the 19th century until the First World War. In his speech the drunkard tackled any subject - news, politics, emotions, religion, even death - in a humorous way, using sexual innuendos, scatology, parody of other types of texts (eg. political speeches, literary classics). Real-life values were reversed and eveything became possible (cf. the traditional comic motive of the "world upside down"). The style was vulgar, packed with malapropisms and slang, thus breaking the linguistic norms as well as the social and moral ones. However, in the cafe-concerts the theme of drunkeness was also treated seriously, in so-called "realistic" songs. Influenced by temperance campigns, and by Zola's L Assonmoir, the authors depicted terrifying and moralising images of alcoholics. The language of these texts was correct and respected the norms. This paper attempts to account for the dichotomy in the treatment of one same theme; the comic treatment coming from folk culture, the serious one from iddle-class and school culture. It also shows the evolution through the period, how and why the serious treatment overcomes the comic one, and drunkeness as a comic theme is virtually eliminated from the French chanson; this being just one part of the process of "cleaning" the repertoire from those of its aspects which shocked the establishment.

Alan R. Pratt, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, New York, USA

 This essay analyzes samples of serious art that are decidely black by first introducing examples of shock satire and differentiating them from visual black humor. Delineating the mechanisms of visual black humor illustrates how nihilistic comdey is translated into a spatial aesthetics. Like visual satire, visual black humor employs distortion, parody, incongruence, and traditional reprsentational techniques in various combinations to create a tension between what is known and what is reprsented. Unlike visual satire, however, which targets people and institutions, visual black humor--frequently grim, macabre and grotesque--portrays the most disagreeable aspects of life to communicate cosmic absurdity and the pessimism of exhausted possibilities. The "humor" of black humor is subtle, complex and seeingly paradosical; it does not dispense relief but elicits trepidation and a defensive nervous laughter. Over four hundred years old, Breughel's Blind Leading the Blind (1568) communicates the stupidity of man and the indifference of nature. The darkest images of black humor, however, are the product of our century. Overturning long standing formal conventions and using material previously taboo has permitted twentieth century artists to create profoundly disturbing visions of nihilistic humor. The anti-art agenda of Dada, for example, produced works of black humor; later, Pop artists manipulated fragments of the everyday to develop an absurd theater of images disclosing metaphysical emptiness. And currently, Postmodernists recycle styles fo concoct outrageous black humor iamges, dispelling the notion that black humor is a Modernist aesthetic.

Thomas Pughe, Universite d'Orleans, France.

 This paper will focus on two contemporary circul novels: Katherine Dunn's Geek Love (1983) and Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984). Both of these texts are "about" freaks and feakishness and both transgress in the comic presentation of their subject the boundaries of "good taste." My aim will be to try and conceptualize the specific approach to the comic used by the two authors. The two texts under discussion pose questions of a more general nature. On the one hand, they force us to reconsider the role of taste in the creation of comic effects (not to mention the "humane humor rule"); on the other hand, the manner of their transgressions draws our attention to the gender of the authors. My analysis of the comic in these two novels will try in particular to investigate the possible relatioships between the writers fascination with "freakishness" and their gender. It is quite clear that in Carter's novel, which is written from an explicitly feminist point of view, such a relatioships exists. Carter in fact opposes two different kinds of laughter, one male, one female, both of which are directed against non-normal, "freakish" kinds of behavior. But while the male laugh in her novel serves to preserve and strengthen conventional boundaries between normal and non-normal forms of being, the female laugh serves to subvert them. The "freak" as a source of laughter becomes an ambiguous figuration of two different philosophies of the comic that are clearly distinguished by gender. Carter leaves no doubt which of the two is preferable. The "freakish" hilarity of her text, finally, is a sign of difference asserted. Dunn's novel is a more difficult case because it is not as self-reflective ("meta-comic") as Carter's but also because it is more provocative. Yet one can, especially with the model of Carter in mind, trace a similar use of the vis comica of "freakishness" in developing a specifically female approach to the comic. Like Carter, too, Dunn is an accomplished parodist of male myths and stereotypes. In the case of Geek Love the parodied intertext is (among others) Shakespear's Tempest. This paper will draw on various theories of the comic and of postmodernist fiction, including Bakhtin, Bergson, Iser, Linda Hutcheon and Schopenhauer. It represents a continuation of my research on the comic in contemporary faction over the last five years.

John R. Rosenberg, Brigham Young University, Utah.

 Historians of aesthetics have described the two dominant aesthetic categories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the Sublime and the Beautiful. The Beautiful was associated with forms of limited size, concepts of order and harmony, love and other forms of positive socialization. The Beautiful might enclose such diverse phenomena as a formal French garden or the English Constitution. The Sublime was formless and contained the seed of mystery. It is associated with the immense and the awe-inspiring and often produced terror. The beholder of the Sublime became aware of his precarious position due to his impotence in the face of awful and uncontrollable forces. Common natural phenomena associated with the Sublime include high mountains, huge waterfalls, dark forests, and stormy seas. In most Romantic texts the poet works to achieve a harmony or reconciliation between the two modes.Spanish Romantics inherited this dual system of understanding natural and social phenomena. However, the political situation in the peninsula prevented the reconciliation of the two forms. Civil wars, oppressive rulers, loss of overseas empires, uncertain economic times, and loss of faith in traditional institutions and epistemologies all contributed to make the aesthetic of the Beautiful an untenable mimetic device. Instead, novels, plays, and poetry tended to develop the overpowering sense of the Sublime. Unlike England, where the Beautiful provided a balance for the Sublime, in Spain there was no respite from the terror and hopelessness associated with it. As a result, the Sublime moment, normally considered to be an elevating event, turns downward and becomes a spiraling descent. The aesthetic mode that describes this downward motion is the grotesque. However, as many critics have noted, the grotesque often contains a humorous element, a Rabelaisian laughter that disconcerts and subverts. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the means by which laughter serves both to provide a respite from the terrors of the grotesque and to subvert the very forms of discourse that make the laughter possible. Examples will be chosen from the poetry and prose of major romantic writers, Mariano Jose de Larra and Jose de Espronceda.

Willibald Ruch, Department of Physiological Psychology, Heinrich-Heine-University of Duesseldorf, Germany.

The presentation will give an overview of the various conceptualizations of the responses to humor and the different measurement approaches as put forward in the history of humor research. The concepts differ in whether they emphasize a cognitive or emotional nature of the humor response. Sometimes it is resigned from using a concept at all. The concepts also differ in their breadth. Although humor elicits a variety of responses at the level of behavior, physiology, and experience, the concepts sometimes are restricted to the perception of a stimulus as being "funny," which may or may not be accompanied by overt behavior. The type of measurement approach taken is depending on the nature of the underlying concept. As regards the level of experience, most frequently the degree of "funniness" of the humor stimulus is rated; the induced emotional state of the recipient was rarely assessed. Overt behavior is either assessed on a continuum, like in the so-called "Mirth-Index" (Zigler, Levine &;Gould, 1966), or smiling and laughter are treated separately and parameters such as frequency, intensity, and duration are recorded. Attention will be directed towards recent development in research on nonverbal behavior. For facial measurement, the use of anatomically based coding systems (like the FACS by Ekman &;Friesen, 1978) or of facial electromyography will be recommended. A more elaborate measure of laughter ("laughing score" by Shimizu, Kawasaki, Azuma, Kawasaki, and Nishimura, 1982) which includes several physiological response systems will be presented as well. It will be argued that a more modern approach to humor research should be taken with respect to issues related to both conceptualization and measurement of responses to humor.

References:

 Ekman, P. &;Friesen, W. V. (1978). Facial action coding system (FACS). Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.

Shimizu, A., Kawasaki, T., Azuma, T., Kawasaki, M. &;Nishimura, T. (1982). Polygraphic study on laughing in normals and schizophrenic patients. In M. Namba &;H. Kaiya (Eds.), Psychobiology of schizophrenia, (pp. 115-120). Oxford: Pergamon.

Zigler, E., Levine, J. &;Gould, L. (1966). Cognitive processes in the development of children's appreciation of humor. Child Development, 37, 507-518.

Elaine B. Safer, University of Delaware, Delaware.

 Much of the postmodern literature exhibits an opennness to the mixing of different genres, both from elite and from popular culture, creating encyclopaedic works with a both/and situation rather then one of either/or. So, too, most postmodern literature has an anti rationalist, anti-realist, and anti-bourgeois emphasis. A tone of comic irony sharpens this thrust and aids the sense of opening boundaries--social as well as literary--in the novels. Barth's works "exhaust" and "replenish" traditional genres as they develop ironic relationships to important writings of the past. I wish to explore some of Barth's narrative strategies--particularly irony, parody, and black humor--in novels that celebrate and exploit for comic purposes the history, resources, and aspirations of the twentieth-century world.

Joyce Anisman-Saltman, Southern Connecticut University, Connecticut, USA.

 This will deal with the physiological benefits of laughter, studies on the mindbody connection, and practical (plus some not-so-practical!) suggestions on ways to bring more laughter into your life. The lecture combines scientific data with comedy, in an effort to provide a mirth-provoking educational experience.Upon completion the participant will be able to: (1) describe several methods of using humor as a form of communication and to cope with stress; (2) identify social, psychological, and physiological benefits of laughter; (3) identify the techniques for the use of humor as a therapeutic tool; and (4) use homor to maintain a healthy perspective in his/her own daily life.

Kopi Saltman. Connecticut, USA.

 For a two year professional growth target while an elementary school pricipal, the presenter designed humorous lessons to coordinate with the whole language program of kindergarten through third grade in his school. The paper describes the type of lessons given and the reaction of students, teachers and the Superintendent of Schools in an elementary school which is the largest K-3 school in the state of Connecticut USA.

Daniel Shealy, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC, USA

 While Louisa May Alcott grew up in Concord surrounded by friends and neighbors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau, whem she admired and respected, she could also poke fun at them, especially their Transcendental ideas. By examining her letters and journals and such published writings as "Transcendental Wild Oats" and "A Wail," my paper will explore the works of Alcott that are often overlooked--her humorous accounts of the famous Concord authors. DANIEL SHEALY is associate professor of English and director of graduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has co-edited THE SELECTED LETTERS OF LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, THE JOURNALS OF LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, and three collections of her works. He recently published his edition of LOUISA MAY ALCOTT'S FAIRY TALES AND FANTASY STORIES.

Diane Shoos, Michigan Technical University, Houghton, Michigan, USA

 These two companion papers explore the humor in the textual and cinema versions of Naked Lunch. Jones' paper explores and establishes the place of humor in the novel within the context of twentieth century American fiction. Burroughs' relationship to such writers as Henry Miller and Norman Mailer clarifies his use of humor, as well as the societal and individual implications of the novel. Shoos' paper focuses on the ways in which the visual and auditory qualities of the film version of Naked Lunch situate the film with respect to the novel and expand on the written text. In the film, visual image and sound both define genre and convey the humor of this cinema noire. Additionally, the presentation will delineate textual differences between the two forms of Naked Lunch and propose a semantic matrix for understanding the two forms.

Wlodzimierz Sobkowiak, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland.

 Along a variety of different dimensions, the characteristics of puns involving juncture manipulation follow rather directly from the properties of the interactive activation theory of speech production, and from the syllabic and metrical structure of the English lexicon. 818 paronomasic puns (taken from a larger sample of almost four thousand items) were analyzed in terms of inter-word juncture manipulation. It was found that the pattern of juncture deletions or mergers ('good enough' --- 'Godunov') and insertions or splits ('because' --- 'big horse') is consistent with the processes in speech production hypothesized by the interactive activation model, and does not approximate the pattern of spontaneous misperceptions, despite surface similarity. This finding supports the claim that puns are best analyzed with reference to the encoder (the punster), rather than to the decoder (the 'punee').In particular, unlike in misperceptions, mergers outnumber splits 8 to 1, which follows from the relatively high phonological activation of monolexemic strings in the lexicon. A fair proportion of splits are of bimorphemic sources ('newspaper' -- 'nose-paper'), involve highly activated function words ('water' - - 'watch her'), and/or exhibit relatively high phonological similarity of source to pun, all three being factors which suppress preference for single-word punning. As far as mergers are concerned, evidence is presented to the effect that the maetrical structure of punning (onset-syllable strength, in particular) is contingent on the chance proportions observed in the English lexicon, e.g. those of monobi-, and multi-syllabics, word-stress patterns, lexical categories (e.g. nouns vs verbs), etc.

Maria Nieves Pascual Soler, Complutense University, Madrid, Spain

 The academic novel as a conscious subgenre started its development in the 60s, both in England and the United States. The practice of its conventions has proved to be highly productive during the 80s and 80s, as an increasing number of university professors and literary critics have devoted part of their time to writing novels. Although the subgenre has fostered no Sophocles, as J. Lyons stated in his Academic Novel in America, writers as entertaining, acuts and popular as David Lodge in England and Alison Lurie in North America, to name only two, can be rated among its practitioners. Universities, replete as they are with a ready-made cast of eccentrics, provide rich material for comedy. However, it is not with the external field of reference, but rather with the internal one that we are to be concerned with in this paper. Intertextually is a vogue word, but almosteverybody who uses it understands it somewhat differently. We might attempt a precarious definition by postulating that it refers to the syntactic, pragmatic and semantic relations a text creates between itself and other texts. The most obvious devices at play in this reference game range from quotation, allusions and cento to the structural forms of parody, travesty and collage.The first hand knowledge the campus novelists possess of literary theory, as it develops within the elitist circles of academe, allows them to provide a sweeping satire of the poststructuralist, deconstructionist and postmodernist critical practices, by using the strategies aforementioned.Their stance is, to us, highly paradoxical, since, while laughing at the excesses of present critical modes, they expect their readers to possess that very kind of sophistication they are deriding. Our aim is thus to trace the critical pre-texts in a small corpus of university novels in order to analyze the means used to ridicule several unduly refined critics and their positions.

Sven Svebak, Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, Arstadveien 21, N-5009 University of Bergen, Norway (E-Mail: Sven.Svebak@psych.uib.no)

Previous research by Martin and his collaborators in Canada has
provided some support to the idea of a moderating effect of sense of humor upon the relation between stress and negative mood as well as psychobiological functions. The present study extended this field of research by the assessment of a systematic range of psychosomatic complaints in a sample of 75 university students when they were preparing for a major exam (one month in advance). Complaints included musculoskeletal pain, symptoms of the upper and lower gastrointestinal tract, cardiorespiratory symptoms and symptoms related to immune function. A scale was also completed to assess the experience of exposure to stressors in everyday life. Scores were related to work, family and finance, separately, and the sum of these scores was used to index overall exposure to stress. Finally, a scale on sense of humor was completed to assess specifically the subject'sliking of people who display their sense of humor in social interaction (a sub-scale of the Sense of Humor Questionnaire: Svebak, 1974). Hierarcical multiple regression analyses were performed to test the significance of direct effects upon complaints by stressors as well as sense of humor. The moderating effect of sense of humor was tested in a third step where the product-score for stressors and sense of humor was the predictor of complaints. Results for musculoskeletal complaints confirmed a direct effect of stressors upon such complaints, an additional direct effect of sense of humor, as well as a significant moderating effect due to particularly high complaint scores in those who reported being exposed to high stress and who, at the same time, scored low on sense of humor. Complaints of the upper gastrointestinal ytract (acid stomach, nausea, epigastric discomfort) as well as lower gastrointestinal tract (constipation, diarrhoea, trouble with gas) were more prevalent among students with high stressor scores. A moderating effect of sense of humor was computed for these associations of complaints with sense of stressors. A similar pattern emerged for immune-related complaints (cough, cold, influenza, allergic skin rash). These findings support the assumption that a beneficial effect of sense of humor is brought out when the individual is under some degree of stress: Complaints become more prevalent among those who score low on sense of humor.

Christoph van Thriel, and Willibald Ruch, University of Dusseldorf

 Humor theories differ with respect to whether or not they consider surprise a necessary construct mediating the perception of incongruity and the release of smiling and laughter. Proponents of one view is, for example, the incongruity-resolution model as proposed by Suls (1972). In this model the unexpected punch line leads to surprise, which, in turn, determines the strength of the recipient's efforts aimed at resolving the incongruity which is a prerequisite for the release of exhilaration or amusement. Thus, linear positive relationships between degree of incongruity, amount of surprise and strength of the affective response are postulated. Whereas the postulation of surprise as an intervening variable is plausible, there is little empircal evidence for its actual emergence so far. The supporting evidence is exclusively based on self-reports and no systematic investigation of the behavioral pattern has been conducted so far. In emotion theory, surprise is considered to be a basic emotion, with a specific physiological pattern and genuine facial expression like raising the brows (based on contraction of the frontalis muscle) and opening of the mouth. An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that surprise precedes the release of humor-induced smiling and laughter. Since the frontalis action can be of low intensity (and thus lead to not or only barely visible changes on the surface of the skin) facial-EMG was utlized detect even mildest forms of surprise. Subjects were confronted with three humor stimuli: a) Weight-Judging Task (Deckers, 1993), b) jokes presented auditorily from a tape recorder, and c) a "Jack in-the-Box" gag. It is analyzed whether a) phasic changes in frontalis activity immediately precede the onset of a smile/laugh, and b) whether the intensity of this action correlates with the degree of perceived incongruity, surprise, and funniness of the stimulus and with the intensity of the contraction of the two muscles producing the smile of exhilaration, the zygomatic major (lip corner puller) and orbicularis oculi (cheek raiser) muscle. The results will be discussed in the context of whether the postulate of surprise asn an intervening construct is necessary.

May Reference Books Contain Humor?

 Reference books are generally serious works, allowing little room to maneuver for the insertion of humor. Publishers of reference books are not tolerant of attempts at humor, which they believe may tend to trivialize what should be considered a serious work. These observations are generally true, but I found an exception when writing The Oxford Thesaurus (which I refer to as the O.T., though not within hearing distance of the people at Oxford University Press. Originally written for the British market, the first edition of the O.T. was published in November, 1991; the second edition, the American version, was published in September, 1992. Both contain examples that illustrate, in full sentences, natural contexts in which a given headword appears in a particular sense. Many of the examples (and some of the synonyms) contain humorous references, most of which were excised by the stultifying editors at OUP in Oxford; some were allowed to get by when the Americanized ms. was offered to OUP in New York.

Carmen Valero, Universidad de Alcala de Henares, Madrid, Spain

 Translating activity is undoubtedly highly diverse. If we consider texts as evidence of a communicative transaction taking place within a social framework, the way is open to a view of translating which is not restricted to a particular field. We could include such diverse activities as film subtitling and dubbing, simultaneous interpreting, abstracting and summarizing, translating and adapting for children or cartoon translation to name but a few. From this point of view we assume the target of the critic in analyzing some problems concerned to the translation of comic strips, considering the conventions and difficulties involved in such a form of culture. If we define the aim of the translator in the case of these texts as being to produce the same reaction in the reader of the translated text as the author produces in the reader of the original text, some points will be problematic: historical background and knowledge of the reader; national stereotypes; reproduction of dialects and regional accents; technical limitations; and onomatopea. How are these topics treated in the Spanish version of some comic strips by Robert Crumb, one of America's most original, trenchant and uncompromising satirists? The purpose of this paper is to give an answer to it.

Isabelle Van de Gejuchte, European University Institute Badia Fiesolana Via dei Roccettini,9, 50016 San Domenico di Fiesole, Firenze, Italy.

In this paper, I would like to focus on the ambivalence of humour. Beside bing a conservative force in society, can it be a discourse of contestation and subversion, an instrument of power in the mouth of those who have none? In order to explore such a complex question, I would like to introduce a real case: a French comic named Coluche, and the political and social reactions that were provoked when he presented his candidature for the presidential election in 1981.

Celia Vazquez, Universidad de Vigo, Spain

 Of the three great themes of human life - birth, marriage and death - the last named may seem the least promising as a humorous device. But this impression proves misleading. It is nearly two centuries since Hazlitt remarked how hard it sometimes is to keep one's countenance at a funeral. A friend of his, Charles Lamb, had the same idea about death. In a letter to Robert Southy, Charles Lamb wrote, "Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral." This paper aims to examine one of the ingredients that make up Tom Sharpe's humorous experience and the ways in which he incorporates death into his novels. Tom Sharpe's fondness for violence can be appreciated throughout all his novels and it often leads to a cataloging of death and destruction as something mechanical and predictable. Sharpe hovers on the borderline between the comic and the tragic in most of his novels. There is indeed much in Sharpe to make one shudder. The dead bodies, which should be treated with reverence and respect, are treated as objects and we laugh - sometimes despite ourselves -at a stuffed corpse without thinking of the ethical implications. Humor nowadays tends toward the black and the sick rather than towards the whimsical of the genteel. And the author says that this is a way of coping with aggression, violence and frustration which are too much with us today.

Clyde Wade, University of Missouri-Rolla, Rolla, Missouri, USA.

 Faulkner's The Hamlet has probably received more attention from scholars and critics since its publication in 1940 than any other comic American novel except the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Contributing to the continuing hold of The Hamlet upon readers is Faulkner's intricate handling of the humorous love affair between the idiot Ike Snopes and Jack Houston's cow. Whatever prurient interest possesses the inhabitants of Frenchman's Bend, there is little of that kind to attract the reader who is seriously challenged by other aspects of this boldly problematic narrative. What kind of humor does the reader find? Opinions diverge. Encouraged by Faulkner's propensity for evoking such archetypal heroes and heroines as Zeus, Siegfried, Juno, Helen, and Don Quixote when alluding to either Ike or the cow, readers inevitably focus upon narrative elements that lend themselves to such matters as heroic comedy, mock epic, burlesque, and travesty. I have previously treated the episode as a complex pastoral comedy as Leo Marx defines the genre in The Machine in the Garden: a work which presents both the pastoral ideal and a counterforce which severely tests the idyllic vision and casts doubt upon the values it expresses. The passing of time shows that, while treating the episode as first one kind of comedy, or humor, and then another works reasonably well, such treatment lacks completeness. Yet all of these approaches involve to some extent a consideration of Faulkner's resorting to an extravagantly poetic style in a grand manner so as to achieve, given the creatural implications in this particular narrative thread, a remarkable psychic distance. It is instructive in terms of grasping a sense of the comic wholeness of the novel to consider the relationship between style and substance and the mutual distancing effect one has upon the other, first in the tale of Ike and the cow and then in the other humorous love narratives that constitute The Hamlet.

Melissa Waller, The College of William and Mary, Williamsberg, Virgina, USA.

 The purpose of the present research was to examine the connection between the right hemisphere and humor appreciation. The study used the Vandenberg Mental Rotation test to measure right hemisphere functioning and a seven point Likert scale to measure funniness of humor. It was hypothesized that individuals with faster mental rotation skills would also rate humor as funnier than people with slower mental rotation skills. Both jokes and cartoons were included to see if this applied to both verbal and visual humor. Verbal SAT scores were used as indicators of the more verbal left hemisphere functioning to see if this could also be a predictor of humor appreciation. A series of regression analyses and analyses of variance was done to determine if mental rotation skill and verbal SAT scores were good predictors of humor ratings. Because it has been shown males and females differ in what type of humor they prefer, it was necessary to conduct a pilot study to select humor stimuli. Sixty-nine college students from introductory psychology classes rated cartoons and jokes for complexity and aggressiveness. Humor stimuli were picked on the basis of the resulting means to ensure equal numbers of aggressive and nonaggressive, and complex and simple stimuli. Ninety-eight undergraduates enrolled in introductory psychology courses served as subjects for the main study. Results indicated that mental rotation was a significant predictor of humor ratings for females, but not for males, and that verbal SAT scores were not a significant predictor of humor appreciation for either males or females. Analyses also revealed a significant interaction between gender and mental rotation. One explanation for the obtained results is that there is an optimum range in which mental rotation scores predict humor appreciation. Perhaps the lower scores which females got on the mental rotation task fell within this range where the higher scores of the males were above this range. Other explanations, including the possibility of completely separate cognitive processes, were also discussed, as well as suggestions for future research.

Nel Warnars-Kleverlaan &;Louis Oppenheimer, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

 Having a good sense of humor is perceived as an important variable in the formation of social relations and friendships. Humor as a social ability is thought to reduce the social distance between the "humorous" individual and others. Besides defining humor as a social ability, humor is also perceived as a cognitive ability involving humor appreciation, understanding and production. In an elaborate research program, the relationships between both perceptions of humor, as well as between both abilities, social distance, and social relationships are cross-sectionally and longitudinally studied. In the cross-sectional part of the study, in which humor is perceived as a social ability, the relationships between intra- and interpersonal perceptions of humor and sociometric indices were examined. This part of the total research program involves a replication and elaboration of the study of Sherman (1988). The purpose was to examine whether a) the relationship between humorousness ratings and social distance, as reported by Sherman (1988), remains similar for different ages, b) social distance is related to social status, and c) sex-differences are present. In total 225 Dutch children participated in this study. They were divided into three age groups consisting of 86 third-graders (mean age 9.2 years) and 76 sixth-graders (mean age 12.3 years) from elementary schools and 63 third-graders (i.e., adolescents; mean age 15.8 years) from secondary schools. All subjects were questioned about humor, friendship, funniness, and social distance. Preliminary analyses demonstrated that only part of the results reported by Sherman were replicated with the Dutch population. The differences and the possible explanations will be discussed.

Uwe Wirth, Johann-Wolfgage-Goethe Universitat, Frankfurt am Main

 The semiotic theory of interpretive cooperation developed by Umberto Eco not only provides a very fruitful approach to the problems of interpretive interaction but also entails some important implictions with regard to a semiotic theory of humor. I want to tie together Eco's theoretical insights concerning the process of interpretation with his remarks about comic, carnical and humor in "The Comic and the Rule," "The Frames of Comic Freedom," and "Pirandello Ridens." It is a commonplace notion that the comic is based on the violation of a rule, particularly a social rule or a convention. But this is not only true for the comic discourse, it is true for the tragic discourse as well. Thus, the following question emerges: How does the comic discourse violate social rules? Eco argues that the comic violates commonly accepted rules implicitly. The comic effect is produced by a rhetorical device which, in a given social or intertextual "frame," displays the violation of the rule "without, however, making it explicit in discourse." The broken frame "must be presupposed, but never spelled out." The comical discourse works "because rules, even unconsciously, are accepted," and thus "their unmotivated violation becomes comic." Even though Eco endorses that "many comic situations can be produced by breaking Grices's conversational maxims," he insists that this is not sufficient. This leads to the question: What are the sufficient conditions to realize the comic effect? The definition of comic as a violation of common rules leads to the idea of Carnival as the attempt to find a situation in which we are not concerned by the rules of our social context. The feeling of carnivalesque freedom derives from liberation from the fear imposed by the existence of conventional laws. Eco argues that there is something wrong with the theory of cosmic carnivalization as global liberation, since "without a valid law to break, carnival is impossible." This is the "diabolic trick": Carnival can exist only as an authorized transgression." Carnival then, is an example of law enforcement, since it reminds us "of the existence of the rule." Therefore one might now ask: Is there any opportunity to undermine the existing laws or is every attempt of rule violation simultaneously a rule reinforcement? This might be seen as the crucial point of Eco's investigation, since he introduces the concept of humor, which stands between the tragic, and the comic-carnivalesque discourse. Humor, in contrast to the tragic or the comic, does not make us accept the system of values, but it obliges us to acknowledge its existence. Humor is based on explicit understanding but not on implicit accepting of rules. Thus, humor does not fall victim of the rule it presupposes. Unlike carnival, Humor does not pretend to lead us beyond our own limits but gives us the feeling of the structure of our limits. According to Eco, humor does not promise liberation, it reminds us "of the presence of a law that we no longer have reasons to obey. In doing so it undermines the law and makes us feel the uneasiness of living under a law - any law."

Anat Zajdman, Unviersity of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.

 This work tries to analyze the ways in which some Face Threatening Acts (FTAs, Brown and Levinson, 1978) are administered in joking. The humorous FTA may be effected in an on record, redressed or off-record mode. When redressed, the humorous FTA may be managed by violation of the speaker's or hearer's positive face within frame of reference of negative politeness, or, alternately, by violation of the speaker's or hearer's negative face within frame of reference of positive politeness. Strategic advantages of the speaker over the hearer involved in the humorous act are discussed. The last section deals with the strategic advantages of self-denigrating humor.

Boguslav Zylko, University of Gdansk, Gdansk, Poland.

 The main points: 1) the role of the Old Russian tradition in the formation of Bakhtin's notion of "people's culture of laughter"/"narodnaia smekhovaia kul'tura"/. 2) the difference between West and East versions of "people's culture and laughter." 3) the ambivalent status of laughter in Russian cultural and spiritual tradition/laughter as a sin/. 4) the place of Gogol's prose in the history of humor and laughter. 5) Bakhtin's analysis of Gogol's humor and laughter. 6) some limitations of Bakhtin's approach/an overestimation of Rabelaisian influence on Gogol.