We Are Not Amused: Failed Humor in Interaction

195 Pages·2015·0.67 MB·English

by  Nancy Bell

Nancy Bell
We Are Not Amused
Humor Research
Editors
Victor Raskin
Willibald Ruch
Volume 10
Nancy Bell
We Are Not
Amused
Failed Humor in Interaction
ISBN 978-1-5015-1052-6
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-0158-6
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0164-7
ISSN 1861-4116
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Acknowledgements
My deepest appreciation goes first to Salvatore Attardo, without whose encour-
agement this work would not have been undertaken. Victor Raskin and Willibald
Ruch provided essential feedback that helped me sharpen my arguments and
broaden the scope of my perspective. Many other colleagues in humor studies
were similarly helpful, sharing comments, questions, insights, and examples that
allowed me develop my thinking. Of special note are Christie Davies and Moira
Smith, who were particularly generous and encouraging.
My husband, Mark Anderson, deserves recognition for having both the
knack and the patience for wading through YouTube videos to identify examples
of failed humor. Nicole Houser also collected data, although here the gratitude
is really due to Barb Houser, whose attempts at humor (along with her sense of
style) have earned her her own Facebook fan page.
Finally, many thanks to Emily Farrell and Marcia Schwartz for shepherding
me through the publication process with lots of laughs along the way.
Preface
Conan Doyle’s Silver Blaze story, while a relatively minor component of the
Holmes’ canon, contains a memorable expression, namely “the curious incident
of the dog in the night-time.” The curious incident turns out to have been that
said dog did not bark, while a race-horse was being stolen. Holmes deduces from
this negative fact that the dog knew the perpetrator of the crime and proceeds to
unravel the mystery.
Holmes does well to emphasize the importance of negative facts. Probably
the biggest lesson of the Chomskian paradigm, cheerfully ignored by linguists of
all persuasions, is that what sentences your grammar does not generate matters
as much as those that it does. This applies particularly well to humor. To inves-
tigate what humorous texts do not succeed as such, and why, will both advance
and complement our understanding of how humor works in a way that other
studies, however good, cannot match.
It has been said that humor research suffers from an optimistic bias, so that
researchers focus on the positive aspects of the phenomenon, ignoring, rela-
tively speaking, its darker, negative aspects (Billig 2005). Billig’s discussion is
not without its flaws, but one point about which he is unquestionably correct is
that the field of humor research had, until recently, systematically favored suc-
cessful humor, humor that goes off as planned, that achieves, as I described it
with a catchy definition, its perlocutionary goal. Very little attention had been
paid to humor that somehow fails to achieve its perlocutionary goal, i.e., to elicit
amusement or at the very least the detection of the intention on the speaker’s part
to do so.
In fact, in Attardo 2008, I had noted that failed humor was one of the areas of
humor research that was badly under-researched and for no good reason, as the
topic hid some interesting theoretical issues, as witnessed, for example, by Janet
Holmes’ (2000: 163) lucid and coherent throwing in of the towel on the matter. I
myself, did little more than waving said towel in the air, but Nancy Bell has taken
the towel, washed it, dried it, folded it, and put a little sprig of lavender on it.
In all seriousness, we have now a treatment of failed humor that is definitive,
comprehensive, and un-avoidable. Young scholars have now taken the habit of
simply side-stepping research they don’t like. To avoid this book on failed humor
would be such an obvious mistake that it seems safe to predict that this will not
happen.
Bell ties in the topic of humor failure with the more general category of mis-
communication and shows convincingly and in painful detail that humor may
fail at every level of communication (linguistic and not). This is a significant
theoretical move, as it anchors the descriptive work and imbues it with explana-
Preface       vii
tory power. Humor fails because communication fails and the latter fails because
systems powerful enough to express what humans need to express cannot be fail-
safe (i.e., they have to rely on input from the speakers/hearers).
Bell’s book encompasses also the reactions to failed humor, or as she terms
it its “management.” The term is inspired because failed humor turns out to
elicit a gamut of reactions ranging from the polite to the aggressive. Here Bell
has recourse to face theory, the politeness approach that sees speakers “man-
aging” their face (perceived social standing). Finally, Bell addresses how social
variables affect the management of humor failures, with particular emphasis on
social status and degree of intimacy.
Bell’s work is thorough and detailed, and she must be congratulated for this,
but where her dedication goes off the scale, in my opinion, is in one daring meth-
odological innovation she introduced, i.e., the elicitation of responses to failed
humor by exposing herself (and later her students—it builds character) to the
willing humiliation of producing deliberately bad humor in order to record the
reactions of the hearers. Much like the pioneers of vaccination research, who
often inoculated themselves with their tentative concoctions, risking their health
or worse their lives, Bell, in the spirit of science, risked her reputation as a funny
person.
As with all good research, this study opens more questions than it closes. For
example, now that we know that humor may fail at any level of the communica-
tive edifice, it will be interesting to see how those who used laughter or smiling
as the identifying feature of humor will deal with the fact that their methodology
has a gaping hole at every level of the communicative gamut, since obviously
some failed humor will not be accompanied by laughter or anything like explicit
comments along the lines of “well, THAT attempt at humor failed!”
Salvatore Attardo – Texas A&M University-Commerce
Attardo, Salvatore 2008. Semantics and pragmatics of humor. Language and Linguistics
Compass 2(6). 1203–1215.
Billig, Michael. 2005. Laughter and Ridicule. Towards a Social Critique of Humour. London:
Sage.
Holmes, Janet. 2000. Politeness, power and provocation: How humour functions in the
workplace. Discourse Studies 2(2). 159–185.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements | v
Preface | vi
1 Introduction | 1
1.1 Introduction | 1
1.2 What is failed humor? | 3
1.3 Why study failed humor? | 5
1.4 Background | 6
1.4.1 Language and interaction | 7
1.5 Discourse analysis and the study of (failed) humor | 16
1.6 Structure of the book | 19
2 Conceptualizing Failed Humor | 21
2.1 Approaches to failed humor | 21
2.1.1 Superiority/hostility theories | 21
2.1.2 Release theories | 23
2.1.3 Incongruity | 24
2.2 Competence, performance, and failed humor | 26
2.2.1 Failed humor and humor competence | 27
2.2.2 Failed humor and humor performance | 29
2.3 Identification of failed humor | 33
2.4 Data set | 38
2.5 Summary | 41
3 Failed Humor as Miscommunication | 43
3.1 Introduction | 43
3.2 Defining miscommunication | 43
3.3 Sources of miscommunication | 44
3.4 Failed humor as misunderstanding | 49
3.4.1 A framework for understanding failed humor | 49
3.5 Structure of miscommunication and repair | 56
3.6 Summary | 60
Table of Contents       ix
4 Triggers of Failed Humor | 61
4.1 Introduction | 61
4.2 Locutionary problems | 61
4.3 Linguistic rules | 66
4.3.1 Phonology | 66
4.3.2 Morphosyntax | 67
4.3.3 Semantics | 69
4.4 Ambiguity | 72
4.5 Pragmatic force | 76
4.6 Message form | 77
4.7 Framing/keying | 80
4.8 Summary | 83
5 Triggers of Failure Specific to Humor | 85
5.1 Introduction | 85
5.2 Joke incongruity | 85
5.3 Joke appreciation | 91
5.4 Joke (meta)messages | 97
5.5 (Appropriate) humor support | 102
5.6 Summary | 106
6 Managing Failed Humor in Interaction | 108
6.1 Introduction | 108
6.2 Speaker management of failure | 108
6.2.1 Preventing failure | 109
6.2.2 Managing failure | 113
6.3 Audience management of failure | 119
6.3.1 Responses to failure due to lack of understanding | 120
6.3.2 Responses to failure due to lack of appreciation | 125
6.3.3 Taking offense to humor | 131
6.4 Final remarks on negotiation of failed humor | 134
6.5 Summary | 139