8 Manipulating interpretations
8.6 Other issues
8.6.1 Misdirection and priming
It has been observed (e.g. Dolitsky (1983, 1992) ) that it may be necessary to withhold certain information from the set-up portion of a joke. Careful selection of information is crucial to forced reinterpretation jokes, where it can be seen as following these principles:
• nothing in the set-up must rule out the ‘hidden’ (less OBVIOUS) inter-pretation;
• nothing in the set-up should draw attention to the ‘hidden’ interpre-tation;
• it may be helpful to include details or choose phrasings which support or suggest the ‘non-hidden’ (more OBVIOUS) interpretation.
The first two of these principles are routinely adhered to in FR jokes (e.g.
(18) ). The third guideline is noticeably at work in (76).
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(76) A pair of suburban couples who had known each other for quite some time talked it over and decided to do a little conjugal swapping. The trade was made the following evening, and the newly arranged couples retired to their respective houses. After about an hour of bedroom bliss, one of the wives propped herself up on her elbow, looked at her new partner and said ‘Well, I wonder how the boys are getting along.’
(quoted from Yamaguchi by Dolitsky (1992: 41) ) The main misdirection is in the choice of conjugal swapping rather than the more common (if less politically correct) wife-swapping, along with the vague phrases the trade was made, newly arranged couples. (This might seem to refute the conjecture in Section 8.1.1 about the location of ambiguity within a story, but these misdirecting phrases are not, strictly speaking, linguistic-ally ambiguous.)
A slightly subtler form of misdirection may occur by having one joke establish an expectation for another joke. Example (78), delivered phonet-ically, is typically preceded by (77).
(77) How do you get two elephants in a Mini?
One in the front, one in the back.
(78) How do you get /tυ/ /wels/ in a Mini?
Across the Severn Bridge.
The first joke, (77), primes the audience to interpret the phonetic string /tυ/ /wels/ as two whales, but the punchline treats it as meaning to Wales (this of course requires a dialect in which wh and w are indistinguish-able). Notice that, in our terms, (77) is technically not part of the set-up, as that term applies to the part of the text which enters into some signifi-cant semantic/pragmatic relationship with the punchline. Instead, (77) is part of the context which influences the interpretation of the set-up (ques-tion) of (78). (Similarly, (1) is probably more effective if told after a few riddles of the form What do you get if you cross . . . ?) None of this has to be explicitly mentioned in our formal model. The basic text model that we are already assuming (Section 3.9 and Appendix A.1) defines a text as having one or more interpretations, ordered by OBVIOUSNESS. This implicitly imposes the constraint that nothing must rule out the less
OBVIOUSinterpretation, and the second and third guidelines above more or less re-state the fact that the interpretations, for the chosen text, must be in a suitable order of OBVIOUSNESS. That is, the three principles above are, if anything, guidelines for constructing a text which meets our formal definitions, rather than being additional formal stipulations.
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8.6.2 An outside view of misinterpretation
Although misinterpretation is a central mechanism in FR jokes, not all jokes where there is some misinterpretation count as FR jokes. For example, in (33), the misinterpretation (by the driver-character) is a contrivance within the set-up, not something revealed by the punchline.
Similarly, (79) uses linguistic ambiguity to create a misinterpretation, but not a reinterpretation of the set-up.
(79) There was a boy standing on a corner selling fish. He was saying, ‘Dam fish for sale, dam fish for sale.’ A preacher walked up and asked why he was calling them dam fish. The kid said, ‘I caught them at the dam, so they’re dam fish.’ The preacher bought some, took them home and asked his wife to cook the dam fish. His wife looked at him in bewilderment and said, ‘Preachers aren’t supposed to talk like that.’
The preacher explained why they were dam fish, and she agreed to cook them. When dinner was ready and everyone was sitting down, the preacher asked his son to pass him the dam fish. His son replied,
‘That’s the spirit, dad. Pass the fucking potatoes!’
(from www.jokes2000.com) In (79), both interpretations of dam(n) fish are openly available (i.e. there is no hidden interpretation from the audience’s point of view). The misin-terpretation in the punchline is by a character in the story. The humorous effect cannot derive from sudden revelation (to the audience) of a hidden meaning, but must be based on amusement at the actions of the mis-interpreting character. The presentational structure in this joke is the simple narrative (Section 8.5) rather than any more oblique mechanism:
the narrative describes a situation in which a character, having made a misinterpretation, makes a fool of himself. (See Section 12.3 for some related discussion.)
In the traditional verbal/referential classification (Section 2.7), (79) would be a verbal joke.
8.6.3 What’s a punchline?
Although we have presented some textual structures in which the division between set-up and punchline seems fairly clear, this may not always be the case.
(80) A rabbit goes into a butcher’s shop and asks, ‘Have you got any lettuce?’ The butcher says, ‘We don’t sell lettuce here. You need the greengrocer’s across the road.’ The next day the rabbit comes into the shop and asks for some lettuce again. The butcher tells him, 1
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‘Look, I told you yesterday, we don’t sell lettuce. You need the green-grocer.’ The rabbit comes in the next day and asks the butcher again,
‘Have you got any lettuce?’ The butcher goes mad. He says, ‘Look, I’m sick of this. How many times do I have to tell you I don’t sell lettuce. If you come in here asking for lettuce, I’m going to nail your ears to the floor.’ The next day the rabbit comes in and asks the butcher, ‘Have you got any nails?’ ‘Nails? No.’ ‘Right,’ the rabbit says, ‘Have you got any lettuce?’
(Ross 1998: 43) In (80), it seems plausible that the set-up continues at least as far as the phrase . . . and asks the butcher. However, the remaining text (four utter-ances) then produces the amusing effect, and it is far from obvious where to draw a line part-way through this sequence. Perhaps all of this textual string constitutes the punchline. In contrast to the text structures outlined above (such as punchline conflict), there is no clear linguistic evidence for separating some particular end segment which has a special relationship with all that has gone before.
8.6.4 Further factors
The definitions given in this chapter (and formally in Appendix A) describe classes of text rather than classes of joke, in that a text could meet one of our definitions without being in any way humorous. A simple misunder-standing, or an accidentally ambiguous utterance, would be covered by these definitions even if completely unhumorous. In our earlier discussion of the FR model (Chapter 5), we suggested that an FR joke required some element of INAPPROPRIATENESS or CONTRAST to distinguish it from a mere misunderstanding. This would be statable more precisely using our formalization of FR jokes (Appendix A.2.1). The other types of joke discussed in this chapter would similarly need some further condition to transform them from describing types of text to defining classes of joke.
We will explore this issue in more detail in Chapter 12.
8.7 Summary
In Chapter 5 we saw that there were, in the existing literature, (at least) two separate variants of the so-called incongruity-resolution model which made different claims about the structure and mechanisms of jokes. We have examined one of these variants further, and shown that there are at least two separate subvariants within it. We have studied some superfi-cially similar, but slightly different, classes of joke. Formal definitions based on our discussion can be found in Appendix A.2.1.
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All of this analysis is directed at particular classes of joke, and does not purport to cover all jokes, not even all incongruity-resolution jokes, if such a class can be defined. Moreover, we have focussed solely on the way that information is presented in these (propositional) jokes: additional conditions on texts, to qualify them as jokes, will be discussed in Chapter 12.
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