The forced reinterpretation (FR) model

5.2.1 The status of the FR model

The forced reinterpretation arrangement is very prominent as an embod-iment of the IR approach, and is often equated directly with IR theory.

Some authors seem to put it forward as a general account of all humour, or all verbally expressed humour. For example, the following quotations are not intended to describe some subclass of jokes, but are offered as general rules:

The comic effect arises when an alternative, non-favored and there-fore non-expected interpretation is revealed, at the punchline, as the correct one.

(Dascal 1985: 95) . . . the punch semantically reverses the sense we would expect from the build-up, and forces an unexpected sense to our attention.

(Norrick 2001: 258) The humorous effect comes from the listener’s realization and accep-tance that s/he has been led down the garden path . . .

In humour, listeners are lured into accepting presuppositions that are later disclosed as unfounded.

(Dolitsky 1992: 35) Attardo (1994: Ch. 2) discusses the isotopy disjunction model (a synthesis of suggestions by various authors starting with Greimas), which seems to be a forced reinterpretation model, and Raskin’s SSTH (Chapter 6 below) can be seen as another variant.

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5.2.2 The basic units

There are various entities involved in the typical FR account, including:

SU₁: the first (more obvious) interpretation of the set-up text SU₂: the second (hidden) interpretation of the set-up text PL: the meaning of the punchline

I: an interpretation formed by integrating the meaning of the punch-line with SU₂.

There are also various relationships and properties that are of interest, based on various observations made informally in the literature (the labels used here are invented as ad hoc mnemonics – part of the problem is that there is no standard terminology for these):

• OBVIOUSNESS: SU₁ is more likely than SU₂ to be noticed by the reader.

• CONFLICT: PL does not make sense with SU₁.

• COMPATIBILITY: PL does make sense with SU₂.

• ^CONTRAST: there is some significant difference between SU₁ and SU₂ (or possibly SU₁ and I ). (This was called COMPARISON in Ritchie (1999).)

• INAPPROPRIATENESS: I is inherently odd, eccentric or preposterous, or is taboo, in that it deals with matters not conventionally talked of openly, such as sexual or lavatorial matters, or forbidden political sentiments. These differ in terms of which norms are being flouted:

those of everyday logic – leading to ^ABSURDITY – or those of socially acceptable discourse – leading to TABOO effects.

Notice that CONFLICT and COMPATIBILITY may in principle rely on a different meaning of ‘does make sense with’, and may not simply be oppo-sites or negations of each other. CONFLICT is the symptom that the punchline meaning does not fit in, thus signalling a need for reinterpre-tation; COMPATIBILITY describes the relationship between punchline meaning and set-up meaning in the eventual resolution. These could, in principle, rely on different factors.

Although some or all of these relations or properties are sometimes proposed as the essential ingredients in IR humour, it is possible to find texts which, although plausibly of the general form of an FR joke, display only some of these relationships, yet which are humorous. For example, (25) relies on a (hidden) ambiguity regarding the structure of the initial question, and this is disambiguated in a surprising way by the answer;

that is, it falls within the FR model.

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(25) A lady went into a clothing store and asked ‘May I try on that dress in the window?’

‘Well,’ replied the sales clerk doubtfully, ‘don’t you think it would be better to use the dressing room?’

Although it could be argued that the hidden meaning is ABSURD, there is no evidence that it additionally has some significant CONTRAST with the more obvious meaning (other than just being different from it). Similar remarks apply to (26).

(26) Postmaster: Here’s your five-cent stamp.

Shopper (with arms full of bundles): Do I have to stick it on myself?

Postmaster: Nope. On the envelope.

Hence, not all of these relations or properties are necessary to create humour, even within the FR class of jokes.

The extent to which the hidden interpretation is INAPPROPRIATE (or has other suitable properties) may vary between jokes, as may the degree of CONTRAST between the interpretations. It is also conceivable that the sharpness of the CONFLICT between punchline and the first interpreta-tion may vary, as may the OBVIOUSNESS of that interpretation. A more detailed version of the FR model may involve a complex disjunction of conditions, where each condition is itself a conjunction of thresholds for certain properties. For example, it may be that a text is humorous if either its CONTRAST level is above a certain threshold or the INAPPROPRI

-ATENESSof the hidden interpretation reaches some other minimum level.

5.2.3 Previous variants compared

All discussions of FR-style jokes admit, as pre-theoretic (or informally theoretic) entities, the items listed in Section 5.2.2 above: SU₁, SU₂, PL, I.

It is therefore reasonable to ask how such theoretical commentaries can be stated as properties of, or as relationships between, these basic entities.

The lack of standard terminology means that it is sometimes hard to be sure what types of entity a proposed relation is between, and whether one author’s incongruity is comparable to another’s. The five relations/

properties used here (CONFLICT, etc.) are chosen as some commonly occur-ring notions, to organize this discussion.

Confusingly, several of these constructs (particularly CONFLICT, CON

-TRAST, and INAPPROPRIATENESS) are referred to as ‘incongruity’, thereby obscuring the relationships. Some of these apparent differences of opinion may be more an artefact of the lack of precise terminology or definitions, in that the ^CONFLICT between punchline and set-up may be conflated with, or confused with, ^CONTRASTbetween the revised interpretation and 1

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the initial interpretation. Shultz says ‘the incongruity consists in the relation between the last line, or punchline, and the part that precedes the last line’ (Shultz 1976: 13) – i.e. CONFLICT. Of example (30), Rothbart and Pien (1977) observe that the resolution involves an elephant sitting in a cup of hot chocolate, and refer to this as ‘an incongruous situation’

(i.e. ^ABSURDITY), and they suggest that this residual ‘incongruity’ is a potential problem for IR theory, in that the oddity has not been elimi-nated (‘resolved’). Alexander (1997: 16) says that a crucial part of joke perception may be ‘an incongruity between the punchline and what comes before’ – i.e. CONFLICT. Freud (1966)’s proposals can be viewed as opting for (a form of) INAPPROPRIATENESS as constituting incongruity.

Raskin’s SSTH (see Chapter 6) has a variant of CONTRAST as the central factor, namely script opposition. The SSTH also seems to package

INAPPROPRIATENESS into script opposition, by regarding this (or other properties of the second interpretation) as relative to the first interpreta-tion, rather than as inherent properties of the less obvious meaning. Giora (1991) proposes that the main mechanism in FR-style jokes is that the punchline provides a marked increase in informativeness, and that the inter-pretations differ in their ‘markedness’. The notion of markedness is not formally defined, but this seems to be tackling CONFLICT, OBVIOUSNESS, and possibly CONTRAST. De Palma and Weiner (1992) discuss a notion of accessibility for the meanings of words, thus addressing OBVIOUSNESS. Attardo (1997) suggests that SSTH’s ‘script opposition’ could be defined in terms of Giora’s and De Palma and Weiner’s concepts, thus replacing a description of ^CONTRAST with an amalgam of accounts of ^CONFLICT and OBVIOUSNESS.

5.2.4 Building on the FR model

The FR account does not particularly illuminate one of the central concepts of IR theory (and of much theorizing about humour): what kind of incon-gruity is funny? What the model does do is strip away some of the aspects of how this particular genre of joke conveys the incongruity. In this way, it reduces the research problem to a set of component subproblems. Most of the abstract concepts outlined above depend upon knowledge about language and (via linguistic meaning) the world, and research into language processing will illuminate these parts of the model. The residual sub-problems are therefore:

• OBVIOUSNESS: What makes one potential interpretation more obvious than another?

• ^CONFLICT: In what way(s) must a piece of text be related to preceding discourse in order to stimulate a search for another interpretation?

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• COMPATIBILITY: What does it mean for a punchline to fit in with (‘be resolved with’) a set-up interpretation?

• CONTRAST: What does it mean for two interpretations to differ in an amusing way (as opposed to merely being different)?

• INAPPROPRIATENESS: What factors make an interpretation inherently more amusing?

Of these, those concerning OBVIOUSNESS, ^CONFLICT, and ^COMPATI

-BILITY are to some extent more general research issues in linguistics and language processing, and the simplest initial assumption to make is that no special mechanisms are needed which are peculiar to humour. However, jokes may (in common with non-humorous stories) require a certain semantic or pragmatic licence, so that the audience can ‘suspend disbelief ’:

jokes can feature entities which would qualify as semantically ill-formed in some descriptions of the world, such as talking kangaroos or walking cauliflowers. These semantic oddities are not necessarily a source of

CONFLICT.

Definitions of several of the necessary concepts might be forthcoming from other disciplines: research into the interpretation and assimilation of sentences within a discourse (CONFLICT, COMPATIBILITY); semantic research, studies of belief systems and of social attitudes (CONTRAST, INAP

-PROPRIATENESS); sociology, psychology (INAPPROPRIATENESS); psycho-linguistic and computational research into parsing and semantic interpreta-tion of texts, particularly ambiguity and its resoluinterpreta-tion (OBVIOUSNESS). If all these building-blocks could be defined independently of humour theory, then defining the FR model of humour would reduce to the following:

what combinations of these factors result in humour?

On the other hand, if it is necessary to have specific definitions of some of these concepts (for example, if only certain types of CONTRAST

result in humour), then the humour-theory account of FR jokes would also include these definitions (cf. Section 2.14). If we accept that some-thing like the FR model applies to a wide range of jokes, then defining

CONTRAST and INAPPROPRIATENESS, and determining the overall combination of these factors necessary and sufficient for humour, are central to humour theory.

This is not to say that the FR model does not, in its present state, contribute to our understanding of humour. Many authors have agreed that the humorous effect usually depends upon the incongruity being brought to the attention of the audience abruptly (e.g. Katz (1993, 1996) ), and the FR mechanism is one way to do this. Hence, it offers an answer to that particular subproblem within a theory of humour.

In Chapter 8 we will examine the FR approach in more detail.

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