The Language of Humour

Walter Nash

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317887836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The broad aim of this lively and engaging book is to examine relationships between the linguistic patterns, the stylistic functions, and the social and cultural contexts of humour. The material used in illustration is of corresponding breadth: schoolyard jokes, graffiti, aphorisms, advertisements, arguments, anecdotes, puns, parodies, passages of comic fiction, all come under Dr Nash's scrutiny.

One

Explaining the joke

Though nothing suffocates humour more swiftly than a thesis, the comic muse will never lack commentators. Sooner or later, protesting our good intentions, acknowledging the futility of the enterprise, we are all drawn to this challenge: explain the joke. The need to explain becomes, indeed, an obsession rooted in our common lot, for as Bergson rightly remarks, the comic does not exist beyond the pale of what is strictly human. Together with the power of speech, the mathematical gift, the gripping thumb, the ability to make tools, humour is a specifying characteristic of humanity. For many of us, it is more than an amiable decoration on life; it is a complex piece of equipment for living, a mode of attack and a line of defence, a method of raising questions and criticizing arguments, a protest against the inequality of the struggle to live, a way of atonement and reconciliation, a treaty with all that is wilful, impaired, beyond our power to control.

In short, as wise men often remind us – with a wink of paradox – humour is a serious business, a land for which the explorer must equip himself thoughtfully. Here we find wit and word-play and banter and bumfun; slogans and captions and catchwords; allusion and parody; ironies; satires; here are graffiti and limericks; here is the pert rhyme, and here the twisted pun; here are scrambled spellings and skewed pronunciations; here is filth for the filthy (you and me), and here are delicacies for the delicate (me and you). How extraordinary that such multiplicity should be denoted by a single word! The sheer variety of phenomena is a temptation to the thesis-maker. He must try to explain what it is that makes one pursuit of all joking, from high comedy to the low snigger, and one family of all jokers, from the deft verbal designers of fiction and poetry down to the aerosol masters of back walls and bridge arches.

1.1 Stages of Explanation: (A) the Culture of the Joke

Since we are to follow this course, let us begin by trying to point out all that might be involved in the explanation of a fairly obvious joke – assuming that it had to be expounded to some galactic incomer. Here is a piece of anonymous doggerel:

Little Willie from the mirror

Licked the mercury right off,

Thinking, in his childish error,

It would cure the whooping cough.

At the funeral, his mother

Smartly quipped to Mrs Brown:

’Twas a chilly day for Willie

When the mercury went down!

Not everyone finds this amusing; foreign students are often either puzzled or embarrassed by its complacent callousness (‘but such a mother!’), and some native speakers are bored by whimsy. What is important, however, is to recognize and accept the intention to joke; from that recognition we can proceed through explanatory stages that takes us from the cultural history of the specimen down to its actual wording.

In the first place, this story of Little Willie is not an anecdote without antecedents. It has a derivation, in the facts of child mortality in Victorian/Edwardian times, and in the consequent existence of dozens of poems and pathetic ballads about dying children. Little Willie (whose name was mockingly conferred, by the rude British soldiery, on Crown Prince Wilhelm of Germany) is one of the most persistently versified figures of late-nineteenth-century popular literature:

Poor little Willie

With his many pretty wiles;

Worlds of wisdom in his look

And quaint, quiet smiles;

Hair of amber, touched with

Gold of Heaven so brave,

All lying darkly hid

In a workhouse grave. [31]

Though the name of Little Willie tops the pathetic polls, it is rivalled in song and story by those of other mortally afflicted cherubs – for example, Little Jim, who figures in an affecting dialogue with his grief-stricken mother:

She gets her answer from the child,

Soft fell these words from him –

‘Mother, the angels do so smile

And beckon Little Jim.

I have no pain, dear mother, now,

But oh! I am so dry;

Just moisten poor Jim’s lips again,

And, mother, don’t you cry.’

With gentle, trembling haste she held

The tea-cup to his lips;

He smiled to thank her, as he took

Three tiny little sips. [31]

In course of time, his pathos lapsed, Jim the virtuous babe became an object for ruthless parody:

‘I have no pain, dear mother, now,

But oh! I am so dry:

Connect me to a brewery

And leave me there to die.’ [31]

That poignant stanza brings us back to our original example, because it is a corroborative illustration of the development of a certain kind of humour. Between the Victorian parlour-recitations and the grim social and personal realities they reflect, there is, we may say, an affective association. They not only treat the theme of child mortality seriously and sympathetically; they also have the psychological functions of propitiating grief by paying tribute to it, generalizing the individual sorrow, providing postures of acceptance. With the mocking parody comes a dissociation, an apparent reneging of the emotions. The worthy feeling lapses, is withdrawn at the very moment when it should be at its strongest. Why is this? Is it really because the parodist has hardened his heart against these wretched infants and their lachrymose parents, and wants to hold them up to cruel ridicule? Hardly. His target, surely, is not the social fact, but the literary form; and one reason for the dissociation of feeling on which the joke depends could simply be that the facts are altered or mitigated. Suppose that there is a steep decline in the rate of infant mortality – eg with the introduction of vaccines; then it becomes possible to make fun of the forms of expression once affectively associated with it. Such an explanation might not apply to all types of ‘heartless’ or ‘black’ humour; but it seems plausible in the present instance.

1.2 Stages of Explanation: (B) Material Facts

Humour nearly always supposes some piece of factual knowledge shared by humorist and audience. It may be a matter of common historical information – eg that Henry VIII had six wives, or that Nelson had one eye, or that Lincoln was assassinated in a theatre. (But apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the show?) More often, however, it is simply a question of domestic acquaintance with the world and the ordinary substance of living – knowing, say, that Coventry is a place in the English midlands, knowing that in most British towns the buses are double deckers, knowing that the Pope presides over a city called the Vatican, perhaps also knowing that there exists a whisky called Vat 69 (whence the ancient and child-charming joke that Vat 69 is the Pope’s telephone number). To understand the broadest humour one must be broadly informed, not with the stuff of scholarship but with things that one ought to know before being allowed to board the Clapham omnibus.

The rhymester of Little Willie presupposes that we are acquainted with the use of mercury in silvering the backs of mirrors. He also assumes the knowledge that mercury is used in thermometers; and of course he takes for granted our awareness that this substance is poisonous. Unless these facts are in our heads, the joke goes nowhere. Of course it is possible to explain them fairly quickly, but then they are no longer ‘lively’ facts; they are possessed distantly, we may say, as one might be studiously apprised of the material allusions underlying an Elizabethan joke. This is foreign to the essentially timekeeping spirit of humour. We seldom laugh at jokes that depend on how things used to be. Humour, rejoicing in the moment, flies with the moment; and if I still smile, as indeed I do, at the ‘facts’ of Little Willie, it may be that I am dating myself by chuckling at things-as-they-are-no-longer. (Is mercury still used in the manufacture of mirrors? How far has its use in thermometers been overtaken by that of coloured alcohol?)

1.3 Stages of Explanation: (C) Logic and Likelihood

Jokers are in the habit of putting up circus-hoops through which their clients must obligingly leap, to achieve the reward of laughter. The hoops are called ‘does this follow?’ and ‘is this likely?’, and as we pass swiftly through them we obediently discard our notions of logic and likelihood. It may seem undignified to allow the ringmaster-humorist to make fools of us in this way; but really, the assent we give to the absurdities of a joke is no more contemptible than the licence we allow to the inventions of a fairy story. In the transaction of any tall tale, there is an executant, who fixes the rules, and a respondent, who accepts the conditions offered, and paradoxically allows himself to be duped in order to enjoy the superiority of his insight. A joke can be a perverse experience, psychologically; the understanding is degraded so that it may rise again.

In the tale of Little Willie, certain unlikely assumptions are enjoined upon us. The major breach of likelihood is that a mother would want to joke about the death of her child, particularly at the funeral; that is, in effect, the hoop through which our minds must boldly jump. But while we balk at that, or giggle at our own daring in making the leap, we forget that we have already cleared another obstacle, hardly less preposterous – namely that a very young child, ravaged by whooping cough, would (a) reason with himself about a cure for his condition, and (b) consequently arrive at a decision to lick the back of his mirror. (The phrase in his childish error works cunning wonders in setting up this part of the joke.) Of course this is absurd. An infant does not observe his own symptoms and prescribe a cure for the disease. As for Willie’s solution to his woes, it is surely a remarkable case of what Piaget calls ‘concrete operational thinking’ – in other words, suck-it-and-see. He is precociously gifted with unavailing powers of mind – or so we must believe; for unless we accept that, we lose the jest. This is no clumsy misadventure. This is the tragedy of the infant philosopher who tackles the problem and gets the wrong answer.

1.4 Stages of Explanation: (D) the Directive of Form

Jokes are often announced, sometimes with a crude forewarning signal (Have you heard this one?; That reminds me . . .; A funny thing happened . . .), sometimes more subtly, through the actual form in which they are presented. The listener or reader recognizes a convention, realizes that he has met something like this before, understands that his wits are being keyed and preconditioned to the acceptance of humour. If, for example, I hear the statement There was an old lady of Slough, the odds are that I will register the onset of a limerick, and the limerick is an exclusively humorous form; I will therefore prepare to be amused, and may be mildly surprised, to say the least of it, if this open...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• 1. Explaining the Joke
• 2. Witty Compression, Comic Expansion
• 3. The Design of the Joke: (i) Locative Formulae
• 4. The Design of the Joke: (ii) The outgrowth of Anecdote
• 5. Allusion and Parody
• 6. Likelihoods and Logics
• 7. Language in its Humour: (i) Manipulations of Meaning
• 8. Language in its Humour (ii) The Staging of Recitals
• Bibliography
• Index