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Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Wolverhampton] | [TOKENS: 5372] |
Contents University of Wolverhampton The University of Wolverhampton is a public university in Wolverhampton, England, located on four campuses across the West Midlands, Shropshire and Staffordshire. Originally founded in 1827 as the Wolverhampton Tradesmen's and Mechanics' Institute, the university was subject to a series of merges, incorporations, and expansions with other local colleges, one of which occurred under the supervision of Prince George, Duke of Kent. The university has four faculties comprising eighteen schools and institutes. It has 18,875 students and currently offers over 380 undergraduate and postgraduate courses. The city campus is located in Wolverhampton city centre, with secondary campuses at Springfield, Walsall, and Telford. There is an additional fifth campus in Wolverhampton at the University of Wolverhampton Science Park. History The roots of the University of Wolverhampton lie in the Wolverhampton Tradesmen's and Mechanics' Institute founded in 1827 and the 19th-century growth of the Wolverhampton Free Library (1870), which developed technical, scientific, commercial and general evening classes. This grew into the Wolverhampton and Staffordshire Technical College in 1926. In 1931, Prince George laid the foundation stone for the new Wolverhampton and Staffordshire Technical College. By 1945, the creation of the Music Department allowed the college to capitalise on the growing demand for a variety of subject areas. Enrolment in the first year totalled 135, and by 1950 HM Inspectors stated that "it was unique among technical colleges". The composer Vaughan Williams attended a performance of his Riders to the Sea in early 1950. In 1951 it was renamed Wolverhampton and Staffordshire College of Technology and the work of the High School of Commerce was partially transferred to the college. In 1956 the Joint Education Committee of the college noted: "Research is an essential feature of any institution of higher learning. Very good work is being done in applied science, and mechanical engineering is bringing to fruition negotiation with a local firm for sponsored research into problems at heat exchangers". By 1957–58 the student numbers grew to 6,236. This included trainee teachers being enrolled into the college. Parallel developments with Wulfrun College set the foundations for the creation of the Faculty of Education created in 1977. The first computers also arrived in 1957, the WITCH (Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell). The annual report for 1956–57 records: "Following a visit of a member of staff to Harwell, the college in competition with eight other colleges was offered the gift of an Electronic Digital Computer." A number of local firms donated sums of money to cover the cost of maintenance and operation. The WITCH is now considered to be the "oldest original functioning electronic stored program computer in the world" and from September 2009 began restoration at The National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park. By 1964, with the further expansion of higher education the college began to provide BA degrees with options in English, Geography, History, Music, and Economics among others. By 1965 the college was offering a degree in Computer Technology. The Wolverhampton School of Art was founded in 1851, becoming the Municipal School of Art in 1878, and finally Wolverhampton College of Art in 1950. The Wolverhampton College of Technology merged with Wolverhampton College of Art in 1969 to form The Polytechnic, Wolverhampton in 1969. The formal opening ceremony took place on 14 January 1970. Wolverhampton Polytechnic was operational by the creation of five faculties; Applied Science, Art and Design, Arts, Engineering and Social Sciences. The functional units were operated by committees such as the Academic Board, Faculty Boards, Planning and Standing Committees, Committee of Deans. 1969 saw the opening of the new School of Art and Design building, designed by architects Diamond Redfern and Partners and A. Chapman (Wolverhampton council architect), and was opened by former student, Sir Charles Wheeler. Mergers with Teacher Training Colleges in Wolverhampton and Dudley in the 1970s added to the expansion of the Polytechnic, with additional growth in 1989 on Walsall Campus when the Polytechnic acquired the Teacher Training College ( West Midlands College of Higher Education ) site. The Polytechnic changed its name to Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1988. In 1992 the Polytechnic was granted university status and became the University of Wolverhampton. The university was further expanded by the construction of the Telford Campus, completed in 1994, which includes in its grounds the 18th Century, Grade II listed Priorslee Hall; the oldest building under the University of Wolverhampton's banner. Telford Campus opened its doors to students from the Business School and the Faculty of Science and Engineering. 1994 also saw Wolverhampton become the first UK university to be awarded the Charter Mark for excellence in customer service. In 1995 the Wolverhampton Science Park opened (renamed the University of Wolverhampton Science Park in November 2012); a collaboration between the university and the local council, with its main aim being to forge links between local businesses and the university's research departments. The Science Park housed The Creative Industries Centre, The Technology Centre, The Development Centre and other business and technology support services. Also in 1995, two local nursing colleges – the United Midlands College for Nursing and Midwifery and the Sister Dora School of Nursing – amalgamated to form the School of Nursing and Midwifery at the Walsall campus, formerly West Midlands College of Higher Education. In 1997 the university was one of the first to establish a virtual learning environment: WOLF (Wolverhampton Online Learning Framework) a system used by students and staff to support learning in most subject areas. It provides online space for tutors to make reference materials, notes, videos and documents related to a subject available. In 2008 an upgraded version "WOLF2" was launched. Two new learning centres were opened at the Telford and City campuses in 1998. These learning centres were a fusion of traditional libraries with high-tech facilities, aimed at providing a greater range of accessible materials for students. The following year the university opened the Arena Theatre, Wolverhampton on the City campus along with the new SC building in Telford. 2000 saw the launch of a multimillion-pound refurbishment programme. From 2000 to 2010 £115 million was invested in campus developments. Highlights include the £26 million 'Millennium City' building opening by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown in February 2003. This was followed in 2004 by a teaching building called the 'Technology Centre' (now the Alan Turing building), home of the School of Computing and IT (later to become the School of Mathematics and Computer Science). The same year a £4 million extension to the Harrison Learning Centre was completed.[citation needed] In October 2005 Caroline Gipps became vice-chancellor – the university's first female vice chancellor.[citation needed] In 2006 the City Campus North Administration and Teaching Building was erected, providing space for a 120-seat lecture theatre, 4 elliptical 35-seat learning pods and the bringing together of many administration departments to work all under the one roof. In 2007, a new building at Walsall Campus was established to accommodate over 1,100 students over four floors and providing a combination of specialist and open access IT facilities and office accommodation for the School of Education. 2009 saw the formation and launch of two new Schools: the School of Law, Social Sciences and Communications and the School of Health and Wellbeing, as well as the launch of the research group Centre for Developmental and Applied Research in Education (CeDARE). The new School of Technology launched on 1 September 2010. In 2011, the university in partnership with Walsall College opened the Black Country University Technical College, one of the first University Technical Colleges in England. Professor Geoff Layer joined the university as vice-chancellor on 1 August 2011. September 2011 saw the opening of the Performance Hub at Walsall Campus; a multimillion-pound teaching, learning, rehearsal and performance space for performing arts. Professor Layer retired from the university in 2021. Plans for a further £45 million investment in City Campus were announced in December 2012, with redevelopments including a new Business School building opposite the Molineux Stadium. In 2013, the university celebrated its 21st anniversary since being granted university status on 17 June 1992. In 2015, the university announced its biggest ever investment plan, 'Our Vision, Your Opportunity', to generate £250 million of investment by 2020 to enhance the student experience and help to drive economic growth in the region. Key projects include the new Rosalind Franklin Science Centre (which opened to the public in 2014), the completion of the Lord Swraj Paul Building (new home to the University of Wolverhampton Business School), £10 million investment in engineering at Telford Innovation Campus, a new courtyard and catering facilities at City Campus, and the development of the new Springfield Campus, a national centre for excellence for construction and the built environment. In 2015, Lord Paul, the chancellor, donated £1m to the university which is the largest donation ever received. On Wednesday 14 November 2018, the university went into partnership with the West Midlands Ambulance Service to form the UK's first University Ambulance Trust. In May 2022, the university announced that it would stop recruiting students for 138 of its undergraduate and postgraduate courses from September of that year. This was a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which had driven up costs and lowered student applications. Campuses The University of Wolverhampton is located across four campuses across the West Midlands and Shropshire. City Campus is the main site for the university and is situated in Wolverhampton city centre, opposite Molineux Stadium and approximately 16 miles (26 km) from Birmingham. Divided into City Campus Wulfruna and City Campus Molineux, it is home to several academic schools/faculties; administration departments; the Students' Union and student support facilities. In addition, there are three separate Halls of Residence on this campus: North Road, Lomas Street and Randall Lines. The Millennium City Building, opened in 2003, provides over 10,000 square metres of teaching space, a 300-seat lecture theatre, exhibition gallery, campus restaurant, and an "informal Social Learning Space".[citation needed] The Alan Turing Building contains an open plan workspace, as well as prototyping equipment and software packages for 3D modelling and product design. The Centre includes a TV studio with greenscreen capability, a radio studio, Newsroom and digital editing suites.[citation needed] The Harrison Learning Centre has traditional and electronic-based library facilities over four floors. It provides electronic auto-service and online cataloguing facilities, and academic librarians manage, monitor and update the available information.[citation needed] The Wolverhampton School of Art is housed in the George Wallis Building, which was formally opened by Sir Charles Wheeler in 1970. It provides specialist equipment, facilities and expertise for students studying one of the various art and design specialisms available to study at the School of Art. On 16 December 2025, the George Wallis Building was granted Grade II listed status by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), following advice from Historic England. The designation affords the structure legal protection as a site of special architectural or historic interest and effectively prevented its planned demolition. The decision followed a sustained campaign by heritage organisations, notably the Twentieth Century Society, which submitted the original listing application, alongside a public petition that attracted thousands of signatures. The 1960s Brutalist building, overlooking Wolverhampton’s inner ring road, had previously been earmarked for demolition as part of the University of Wolverhampton’s proposals for a “radical” overhaul of its estate announced earlier in the year. Under these plans, the art school would have been removed and the site redeveloped on the advice of external university consultants. Historic England’s recommendation for listing cited the building’s dual significance. This included its association with the British Black Art movement, particularly its role as the host venue for the First National Black Art Convention in 1982, as well as its architectural importance as a “striking” example of post-war Brutalist design. The organisation described the structure as an “emblem on the skyline of the city”, highlighting its visual prominence and sculptural concrete form. Opponents of demolition argued that the building possessed “abundant potential” for adaptive reuse and retrofitting, and that redevelopment proposals failed to adequately account for its cultural, architectural and environmental value. The Arena Theatre contains an auditorium seating 150, a studio seating 100 and a seminar room for up to 50 people. Its programme includes professional companies, celebrating drama, dance and music, as well as showcasing work by local schools, colleges, students, amateur companies and community events. The Telford Innovation Campus opened in 1994. 18 miles (29 km) from Wolverhampton and 26 miles (42 km) from Birmingham, the campus is on a greenfield site in the grounds of Priorslee Hall – a grade-II listed 18th Century redbrick mansion. The campus houses facilities for engineering, built environment, business, computing and social work. Halls of residence for just under 500 students are located on campus. The environment in the university is very good and friendly. The campus is home to the e-Innovation Centre which provides startup companies and small and medium enterprises with business accommodation and funded support from a team of IT consultants, giving them access to the university's IT facilities, expertise and resources. It has hi-tech meeting rooms, social meeting areas, "hot-desking" provision, fully furnished offices, "incubation" units, and "grow-on" space for businesses who need to expand. The Walsall Campus is based a mile from Walsall town centre. Students studying sport, music, dance, education, health, events management, tourism and hospitality are based here. Opened in 2005, the Student Village provides accommodation for over 300 students.[citation needed] The campus has a teaching building with three lecture theatres and specialist teaching rooms. It's also home to the Institute for Learning Enhancement.[citation needed] Facilities at Boundary House allow trainee nurses and other healthcare professionals to follow the academic part of their course.[citation needed] The Performance Hub houses performing arts facilities and opened in September 2011.[citation needed] The Walsall Campus Sports Centre was named as an official training base for the London 2012 Summer Olympics. It hosts training facilities for the Olympic sports of Basketball, Judo and Taekwondo. The campus hosts a judo Centre of Excellence in England by the British Judo Association which opened in September 2013. The Springfield Campus was opened on October 31, 2021, serving as the university's main campus for its RIBA certified School of Architecture and Built Environment. The campus building was originally a 12-acre Grade II-listed brewery established in 1873 by William Butler through his company William Butler & Co. Ltd, which ceased operations in 1990, leaving the building abandoned and ultimately damaged in a fire in 2004. The university bought the damaged property and redeveloped the building into a new £40 million school campus. The new campus was designed by Birmingham-based architecture firm Associated Architects, which won the 2023 RIBA West Midlands Award for its design. The University of Wolverhampton Science Park is home to around 80 businesses working in science, technology, knowledge-based and creative sectors. As well as business support services, it offers office accommodation and workshop/laboratory areas for companies, as well as conference and meeting facilities. The Science Park was formed in 1993 as a joint venture between the University of Wolverhampton and Wolverhampton City Council.[citation needed] . Organisation and governance The university has three faculties, 22 academic schools/institutes, 14 research institutes and centres, and a range of other departments. The university's arms show supporters on either side of the shield. These represent Lady Wulfrun often regarded as the founder of what is now the City of Wolverhampton in CE circa 980 (a settlement described as Wulfruna's Heantun in the Saxon Chronicles) and Thomas Telford, the engineer who, in 1787 became surveyor of public works for Shropshire, and whose works and structures can be seen across the region and the nation and after whom the Shropshire New Town was named. The motto of the university is "Innovation and Opportunity". The University of Wolverhampton is led by the Board of Governors and Offices of the Vice-Chancellor. The honorary position of chancellor is the figurehead of the university and presides over the university's ceremonial occasions and acts as its ambassador. The role of chancellor was created following the grant of university title in 1992. The Board of Governors is responsible for the oversight of the university's activities and for the effective and efficient use of resources and the safeguarding of assets. It has 18 members including nine independent members and a representative of the student body. Its chair is CEO of the Midcounties Co-operative group Ben Reid. The Offices of the Vice-Chancellor has responsibility for the overall management of the university. The Offices of the Vice-Chancellor are led by the vice-chancellor assisted by three deputy vice-chancellors, the university registrar and secretary, and finance director. The Offices of the Vice-Chancellor are also responsible for implementing corporate strategy and operational policy decisions from the Academic Board and the Board of Governors. Each academic school/faculty is managed by a dean aided by associate deans. The academic provision in the schools is supported by support departments each managed by a head or director. Wolverhampton's former chancellor is Lord Paul of Marylebone, and its current vice-chancellor is Ebrahim Adia who took up the position in 2023. Academic profile The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) announced a 1,290% increase in funding allocation for Wolverhampton's Quality Research (QR). The QR allocation of £1.905 million for Wolverhampton was the highest amount for a new university in the West Midlands. The university achieved its best ever results in the most recent Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2014, with all Research Centres that submitted rated as having 'world-leading' elements. The mathematicians and information scientists in the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group were rated world number 1 for research quality in the 2017 Shanghai Rankings for Library and Information Science. The university is noted for its success in encouraging wider participation in higher education. The university draws two-thirds of its students from the West Midlands, and has about 2500 international students. Between 2005 and 2009 five staff were awarded National Teaching Fellowships. In May 2008 the university was awarded seven Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, securing its top position in the West Midlands. In September 2009 it was awarded £24.3 million for knowledge transfer, bringing it to 2nd place nationally for the number of KTPs it runs. The university will lead a consortium of all 12 of the universities in its region to increase the number of partnerships from 70 to 210 over the next three years. In June 2013, a university team won a Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Award (THELMA) in the category of Knowledge Exchange/Transfer Initiative of the Year for its "one-stop shop" approach to promoting services to businesses. In May 2016, the university was awarded 'Business of the Year' at the Express & Star Business Awards, where its contribution to the region's economy was hailed as 'truly outstanding'. In 1998, Ian Connell, a lecturer in television and media, left the university after being found guilty of academic misconduct. A few weeks later he committed suicide, apparently depressed by his situation. In 2009 the university Executive announced that the university was in financial difficulties, needing to make savings of £8 million. This followed reports in the media that it had understated student non-completion rates to HEFCE. The university announced it was taking steps to reduce expenditure on staff pay and launched a voluntary redundancy exercise on 1 October 2009. This concluded with the loss of 150 posts through voluntary redundancy. In 2015, despite 2014 REF successes, the Vice Chancellor announced that four areas of research would be cut back and some professors selected for compulsory redundancy while all professors would be subject to more rigorous annual appraisal which would lead to demotion to senior lecturer in three years if they failed to sustain their target levels of outputs, income and PhD students. Student life The University of Wolverhampton Students' Union (UWSU) is a charity led by a team consisting of 4 full-time Officers (currently the positions are Union Affairs, Academic, Community and Diversity Officers) and part-time Officers. These posts are elected annually in cross-campus elections. UWSU is primarily based in City (Wolverhampton) in the Ambika Paul Building and the WS Building in Walsall. UWSU has over 60 societies, based on student interests. These societies are set up and run by students, with support from the Union. The university offers over 1600 places in Halls of Residence across three campuses, including over 1000 rooms with en-suite facilities. Students also have a variety of opportunities to gain work experience while they are studying and on graduation. These include graduate placements such as Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP). The university is leading on the £5.2M national Student Placements for Entrepreneurs in Education West Midlands (SPEED WM) project involving 13 UK universities, to help students create their own businesses whilst they are studying. 'Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs' is aimed at helping new entrepreneurs to acquire relevant skills for managing a small or medium-sized enterprise by spending time working in another EU country with an experienced entrepreneur in his/her company. And SP/ARK provides facilities, accommodation, training and mentoring for business start-ups and freelancers in new media and design. In 2013 the university won a Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Award for Knowledge Exchange/Transfer Initiative of the Year. Academies and school links In April 2012 the university established the University of Wolverhampton Multi Academy Trust. The trust sponsors a number of schools in the West Midlands including University of Wolverhampton Wednesfield Academy and Health Futures UTC. Notable people Notable alumni in the field of government and politics include: 161st Mayor of Wolverhampton, Claire Darke; Steven Linares, MP in the Gibraltar Parliament; Nando Bodha, former Minister of Tourism & Leisure and former Minister of Agriculture of Mauritius; Juhar Mahiruddin, Governor of Sabah, Malaysia, and Chancellor of University Malaysia Sabah; Michael John Foster, former Labour MP; David Wright, former Labour MP; Chris Heaton-Harris, Conservative MP; Brian Jenkins, former Labour MP; Jenny Jones, former Labour MP; Ken Purchase, former Labour MP; Chauhdry Abdul Rashid, former Lord Mayor of Birmingham and former Chancellor of Birmingham City University; Bill Etheridge, former UKIP MEP. Other notable alumni include: Sir Terence Beckett, former director-general of the Confederation of British Industry; Sir Charles Wheeler, sculptor and President of the Royal Academy; Suzi Perry, television presenter and journalist; Maggie Gee, novelist; Trevor Beattie, advertising executive; Peter Bebb, special effect artist; Vernie Bennett, singer, formerly of Eternal; Scott Boswell, former professional cricketer; David Carruthers, Professor Paul Gough, Vice-Chancellor, Arts University Bournemouth, and Chair of UKADIA,; Major Peter Cottrell, soldier, author and military historian; academic, artist and disability rights activist Paul Darke; Matt Hayes, television angler; Tanwir Ikram, Deputy Senior District Judge; Mil Millington, director & filmmaker; Richard Duncan, author and philanthropist; Michael Cumming, author; Magnus Mills, author; Mark O'Shea, zoologist and television presenter; Cornelia Parker, artist/sculptor; Julian Peedle-Calloo, television presenter; Robert Priseman, artist; Anne Schwegmann-Fielding, artist; Michael Salu, graphic artist and creative director; Ged Simmons, television actor; Gillian Small, University Dean for Research, City University of New York; Clare Teal, jazz singer and broadcaster; Andrew White, writer and TV presenter; Andy Thompson, footballer; Patrick Trollope, editor of UK's first online-only regional newspaper; Annemarie Wright, artist; Adesua Etomi, actress; Tim Dutton, actor; and Kevin McCauley, English professional boxer. Notable academics include the broadcaster and journalist Jeff Randall; sculptor Sir Anish Kapoor; artist Roy Ascott; author Howard Jacobson; and Sir Alan Tuckett, specialist in adult education. See also References 52°35′14″N 2°07′38″W / 52.58722°N 2.12722°W / 52.58722; -2.12722 Further reading Mike Haynes and Lib Meakin, Opening Doors in the Heartlands: A History of the University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton: University of Wolverhampton, 2013, 184 pages ISBN 978-0-9576636-0-2. External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke#cite_ref-FOOTNOTEJoseph2008_6-1] | [TOKENS: 8460] |
Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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Contents U&Dave U&Dave is a British free-to-air television channel owned by UKTV, a subsidiary of BBC Studios. It is known for broadcasting modern comedy and factual programming, with both original production and repeats. Launched in October 1998 as UK Gold Classics, the channel would undergo various identity and format changes before adopting the Dave branding on 15 October 2007. It was renamed U&Dave in July 2024 to mark the streaming service UKTV Play being renamed as U. U&DaveJaVu is its sister timeshift channel. Unlike other commercial channels, it doesn't have a "+1" next to it and is named after the term déjà vu. History UK Gold Classics was UKTV's first digital-only channel. It was launched on 2 October 1998, and was only broadcast from Friday to Sunday on Sky Digital from 6.00pm to 2.00am.[citation needed] Around this time, UK Gold began to move away from older programmes and towards newer ones. Their 'classics' line-up included a number of early shows, and some black-and-white programmes, which had been acquired in the early years of the UK Gold service.[citation needed] While Gold Classics showed some recent shows from the main Gold channel, its main purpose was older shows from the early years of UK Gold.[citation needed] On weekdays, the channel was off air, showing a still caption of all the UKTV channels and start-up times.[citation needed] Some of the programmes that aired on UK Gold Classics were a repeat run of the ITV comedy series Oh No It's Selwyn Froggitt, BBC comedy series Open All Hours,[citation needed] BBC soap opera EastEnders,[citation needed] ITV police drama series The Bill,[citation needed] and ITV comedy series Gingerbread Girl.[citation needed] Some of UK Gold's original commissioned programming that were recently aired on the main channel at the time (Wow-fab-Groovy, Tellystack, Sports Anorak of the Year, stand-up comedy show Live at Jongleurs, Rowland Rivron Bites The Bullet and music show Gold Goes Pop) also received airings on Gold Classics[citation needed] The 'Classics' format lasted just six months; ending on 28 March 1999. The following day, UKTV announced that the channel would be relaunched as UK Gold 2 from 2 April 1999, and eventually expand its broadcast hours. UK Gold 2 essentially functioned as a secondary timeshift service, with the channel screening UK Gold's programmes from the morning of that day.[citation needed] On 24 May 1999, it was officially announced that the channel would start broadcasting daily from 1 June. On 11 February 2002, UK Gold 2's downtime within the day became home to UK Style +. On 29 May, the channel launched on NTL. and eventually on Telewest. On 1 August, the channel moved from 110 to 111 on the Sky EPG, to make room for UK Gold +1, which launched that day. In July 2003, UK Style + vacated the downtime slot used by UK Gold 2 and extended its broadcast hours.[citation needed] On 28 October 2003, it was announced that UK Gold 2 would be relaunched and rebranded as UK G2 (stylized as UK G²) on 12 November. UK G2 was promoted as being an edgier alternative to UK Gold; airing programmes aimed at an 18-34 year-old youth audience. Some of the programmes that already aired on UK Gold moved to the new network, in addition to some programmes from Play UK (which had closed the year prior). The broadcast hours were also changed, with the channel now operating from 8:00pm to 5:00am. On 8 March 2004, in-line with its sibling channels, the channel would adopt the full "UKTV" name, becoming UKTV G2. On 1 November, near the channel's first anniversary, a one-hour timeshift service, UKTV G2 +1, was launched on Sky and Telewest., broadcasting from 9:00pm to 4:00am. On 7 October 2005, it was announced that UKTV G2 would pilot a sports programming block titled "UKTV Sport". The block would include a new show by the same name, as well as its own logo and digital on-screen graphic. The block was planned to be a pilot for a dedicated TV channel of the same name, which never came into fruition. On 10 December 2005, UKTV announced that UKTV G2 would expand broadcast hours to the daytime and begin operations at 9:00am beginning on 16 January 2006. The expansion of hours was to prepare for the full launch of the UKTV Sport strand, which would fill out some of the daytime hours during sports events. Standard programmes featured included pre-watershed comedy programmes already seen on the channel, alongside the addition of popular-factual and magazine shows which were already running on UKTV People, such as Top Gear and Airport. The extended hours did not apply to UKTV G2 +1, which remained an evening-only service.[citation needed] In February 2006, UKTV obtained the rights to show highlights of the Six Nations rugby union championship, with a highlights show broadcast on the evening of the games previously shown live on the BBC. On 16 March 2006, they announced a deal to air extensive coverage of the 2006 FIFA World Cup as a sub-licensing of the BBC's rights to the tournament. UKTV G2 simulcast the BBC's live matches, including the opening match between Germany and Costa Rica, England's game with Paraguay and the final. The channel also showed highlights of every match in the tournament. In April 2006, the channel acquired the rights to the quarter-finals of the EuroLeague Basketball and in August, UKTV G2 also picked up rights to the 2006 FIBA World Championship, forming the programme 'UKTV Slam'. In August 2007, UKTV announced they were considering adding a planned relaunch of UKTV G2 to the digital terrestrial platform Freeview, replacing UKTV Bright Ideas. On 20 September 2007, UKTV officially announced that the relaunch of UKTV G2 would be called Dave, scheduled for 15 October, with the channel joining Freeview on the same day. The channel's name was chosen with UKTV stating that "everyone knows a bloke called Dave". The name has been reported to have originated from a suggestion made during early branding discussions by a technical adviser seconded from Virgin Media to assist UKTV with streaming and digital strategy. The suggestion was inspired by an anecdote in which several colleagues shared the same name, prompting the observation that “everyone knows a Dave”, and reinforcing the intention for the name to convey familiarity and ordinariness rather than reference any specific individual. To prepare for the launch, UKTV Bright Ideas was shut down permanently, with UKTV History taking over its timesharing bandwidth with Virgin1, while Dave would launch in UKTV History's former Freeview bandwidth. To ensure that all Freeview viewers received Dave on channel number 19, UKTV briefly placed a re-tuning notice on the programme's information. The timeshift service UKTV G2 +1 was effectively renamed Dave +1 and expanded its own broadcast hours to match its parent network.[citation needed] Dave used the tagline "the home of witty banter", and had Ralph Ineson as an announcer; along with David Flynn, Phill Jupitus, Iain Lee and BBC Radio 1 DJ Greg James.[citation needed] On 31 January 2008, the channel began broadcasting in widescreen, along with the other UKTV channels. On 22 January 2009, following UKTV's acquisition of a further Freeview broadcast slot, Dave +1 was made available on the digital terrestrial platform. Dave +1 would be renamed Dave ja vu (a play on the phrase déjà vu) on 24 February, in order to "strengthen the brand's positioning as the home of witty banter" according to UKTV bosses. In April 2009, they aired three new instalments of Red Dwarf, entitled Back to Earth. This marked the channel's first foray into scripted original programming. During the airing of the Red Dwarf mini-series, the Dave DOG in the top left corner of the screen had the word 'Lister' added after it in the same font, after the show's lead character; during the special it is even suggested that the station is named after him. Back to Earth brought record breaking viewing figures, not just in the context of the channel's past, but for digital television in general. Subsequently, three full series of Red Dwarf have been produced for Dave which aired in 2012, 2016 and 2017, along with a feature-length special in 2020. In June 2009, the logo was updated to incorporate the 'circle' logo branding of all the new UKTV channels.[citation needed] At the same time, the voice of Dave became Nigel Grover, aka Scott Saunders, who had previously worked at a number of local radio stations.[citation needed] On 14 June 2011, UKTV announced that Really would launch on Freeview on 2 August 2011. To facilitate this, Dave ja vu's broadcast hours on the platform were reduced from 8.00 am-4.00 am to 2.00 am-4.00 am in order to keep the space for future use. On 29 July 2011, UKTV announced that it had secured a deal with BSkyB to launch three more high-definition channels on Sky UK. As part of Virgin Media's deal to sell its share of UKTV, all five of UKTV's HD channels would also be added to Virgin's cable television service by 2012. Dave HD launched on 10 October 2011 on Sky and Virgin Media, two days before Watch HD, while Alibi HD launched in July 2012. All three channels are HD simulcasts of the standard-definition channel. In September 2012, the channel swapped its Freeview EPG number with Yesterday, moving to channel 12. On 22 November 2012, UKTV confirmed that it had secured a deal for another 24-hour DTT slot and would use it for Dave ja vu until it firmed up permanent plans for the slot. Dave ja vu began to broadcast its full schedule on the platform again from 3 January 2013. Drama permanently took the slot from 8 July 2013, however Dave ja vu continued to broadcast between 2.00 am-5.00 am. On 29 April 2014, the 'circle' logo was removed and the original 2007 logo was restored, also updating the idents. On 20 November, Dave ja vu returned to 24-hour broadcasting on Freeview. Dave HD along with Good Food HD and Eden HD launched on BT TV on 3 October 2016.[citation needed] In June 2019, Dave moved back to channel 19 on Freeview, a space previously occupied by Yesterday.[citation needed] This was following owner BBC Studios breaking up its joint venture with Discovery, Inc., with Discovery acquiring Good Food, Home and Really.[citation needed] In November 2020, following UKTV's purchase of CCXTV, Dave ja vu moved to channel 23, whilst CCXTV moved to Freeview 73. After the relaunch of BBC Three (and with BBC Four in Scotland taking the next slot), Dave ja vu moved down to channel 25. This lasted until March 2022, when UKTV revealed that Dave would be going back to the 70s section on the Freeview EPG, as the channel number was used by UKTV for their female-skewing W channel. From 28 March 2022, Dave Ja Vu took Drama+1's slot on Freeview 74, with that one-hour timeshift of Drama moving up to channel 60. On 9 November 2022, Dave was given a on-air refresh, including a new logo, idents, and a new slogan ("Add a bit of Dave"). On 16 July 2024, the channel was rebranded as U&Dave, as part of the realignment of UKTV's free-to-air networks under the new "U" masterbrand. Reception Within just one month of its launch, Dave was the tenth most viewed television channel in the UK. In November 2007, the broadcaster listed daily viewing averages at around 3 million viewers, although, much of the growth was attributed to its presence on Freeview; nonetheless, it was performing significantly better in pay TV homes than UKTV G2. Over the month since its launch, Dave averaged a 1.32% share in multichannel homes and a 3.2% share in the 16–34 male demographic. Dave received 4 million viewers throughout 18 November 2007 for its coverage of "Car of the Year", pushing it to second place in multichannel behind ITV2. The first episode of Red Dwarf: Back to Earth attracted 2,060,000 viewers on the first viewing, though over 4 million viewed the episode at some point over its debut weekend. The highest rating original commission before this had been Red Bull X-Fighters (about 185,000). Programming From 2008 to 2010, Dave showed highlights of the World Rally Championship. On 6 January 2016, UKTV announced that Dave would show its first-ever live sporting event with a boxing match between David Haye and Mark de Mori at the O2 Arena on 16 January 2016 produced by Salter Brothers Entertainment. In late May 2016, Dave broadcast full live coverage of the 2016 BDO World Trophy darts tournament. In July 2016, Dave covered cricket's Caribbean Premier League. It broadcast five matches live, including the final and showed the other games in full on a delayed basis. In 2017, Dave started broadcasting live MMA with promotion BAMMA. In its early years, Dave aired a mix of black-and-white films like The Lavender Hill Mob and 90s films like The Hudsucker Proxy. In 2012, Dave introduced its 'film club' where a different film would be shown every week, including Barton Fink, City of God, The Big Lebowski, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Taxi Driver, and Clerks to name a few. In early 2016, Dave and Yesterday aired Western films during the daytime. From 2017, Dave mostly show films on Friday and Saturday nights, with Friday being a repeat of the film that was shown on a Saturday. In 2019 and 2023, Dave showed a season of Quentin Tarantino movies. Dave Weekly podcast In August 2011, Dave launched a regular comedy podcast called The Dave Weekly hosted on joindave.co.uk and accessible via iTunes. Presented by Ben Shires, the podcast comprises interviews with comedians such as Russell Kane, Jo Brand, Adam Buxton, Paul Foot and Alex Horne along with occasional features. Dave’s Funniest Joke Of The Fringe Since 2008 the channel has given the Funniest Joke of the Fringe award. The award is voted on by the public from a shortlist and aims to highlight the best single joke told at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. 'Accomodation' has won the award 10 times. References External links |
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Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological] | [TOKENS: 19598] |
Contents Psychology Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both conscious and unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, and motives. Psychology is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Biological psychologists seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups. A professional practitioner or researcher involved in the discipline is called a psychologist. Some psychologists can also be classified as behavioral or cognitive scientists. Some psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in individual and social behavior. Others explore the physiological and neurobiological processes that underlie cognitive functions and behaviors. As part of an interdisciplinary field, psychologists are involved in research on perception, cognition, attention, emotion, intelligence, subjective experiences, motivation, brain functioning, and personality. Psychologists' interests extend to interpersonal relationships, psychological resilience, family resilience, and other areas within social psychology. They also consider the unconscious mind. Research psychologists employ empirical methods to infer causal and correlational relationships between psychosocial variables. Some, but not all, clinical and counseling psychologists rely on symbolic interpretation. While psychological knowledge is often applied to the assessment and treatment of mental health problems, it is also directed towards understanding and solving problems in several spheres of human activity. By many accounts, psychology ultimately aims to benefit society. Many psychologists are involved in some kind of therapeutic role, practicing psychotherapy in clinical, counseling, or school settings. Other psychologists conduct scientific research on a wide range of topics related to mental processes and behavior. Typically the latter group of psychologists work in academic settings (e.g., universities, medical schools, or hospitals). Another group of psychologists is employed in industrial and organizational settings. Yet others are involved in work on human development, aging, sports, health, forensic science, education, and the media. Etymology and definitions The word psychology derives from the Greek word psyche, for spirit or soul. The latter part of the word psychology derives from -λογία -logia, which means "study" or "research". The word psychology was first used in the Renaissance. In its Latin form psychiologia, it was first employed by the Croatian humanist and Latinist Marko Marulić in his book Psichiologia de ratione animae humanae (Psychology, on the Nature of the Human Soul) in the decade 1510–1520 The earliest known reference to the word psychology in English was by Steven Blankaart in 1694 in The Physical Dictionary. The dictionary refers to "Anatomy, which treats the Body, and Psychology, which treats of the Soul." Ψ (psi), the first letter of the Greek word psyche from which the term psychology is derived, is commonly associated with the field of psychology. In 1890, William James defined psychology as "the science of mental life, both of its phenomena and their conditions." This definition enjoyed widespread currency for decades. However, this meaning was contested, notably by John B. Watson, who in 1913 asserted the methodological behaviorist view of psychology as a purely objective experimental branch of natural science, the theoretical goal of which "is the prediction and control of behavior." Since James defined "psychology", the term more strongly implicates scientific experimentation. Folk psychology is the understanding of the mental states and behaviors of people held by ordinary people, as contrasted with psychology professionals' understanding. History The ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, China, India, and Persia all engaged in the philosophical study of psychology. In Ancient Egypt the Ebers Papyrus mentioned depression and thought disorders. Historians note that Greek philosophers, including Thales, Plato, and Aristotle (especially in his De Anima treatise), addressed the workings of the mind. As early as the 4th century BCE, the Greek physician Hippocrates theorized that mental disorders had physical rather than supernatural causes. In 387 BCE, Plato suggested that the brain is where mental processes take place, and in 335 BC Aristotle suggested that it was the heart. In China, the foundations of psychological thought emerged from the philosophical works of ancient thinkers like Laozi and Confucius, as well as the teachings of Buddhism. This body of knowledge drew insights from introspection, observation, and techniques for focused thinking and behavior. It viewed the universe as comprising physical and mental realms, along with the interplay between the two. Chinese philosophy also emphasized purifying the mind in order to increase virtue and power. An ancient text known as The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine identifies the brain as the nexus of wisdom and sensation, includes theories of personality based on yin–yang balance, and analyzes mental disorder in terms of physiological and social disequilibria. Chinese scholarship that focused on the brain advanced during the Qing dynasty with the work of Western-educated Fang Yizhi (1611–1671), Liu Zhi (1660–1730), and Wang Qingren (1768–1831). Wang Qingren emphasized the importance of the brain as the center of the nervous system, linked mental disorder with brain diseases, investigated the causes of dreams and insomnia, and advanced a theory of hemispheric lateralization in brain function. Influenced by Hinduism, Indian philosophy explored distinctions in types of awareness. A central idea of the Upanishads and other Vedic texts that formed the foundations of Hinduism was the distinction between a person's transient mundane self and their eternal, unchanging soul. Divergent Hindu doctrines and Buddhism have challenged this hierarchy of selves, but have all emphasized the importance of reaching higher awareness. Yoga encompasses a range of techniques used in pursuit of this goal. Theosophy, a religion established by Russian-American philosopher Helena Blavatsky, drew inspiration from these doctrines during her time in British India. Psychology was of interest to Enlightenment thinkers in Europe. In Germany, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) applied his principles of calculus to the mind, arguing that mental activity took place on an indivisible continuum. He suggested that the difference between conscious and unconscious awareness is only a matter of degree. Christian Wolff identified psychology as its own science, writing Psychologia Empirica in 1732 and Psychologia Rationalis in 1734. Immanuel Kant advanced the idea of anthropology as a discipline, with psychology an important subdivision. Kant, however, explicitly rejected the idea of an experimental psychology, writing that "the empirical doctrine of the soul can also never approach chemistry even as a systematic art of analysis or experimental doctrine, for in it the manifold of inner observation can be separated only by mere division in thought, and cannot then be held separate and recombined at will (but still less does another thinking subject suffer himself to be experimented upon to suit our purpose), and even observation by itself already changes and displaces the state of the observed object." In 1783, Ferdinand Ueberwasser (1752–1812) designated himself Professor of Empirical Psychology and Logic and gave lectures on scientific psychology, though these developments were soon overshadowed by the Napoleonic Wars. At the end of the Napoleonic era, Prussian authorities discontinued the Old University of Münster. Having consulted philosophers Hegel and Herbart, however, in 1825 the Prussian state established psychology as a mandatory discipline in its rapidly expanding and highly influential educational system. However, this discipline did not yet embrace experimentation. In England, early psychology involved phrenology and the response to social problems including alcoholism, violence, and the country's crowded "lunatic" asylums. Philosopher John Stuart Mill believed that the human mind was open to scientific investigation, even if the science is in some ways inexact. Mill proposed a "mental chemistry" in which elementary thoughts could combine into ideas of greater complexity. Gustav Fechner began conducting psychophysics research in Leipzig in the 1830s. He articulated the principle that human perception of a stimulus varies logarithmically according to its intensity.: 61 The principle became known as the Weber–Fechner law. Fechner's 1860 Elements of Psychophysics challenged Kant's negative view with regard to conducting quantitative research on the mind. Fechner's achievement was to show that "mental processes could not only be given numerical magnitudes, but also that these could be measured by experimental methods." In Heidelberg, Hermann von Helmholtz conducted parallel research on sensory perception, and trained physiologist Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt, in turn, came to Leipzig University, where he established the psychological laboratory that brought experimental psychology to the world. Wundt focused on breaking down mental processes into the most basic components, motivated in part by an analogy to recent advances in chemistry, and its successful investigation of the elements and structure of materials. Paul Flechsig and Emil Kraepelin soon created another influential laboratory at Leipzig, a psychology-related lab, that focused more on experimental psychiatry. James McKeen Cattell, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University and the co-founder of Psychological Review, was the first professor of psychology in the United States. The German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, a researcher at the University of Berlin, was a 19th-century contributor to the field. He pioneered the experimental study of memory and developed quantitative models of learning and forgetting. In the early 20th century, Wolfgang Kohler, Max Wertheimer, and Kurt Koffka co-founded the school of Gestalt psychology of Fritz Perls. The approach of Gestalt psychology is based upon the idea that individuals experience things as unified wholes. Rather than reducing thoughts and behavior into smaller component elements, as in structuralism, the Gestaltists maintain that whole of experience is important, "and is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful." Psychologists in Germany, Denmark, Austria, England, and the United States soon followed Wundt in setting up laboratories. G. Stanley Hall, an American who studied with Wundt, founded a psychology lab that became internationally influential. The lab was located at Johns Hopkins University. Hall, in turn, trained Yujiro Motora, who brought experimental psychology, emphasizing psychophysics, to the Imperial University of Tokyo. Wundt's assistant, Hugo Münsterberg, taught psychology at Harvard to students such as Narendra Nath Sen Gupta—who, in 1905, founded a psychology department and laboratory at the University of Calcutta. Wundt's students Walter Dill Scott, Lightner Witmer, and James McKeen Cattell worked on developing tests of mental ability. Cattell, who also studied with eugenicist Francis Galton, went on to found the Psychological Corporation. Witmer focused on the mental testing of children; Scott, on employee selection.: 60 Another student of Wundt, the Englishman Edward Titchener, created the psychology program at Cornell University and advanced "structuralist" psychology. The idea behind structuralism was to analyze and classify different aspects of the mind, primarily through the method of introspection. William James, John Dewey, and Harvey Carr advanced the idea of functionalism, an expansive approach to psychology that underlined the Darwinian idea of a behavior's usefulness to the individual. In 1890, James wrote an influential book, The Principles of Psychology, which expanded on the structuralism. He memorably described "stream of consciousness." James's ideas interested many American students in the emerging discipline.: 178–82 Dewey integrated psychology with societal concerns, most notably by promoting progressive education, inculcating moral values in children, and assimilating immigrants.: 196–200 A different strain of experimentalism, with a greater connection to physiology, emerged in South America, under the leadership of Horacio G. Piñero at the University of Buenos Aires. In Russia, too, researchers placed greater emphasis on the biological basis for psychology, beginning with Ivan Sechenov's 1873 essay, "Who Is to Develop Psychology and How?" Sechenov advanced the idea of brain reflexes and aggressively promoted a deterministic view of human behavior. The Russian-Soviet physiologist Ivan Pavlov discovered in dogs a learning process that was later termed "classical conditioning" and applied the process to human beings. One of the earliest psychology societies was La Société de Psychologie Physiologique in France, which lasted from 1885 to 1893. The first meeting of the International Congress of Psychology sponsored by the International Union of Psychological Science took place in Paris, in August 1889, amidst the World's Fair celebrating the centennial of the French Revolution. William James was one of three Americans among the 400 attendees. The American Psychological Association (APA) was founded soon after, in 1892. The International Congress continued to be held at different locations in Europe and with wide international participation. The Sixth Congress, held in Geneva in 1909, included presentations in Russian, Chinese, and Japanese, as well as Esperanto. After a hiatus for World War I, the Seventh Congress met in Oxford, with substantially greater participation from the war-victorious Anglo-Americans. In 1929, the Congress took place at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, attended by hundreds of members of the APA. Tokyo Imperial University led the way in bringing new psychology to the East. New ideas about psychology diffused from Japan into China. American psychology gained status upon the U.S.'s entry into World War I. A standing committee headed by Robert Yerkes administered mental tests ("Army Alpha" and "Army Beta") to almost 1.8 million soldiers. Subsequently, the Rockefeller family, via the Social Science Research Council, began to provide funding for behavioral research. Rockefeller charities funded the National Committee on Mental Hygiene, which disseminated the concept of mental illness and lobbied for applying ideas from psychology to child rearing. Through the Bureau of Social Hygiene and later funding of Alfred Kinsey, Rockefeller foundations helped establish research on sexuality in the U.S. Under the influence of the Carnegie-funded Eugenics Record Office, the Draper-funded Pioneer Fund, and other institutions, the eugenics movement also influenced American psychology. In the 1910s and 1920s, eugenics became a standard topic in psychology classes. In contrast to the US, in the UK psychology was met with antagonism by the scientific and medical establishments, and up until 1939, there were only six psychology chairs in universities in England. During World War II and the Cold War, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies established themselves as leading funders of psychology by way of the armed forces and in the new Office of Strategic Services intelligence agency. University of Michigan psychologist Dorwin Cartwright reported that university researchers began large-scale propaganda research in 1939–1941. He observed that "the last few months of the war saw a social psychologist become chiefly responsible for determining the week-by-week-propaganda policy for the United States Government." Cartwright also wrote that psychologists had significant roles in managing the domestic economy. The Army rolled out its new General Classification Test to assess the ability of millions of soldiers. The Army also engaged in large-scale psychological research of troop morale and mental health. In the 1950s, the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to fund research on psychological warfare. In 1965, public controversy called attention to the Army's Project Camelot, the "Manhattan Project" of social science, an effort which enlisted psychologists and anthropologists to analyze the plans and policies of foreign countries for strategic purposes. In Germany after World War I, psychology held institutional power through the military, which was subsequently expanded along with the rest of the military during Nazi Germany. Under the direction of Hermann Göring's cousin Matthias Göring, the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was renamed the Göring Institute. Freudian psychoanalysts were expelled and persecuted under the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazi Party, and all psychologists had to distance themselves from Freud and Adler, founders of psychoanalysis who were also Jewish. The Göring Institute was well-financed throughout the war with a mandate to create a "New German Psychotherapy." This psychotherapy aimed to align suitable Germans with the overall goals of the Reich. As described by one physician, "Despite the importance of analysis, spiritual guidance and the active cooperation of the patient represent the best way to overcome individual mental problems and to subordinate them to the requirements of the Volk and the Gemeinschaft." Psychologists were to provide Seelenführung [lit., soul guidance], the leadership of the mind, to integrate people into the new vision of a German community. Harald Schultz-Hencke melded psychology with the Nazi theory of biology and racial origins, criticizing psychoanalysis as a study of the weak and deformed. Johannes Heinrich Schultz, a German psychologist recognized for developing the technique of autogenic training, prominently advocated sterilization and euthanasia of men considered genetically undesirable, and devised techniques for facilitating this process. After the war, new institutions were created although some psychologists, because of their Nazi affiliation, were discredited. Alexander Mitscherlich founded a prominent applied psychoanalysis journal called Psyche. With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, Mitscherlich established the first clinical psychosomatic medicine division at Heidelberg University. In 1970, psychology was integrated into the required studies of medical students. After the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks promoted psychology as a way to engineer the "New Man" of socialism. Consequently, university psychology departments trained large numbers of students in psychology. At the completion of training, positions were made available for those students at schools, workplaces, cultural institutions, and in the military. The Russian state emphasized pedology and the study of child development. Lev Vygotsky became prominent in the field of child development. The Bolsheviks also promoted free love and embraced the doctrine of psychoanalysis as an antidote to sexual repression.: 84–6 Although pedology and intelligence testing fell out of favor in 1936, psychology maintained its privileged position as an instrument of the Soviet Union. Stalinist purges took a heavy toll and instilled a climate of fear in the profession, as elsewhere in Soviet society.: 22 Following World War II, Jewish psychologists past and present, including Lev Vygotsky, A.R. Luria, and Aron Zalkind, were denounced; Ivan Pavlov (posthumously) and Stalin himself were celebrated as heroes of Soviet psychology.: 25–6, 48–9 Soviet academics experienced a degree of liberalization during the Khrushchev Thaw. The topics of cybernetics, linguistics, and genetics became acceptable again. The new field of engineering psychology emerged. The field involved the study of the mental aspects of complex jobs (such as pilot and cosmonaut). Interdisciplinary studies became popular and scholars such as Georgy Shchedrovitsky developed systems theory approaches to human behavior.: 27–33 Twentieth-century Chinese psychology originally modeled itself on U.S. psychology, with translations from American authors like William James, the establishment of university psychology departments and journals, and the establishment of groups including the Chinese Association of Psychological Testing (1930) and the Chinese Psychological Society (1937). Chinese psychologists were encouraged to focus on education and language learning. Chinese psychologists were drawn to the idea that education would enable modernization. John Dewey, who lectured to Chinese audiences between 1919 and 1921, had a significant influence on psychology in China. Chancellor T'sai Yuan-p'ei introduced him at Peking University as a greater thinker than Confucius. Kuo Zing-yang who received a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, became President of Zhejiang University and popularized behaviorism.: 5–9 After the Chinese Communist Party gained control of the country, the Stalinist Soviet Union became the major influence, with Marxism–Leninism the leading social doctrine and Pavlovian conditioning the approved means of behavior change. Chinese psychologists elaborated on Lenin's model of a "reflective" consciousness, envisioning an "active consciousness" (pinyin: tzu-chueh neng-tung-li) able to transcend material conditions through hard work and ideological struggle. They developed a concept of "recognition" (pinyin: jen-shih) which referred to the interface between individual perceptions and the socially accepted worldview; failure to correspond with party doctrine was "incorrect recognition.": 9–17 Psychology education was centralized under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, supervised by the State Council. In 1951, the academy created a Psychology Research Office, which in 1956 became the Institute of Psychology. Because most leading psychologists were educated in the United States, the first concern of the academy was the re-education of these psychologists in the Soviet doctrines. Child psychology and pedagogy for the purpose of a nationally cohesive education remained a central goal of the discipline.: 18–24 Women in the early 1900s started to make key findings within the world of psychology. In 1923, Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund Freud, built on her father's work using different defense mechanisms (denial, repression, and suppression) to psychoanalyze children. She believed that once a child reached the latency period, child analysis could be used as a mode of therapy. She stated it is important focus on the child's environment, support their development, and prevent neurosis. She believed a child should be recognized as their own person with their own right and have each session catered to the child's specific needs. She encouraged drawing, moving freely, and expressing themselves in any way. This helped build a strong therapeutic alliance with child patients, which allows psychologists to observe their normal behavior. She continued her research on the impact of children after family separation, children with socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and all stages of child development from infancy to adolescence. Functional periodicity, the belief women are mentally and physically impaired during menstruation, impacted women's rights because employers were less likely to hire them due to the belief they would be incapable of working for 1 week a month. Leta Stetter Hollingworth wanted to prove this hypothesis and Edward L. Thorndike's theory, that women have lesser psychological and physical traits than men and were simply mediocre, incorrect. Hollingworth worked to prove differences were not from male genetic superiority, but from culture. She also included the concept of women's impairment during menstruation in her research. She recorded both women and men performances on tasks (cognitive, perceptual, and motor) for three months. No evidence was found of decreased performance due to a woman's menstrual cycle. She also challenged the belief intelligence is inherited and women here are intellectually inferior to men. She stated that women do not reach positions of power due to the societal norms and roles they are assigned. As she states in her article, "Variability as related to sex differences in achievement: A Critique", the largest problem women have is the social order that was built due to the assumption women have less interests and abilities than men. To further prove her point, she completed another experiment with infants who have not been influenced by the environment of social norms, like the adult male getting more opportunities than women. She found no difference between infants besides size. After this research proved the original hypothesis wrong, Hollingworth was able to show there is no difference between the physiological and psychological traits of men and women, and women are not impaired during menstruation. The first half of the 1900s was filled with new theories and it was a turning point for women's recognition within the field of psychology. In addition to the contributions made by Leta Stetter Hollingworth and Anna Freud, Mary Whiton Calkins invented the paired associates technique of studying memory and developed self-psychology. Karen Horney developed the concept of "womb envy" and neurotic needs. Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein impacted developmental psychology with her research of play therapy. These great discoveries and contributions were made during struggles of sexism, discrimination, and little recognition for their work. Women in the second half of the 20th century continued to do research that had large-scale impacts on the field of psychology. Mary Ainsworth's work centered around attachment theory. Building off fellow psychologist John Bowlby, Ainsworth spent years doing fieldwork to understand the development of mother-infant relationships. In doing this field research, Ainsworth developed the Strange Situation Procedure, a laboratory procedure meant to study attachment style by separating and uniting a child with their mother several different times under different circumstances. These field studies are also where she developed her attachment theory and the order of attachment styles, which was a landmark for developmental psychology. Because of her work, Ainsworth became one of the most cited psychologists of all time. Mamie Phipps Clark was another woman in psychology that changed the field with her research. She was one of the first African-Americans to receive a doctoral degree in psychology from Columbia University, along with her husband, Kenneth Clark. Her master's thesis, "The Development of Consciousness in Negro Pre-School Children," argued that black children's self-esteem was negatively impacted by racial discrimination. She and her husband conduced research building off her thesis throughout the 1940s. These tests, called the doll tests, asked young children to choose between identical dolls whose only difference was race, and they found that the majority of the children preferred the white dolls and attributed positive traits to them. Repeated over and over again, these tests helped to determine the negative effects of racial discrimination and segregation on black children's self-image and development. In 1954, this research would help decide the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, leading to the end of legal segregation across the nation. Clark went on to be an influential figure in psychology, her work continuing to focus on minority youth. As the field of psychology developed throughout the latter half of the 20th century, women in the field advocated for their voices to be heard and their perspectives to be valued. Second-wave feminism did not miss psychology. An outspoken feminist in psychology was Naomi Weisstein, who was an accomplished researcher in psychology and neuroscience, and is perhaps best known for her paper, "Kirche, Kuche, Kinder as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female." Psychology Constructs the Female criticized the field of psychology for centering men and using biology too much to explain gender differences without taking into account social factors. Her work set the stage for further research to be done in social psychology, especially in gender construction. Other women in the field also continued advocating for women in psychology, creating the Association for Women in Psychology to criticize how the field treated women. E. Kitsch Child, Phyllis Chesler, and Dorothy Riddle were some of the founding members of the organization in 1969. The latter half of the 20th century further diversified the field of psychology, with women of color reaching new milestones. In 1962, Martha Bernal became the first Latina woman to get a Ph.D. in psychology. In 1969, Marigold Linton, the first Native American woman to get a Ph.D. in psychology, founded the National Indian Education Association. She was also a founding member of the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science. In 1971, The Network of Indian Psychologists was established by Carolyn Attneave. Harriet McAdoo was appointed to the White House Conference on Families in 1979. In the 21st century, women have gained greater prominence in psychology, contributing significantly to a wide range of subfields. Many have taken on leadership roles, directed influential research labs, and guided the next generation of psychologists. However, gender disparities remain, especially when it comes to equal pay and representation in senior academic positions. The number of women pursuing education and training in psychological science has reached a record high. In the United States, estimates suggest that women make up about 78% of undergraduate students and 71% of graduate students in psychology. Disciplinary organizations In 1920, Édouard Claparède and Pierre Bovet created a new applied psychology organization called the International Congress of Psychotechnics Applied to Vocational Guidance, later called the International Congress of Psychotechnics and then the International Association of Applied Psychology. The IAAP is considered the oldest international psychology association. Today, at least 65 international groups deal with specialized aspects of psychology. In response to male predominance in the field, female psychologists in the U.S. formed the National Council of Women Psychologists in 1941. This organization became the International Council of Women Psychologists after World War II and the International Council of Psychologists in 1959. Several associations including the Association of Black Psychologists and the Asian American Psychological Association have arisen to promote the inclusion of non-European racial groups in the profession. The International Union of Psychological Science (IUPsyS) is the world federation of national psychological societies. The IUPsyS was founded in 1951 under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO). Psychology departments have since proliferated around the world, based primarily on the Euro-American model. Since 1966, the Union has published the International Journal of Psychology. IAAP and IUPsyS agreed in 1976 each to hold a congress every four years, on a staggered basis. IUPsyS recognizes 66 national psychology associations and at least 15 others exist. The American Psychological Association is the oldest and largest. Its membership has increased from 5,000 in 1945 to 100,000 in the present day. The APA includes 54 divisions, which since 1960 have steadily proliferated to include more specialties. Some of these divisions, such as the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and the American Psychology–Law Society, began as autonomous groups. The Interamerican Psychological Society, founded in 1951, aspires to promote psychology across the Western Hemisphere. It holds the Interamerican Congress of Psychology and had 1,000 members in year 2000. The European Federation of Professional Psychology Associations, founded in 1981, represents 30 national associations with a total of 100,000 individual members. At least 30 other international organizations represent psychologists in different regions. In some places, governments legally regulate who can provide psychological services or represent themselves as a "psychologist." The APA defines a psychologist as someone with a doctoral degree in psychology. Early practitioners of experimental psychology distinguished themselves from parapsychology, which in the late nineteenth century enjoyed popularity (including the interest of scholars such as William James). Some people considered parapsychology to be part of "psychology". Parapsychology, hypnotism, and psychism were major topics at the early International Congresses. But students of these fields were eventually ostracized, and more or less banished from the Congress in 1900–1905. Parapsychology persisted for a time at Imperial University in Japan, with publications such as Clairvoyance and Thoughtography by Tomokichi Fukurai, but it was mostly shunned by 1913. As a discipline, psychology has long sought to fend off accusations that it is a "soft" science. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn's 1962 critique implied psychology overall was in a pre-paradigm state, lacking agreement on the type of overarching theory found in mature hard sciences such as chemistry and physics. Because some areas of psychology rely on research methods such as self-reports in surveys and questionnaires, critics asserted that psychology is not an objective science. Skeptics have suggested that personality, thinking, and emotion cannot be directly measured and are often inferred from subjective self-reports, which may be problematic. Experimental psychologists have devised a variety of ways to indirectly measure these elusive phenomenological entities. Divisions still exist within the field, with some psychologists more oriented towards the unique experiences of individual humans, which cannot be understood only as data points within a larger population. Critics inside and outside the field have argued that mainstream psychology has become increasingly dominated by a "cult of empiricism", which limits the scope of research because investigators restrict themselves to methods derived from the physical sciences.: 36–7 Feminist critiques have argued that claims to scientific objectivity obscure the values and agenda of (historically) mostly male researchers. Jean Grimshaw, for example, argues that mainstream psychological research has advanced a patriarchal agenda through its efforts to control behavior.: 120 Major schools of thought Psychologists generally consider biology the substrate of thought and feeling, and therefore an important area of study. Behaviorial neuroscience, also known as biological psychology, involves the application of biological principles to the study of physiological and genetic mechanisms underlying behavior in humans and other animals. The allied field of comparative psychology is the scientific study of the behavior and mental processes of non-human animals. A leading question in behavioral neuroscience has been whether and how mental functions are localized in the brain. From Phineas Gage to H.M. and Clive Wearing, individual people with mental deficits traceable to physical brain damage have inspired new discoveries in this area. Modern behavioral neuroscience could be said to originate in the 1870s, when in France Paul Broca traced production of speech to the left frontal gyrus, thereby also demonstrating hemispheric lateralization of brain function. Soon after, Carl Wernicke identified a related area necessary for the understanding of speech.: 20–2 The contemporary field of behavioral neuroscience focuses on the physical basis of behavior. Behaviorial neuroscientists use animal models, often relying on rats, to study the neural, genetic, and cellular mechanisms that underlie behaviors involved in learning, memory, and fear responses. Cognitive neuroscientists, by using neural imaging tools, investigate the neural correlates of psychological processes in humans. Neuropsychologists conduct psychological assessments to determine how an individual's behavior and cognition are related to the brain. The biopsychosocial model is a cross-disciplinary, holistic model that concerns the ways in which interrelationships of biological, psychological, and socio-environmental factors affect health and behavior. Evolutionary psychology approaches thought and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. This perspective suggests that psychological adaptations evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments. Evolutionary psychologists attempt to find out how human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, the results of natural selection or sexual selection over the course of human evolution. The history of the biological foundations of psychology includes evidence of racism. The idea of white supremacy and indeed the modern concept of race itself arose during the process of world conquest by Europeans. Carl von Linnaeus's four-fold classification of humans classifies Europeans as intelligent and severe, Americans as contented and free, Asians as ritualistic, and Africans as lazy and capricious. Race was also used to justify the construction of socially specific mental disorders such as drapetomania and dysaesthesia aethiopica—the behavior of uncooperative African slaves. After the creation of experimental psychology, "ethnical psychology" emerged as a subdiscipline, based on the assumption that studying primitive races would provide an important link between animal behavior and the psychology of more evolved humans. A tenet of behavioral research is that a large part of both human and lower-animal behavior is learned. A principle associated with behavioral research is that the mechanisms involved in learning apply to humans and non-human animals. Behavioral researchers have developed a treatment known as behavior modification, which is used to help individuals replace undesirable behaviors with desirable ones. Early behavioral researchers studied stimulus–response pairings, now known as classical conditioning. They demonstrated that when a biologically potent stimulus (e.g., food that elicits salivation) is paired with a previously neutral stimulus (e.g., a bell) over several learning trials, the neutral stimulus by itself can come to elicit the response the biologically potent stimulus elicits. Ivan Pavlov—known best for inducing dogs to salivate in the presence of a stimulus previously linked with food—became a leading figure in the Soviet Union and inspired followers to use his methods on humans. In the United States, Edward Lee Thorndike initiated "connectionist" studies by trapping animals in "puzzle boxes" and rewarding them for escaping. Thorndike wrote in 1911, "There can be no moral warrant for studying man's nature unless the study will enable us to control his acts.": 212–5 From 1910 to 1913 the American Psychological Association went through a sea change of opinion, away from mentalism and towards "behavioralism." In 1913, John B. Watson coined the term behaviorism for this school of thought.: 218–27 Watson's famous Little Albert experiment in 1920 was at first thought to demonstrate that repeated use of upsetting loud noises could instill phobias (aversions to other stimuli) in an infant human, although such a conclusion was likely an exaggeration. Karl Lashley, a close collaborator with Watson, examined biological manifestations of learning in the brain. Clark L. Hull, Edwin Guthrie, and others did much to help behaviorism become a widely used paradigm. A new method of "instrumental" or "operant" conditioning added the concepts of reinforcement and punishment to the model of behavior change. Radical behaviorists avoided discussing the inner workings of the mind, especially the unconscious mind, which they considered impossible to assess scientifically. Operant conditioning was first described by Miller and Kanorski and popularized in the U.S. by B.F. Skinner, who emerged as a leading intellectual of the behaviorist movement. Noam Chomsky published an influential critique of radical behaviorism on the grounds that behaviorist principles could not adequately explain the complex mental process of language acquisition and language use. The review, which was scathing, did much to reduce the status of behaviorism within psychology.: 282–5 Martin Seligman and his colleagues discovered that they could condition in dogs a state of "learned helplessness", which was not predicted by the behaviorist approach to psychology. Edward C. Tolman advanced a hybrid "cognitive behavioral" model, most notably with his 1948 publication discussing the cognitive maps used by rats to guess at the location of food at the end of a maze. Skinner's behaviorism did not die, in part because it generated successful practical applications. The Association for Behavior Analysis International was founded in 1974 and by 2003 had members from 42 countries. The field has gained a foothold in Latin America and Japan. Applied behavior analysis is the term used for the application of the principles of operant conditioning to change socially significant behavior (it supersedes the term, "behavior modification"). Green Red BluePurple Blue Purple Blue Purple RedGreen Purple Green The Stroop effect is the fact that naming the color of the first set of words is easier and quicker than the second. Cognitive psychology involves the study of mental processes, including perception, attention, language comprehension and production, memory, and problem solving. Researchers in the field of cognitive psychology are sometimes called cognitivists. They rely on an information processing model of mental functioning. Cognitivist research is informed by functionalism and experimental psychology. Starting in the 1950s, the experimental techniques developed by Wundt, James, Ebbinghaus, and others re-emerged as experimental psychology became increasingly cognitivist and, eventually, constituted a part of the wider, interdisciplinary cognitive science. Some called this development the cognitive revolution because it rejected the anti-mentalist dogma of behaviorism as well as the strictures of psychoanalysis. Albert Bandura helped along the transition in psychology from behaviorism to cognitive psychology. Bandura and other social learning theorists advanced the idea of vicarious learning. In other words, they advanced the view that a child can learn by observing the immediate social environment and not necessarily from having been reinforced for enacting a behavior, although they did not rule out the influence of reinforcement on learning a behavior. Technological advances also renewed interest in mental states and mental representations. English neuroscientist Charles Sherrington and Canadian psychologist Donald O. Hebb used experimental methods to link psychological phenomena to the structure and function of the brain. The rise of computer science, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence underlined the value of comparing information processing in humans and machines. A popular and representative topic in this area is cognitive bias, or irrational thought. Psychologists (and economists) have classified and described a sizeable catalog of biases which recur frequently in human thought. The availability heuristic, for example, is the tendency to overestimate the importance of something which happens to come readily to mind. Elements of behaviorism and cognitive psychology were synthesized to form cognitive behavioral therapy, a form of psychotherapy modified from techniques developed by American psychologist Albert Ellis and American psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck. On a broader level, cognitive science is an interdisciplinary enterprise involving cognitive psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, linguists, and researchers in artificial intelligence, human–computer interaction, and computational neuroscience. The discipline of cognitive science covers cognitive psychology as well as philosophy of mind, computer science, and neuroscience. Computer simulations are sometimes used to model phenomena of interest. Social psychology is concerned with how behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and the social environment influence human interactions. Social psychologists study such topics as the influence of others on an individual's behavior (e.g. conformity, persuasion) and the formation of beliefs, attitudes, and stereotypes about other people. Social cognition fuses elements of social and cognitive psychology for the purpose of understanding how people process, remember, or distort social information. The study of group dynamics involves research on the nature of leadership, organizational communication, and related phenomena. In recent years, social psychologists have become interested in implicit measures, mediational models, and the interaction of person and social factors in accounting for behavior. Some concepts that sociologists have applied to the study of psychiatric disorders, concepts such as the social role, sick role, social class, life events, culture, migration, and total institution, have influenced social psychologists. Psychoanalysis is a collection of theories and therapeutic techniques intended to analyze the unconscious mind and its impact on everyday life. These theories and techniques inform treatments for mental disorders. Psychoanalysis originated in the 1890s, most prominently with the work of Sigmund Freud. Freud's psychoanalytic theory was largely based on interpretive methods, introspection, and clinical observation. It became very well known, largely because it tackled subjects such as sexuality, repression, and the unconscious.: 84–6 Freud pioneered the methods of free association and dream interpretation. Psychoanalytic theory is not monolithic. Other well-known psychoanalytic thinkers who diverged from Freud include Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Erik Erikson, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, John Bowlby, Freud's daughter Anna Freud, and Harry Stack Sullivan. These individuals ensured that psychoanalysis would evolve into diverse schools of thought. Among these schools are ego psychology, object relations, and interpersonal, Lacanian, and relational psychoanalysis. Psychologists such as Hans Eysenck and philosophers including Karl Popper sharply criticized psychoanalysis. Popper argued that psychoanalysis was not falsifiable (no claim it made could be proven wrong) and therefore inherently not a scientific discipline, whereas Eysenck advanced the view that psychoanalytic tenets had been contradicted by experimental data. By the end of the 20th century, psychology departments in American universities mostly had marginalized Freudian theory, dismissing it as a "desiccated and dead" historical artifact. Researchers such as António Damásio, Oliver Sacks, and Joseph LeDoux; and individuals in the emerging field of neuro-psychoanalysis have defended some of Freud's ideas on scientific grounds. Humanistic psychology, which has been influenced by existentialism and phenomenology, stresses free will and self-actualization. It emerged in the 1950s as a movement within academic psychology, in reaction to both behaviorism and psychoanalysis. The humanistic approach seeks to view the whole person, not just fragmented parts of the personality or isolated cognitions. Humanistic psychology also focuses on personal growth, self-identity, death, aloneness, and freedom. It emphasizes subjective meaning, the rejection of determinism, and concern for positive growth rather than pathology. Some founders of the humanistic school of thought were American psychologists Abraham Maslow, who formulated a hierarchy of human needs, and Carl Rogers, who created and developed client-centered therapy. Later, positive psychology opened up humanistic themes to scientific study. Positive psychology is the study of factors which contribute to human happiness and well-being, focusing more on people who are currently healthy. In 2010, Clinical Psychological Review published a special issue devoted to positive psychological interventions, such as gratitude journaling and the physical expression of gratitude. It is, however, far from clear that positive psychology is effective in making people happier. Positive psychological interventions have been limited in scope, but their effects are thought to be somewhat better than placebo effects. The American Association for Humanistic Psychology, formed in 1963, declared: Humanistic psychology is primarily an orientation toward the whole of psychology rather than a distinct area or school. It stands for respect for the worth of persons, respect for differences of approach, open-mindedness as to acceptable methods, and interest in exploration of new aspects of human behavior. As a "third force" in contemporary psychology, it is concerned with topics having little place in existing theories and systems: e.g., love, creativity, self, growth, organism, basic need-gratification, self-actualization, higher values, being, becoming, spontaneity, play, humor, affection, naturalness, warmth, ego-transcendence, objectivity, autonomy, responsibility, meaning, fair-play, transcendental experience, peak experience, courage, and related concepts. Existential psychology emphasizes the need to understand a client's total orientation towards the world. Existential psychology is opposed to reductionism, behaviorism, and other methods that objectify the individual. In the 1950s and 1960s, influenced by philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, psychoanalytically trained American psychologist Rollo May helped to develop existential psychology. Existential psychotherapy, which follows from existential psychology, is a therapeutic approach that is based on the idea that a person's inner conflict arises from that individual's confrontation with the givens of existence. Swiss psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger and American psychologist George Kelly may also be said to belong to the existential school. Existential psychologists tend to differ from more "humanistic" psychologists in the former's relatively neutral view of human nature and relatively positive assessment of anxiety. Existential psychologists emphasized the humanistic themes of death, free will, and meaning, suggesting that meaning can be shaped by myths and narratives; meaning can be deepened by the acceptance of free will, which is requisite to living an authentic life, albeit often with anxiety with regard to death. Austrian existential psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl drew evidence of meaning's therapeutic power from reflections upon his own internment. He created a variation of existential psychotherapy called logotherapy, a type of existentialist analysis that focuses on a will to meaning (in one's life), as opposed to Adler's Nietzschean doctrine of will to power or Freud's will to pleasure. Themes Personality psychology is concerned with enduring patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion. Theories of personality vary across different psychological schools of thought. Each theory carries different assumptions about such features as the role of the unconscious and the importance of childhood experience. According to Freud, personality is based on the dynamic interactions of the id, ego, and super-ego. By contrast, trait theorists have developed taxonomies of personality constructs in describing personality in terms of key traits. Trait theorists have often employed statistical data-reduction methods, such as factor analysis. Although the number of proposed traits has varied widely, Hans Eysenck's early biologically based model suggests at least three major trait constructs are necessary to describe human personality, extraversion–introversion, neuroticism-stability, and psychoticism-normality. Raymond Cattell empirically derived a theory of 16 personality factors at the primary-factor level and up to eight broader second-stratum factors. Since the 1980s, the Big Five (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) emerged as an important trait theory of personality. Dimensional models of personality disorders are receiving increasing support, and a version of dimensional assessment, namely the Alternative DSM-5 Model for Personality Disorders, has been included in the DSM-5. However, despite a plethora of research into the various versions of the "Big Five" personality dimensions, it appears necessary to move on from static conceptualizations of personality structure to a more dynamic orientation, acknowledging that personality constructs are subject to learning and change over the lifespan. An early example of personality assessment was the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet, constructed during World War I. The popular, although psychometrically inadequate, Myers–Briggs Type Indicator was developed to assess individuals' "personality types" according to the personality theories of Carl Jung. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), despite its name, is more a dimensional measure of psychopathology than a personality measure. California Psychological Inventory contains 20 personality scales (e.g., independence, tolerance). The International Personality Item Pool, which is in the public domain, has become a source of scales that can be used personality assessment. Study of the unconscious mind, a part of the psyche outside the individual's awareness but that is believed to influence conscious thought and behavior, was a hallmark of early psychology. In one of the first psychology experiments conducted in the United States, C.S. Peirce and Joseph Jastrow found in 1884 that research subjects could choose the minutely heavier of two weights even if consciously uncertain of the difference. Freud popularized the concept of the unconscious mind, particularly when he referred to an uncensored intrusion of unconscious thought into one's speech (a Freudian slip) or to his efforts to interpret dreams. His 1901 book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life catalogs hundreds of everyday events that Freud explains in terms of unconscious influence. Pierre Janet advanced the idea of a subconscious mind, which could contain autonomous mental elements unavailable to the direct scrutiny of the subject. The concept of unconscious processes has remained important in psychology. Cognitive psychologists have used a "filter" model of attention. According to the model, much information processing takes place below the threshold of consciousness, and only certain stimuli, limited by their nature and number, make their way through the filter. Much research has shown that subconscious priming of certain ideas can covertly influence thoughts and behavior. Because of the unreliability of self-reporting, a major hurdle in this type of research involves demonstrating that a subject's conscious mind has not perceived a target stimulus. For this reason, some psychologists prefer to distinguish between implicit and explicit memory. In another approach, one can also describe a subliminal stimulus as meeting an objective but not a subjective threshold. The automaticity model of John Bargh and others involves the ideas of automaticity and unconscious processing in our understanding of social behavior, although there has been dispute with regard to replication. Some experimental data suggest that the brain begins to consider taking actions before the mind becomes aware of them. The influence of unconscious forces on people's choices bears on the philosophical question of free will. John Bargh, Daniel Wegner, and Ellen Langer describe free will as an illusion. Some psychologists study motivation or the subject of why people or lower animals initiate a behavior at a particular time. It also involves the study of why humans and lower animals continue or terminate a behavior. Psychologists such as William James initially used the term motivation to refer to intention, in a sense similar to the concept of will in European philosophy. With the steady rise of Darwinian and Freudian thinking, instinct also came to be seen as a primary source of motivation. According to drive theory, the forces of instinct combine into a single source of energy which exerts a constant influence. Psychoanalysis, like biology, regarded these forces as demands originating in the nervous system. Psychoanalysts believed that these forces, especially the sexual instincts, could become entangled and transmuted within the psyche. Classical psychoanalysis conceives of a struggle between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, roughly corresponding to id and ego. Later, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud introduced the concept of the death drive, a compulsion towards aggression, destruction, and psychic repetition of traumatic events. Meanwhile, behaviorist researchers used simple dichotomous models (pleasure/pain, reward/punishment) and well-established principles such as the idea that a thirsty creature will take pleasure in drinking. Clark Hull formalized the latter idea with his drive reduction model. Hunger, thirst, fear, sexual desire, and thermoregulation constitute fundamental motivations in animals. Humans seem to exhibit a more complex set of motivations—though theoretically these could be explained as resulting from desires for belonging, positive self-image, self-consistency, truth, love, and control. Motivation can be modulated or manipulated in many different ways. Researchers have found that eating, for example, depends not only on the organism's fundamental need for homeostasis—an important factor causing the experience of hunger—but also on circadian rhythms, food availability, food palatability, and cost. Abstract motivations are also malleable, as evidenced by such phenomena as goal contagion: the adoption of goals, sometimes unconsciously, based on inferences about the goals of others. Vohs and Baumeister suggest that contrary to the need-desire-fulfillment cycle of animal instincts, human motivations sometimes obey a "getting begets wanting" rule: the more you get a reward such as self-esteem, love, drugs, or money, the more you want it. They suggest that this principle can even apply to food, drink, sex, and sleep. Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why the thought processes, emotions, and behaviors of humans change over the course of their lives. Some credit Charles Darwin with conducting the first systematic study within the rubric of developmental psychology, having published in 1877 a short paper detailing the development of innate forms of communication based on his observations of his infant son. The main origins of the discipline, however, are found in the work of Jean Piaget. Like Piaget, developmental psychologists originally focused primarily on the development of cognition from infancy to adolescence. Later, developmental psychology extended itself to the study cognition over the life span. In addition to studying cognition, developmental psychologists have also come to focus on affective, behavioral, moral, social, and neural development. Developmental psychologists who study children use a number of research methods. For example, they make observations of children in natural settings such as preschools and engage them in experimental tasks. Such tasks often resemble specially designed games and activities that are both enjoyable for the child and scientifically useful. Developmental researchers have even devised clever methods to study the mental processes of infants. In addition to studying children, developmental psychologists also study aging and processes throughout the life span, including old age. These psychologists draw on the full range of psychological theories to inform their research. All researched psychological traits are influenced by both genes and environment, to varying degrees. These two sources of influence are often confounded in observational research of individuals and families. An example of this confounding can be shown in the transmission of depression from a depressed mother to her offspring. A theory based on environmental transmission would hold that an offspring, by virtue of their having a problematic rearing environment managed by a depressed mother, is at risk for developing depression. On the other hand, a hereditarian theory would hold that depression risk in an offspring is influenced to some extent by genes passed to the child from the mother. Genes and environment in these simple transmission models are completely confounded. A depressed mother may both carry genes that contribute to depression in her offspring and also create a rearing environment that increases the risk of depression in her child. Behavioral genetics researchers have employed methodologies that help to disentangle this confound and understand the nature and origins of individual differences in behavior. Traditionally the research has involved twin studies and adoption studies, two designs where genetic and environmental influences can be partially un-confounded. More recently, gene-focused research has contributed to understanding genetic contributions to the development of psychological traits. The availability of microarray molecular genetic or genome sequencing technologies allows researchers to measure participant DNA variation directly, and test whether individual genetic variants within genes are associated with psychological traits and psychopathology through methods including genome-wide association studies. One goal of such research is similar to that in positional cloning and its success in Huntington's: once a causal gene is discovered biological research can be conducted to understand how that gene influences the phenotype. One major result of genetic association studies is the general finding that psychological traits and psychopathology, as well as complex medical diseases, are highly polygenic, where a large number (on the order of hundreds to thousands) of genetic variants, each of small effect, contribute to individual differences in the behavioral trait or propensity to the disorder. Active research continues to work toward understanding the genetic and environmental bases of behavior and their interaction. Applications Psychology encompasses many subfields and includes different approaches to the study of mental processes and behavior. Psychological testing has ancient origins, dating as far back as 2200 BCE, in the examinations for the Chinese civil service. Written exams began during the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE). By 1370, the Chinese system required a stratified series of tests, involving essay writing and knowledge of diverse topics. The system was ended in 1906.: 41–2 In Europe, mental assessment took a different approach, with theories of physiognomy—judgment of character based on the face—described by Aristotle in 4th century BCE Greece. Physiognomy remained current through the Enlightenment, and added the doctrine of phrenology: a study of mind and intelligence based on simple assessment of neuroanatomy.: 42–3 When experimental psychology came to Britain, Francis Galton was a leading practitioner. By virtue of his procedures for measuring reaction time and sensation, he is considered an inventor of modern mental testing (also known as psychometrics).: 44–5 James McKeen Cattell, a student of Wundt and Galton, brought the idea of psychological testing to the United States, and in fact coined the term "mental test".: 45–6 In 1901, Cattell's student Clark Wissler published discouraging results, suggesting that mental testing of Columbia and Barnard students failed to predict academic performance.: 45–6 In response to 1904 orders from the Minister of Public Instruction, One example of an observational study was run by Arthur Bandura. This observational study focused on children who were exposed to an adult exhibiting aggressive behaviors and their reaction to toys versus other children who were not exposed to these stimuli. The result shows that children who had seen the adult acting aggressively towards a toy, in turn, were aggressive towards their own toy when put in a situation that frustrated them. psychologists Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon developed and elaborated a new test of intelligence in 1905–1911. They used a range of questions diverse in their nature and difficulty. Binet and Simon introduced the concept of mental age and referred to the lowest scorers on their test as idiots. Henry H. Goddard put the Binet-Simon scale to work and introduced classifications of mental level such as imbecile and feebleminded. In 1916, (after Binet's death), Stanford professor Lewis M. Terman modified the Binet-Simon scale (renamed the Stanford–Binet scale) and introduced the intelligence quotient as a score report.: 50–56 Based on his test findings, and reflecting the racism common to that era, Terman concluded that intellectual disability "represents the level of intelligence which is very, very common among Spanish-Indians and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial." Following the Army Alpha and Army Beta tests, which was developed by psychologist Robert Yerkes in 1917 and then used in World War 1 by industrial and organizational psychologists for large-scale employee testing and selection of military personnel. Mental testing also became popular in the U.S., where it was applied to schoolchildren. The federally created National Intelligence Test was administered to 7 million children in the 1920s. In 1926, the College Entrance Examination Board created the Scholastic Aptitude Test to standardize college admissions.: 61 The results of intelligence tests were used to argue for segregated schools and economic functions, including the preferential training of Black Americans for manual labor. These practices were criticized by Black intellectuals such a Horace Mann Bond and Allison Davis. Eugenicists used mental testing to justify and organize compulsory sterilization of individuals classified as mentally retarded (now referred to as intellectual disability). In the United States, tens of thousands of men and women were sterilized. Setting a precedent that has never been overturned, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of this practice in the 1927 case Buck v. Bell. Today mental testing is a routine phenomenon for people of all ages in Western societies.: 2 Modern testing aspires to criteria including standardization of procedure, consistency of results, output of an interpretable score, statistical norms describing population outcomes, and, ideally, effective prediction of behavior and life outcomes outside of testing situations.: 4–6 Psychological testing is regularly used in forensic contexts to aid legal judgments and decisions. Developments in psychometrics include work on test and scale reliability and validity. Developments in item-response theory, structural equation modeling, and bifactor analysis have helped in strengthening test and scale construction. The provision of psychological health services is generally called clinical psychology in the U.S. Sometimes, however, members of the school psychology and counseling psychology professions engage in practices that resemble that of clinical psychologists. Clinical psychologists typically include people who have graduated from doctoral programs in clinical psychology. In Canada, some of the members of the abovementioned groups usually fall within the larger category of professional psychology. In Canada and the U.S., practitioners get bachelor's degrees and doctorates; doctoral students in clinical psychology usually spend one year in a predoctoral internship and one year in postdoctoral internship. In Mexico and most other Latin American and European countries, psychologists do not get bachelor's and doctoral degrees; instead, they take a three-year professional course following high school. Clinical psychology is at present the largest specialization within psychology. It includes the study and application of psychology for the purpose of understanding, preventing, and relieving psychological distress, dysfunction, and/or mental illness. Clinical psychologists also try to promote subjective well-being and personal growth. Central to the practice of clinical psychology are psychological assessment and psychotherapy although clinical psychologists may also engage in research, teaching, consultation, forensic testimony, and program development and administration. Credit for the first psychology clinic in the United States typically goes to Lightner Witmer, who established his practice in Philadelphia in 1896. Another modern psychotherapist was Morton Prince, an early advocate for the establishment of psychology as a clinical and academic discipline. In the first part of the twentieth century, most mental health care in the United States was performed by psychiatrists, who are medical doctors. Psychology entered the field with its refinements of mental testing, which promised to improve the diagnosis of mental problems. For their part, some psychiatrists became interested in using psychoanalysis and other forms of psychodynamic psychotherapy to understand and treat the mentally ill. Psychotherapy as conducted by psychiatrists blurred the distinction between psychiatry and psychology, and this trend continued with the rise of community mental health facilities. Some in the clinical psychology community adopted behavioral therapy, a thoroughly non-psychodynamic model that used behaviorist learning theory to change the actions of patients. A key aspect of behavior therapy is empirical evaluation of the treatment's effectiveness. In the 1970s, cognitive-behavior therapy emerged with the work of Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck. Although there are similarities between behavior therapy and cognitive-behavior therapy, cognitive-behavior therapy required the application of cognitive constructs. Since the 1970s, the popularity of cognitive-behavior therapy among clinical psychologists increased. A key practice in behavioral and cognitive-behavioral therapy is exposing patients to things they fear, based on the premise that their responses (fear, panic, anxiety) can be deconditioned. Mental health care today involves psychologists and social workers in increasing numbers. In 1977, National Institute of Mental Health director Bertram Brown described this shift as a source of "intense competition and role confusion." Graduate programs issuing doctorates in clinical psychology emerged in the 1950s and underwent rapid increase through the 1980s. The PhD degree is intended to train practitioners who could also conduct scientific research. The PsyD degree is more exclusively designed to train practitioners. Some clinical psychologists focus on the clinical management of patients with brain injury. This subspecialty is known as clinical neuropsychology. In many countries, clinical psychology is a regulated mental health profession. The emerging field of disaster psychology (see crisis intervention) involves professionals who respond to large-scale traumatic events. The work performed by clinical psychologists tends to be influenced by various therapeutic approaches, all of which involve a formal relationship between professional and client (usually an individual, couple, family, or small group). Typically, these approaches encourage new ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving. Four major theoretical perspectives are psychodynamic, cognitive behavioral, existential–humanistic, and systems or family therapy. There has been a growing movement to integrate the various therapeutic approaches, especially with an increased understanding of issues regarding culture, gender, spirituality, and sexual orientation. With the advent of more robust research findings regarding psychotherapy, there is evidence that most of the major therapies have equal effectiveness, with the key common element being a strong therapeutic alliance. Because of this, more training programs and psychologists are now adopting an eclectic therapeutic orientation. Diagnosis in clinical psychology usually follows the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The study of mental illnesses is called abnormal psychology. Educational psychology is the study of how humans learn in educational settings, the effectiveness of educational interventions, the psychology of teaching, and the social psychology of schools as organizations. Educational psychologists can be found in preschools, schools of all levels including post secondary institutions, community organizations and learning centers, Government or private research firms, and independent or private consultant. The work of developmental psychologists such as Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, and Jerome Bruner has been influential in creating teaching methods and educational practices. Educational psychology is often included in teacher education programs in places such as North America, Australia, and New Zealand. School psychology combines principles from educational psychology and clinical psychology to understand and treat students with learning disabilities; to foster the intellectual growth of gifted students; to facilitate prosocial behaviors in adolescents; and otherwise to promote safe, supportive, and effective learning environments. School psychologists are trained in educational and behavioral assessment, intervention, prevention, and consultation, and many have extensive training in research. Industrial and organizational (I/O) psychology involves research and practices that apply psychological theories and principles to organizations and individuals' work-lives. In the field's beginnings, industrialists brought the nascent field of psychology to bear on the study of scientific management techniques for improving workplace efficiency. The field was at first called economic psychology or business psychology; later, industrial psychology, employment psychology, or psychotechnology. An influential early study examined workers at Western Electric's Hawthorne plant in Cicero, Illinois from 1924 to 1932. Western Electric experimented on factory workers to assess their responses to changes in illumination, breaks, food, and wages. The researchers came to focus on workers' responses to observation itself, and the term Hawthorne effect is now used to describe the fact that people's behavior can change when they think they are being observed. Although the Hawthorne research can be found in psychology textbooks, the research and its findings were weak at best. The name industrial and organizational psychology emerged in the 1960s. In 1973, it became enshrined in the name of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Division 14 of the American Psychological Association. One goal of the discipline is to optimize human potential in the workplace. Personnel psychology is a subfield of I/O psychology. Personnel psychologists apply the methods and principles of psychology in selecting and evaluating workers. Another subfield, organizational psychology, examines the effects of work environments and management styles on worker motivation, job satisfaction, and productivity. Most I/O psychologists work outside of academia, for private and public organizations and as consultants. A psychology consultant working in business today might expect to provide executives with information and ideas about their industry, their target markets, and the organization of their company. Organizational behavior (OB) is an allied field involved in the study of human behavior within organizations. One way to differentiate I/O psychology from OB is that I/O psychologists train in university psychology departments and OB specialists, in business schools. One role for psychologists in the military has been to evaluate and counsel soldiers and other personnel. In the U.S., this function began during World War I, when Robert Yerkes established the School of Military Psychology at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia. The school provided psychological training for military staff. Today, U.S. Army psychologists perform psychological screening, clinical psychotherapy, suicide prevention, and treatment for post-traumatic stress, as well as provide prevention-related services, for example, smoking cessation. The United States Army's Mental Health Advisory Teams implement psychological interventions to help combat troops experiencing mental problems. Psychologists may also work on a diverse set of campaigns known broadly as psychological warfare. Psychological warfare chiefly involves the use of propaganda to influence enemy soldiers and civilians. This so-called black propaganda is designed to seem as if it originates from a source other than the Army. The CIA's MKULTRA program involved more individualized efforts at mind control, involving techniques such as hypnosis, torture, and covert involuntary administration of LSD. The U.S. military used the name Psychological Operations (PSYOP) until 2010, when these activities were reclassified as Military Information Support Operations (MISO), part of Information Operations (IO). Psychologists have sometimes been involved in assisting the interrogation and torture of suspects, staining the records of the psychologists involved. An example of the contribution of psychologists to social change involves the research of Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark. These two African American psychologists studied segregation's adverse psychological impact on Black children. Their research findings played a role in the desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The impact of psychology on social change includes the discipline's broad influence on teaching and learning. Research has shown that compared to the "whole word" or "whole language" approach, the phonics approach to reading instruction is more efficacious. Medical facilities increasingly employ psychologists to perform various roles. One aspect of health psychology is the psychoeducation of patients: instructing them in how to follow a medical regimen. Health psychologists can also educate doctors and conduct research on patient compliance. Psychologists in the field of public health use a wide variety of interventions to influence human behavior. These range from public relations campaigns and outreach to governmental laws and policies. Psychologists study the composite influence of all these different tools in an effort to influence whole populations of people. Psychologists work with organizations to apply findings from psychological research to improve the health and well-being of employees. Some work as external consultants hired by organizations to solve specific problems, whereas others are full-time employees of the organization. Applications include conducting surveys to identify issues and designing interventions to make work healthier. Some of the specific health areas include: Interventions that improve climates are a way to address accidents and violence. Interventions that reduce stress at work or provide employees with tools to better manage it can help in areas where stress is an important component. Industrial psychology became interested in worker fatigue during World War I, when government ministers in Britain were concerned about the impact of fatigue on workers in munitions factories but not other types of factories. In the U. K. some interest in worker well-being emerged with the efforts of Charles Samuel Myers and his National Institute of Industrial Psychology (NIIP) during the inter-War years. In the U. S. during the mid-twentieth century industrial psychologist Arthur Kornhauser pioneered the study of occupational mental health, linking industrial working conditions to mental health as well as the spillover of an unsatisfying job into a worker's personal life. Zickar accumulated evidence to show that "no other industrial psychologist of his era was as devoted to advocating management and labor practices that would improve the lives of working people." As interest in the worker health expanded toward the end of the twentieth century, the field of occupational health psychology (OHP) emerged. OHP is a branch of psychology that is interdisciplinary. OHP is concerned with the health and safety of workers. OHP addresses topic areas such as the impact of occupational stressors on physical and mental health, mistreatment of workers (e.g., bullying and violence), work-family balance, the impact of involuntary unemployment on physical and mental health, the influence of psychosocial factors on safety and accidents, and interventions designed to improve/protect worker health. OHP grew out of health psychology, industrial and organizational psychology, and occupational medicine. OHP has also been informed by disciplines outside psychology, including industrial engineering, sociology, and economics. Research methods Quantitative psychological research lends itself to the statistical testing of hypotheses. Although the field makes abundant use of randomized and controlled experiments in laboratory settings, such research can only assess a limited range of short-term phenomena. Some psychologists rely on less rigorously controlled, but more ecologically valid, field experiments as well. Other research psychologists rely on statistical methods to glean knowledge from population data. The statistical methods research psychologists employ include the Pearson product–moment correlation coefficient, the analysis of variance, multiple linear regression, logistic regression, structural equation modeling, and hierarchical linear modeling. The measurement and operationalization of important constructs is an essential part of these research designs. Although this type of psychological research is much less abundant than quantitative research, some psychologists conduct qualitative research. This type of research can involve interviews, questionnaires, and first-hand observation. While hypothesis testing is rare, virtually impossible, in qualitative research, qualitative studies can be helpful in theory and hypothesis generation, interpreting seemingly contradictory quantitative findings, and understanding why some interventions fail and others succeed. A true experiment with random assignment of research participants (sometimes called subjects) to rival conditions allows researchers to make strong inferences about causal relationships. When there are large numbers of research participants, the random assignment (also called random allocation) of those participants to rival conditions ensures that the individuals in those conditions will, on average, be similar on most characteristics, including characteristics that went unmeasured. In an experiment, the researcher alters one or more variables of influence, called independent variables, and measures resulting changes in the factors of interest, called dependent variables. Prototypical experimental research is conducted in a laboratory with a carefully controlled environment. A quasi-experiment is a situation in which different conditions are being studied, but random assignment to the different conditions is not possible. Investigators must work with preexisting groups of people. Researchers can use common sense to consider how much the nonrandom assignment threatens the study's validity. For example, in research on the best way to affect reading achievement in the first three grades of school, school administrators may not permit educational psychologists to randomly assign children to phonics and whole language classrooms, in which case the psychologists must work with preexisting classroom assignments. Psychologists will compare the achievement of children attending phonics and whole language classes and, perhaps, statistically adjust for any initial differences in reading level. Experimental researchers typically use a statistical hypothesis testing model which involves making predictions before conducting the experiment, then assessing how well the data collected are consistent with the predictions. These predictions are likely to originate from one or more abstract scientific hypotheses about how the phenomenon under study actually works. Surveys are used in psychology for the purpose of measuring attitudes and traits, monitoring changes in mood, and checking the validity of experimental manipulations (checking research participants' perception of the condition they were assigned to). Psychologists have commonly used paper-and-pencil surveys. However, surveys are also conducted over the phone or through e-mail. Web-based surveys are increasingly used to conveniently reach many subjects. Observational studies are commonly conducted in psychology. In cross-sectional observational studies, psychologists collect data at a single point in time. The goal of many cross-sectional studies is the assess the extent factors are correlated with each other. By contrast, in longitudinal studies psychologists collect data on the same sample at two or more points in time. Sometimes the purpose of longitudinal research is to study trends across time such as the stability of traits or age-related changes in behavior. Because some studies involve endpoints that psychologists cannot ethically study from an experimental standpoint, such as identifying the causes of depression, they conduct longitudinal studies a large group of depression-free people, periodically assessing what is happening in the individuals' lives. In this way psychologists have an opportunity to test causal hypotheses regarding conditions that commonly arise in people's lives that put them at risk for depression. Problems that affect longitudinal studies include selective attrition, the type of problem in which bias is introduced when a certain type of research participant disproportionately leaves a study. One example of an observational study was run by Arthur Bandura. This observational study focused on children who were exposed to an adult exhibiting aggressive behaviors and their reaction to toys versus other children who were not exposed to these stimuli. The result shows that children who had seen the adult acting aggressively towards a toy, in turn, were aggressive towards their own toy when put in a situation that frustrated them. Exploratory data analysis includes a variety of practices that researchers use to reduce a great many variables to a small number overarching factors. In Peirce's three modes of inference, exploratory data analysis corresponds to abduction. Meta-analysis is the technique research psychologists use to integrate results from many studies of the same variables and arriving at a grand average of the findings. A classic and popular tool used to relate mental and neural activity is the electroencephalogram (EEG), a technique using amplified electrodes on a person's scalp to measure voltage changes in different parts of the brain. Hans Berger, the first researcher to use EEG on an unopened skull, quickly found that brains exhibit signature "brain waves": electric oscillations which correspond to different states of consciousness. Researchers subsequently refined statistical methods for synthesizing the electrode data, and identified unique brain wave patterns such as the delta wave observed during non-REM sleep. Newer functional neuroimaging techniques include functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography, both of which track the flow of blood through the brain. These technologies provide more localized information about activity in the brain and create representations of the brain with widespread appeal. They also provide insight which avoids the classic problems of subjective self-reporting. It remains challenging to draw hard conclusions about where in the brain specific thoughts originate—or even how usefully such localization corresponds with reality. However, neuroimaging has delivered unmistakable results showing the existence of correlations between mind and brain. Some of these draw on a systemic neural network model rather than a localized function model. Interventions such as transcranial magnetic stimulation and drugs also provide information about brain–mind interactions. Psychopharmacology is the study of drug-induced mental effects. Computational modeling is a tool used in mathematical psychology and cognitive psychology to simulate behavior. This method has several advantages. Since modern computers process information quickly, simulations can be run in a short time, allowing for high statistical power. Modeling also allows psychologists to visualize hypotheses about the functional organization of mental events that could not be directly observed in a human. Computational neuroscience uses mathematical models to simulate the brain. Another method is symbolic modeling, which represents many mental objects using variables and rules. Other types of modeling include dynamic systems and stochastic modeling. Animal experiments aid in investigating many aspects of human psychology, including perception, emotion, learning, memory, and thought, to name a few. In the 1890s, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov famously used dogs to demonstrate classical conditioning. Non-human primates, cats, dogs, pigeons, and rats and other rodents are often used in psychological experiments. Ideally, controlled experiments introduce only one independent variable at a time, in order to ascertain its unique effects upon dependent variables. These conditions are approximated best in laboratory settings. In contrast, human environments and genetic backgrounds vary so widely, and depend upon so many factors, that it is difficult to control important variables for human subjects. There are pitfalls, however, in generalizing findings from animal studies to humans through animal models. Comparative psychology is the scientific study of the behavior and mental processes of non-human animals, especially as these relate to the phylogenetic history, adaptive significance, and development of behavior. Research in this area explores the behavior of many species, from insects to primates. It is closely related to other disciplines that study animal behavior such as ethology. Research in comparative psychology sometimes appears to shed light on human behavior, but some attempts to connect the two have been quite controversial, for example the Sociobiology of E.O. Wilson. Animal models are often used to study neural processes related to human behavior, e.g. in cognitive neuroscience. Qualitative research is often designed to answer questions about the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals. Qualitative research involving first-hand observation can help describe events as they occur, with the goal of capturing the richness of everyday behavior and with the hope of discovering and understanding phenomena that might have been missed if only more cursory examinations are made. Qualitative psychological research methods include interviews, first-hand observation, and participant observation. Creswell (2003) identified five main possibilities for qualitative research, including narrative, phenomenology, ethnography, case study, and grounded theory. Qualitative researchers sometimes aim to enrich our understanding of symbols, subjective experiences, or social structures. Sometimes hermeneutic and critical aims can give rise to quantitative research, as in Erich Fromm's application of psychological and sociological theories, in his book Escape from Freedom, to understanding why many ordinary Germans supported Hitler. Just as Jane Goodall studied chimpanzee social and family life by careful observation of chimpanzee behavior in the field, psychologists conduct naturalistic observation of ongoing human social, professional, and family life. Sometimes the participants are aware they are being observed, and other times the participants do not know they are being observed. Strict ethical guidelines must be followed when covert observation is being carried out. Program evaluation involves the systematic collection, analysis, and application of information to answer questions about projects, policies and programs, particularly about their effectiveness. In both the public and private sectors, stakeholders often want to know the extent which the programs they are funding, implementing, voting for, receiving, or objecting to are producing the intended effects. While program evaluation first focuses on effectiveness, important considerations often include how much the program costs per participant, how the program could be improved, whether the program is worthwhile, whether there are better alternatives, if there are unintended outcomes, and whether the program goals are appropriate and useful. Contemporary issues Metascience involves the application of scientific methodology to study science itself. The field of metascience has revealed problems in psychological research. Some psychological research has suffered from bias, problematic reproducibility, and misuse of statistics. These findings have led to calls for reform from within and from outside the scientific community. In 1959, statistician Theodore Sterling examined the results of psychological studies and discovered that 97% of them supported their initial hypotheses, implying possible publication bias. Similarly, Fanelli (2010) found that 91.5% of psychiatry/psychology studies confirmed the effects they were looking for, and concluded that the odds of this happening (a positive result) was around five times higher than in fields such as space science or geosciences. Fanelli argued that this is because researchers in "softer" sciences have fewer constraints to their conscious and unconscious biases. A replication crisis in psychology has emerged. Many notable findings in the field have not been replicated. Some researchers were even accused of publishing fraudulent results. Systematic efforts, including efforts by the Reproducibility Project of the Center for Open Science, to assess the extent of the problem found that as many as two-thirds of highly publicized findings in psychology failed to be replicated. Reproducibility has generally been stronger in cognitive psychology (in studies and journals) than social psychology and subfields of differential psychology. Other subfields of psychology have also been implicated in the replication crisis, including clinical psychology, developmental psychology, and a field closely related to psychology, educational research. Focus on the replication crisis has led to other renewed efforts in the discipline to re-test important findings. In response to concerns about publication bias and data dredging (conducting a large number of statistical tests on a great many variables but restricting reporting to the results that were statistically significant), 295 psychology and medical journals have adopted result-blind peer review where studies are accepted not on the basis of their findings and after the studies are completed, but before the studies are conducted and upon the basis of the methodological rigor of their experimental designs and the theoretical justifications for their proposed statistical analysis before data collection or analysis is conducted. In addition, large-scale collaborations among researchers working in multiple labs in different countries have taken place. The collaborators regularly make their data openly available for different researchers to assess. Allen and Mehler estimated that 61 per cent of result-blind studies have yielded null results, in contrast to an estimated 5 to 20 per cent in traditional research. Some critics view statistical hypothesis testing as misplaced. Psychologist and statistician Jacob Cohen wrote in 1994 that psychologists routinely confuse statistical significance with practical importance, enthusiastically reporting great certainty in unimportant facts. Some psychologists have responded with an increased use of effect size statistics, rather than sole reliance on p-values. In 2008, Arnett pointed out that most articles in American Psychological Association journals were about U.S. populations when U.S. citizens are only 5% of the world's population. He complained that psychologists had no basis for assuming psychological processes to be universal and generalizing research findings to the rest of the global population. In 2010, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan reported a bias in conducting psychology studies with participants from "WEIRD" ("Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic") societies. Henrich et al. found that "96% of psychological samples come from countries with only 12% of the world's population" (p. 63). The article gave examples of results that differ significantly between people from WEIRD and tribal cultures, including the Müller-Lyer illusion. Arnett (2008), Altmaier and Hall (2008) and Morgan-Consoli et al. (2018) view the Western bias in research and theory as a serious problem considering psychologists are increasingly applying psychological principles developed in WEIRD regions in their research, clinical work, and consultation with populations around the world. In 2018, Rad, Martingano, and Ginges showed that nearly a decade after Henrich et al.'s paper, over 80% of the samples used in studies published in the journal Psychological Science employed WEIRD samples. Moreover, their analysis showed that several studies did not fully disclose the origin of their samples; the authors offered a set of recommendations to editors and reviewers to reduce WEIRD bias. Similar to the WEIRD bias, starting in 2020, researchers of non-human behavior have started to emphasize the need to document the possibility of the STRANGE (Social background, Trappability and self-selection, Rearing history, Acclimation and habituation, Natural changes in responsiveness, Genetic makeup, and Experience) bias in study conclusions. Some observers perceive a gap between scientific theory and its application—in particular, the application of unsupported or unsound clinical practices. Critics say there has been an increase in the number of mental health training programs that do not instill scientific competence. Practices such as "facilitated communication for infantile autism"; memory-recovery techniques including body work; and other therapies, such as rebirthing and reparenting, may be dubious or even dangerous, despite their popularity. These practices, however, are outside the mainstream practices taught in clinical psychology doctoral programs. Ethics Ethical standards in the discipline have changed over time. Some famous past studies are today considered unethical and in violation of established codes (e.g., the Canadian Code of Conduct for Research Involving Humans, and the Belmont Report). The American Psychological Association has advanced a set of ethical principles and a code of conduct for the profession. The most important contemporary standards include informed and voluntary consent. After World War II, the Nuremberg Code was established because of Nazi abuses of experimental subjects. Later, most countries (and scientific journals) adopted the Declaration of Helsinki. In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health established the Institutional Review Board in 1966, and in 1974 adopted the National Research Act (HR 7724). All of these measures encouraged researchers to obtain informed consent from human participants in experimental studies. A number of influential but ethically dubious studies led to the establishment of this rule; such studies included the MIT-Harvard Fernald School radioisotope studies, the Thalidomide tragedy, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Stanley Milgram's studies of obedience to authority, and the Stanford Prison Experiment. The ethics code of the American Psychological Association originated in 1951 as "Ethical Standards of Psychologists." This code has guided the formation of licensing laws in most American states. It has changed multiple times over the decades since its adoption, and contains both aspirational principles and binding ethical standards. The APA's Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct consists of five General Principles, which are meant to guide psychologists to higher ethical practice where a particular standard does not apply. Those principles are: A. Beneficence and Nonmaleficence - meaning the psychologists must work to benefit those they work with and "do no harm." This includes awareness of indirect benefits and harms their work might have on others due to personal, social, political, or other factors. B. Fidelity and Responsibility - an awareness of public trust in the profession and adherence to ethical standards and clarification of roles to preserve that trust. This includes managing conflicts of interest, as well as committing some portion of a psychologist's professional time to low-cost or pro bono work. C. Integrity - upholding honesty and accuracy in all psychological practices, including avoiding misrepresentations and fraud. In situations where psychologists would use deception (i.e., certain research), psychologists must consider the necessity, benefits, and harms, and mitigate any harms where possible. D. Justice - an understanding that psychology must be for everyone's benefit, and that psychologists take special care to avoid unjust practices as a result of biases or limitations of expertise. E. Respect for People's Rights and Dignity - the preservation of people's rights when working with psychologists, including confidentially, privacy, and autonomy. Psychologists should consider a multitude of factors, including a need for special safeguards for protected populations (e.g., minors, incarcerated individuals) and awareness of differences based on numerous factors, including culture, race, age, gender, and socioeconomic status. In 1989, the APA revised its policies on advertising and referral fees to negotiate the end of an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. The 1992 incarnation was the first to distinguish between "aspirational" ethical standards and "enforceable" ones. The APA code was further revised in 2010 to prevent the use of the code to justify violating human rights, which was in response to the participation of APA members in interrogations under the administration of United States President George W. Bush. Members of the public have a five-year window to file ethics complaints about APA members with the APA ethics committee; members of the APA have a three-year window. The Canadian Psychological Association used the APA code until 1986, when it developed its own code drawing from four similar principles: 1) Respect for the Dignity of Persons and Peoples, 2) Responsible Caring, 3) Integrity in Relationships, 4) Responsibility to Society. The European Federation of Psychologist's Associations, have adopted a model code using the principles of the Canadian Code, while also drawing from the APA code. Universities have ethics committees dedicated to protecting the rights (e.g., voluntary nature of participation in the research, privacy) and well-being (e.g., minimizing distress) of research participants. University ethics committees evaluate proposed research to ensure that researchers protect the rights and well-being of participants; an investigator's research project cannot be conducted unless approved by such an ethics committee. The field of psychology also identifies certain categories of people that require additional or special protection due to particular vulnerabilities, unequal power dynamics, or diminished capacity for informed consent. This list often includes, but is not limited to, children, incarcerated individuals, pregnant women, human fetuses and neonates, institutionalized persons, those with physical or mental disabilities, and the educationally or economically disadvantaged. Some of the ethical issues considered most important are the requirement to practice only within the area of competence, to maintain confidentiality with the patients, and to avoid sexual relations with them. Another important principle is informed consent, the idea that a patient or research subject must understand and freely choose a procedure they are undergoing. Some of the most common complaints against clinical psychologists include sexual misconduct and breaches in confidentiality or privacy. Psychology ethics apply to all types of human contact in a psychologist's professional capacity, including therapy, assessment, teaching, training, work with research subjects, testimony in courts and before government bodies, consulting, and statements to the public or media pertaining to matters of psychology. Research on other animals is governed by university ethics committees. Research on nonhuman animals cannot proceed without permission of the ethics committee, of the researcher's home institution. Ethical guidelines state that using non-human animals for scientific purposes is only acceptable when the harm (physical or psychological) done to animals is outweighed by the benefits of the research. Psychologists can use certain research techniques on animals that could not be used on humans. Comparative psychologist Harry Harlow drew moral condemnation for isolation experiments on rhesus macaque monkeys at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the 1970s. The aim of the research was to produce an animal model of clinical depression. Harlow also devised what he called a "rape rack", to which the female isolates were tied in normal monkey mating posture. In 1974, American literary critic Wayne C. Booth wrote that, "Harry Harlow and his colleagues go on torturing their nonhuman primates decade after decade, invariably proving what we all knew in advance—that social creatures can be destroyed by destroying their social ties." He writes that Harlow made no mention of the criticism of the morality of his work. Animal research is influential in psychology, while still being debated among academics. The testing of animals for research has led to medical breakthroughs in human medicine. Many psychologists argue animal experimentation is essential for human advancement, but must be regulated by the government to ensure ethicality. References Further reading External links |
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Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke#CITEREFLane1905] | [TOKENS: 8460] |
Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke#CITEREFRaskin1985] | [TOKENS: 8460] |
Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke#CITEREFDundes1980] | [TOKENS: 8460] |
Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke#CITEREFRaskin1992] | [TOKENS: 8460] |
Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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Contents Joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".[note 1] History in print Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.[citation needed] Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts.[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch". During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".[note 3] However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling jokes Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. Relationships The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. Electronic The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. Joke cycles A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle.[note 4] These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.[note 5] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. Classification systems As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Joke and humour research Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.[note 6] Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools. "The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny. Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.[note 7] Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text. Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words. Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible. This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research: Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them. A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few. In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies. While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes. Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build. More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment. Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. See also Notes References Further reading |
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