Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 18361840

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Journal of Pragmatics
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Book review
The Language of Comic Narratives. Humor Construction in Short Stories Isabel Ermida, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York, 2008, 261 pp., Humor Research 9, ISBN 978-3-11-020514-5 The phenomenon of humor has fascinated scholars ever since Antiquity, yet humor research has established itself as a distinct eld of scientic analysis only recently. Over the past twenty years, humor despite its notorious elusiveness as an analytical concept has claimed the attention of scientists from various disciplines. It has been tackled from a variety of multidisciplinary perspectives such as linguistics, psychology, sociology, and philosophy. Ermidas book offers a very thorough linguistic analysis of one type of humorous narrative the comic short story. The authors approach combines elements of both the currently prevailing paradigms in linguistically-oriented humour research, namely Raskin and Attardos script-based theory and Gioras cognitive approach. However, she extends the theories by enriching them with a pragmatic perspective, thus arriving at a new, semantico-pragmatic model of humorous narrative that aptly captures the structural and interpersonal nature of the genre. The monograph progresses through seven chapters from the initial accounts of humor, its linguistic mechanisms and relevant textual genres, to pragmatic issues of humorous narrative, eventually culminating in the formulation of a hypothesis for a new model of humorous narratives, convincingly tested on several short stories. The individual chapters t neatly into the whole like pieces of a puzzle and provide a well-rounded account of not only the humorous operation of the genre of the short story but also linguistic approaches to the study of humor in general. Chapter 1 starts with the various approaches to humor and other related concepts such as laughter, wit, and irony, tracing their understanding and development through the centuries. This is complemented with a classication of previous studies into three broad categories: the sociologically-oriented disparagement theories, the psychologically-focused release theories, and the cognitively-based incongruity theories. It is the last one with which Ermida aligns her study, especially as regards the operation of the principles of semantic opposition and informativeness that underlie her model. For her, humour constitutes a communicative act a dynamic phenomenon depending on the relationship between the participants. Though this communicative dimension of humorous discourse is most obvious in face-to-face interaction, it also applies to literary communication. In ction, the humorous stimulus and the humorous reaction do not occur simultaneously, but production and reception do function in interaction, while relying on shared cultural codes and discursive norms. Chapter 2 on linguistic resources in humor reviews the various manipulations and distortions that language undergoes for comic purposes on all the traditional levels of analysis: phonological, morphologal, lexical, syntactic and semantic. Jokes often depend on such sound mechanisms as the phonetic pun, rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, and assonance, while in the written mode they draw on graphological games and morphological plays, e.g. blends. Syntactic ambiguity is also crucial because it suggests to the recipient a false interpretation that eventually needs to be abandoned in favour of some other, typically incongruent interpretation (so-called garden-path effects, cf. Yamaguchi, 1998; Dynel, 2009). This is where the exploration of linguistic form inevitably turns into a semantic investigation since humorous language is typically based on verbal expressions with two or more meanings. However, it is not the mere presence of multiple meanings in a certain structure or text that matters rather, it is their mutual intersections in a given context. Thus lexical puns, for instance, have two dimensions: they are ambiguous both inherently (on account of, e.g., homonymy and polysemy), and functionally (i.e., depending on the interaction between linguistic units in context, p. 65). This understanding of meaning as functional, i.e., as a certain potential that is realized in a given context and may develop in a cumulative manner across extensive stretches of discourse, is eventually crucial for the authors explanation of how humorous narratives are constructed (in Chapter 6). The meaning shifts that have a humorous potential in texts may involve various elements, which often constitute dichotomies, such as literal/metaphorical, general/specic, whole/part, etc., or logical irregularities and even nonsense, as in the discursive evocation of possible worlds contrasting with actual reality. After dealing with the microstructural level, the book takes up the issue of humor on a higher dimension the broader discursive and textual levels. Chapter 3 focuses on jokes as the most frequently studied category of humorous texts and the one which has enjoyed the most systematic theoretical attention. This textual genre has been subject to Raskins (1985) Semantic Script Theory of Humour, its extension in Raskin and Attardos General Theory of Verbal Humour (1991), and Gioras (1991) cognitive joke model. The author reviews all these approaches in detail and delineates her position towards
0378-2166/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.11.006

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their theoretical concepts. Thus, for example, she agrees with Raskin that in humorous communication (called non-bonade by Raskin), speaker and hearer are cooperatively engaged in a different type of verbal interaction (p. 87) than in nonjoking, or bona-de, communication, emphasising that humour cannot be explained well in terms of Gricean maxims of cooperation (even though humor itself is cooperative). Despite the obvious outings of the maxims (e.g. by proffering incompatible scripts), there is a certain complicity between the producer and the recipient of humour: when they produce jokes, they expect to mislead and be misled, and their communication is thus not necessarily merely truth-oriented. As regards Gioras theory on the cognitive processing of humor, the author adopts some of the key operational concepts, such as informativeness, which concerns the hierarchical nature of textual organization. This combines with markedness: elements that are related to the discourse topic of a text are most predictable and thus likely to appear within an unfolding text; hence, they are the most unmarked. The textual organization of jokes develops in such a way that they typically end with an element that is markedly informative unexpected in the context and often conicting with the discourse topic established initially. Although Ermida operates with some of the ideas from all of the three theories mentioned above, her main criticism is that they were devised for the analysis of jokes and are hence of limited applicability to other kinds of humorous texts. Previous studies that have extended Raskins semantic approach to longer narrative humour do not, she argues, offer a really systematic framework for an in-depth analysis, although some of them, such as Chopickis (1987) work on Polish short stories, deal with the idea of macro-scripts and script overlap that Ermida draws on in her model. She also suggests that a linear analysis (cf. Attardo, 2001) is not sufcient to describe the humorous nature of narrative texts. Instead, she proposes a supra-sequential approach, which has the advantage that it does not reduce the text to a succession of autonomous jokelike structures (p. 111) that are punctuated with jab lines and culminate in the nal punch line, but does justice to the hierarchical organization of the text. That is plausible: a comic short story is certainly not a succession of jokes. Yet, the humor is constructed incrementally, but in a much more complex way, namely as a sequence of supra-script oppositions that preside over the whole text. As regards jokes, it might be interesting to see if such autonomous joke-like structures play any role within the overall structure of the comic narrative, apart from, say, the characterisation of a certain character (e.g., as having a sense of humor). The complexity of narrative humor in terms of its structural principles is the subject of Chapter 4, which deals with such macrostructures as coherence and cohesion, and narrative units and their organization. After comparing various narrative models, Ermida distances herself from inductive approaches which analyze texts in linear terms, tracing the way the story evolves. Instead, she opts for the vertical conguration of texts (based on the deductive approach). In this view, the textual organization departs from an established whole (a theme or a topic) to the entities that, on different hierarchical levels, instantiate it (p. 124). The text is then seen not sequentially but as formed by overlapping organizational levels, with an important role for the communicative dimension, i.e., the interactive process of text production and reception. This notion of humorous narrative as an interactive phenomenon underlies Chapter 5, which introduces the perspective of pragmatics, indicating Ermidas shift from the structuralist paradigm to a discursive one. First, the humorous short story as a narrative and a literary genre is located with respect to other modes of discourse, especially conversation. Though the narrative story is written, it is by no means a static product. The understanding of the written text as a dynamic interactive process involving several dimensions of utterances and participants has been well documented by a range of studies both in literary theory and linguistics that deal with such concepts as voice, persona, narrator/reader types, etc. A written text may be ostensibly monologic, yet it has an underlying dialogic nature. Another of Bakhtins ideas is the notion of carnival (cf. Bakhtin, 1981), which Ermida sees in humor as a display of an inverted world, which disobeys the linguistic and pragmatic rules that usually preside over communication (p. 140). Norms and transgressions are involved whenever there is an instance of breaking the communicative contract: illocutionary ambiguity, humorous (in)felicities, speech-act transgressions, and infringements of conversational maxims, all of which are discussed by the author in a very detailed manner and illustrated with ample examples. As regards Grices maxims, for instance, she concludes that although real data show that all the maxims are outed in comic narratives, this neither discounts the operation of the Cooperative Principle per se nor demands the formulation of any special set of cooperative principles for the non-bona-de communication mode of joke telling (as does Raskin, 1985), since the outings and violations can indeed be explained within the Gricean framework as a somewhat specic kind of cooperation, justied by the context of interaction in which the humorous text is located. It is argued that the narrator is cooperative because he or she relies on implicatures (which are inherently cooperative): there exists a subtle compromise between the need to, on the one hand, deceive the recipient and, on the other, provide him/her with the key to deciphering the puzzle, which takes the form of implicatures (p. 168). Clearly, humor is constructed on a cooperative basis, with the interlocutors exploiting rather than violating conversational maxims. The role of implicature is often to uphold the operation of the Cooperative Principle where the latter might be ostensibly jeopardized. From Sperber and Wilsons (1986) relevance perspective, implicature and indirectness also stimulate the inferential processes, thereby supplying additional contextual effects. In the case of a humorous utterance, indirectness may actually turn out to be optimally relevant it may be a way of saying more with fewer words because the contextual effects become greater (cf. also Yus, 2003, 2008). As Ermida species, resorting to implicature allows two signication plans to be established the literal one and the implicit one in the intersection of which resides an opposition and consequent comic incongruity (p. 161). All this raises an interesting question: how well does the unsaid travel, i.e., how successfully is it received by the audience, especially since so much humor depends on intertextuality in the form of allusion to and parody of other, pre-existing texts

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and discourses? First of all, humor relies on a tacit agreement between the producer and the recipient: it can operate only if, as Ermida argues, readers of comic stories voluntarily and conventionally join in the humorous game. The recipient identies the senders humorous intentions and, deliberately, accepts them and the discursive circle is closed. . . [the recipient is then] amused along with the sender, instead of being a mere victim, or indeed the very butt of the joke (p. 151). This equalizes their power, for in the absence of this approval, the authors discourse becomes monological and void, and humor, incomprehended, aborts (p. 151). Second, intertextual references presuppose shared knowledge in order to be identied and eventually interpreted (and possibly appreciated). If allusions go undetected, they are relegated into the realm of the unsaid and un-read (p. 164), thereby existing as a humorous potential that remains, on a given occasion, unrealized. The two requirements on the part of the recipient then seem to be complicity in the act and the ability to unravel the crux of the matter. Having thus outlined her conception of humor and the comic short story at the intersection of narratology, literary criticism, discourse analysis and pragmatics, the author then proceeds with her semantico-pragmatic analytical model in Chapter 6. The hypothesis which she proposes for analyzing humorous narrative texts is based on the observance of the following ve principles: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Principle Principle Principle Principle Principle of of of of of Opposition Hierarchy Recurrence Informativeness Cooperation

According to the Principle of Opposition, each script activates an opposite script (a shadow script) in the text. The Principle of Hierarchy is connected with Ermidas vertical understanding of the genre: the scripts are organized on hierarchically different semantic levels, with supra-scripts presiding over long stretches of the textual line, or even its totality (p. 172). By contrast, the lower-level scripts (infra-scripts) represent sequentially limited information. The Principle of Recurrence refers to the instantiation of the individual scripts along the textual axis: infra-scripts recurrently evoke (activate) the supra-scripts, thereby leading the recipient to make predictions and to create interpretative expectations (p. 172). The Principle of Informativeness (cf. Gioras notion of marked informativeness) is applied at the end of the story, where a non-gradual, hence unexpected, supra-script inversion occurs, whereby the most informative that is, most improbable and marked supra-script of each opposition suddenly gains the upper hand, thus surprisingly breaking the reading expectations built up till then (p. 172). Finally, the Principle of Cooperation provides that while the sender raises the recipients expectations only to contradict them at the nal stage of the story, he or she does so with a cooperative intention of comicality (p. 173). The hierarchical organization of a narrative text then posits the existence of a supra-script which is locally manifested by means of various kinds of semantic input on a lower level. What is crucial in this model is that the local contrasts occurring within the story point to a broader, global script that exists in opposition to its shadow script. The recurrence of the antithetical pattern both on the level of the super-script opposed to its shadow script and on the level of the infra-scripts (sub-scripts) is, in Ermidas view, the fundamental key to constructing narrative humor (p. 179). On the basis of the supra-structural nuclei, the reader is able to make predictions about the progression of the narrative. However, the scriptswitch at the end of the story, thanks to which the shadow script emerges as dominant, contradicts the readers expectations and inverts the interpretative direction in an abrupt and surprising way. The surprise element, so typical of comic narrative, carries a high degree of informativeness: the predictability pattern that is constructed throughout the story is broken and the reader is obliged to consider the previously unlikely paradigmatic choices that are associated with the shadow script. In effect, the reader will then retrospectively reevaluate the individual infra-script oppositions from the perspective of the opposing supra-script, i.e., the shadow script, whereby the desired comic effects occur. It is acknowledged that the identication of scripts and their oppositions is, inevitably, somewhat subjective, yet Ermida argues that the hierarchical organization is in fact helpful in this respect. Script identication is possible on the basis of lexicality and inference (cf. lexical scripts and inferential scripts, Attardo, 2001), to which Ermida adds functionality, which operates on the supra-structural level. Thanks to the local context and the textual structure of humorous narrative, infrascripts serve as functional cues of the supra-script. The situation is then more complex than when identifying scripts merely on the basis of lexical cues (as in the case of lexical scripts) and inferencing/background knowledge (as in the case of inferential and extratextual scripts, the latter triggered by, for instance, allusion). The functionality of a supra-script thus ties together highly diverse semantic frames (i.e., infra-scripts) which function as instantiations of the supra-script. Thus, an analysis of a comic short story will reveal that it is based on two supra-structural scripts that preside over the whole text, for instance PERFECTION vs. IMPERFECTION, as in Ermidas analysis of The Lunatics Tale by Woody Allen. This supra-script opposition is then instantiated by numerous infra-script contrasts, such as BEAUTY vs. UGLINESS, INTELLIGENCE vs. STUPIDITY, SENSE OF HUMOR vs. LACK OF SENSE OF HUMOR, GOOD TASTE vs. BAD TASTE, SENSUALITY vs. FRIDIGITY, YOUTH vs. MATURITY, etc. (p. 191). These are normally unrelated but when viewed from the supra-structural, i.e., vertical perspective, they become functionally connected because they articulate one and the same macrostructural opposition. Horizontally, i.e., in their syntagmatic succession, they recurrently express (cf. Principle of Recurrence) the supra-script opposition (cf. Principle of Hierarchy; Principle of Opposition), leading up to the point when the surprising

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script-switch occurs and the shadow script gains the upper hand (cf. Principle of Informativeness). Throughout the process, interaction between the writer and the reader is crucial (cf. Principle of Cooperation), since the writer builds a codied and incomplete puzzle, whereas the reader supplies the missing pieces (p. 199). Through allusion, presupposition and implicature, the missing and the unsaid information is conveyed, requiring extra processing effort on the part of the reader. Part of the fun, of course, consists in the fact that the writer constructs his or her text by progressing along a plausible suprascript that is instantiated and reactivated by seemingly straightforward infra-scripts; yet he or she builds up towards an eventual script-switch where the supra-script collapses to the advantage of a shadow supra-script. This cat-and-mouse game is, as Ermida points out, intentional and in fact fundamental for the construction of the humorous narrative: [t]he clues, the obstacles and the traps laid out by the author turn out to be, not an end, but a means a strategy of making the reader succeed in solving the text and enjoying its reward: amusement (p. 205). As mentioned above, Ermida, drawing heavily on pragmatics, extends the most inuential linguistic theories of humor, adopting and adapting Raskins principle of script opposition (1985) and Gioras notion of marked informativeness (1991) in a novel way to humorous non-joke texts. She offers a unique model in which the micro-elements are interpreted at several narrative levels as contributing to a supra-script. She shows on a number of other examples (in Chapter 7) that the humorous narrative is certainly not just a sequence of jokes. In this literary genre, instead, all the narrated elements are masterfully orchestrated by the author into a complex, multi-faceted whole. They are connected to the supra-script (which they reactivate throughout the text) and, following the script-switch at the end, turn out to be linked to a less likely and locally unpredictable shadow script. In this way, the story culminates in a surprising and humorous ending. Despite the large diversity of short humorous texts, the author shows that comic literary narrative can indeed be described in similarly universal structural terms as jokes. Yet, Ermida cautions that her model is not a universal approach to humorous narrative, pointing out that it applies to the comic story and certainly not to other literary genres in which humor occurs: The occurrence of humor in other literary genres as is the paradoxical case of tragedy functions (if one were to use a gastronomic metaphor) as a mere condiment, whereas in narrative comedies it amounts to the main course (p. 172). At the same time, she notes that the mechanism of the nal, unexpected script-switch (governed by the Principle of Informativeness) also occurs in some non-humorous texts, such as detective stories. Yet, such genres do not correspond to the structural framework offered by Ermida, e.g. they do not apply the principle of recurrence and are not built on the dichotomous basis of lexico-semantic oppositions (p. 233). That seems to imply that if some of the principles suggested in this model are absent from a given literary text, one may be faced with a different genre. Or, taken from the opposite perspective, other genres may rely on similar semantico-pragmatic principles and be differentiated by the absence of one or more of these principles. Necessarily, one is led to ask whether the model or some of its components could be extended to describe other genres, although the answer to that question is, truly, beyond the scope of the book. Nevertheless, it seems that the study opens up a promising area for further cross-genre or even cross-cultural research. This relates to some other considerations. For instance: how universal, with respect to comic narratives in short stories, are Ermidas ndings? She describes her semantico-pragmatic approach as a model of analysis that reveals the underlying structural and conceptual patterning on the basis of which such texts are constructed. She argues that the genre of the comic short story (hard and elusive as it may be to dene) is actually constituted by this pattern; in its absence, the result is an essentially non-humorous text (e.g., a non-humorous story with a comic ending). In her account, the attribute comic thus appears to be equated with the existence of the pattern, as a result of which a literary text is made comic as a whole. The universality claim is perhaps the most daring achievement of the book, because it aims to redene the genre in highly specic, semantico-pragmatic terms. Still, this raises a number of questions. Does the pattern identied account ideally for all such comic narratives, thus being their dening characteristic, or is it seen as some kind of structural/semantic ideal towards which the genre aspires? Are there perhaps some comic short stories that follow different principles or work towards achieving their effects in different ways (e.g., where readers are amused by the ignorance of a character, not necessarily as a result of a nal switch of scripts, i.e., the Principle of Informativeness) or should such stories be classied as different genres? What could the absence of any of the principles lead to: a different genre (e.g., a detective story, as mentioned by the author), an ill-formed instance of a comic short story that may fall at (due, for instance, to the writers inexperience or ignorance of the pattern, e.g., insufcient application of the Principle of Recurrence), or, say, a foregrounding technique by which a given writer may assert his or her individual style? And what, after all, is the role of the author as regards the creation of the humorous narrative? To what extent are the authors professional writers aware of the underlying structure of their comic short stories? Do they consciously construct their texts around contrastive scripts that exist on several hierarchical levels or do they, perhaps unconsciously and intuitively, follow and approximate to a culturally pre-established pattern? Obviously, it is impossible to know what goes on in the authors minds when they are writing; but, after all, creative writing is as much an art as a craft. It is through the laborious technical process of writing, rewriting, editing, adding, etc., that a text reaches a nal stage with which the author is satised and which, in their view, encapsulates most effectively the humorous potential of the story. Could the model proposed by Ermida also be used for assessing the well-formedness of a given comic short story and, by extension, even the creative mastery or professional skill of individual authors? The fact that Ermidas book inspires questions such as these, however, is not its shortcoming: it must be conceded that the book aspires to a different goal. All in all, Ermidas interdisciplinary, yet linguistically-oriented book is a welcome contribution to the study of humour. Thanks to the extensive research, any scholar contemplating the study of the interface between humor and language will

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nd it useful since it provides a wealth of accessible and precise information presented in a highly systematic and logical way. Ermidas gift for minute analysis makes the book a particularly enjoyable read, especially in combination with the wellchosen material for illustration. Furthermore, the semantico-pragmatic model of analysis that she offers for the short comic narrative is theoretically sound and likely to become indispensable to any further research in the area, though its universal validity may need to be tested on a larger set of texts of the relevant genre. To conclude by continuing the food metaphor which Ermida uses several times in her text the book is indeed a satisfying meal that will be enjoyed in all of its courses from the hors doeuvre to the dessert. But unlike a meal, however, readers will be able to appreciate Ermidas savoury morsels again and again. References
Attardo, Salvatore, 2001. Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York. Bakhtin, Michail M., 1981. In: Holquist, Michael (Ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of Texas Press, Austin/London. Chopicki, Wadysaw, 1987. An Application of the Script Theory of Semantics to the Analysis of Selected Polish Humorous Short Stories. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Purdue University. Dynel, Marta, 2009. Humorous Garden-Paths. A Pragmatic-Cognitive Study. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne. Giora, Rachel, 1991. On the cognitive aspects of the joke. Journal of Pragmatics 16, 465485. Raskin, Victor, 1985. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. D. Reidel, Dordrecht. Raskin, Victor, Attardo, Salvatore, 1991. Script theory revis(it)ed: joke similarity and joke representation model. Humor 4 (34), 293347. Sperber, Dan, Wilson, Deidre, 1986. Relevance. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Yamaguchi, Haruhiko, 1998. How to pull strings with words. Deceptive violations in the garden-path joke. Journal of Pragmatics 12, 323337. Yus, Francisco, 2003. Humor and the search for relevance. Journal of Pragmatics 35 (9), 12951331. Yus, Francisco, 2008. A relevance-theoretic classication of jokes. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 4 (1), 131157. Jan Chovanec is an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. His research interests include the interactive nature of discourse in media contexts, the representation of social actors, face and politeness in interpersonal interactions, and word play. He has recently focused on dialogism and humour in the discourse of live text commentary. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Brno Studies in English.

Jan Chovanec Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic E-mail address: chovanec@phil.muni.cz Available online 17 December 2010