Funny Fiction; or, Jokes and Their Relation to the Humorous Novel

Funny Fiction; or, Jokes and Their Relationto the Humorous Novel

Cristina Larkin GaliñanesEnglish, French, and German Philology, Vigo (Spain)

Abstract This article aims to put forward some ideas as to the narrative characteris-

tics of funny novels. Since the chief common denominator of this kind of work is the

goal to make the reader laugh, one would suppose that these works have a lot in com-

mon with other forms of verbal humor, such as jokes. Here I look into incongruity-

resolution theories of humor and certain linguistically based accounts of joking as

well as the insights provided by Sperber and Wilson’s theory of relevance into the

type of pragmatic processing attendant on the appreciation of humor. Jokes appear

to be characterized by an increased demand in processing effort for the attainment

of maximum contextual effects, but this increase is limited to the resolution of incon-

gruities typical of this sort of utterance. Also, social-behavioral theories of humor

relate the effect of jokes to the establishment of a climate of normative sympathy

between teller and receiver. Humorous novels, far longer and more complex than

jokes, largely base the process of incongruity-resolution on an interplay of, on the one

hand, text-internal coherence established by the persistent use of strong implicature

in the creation of character and, on the other, text-external incongruity established

by the narrator’s appeal to the reader’s encyclopedic knowledge. Although it is prob-

ably true of most novels, it seems particularly important for the humorous effect of

‘‘funny’’ novels that their discourse should be based on moral, social, cultural, aes-

thetic, and even generic assumptions shared with the reader: these allow the latter

either to see the narrator as ‘‘reliable’’ and to develop a feeling of rapport with him

or her or to easily assume the existence of an implied author who manipulates the

This article is a greatly extended and more elaborated version of an earlier paper (Larkin

Galiñanes 2000).The author wishes to thank the anonymous referees of Poetics Today for theirkind comments and suggestions.

Poetics Today 26:1 (Spring 2005). Copyright © 2005 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and

Semiotics.

Poetics Today

Published by Duke University Press

80 Poetics Today 26:1

narrator for his or her own purposes. The use of strong implicature, which charac-

terizes these works and seems necessary for the sustained creation of humor, explains

the air of inevitability that permeates their plots and, finally, would also seem to

explain the fact that they are intuitively and almost invariably considered low-class

literature. For ‘‘good’’ literature, according to Relevance Theory, is characterized by

a complexity and multiplicity of contextual effects produced fundamentally by way

of weak implicature.

In this article I put forward some ideas about the narrative characteristics

of more or less contemporary humorous novels. The objects of my study,

therefore, are extended narrative texts whose principal perlocutionary goal

is ‘‘the recognition on the part of [their] intended audience’’ of the writer’s

‘‘intention . . . to have the said text be perceived as funny’’ (Attardo 2001:

33 n. 30). In this type of humorous text, ‘‘the central narrative complica-

tion the fabula revolves around is itself humorous’’ (ibid.: 97). As such, these

texts are distinct fromother narratives (for example, some of Dickens’s early

novels) in which, as Salvatore Attardo (ibid.: 98) writes, the humor is, so

to speak, superimposed on an essentially serious fabula. I shall be dealing,

then, with macro-narratives, such as Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim andOne FatEnglishman, William Boyd’s A Good Man in Africa and Stars and Bars, DavidLodge’s Small World and Changing Places, and the novels of Tom Sharpe. A

close perusal of such texts would seem to reveal certain common character-

istics that would justify a treatment of this type of literature as a subgenre

of the novel, with its own specific communicative strategies and structure

dictated by its perlocutionary aims. Since the chief distinguishing feature

of these works is their aim to make the reader laugh, one could reasonably

suppose that they will have much in common with other types of verbal

humor, such as jokes, many of which constitute short and relatively simple

narratives.1

In order to substantiate my intuitions and suppositions, I have referred to

incongruity-resolution and linguistically based accounts of joking. These,

I have found, do indeed throw a revealing light on some of the commu-

nicative conventions which seem to mark the texts I have studied, showing

that their typical narrative structure is heavily conditioned by the sort of

pragmatic processing attendant on the appreciation of humor in jokes.This

factor in itself, I contend, accounts for the exclusion of this sort of work from

1. Regarding the issue of whether all verbal jokes are, in fact, narratives or not, Attardo andChabanne (1992) and Attardo (2001) tend to the conclusion that they are. Attardo (2001: 23)

writes that ‘‘any joke has to be cast in some form of narrative organization, either as a simple

narrative, as a dialogue (question and answer), as a (pseudo-)riddle, as an aside in conversa-

tion, etc.’’ However, he admits that to date there does not exist much research on this subject.

Poetics Today


Larkin Galinanes • Funny Fiction; or, Jokes and the Humorous Novel 81

the category of ‘‘good’’ literature, irrespective of how successful any indi-

vidual exponent may be in fulfilling its purpose: to make the reader laugh.

Incongruity-Resolution and the Search for Relevance in Humor

As far back as Plato and Aristotle, it seems to have been a point of con-

sensus for theorists and students of humor that incongruity is an element

basic to this phenomenon. But more recent thinkers have conceptualized

humor appreciation as a two-stage process involving the discovery of an

incongruity followed by the resolution of that incongruity via the applica-

tion of a different cognitive rule. Thomas Shultz (1976: 13), for example,

defines incongruity as ‘‘a conflict between what is expected and what actu-

ally occurs in jokes,’’ while resolution is ‘‘a second, more subtle aspect of

jokes which renders incongruity meaningful or appropriate by resolving

or explaining it.’’ And Arthur Koestler (1989 [1964]: 35), coining the term

bisociation, explains that the pattern underlying funny stories is ‘‘the perceiv-ing of a situation or an idea, L, in two self-consistent but habitually incom-

patible frames of reference, M1 and M2. The event, L, in which the two

intersect, is made to vibrate simultaneously on two different wavelengths,

as it were.While this unusual situation lasts, L is not merely linked to one

associative context, but bisociated with two.’’Koestler’s description, which has been a common source of inspira-

tion for semiotic theories of humor, is speculative and psychological in

character. Victor Raskin (1985) elaborates on it in an attempt to account

for the capacity of an idealized speaker/hearer, when presented with a

joke, to recognize (and, ideally, appreciate) its perlocutionary aim (i.e., to

account for the individuals’ humor competence, along the lines of Chom-

sky 1965: 3). Raskin offers a linguistically based theory centered on the

notion of ‘‘scripts.’’ This construct, incorporated into linguistics from the

field of Artificial Intelligence by Charles Fillmore (1975, 1985) and Wallace

Chafe (1977), enables Raskin to redefine Koestler’s rather vague concepts

of ‘‘frame of reference’’ and ‘‘associative context’’ and to give a more exact

description of how his ‘‘vibrations’’ are actually created. In his Semantic

Script Theory of Humor, Raskin (1985: 81) defines the script as follows:

The script is a large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word or

evoked by it.The script is a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker

and it represents the native speaker’s knowledge of a small part of the world.

Every speaker has internalized rather a large repertoire of scripts of ‘‘common

sense’’ which represent his/her knowledge of certain routines, standard proce-

dures, basic situations, etc.

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With the above as a basis, Raskin (ibid.: 47) sets out ‘‘to account for the

fact that some texts are funny while some others are not, and to do it in

terms of certain linguistic properties of the text’’ and also to ‘‘determine and

formulate the necessary and sufficient linguistic conditions for the text to

be funny.’’ To these ends, he proposes his Main Hypothesis for a semantic

theory of humor, which he (ibid.: 99) summarizes very succintly:

A text can be characterized as a single-joke-carrying text if both of the following

conditions are satisfied:

i. The text is compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts.

ii. The two scripts with which the text is compatible are opposite.

The two scripts for the text may, according to Raskin, overlap completely

or, much more frequently, only partially. Thus the semantic structure of a

joke and the process followed by the listener who appreciates the humor in

it may be described in the following way: the hearer or reader receives the

text and, while listening to or reading it, selects automatically the ‘‘usual,’’

most frequent, or ‘‘unmarked’’ scripts for each of its elements, which com-

bine with each other coherently, in the normal way of ‘‘bona fide’’ com-

munication. However, there comes a point, usually at or just before the

end, where a newly introduced element is incompatible with all, or a great

part, of the script that has gone before. This point, which Raskin calls the

‘‘script-switch trigger’’ and which the layperson knows as the punch line of

the joke, causes the receiver to go back over the preceding parts, accommo-

dating scripts to this new reading. Thus the second category of ‘‘marked’’

(not usually immediately accessed but also possible) scripts is introduced

so that a new, different interpretation is now cast on all or part of the text.

This new interpretation usually involves a non-actual, abnormal, or even

impossible state of affairs: the role of the trigger is not only to suggest this

new reading, but also to make it more plausible and less non-actual, abnor-

mal, or impossible. At this point in the proceedings, it is important that

the receiver of the joke appreciate that he or she is dealing with a ‘‘non–

bona fide’’ mode of communication—namely, joking—if the joke is to be

enjoyed. For, as Raskin (ibid.: 115) says:

In ‘‘bona-fide’’ communication as well, ambiguity is quite frequent. . . . There,

however, the process of disambiguation should, and normally does, take place

immediately and, ideally, only one meaning of the utterance is intended by the

speaker and received by the hearer. In many, if not most jokes, however, ambi-

guity is deliberate and the intention of the speaker includes two interpretations

which he wants the hearer to perceive. If both the speaker and the hearer are in

the samemode of communication, the hearer knows the ‘‘rules of the game’’ and

is not only ready to perceive the second interpretation along with the first one

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but actually is willing to look for it. This cooperation . . . makes it possible for

a somewhat forced and often over-extended second interpretation to pass and

thus to become more real.

Raskin’s description of the mental processes followed in ‘‘getting’’ a joke

carries a conviction which has led to the application and extension of his

hypotheses in a range of analyses of jokes and other types of humorous

texts (Chlopicki 1997, 2000;Kolek 1985, 1989;Holcomb 1992; Attardo 1996,

1998, 2000, 2001). And this power of conviction seems reinforced by the par-

allel intuitions and findings of Relevance Theory within the field of Prag-

matics. Relevance Theory asserts that a communicative act succeeds not

only by virtue of the hearer’s recognition and understanding of the lin-

guistic meaning of the speaker’s utterance but also due to an automatically

triggered inferencing process. This process is based on (a) the context as

provided at any given point in any conversation by the set of propositions

afforded by preceding utterances and (b) the context provided by sets of

propositions which the hearer has previously internalized as part of his or

her encyclopedic knowledge of the world. Thus, if we accept that ‘‘every

act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own

relevance’’ (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 158), that is to say that the hearer

always presupposes that a speakerwill say something relevant to the conver-

sation in course and therefore launches into a process of deduction in which

he or she endeavors to make the propositional set of entailments included

in the speaker’s utterance interact with the sets of propositions available

in (a) and (b) above, thus deriving a number of implicatures which serve

either to reinforce or contradict (a) and/or (b), then we find that we have

a description of the communicative process parallel in essence to that of

the perception and resolution of incongruities described above as basic to

the appreciation of humor. The difference between a normal communica-

tive act and a humorous one appears to lie in the fact that in the former

any existing elements of ambiguity or incongruity would ideally tend to be

eliminated by the hearer’s deductive process in conjunction with the con-

text, whereas in humor they are deliberately heightened by the speaker.

In humor, the hearer either discards what is being said as irrelevant non-

sense or assimilates the ambiguity or incongruity and processes it in the

way described byRaskin, revising and accommodating the implicatures ini-

tially derived and resolving the incongruity. So there seems to be a striking

degree of coincidence between Raskin’s theory of humor and Dan Sperber

and Deirdre Wilson’s theory of relevance, a similarity that has also been

pointed out byMaria Jodlowiec (1991), CarmenCurcó (1995), and Francisco

Yus Ramos (1997).

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The striking parallelism between the incongruity-resolution theory of

humor and the theory of relevance is further heightened by their common

awareness of the mental effort involved in the process of reception. Humor,

as we have seen, depends on the presence of a ‘‘script-switch trigger’’ which

presents incongruity and involves the receiver in an effort to resolve the

incongruity or, to use Sperber andWilson’s terms, in a search for relevance.

The manner in which this resolution of incongruity takes place is consid-

ered by many writers (including Raskin) to be of importance in the appre-

ciation of humor. Among the various factors taken into account, the first

is the degree of the incongruity. Humor may fail because the element of

incongruity is too small or too familiar to us from similar jokes (Morreall

1983: 50; Raskin 1985: 33). Closely related is the complexity of the problem-

solving activity involved, which must be enough to present a challenge to

the receiver while at the same time not so great as to demand elaborate

mental activity (McGhee 1977: 29;Monro 1951: 65; Rothbart and Pien 1977:

39; Shultz 1976: 12–13; Suls 1977: 41; Morreall 1983: 50). The amount of

time that it takes the hearer to solve the problem also is important. Jerry

Suls (1972: 93) says that the pleasure derived from ‘‘getting’’ a joke comes

in large measure from a feeling of success which ‘‘may be associated with

the time spent on the problem irrespective of the number of operations

required for the solution.Reasoning from common sense, wemight suppose

that the faster we solve the problem, the more likely we are to be pleased

with ourselves.’’ The point originally made by Freud (1991 [1905]: 202) is

still held to be valid: ‘‘A joke loses its effect of laughter . . . as soon as he

[the receiver] is required to make an expenditure on intellectual work in

connection with it. The allusions made in a joke must be obvious and the

omissions easy to fill; an awakening of conscious intellectual interest usually

makes the effect of the joke impossible.’’ In fact, the notions of ‘‘expenditure

on intellectual work’’ or of the mental activity necessary for the resolution

of incongruity according to humor theorists are, it seems to me, essentially

parallel to Sperber and Wilson’s ‘‘processing effort,’’ and both would seem

to be intimately connected to the time taken by the process.

Sperber and Wilson have been criticized for the apparent inconsistency

in their account of ‘‘processing effort,’’ or the way in which relevance is

computed:

At one point they speak as though relevance has a predetermined value, and

that contexts will be expanded until this value is satisfied. At another point they

regard relevance as a comparative measure, so that the best of the competing

interpretations are selected. Elsewhere they speak as though processing costs will

have a threshold value, so that the first available contextual assumption which

yields any effect will be automatically selected. (Levinson 1989: 463)

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Andrew Goatley (1994), in an article on register, Relevance Theory, and

metaphor, refers to this criticism and suggests that the degree of process-

ing effort required on the part of the receiver in the search for relevance

is essentially genre-dependent. Accordingly, the third way of computing

relevance outlined above would seem to be adequate when the time avail-

able for processing is relatively short (e.g., in conversation); the second way

could be applied to literary works, since ‘‘with literary interpretations one is

more often faced with conflicting possibilities for the most relevant contex-

tual assumptions, none of which can be categorically claimed as the most

relevant, since the contextual effects produced by literary texts are typi-

cally both multiple and weak’’ (Goatley 1994: 150); and the first way would

be applicable to crossword puzzles and jokes. Although it is difficult to see

what there may be in common between these two last ‘‘genres,’’ Goatley

(ibid.) goes on to say that ‘‘with a crossword puzzle one is generally rea-

sonably certain when one has solved the clue correctly; one simply has to

go on expanding or selecting different contexts until the answer ‘clicks.’ ’’ A

little later Goatley adds that ‘‘certain genres, which could be labelled collec-

tively ‘passtimes,’ including jokes and riddles, are deliberately designed to

increase processing effort. Consideration of the ways in which such genres

exploit the principle of relevance leads us to the conclusion that some of the

contextual assumptionswhich are accessed, andwhich are ultimately irrele-

vant in terms of the solution, are nevertheless relevant in their distractive

and puzzling function’’ (ibid.).

I disagree with Goatley when he throws together crossword puzzles,

riddles, and jokes into a single bag which he labels ‘‘passtimes.’’ As may be

seen from the discussion of jokes above, it really cannot be said that the con-

textual assumptions accessed in them are irrelevant to a solution, since it is

precisely these contextual assumptions that provide the parallel but oppo-

site scripts necessary for incongruity and resolution. Nor can it be argued

that they have a ‘‘distractive or puzzling function’’ in the way theymight in a

riddle or a crossword puzzle (though some riddles play on incongruity and

resolution in a way similar to jokes). However, it is true that jokes are delib-

erately designed to increase processing effort and, furthermore, that this

effort is limited to hitting on the ‘‘right’’ solution quickly and efficiently.This

is what triggers laughter and the satisfying effects related to it; everyone has

experienced the frustrating effects of inefficient or unsuccessful processing

involved in not ‘‘getting’’ a joke or of having to have one explained. Jokes

are, in fact, a very good example of the first way of computing relevance

outlined by Levinson in the quotation above.

All that I have said so far about jokes refers to what is commonly under-

stood as such, that is, brief acts of verbal communication which involve

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a relatively simple narrative structure and have the perlocutionary aim

of making the receiver laugh. My question here is, to what extent can it

be applied to the far more complex and elaborate structure of humorous

novels? If, as Raskin says, joke-carrying texts are characterized by their

compatibility with different and opposite scripts, and if this element of dif-

ference and oppositeness must be both appreciated and resolved by the

receiver in a quick and efficientmanner in the search for relevance, how can

all thismaterialize in a funny novel, with all the complexities of its genre and

its greatly extended length? After all, a humorous novel is not an anthology

of jokes, and, as a novel, it surely must aspire to literary effects. Does the

narrative structure characteristic of jokes have anything to do with that of

humorous novels? One would tend to think it must, yet, as Marie-Laure

Ryan (1981: 524) points out:

One of the consequences of the layered structure of fictional communication

is that the real speaker and the substitute speaker [the narrator] accomplish

different communicative acts, are bound by different verbal contracts to their

addressee, and bear different relationships to the narrative discourse.The genre

of the real communicative contract is usually something like novel, short story,

joke, tall tale; that is, a genre whose pragmatic purpose is to entertain the reader

with an invented tale. This tale concerns what is, from the point of view of nar-

rator and reader, an alternate possible world, but on the level of the embedded

contract, speaker and hearer communicate about what is for them the real world.

Every narrative text whose narrator is not hallucinating presupposes a level

where a speaker tells a story as a true fact and not as invention. This makes it

possible for the embedded contract to belong to one of the genres of natural com-

munication. . . . But if fiction can embed discourse belonging to any genre, the

fictional realization of a genre will always differ to some extent from its natu-

ral realization. . . . The demands of the embedding contract interfere with the

demands of the embedded contract and require some sort of compromise.

I shall attempt to demonstrate that, in the case of the funny or humorous

novel, the compromise mentioned by Ryan affects both what she terms the

embedding and the embedded genres. If the nature of the ‘‘real commu-

nicative contract’’ is not only that of a novel but also that of a funny novel,

one of whose outstanding pragmatic purposes is to make the reader laugh,

then the novelistic structure must logically be affected by the structure of

jokes and verbal humor in general.

Stereotypes, Caricature, and the Use of Strong Implicature

It is widely accepted that jokes make extensive use of stereotypes, which,

it has been pointed out, are extremely fertile for humor and its apprecia-

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tion: within any specific culture, they constitute a shared set of assumptions

that are readily available with aminimal expenditure of mental effort (Apte

1985: 113). In terms of Relevance Theory, they render a maximum contex-

tual effect with a minimum processing effort. Since humor appreciation

decreases when it depends on a concept that cannot be understood without

an effort or when critical examination is required, speed of processing being

essential for the success of a joke, it seems evident that such ready-made

conceptualizations are of the utmost utility.

Thus, when someone tells a joke which begins with ‘‘There was an

Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman,’’ this introduction not only

announces a joke, and hence produces humorous expectations, but it also

immediately evokes the corresponding stereotypes from the listener’s ency-

clopedic knowledge.The humor in such jokes lies in the tension between, on

the one hand, the fact that the receiver thinks immediately of certain char-

acteristics attached to his or her stereotyped images and therefore forms

specific expectations and, on the other hand, the fact that the outcome of

the situation thus introduced is incongruous in view of the listener’s general

sense of appropriateness and, in the best jokes, surprising even in view of his

or her expectations but is nevertheless in some way coherent with the latter.

The pleasure of the receiver would seem to derive not only from surprise

and incongruity, but also from the satisfaction of having his or her expecta-

tions confirmed and, in the worst of cases, his or her prejudices reaffirmed.

For example, there’s the one about the Scotsman who is staggering home

after a night out at the pub with a half-empty bottle of whiskey in his coat

pocket. He sways around, trips over his feet and suddenly falls down. As

he is lying on the ground, he feels himself to see if anything is broken and

finds that his leg is covered with a warmish liquid. ‘‘Please God,’’ he says,

‘‘Let it be blood!’’ This tale produces a variety of contextual connections

to the cognitive schemata of the receiver, who uses his or her encyclopedic

knowledge to form suppositions like the following:

a) The speaker is about to tell a joke (‘‘There’s the one about . . .’’).

b) The joke is about a Scotsman; the stereotyped image of the Scots is

that they are tightfisted.

c) This one has been in a pub and he staggers; therefore he is drunk.

d) When one falls over, one is likely to hurt oneself, which gives cause

for concern.

e) Hurting oneself may well involve loss of blood, which is undesirable.

But the Scotsman says ‘‘Please let it be blood,’’ which is incongruous for the

listener’s sense of appropriateness in view of the context created. However,

the listener’s automatic search for relevance takes him or her straight back

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to the stereotype of the Scotsman as initially suggested by the mention of

his name in the joking context, thus resolving the incongruity—the Scots-

man would prefer to bleed rather than lose the half-bottle of whiskey—and

deriving pleasure not only from so doing but also from having the stereo-

type confirmed. Two ‘‘frames of reference’’ or ‘‘scripts’’ are brought into

play: (a) that suggested by the stereotyped image of the Scotsman (mean-

ness) and (b) that supplied by the receiver’s encyclopedic (normal, every-

day, text-external) knowledge of what may happen when one falls over.

The receiver’s temporary puzzlement and sense of incongruity on hearing

the Scotsman’s words is resolved by reference to the simplistic stereotyped

image initially suggested, which the receiver accesses in a swift and efficient

manner.

I think that a similar effect is very frequently created in ‘‘funny’’ novels

by the use of caricaturization. Caricature appears to be fertile for the effi-

cient functioning of the ‘‘joke work’’ of this type of text because it provides

a ‘‘script’’ which becomes, in the course of reading, easily accessible to the

reader and one of the frames of reference which contribute to the creation

of incongruity. In the type of novel that, as Seymour Chatman (1990: 26)

says, we have come to consider ‘‘high art,’’ a complex character has no

easy referent for the reader because of the character’s very complexity and

‘‘because of two conventions we have learned so well: that of the ‘round’

character, and that of the uncertain or ambivalent reporter. . . . Complex

self-contradiction is ‘recuperable’ as a source of both ‘roundness’ and nar-

ratorial uncertainty, and hence of modern ‘psychological’ interest.’’ A char-

acter’s description, thoughts, actions, and words generate a wide range of

implicatures to be grasped by the reader, but we very often cannot recon-

vert these into any coherent set of propositions pertaining to the charac-

ter.2In the case of a simple character or caricature, however, the narrator’s

descriptions, or the character’s own words, however widely and frequently

scattered over the text, all point in a specific direction, generating a lim-

ited number of implicatures and making the character easy to assimilate.3

In this way the reader knows more or less what to expect when that char-

acter is mentioned, in the same way as the receiver would know more or

less what to expect of a joke that began with ‘‘There was an Englishman, a

Scotsman, and an Irishman . . .’’

The process of reading a ‘‘funny’’ novel, I think, is one highly orga-

2. Excellent examples of what I mean here are to be found in Modernist authors, such as

James Joyce or VirginiaWoolf.The latter’s Mrs. Dalloway, depicted in the eponymous novel

from different, sometimes contradictory points of view, is a case in point.

3. If the character ‘‘scripts’’ were complex, the reader would find them more difficult to

englobe and grasp, an effect which would inhibit the creation of humor.

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nized by the narrator’s use of ‘‘strong implicature.’’ I have coined this term

in direct reference and opposition to ‘‘weak implicature,’’ considered by

Adrian Pilkington (1996: 159) and others as ‘‘crucially important for explain-

ing poetic effects’’ and related to the work onmetaphor carried out by theo-

rists such asMerrie Bergman (1991), Rachel Giora (1997, 1999), and Begoña

Vicente (1992, 1996). All of them place the ‘‘creative’’ or ‘‘rich’’ metaphors

typical of poetry at the extreme end of a continuum, at the other end of

which lie the literal or ‘‘salient’’ interpretations of conversation and rapid

exchange. According to them, implicature is weak and metaphors rich if

the latter suggest numerous and varying interpretations.4Strong implica-

ture, in contrast, limits the range of possible interpretations accessed by the

reader through the accumulation of statements whose salient connotations

reinforce each other and thus guide the reader’s search for relevance in a

given context, eliminating secondary interpretations through the pressure

of the implicatures previously generated.

In the initial passages of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1977), for example,much of the metaphorical language employed by the narrator is dedicated

to the description of ProfessorWelch: ‘‘his smile . . . gradually sank beneath

the surface of his features’’ (7); ‘‘Welch again seemed becalmed’’ (7); ‘‘anima-

tion abruptly gathered again and burst in the older man’’ (8); ‘‘the other’s

clay-like features changed indefinably as his attention, like a squadron of

slow old battleships, began wheeling to face this new phenomenon’’ (9).

Thesemetaphors signify thatWelch stopped smiling, that he stopped speak-

ing and moving, that he started speaking again, and that he turned his

attention to another subject. When we compare the meanings with the

actual locutions employed, however, certain salient characteristics come to

the fore.

In the first place, whereas on the level of the speaker’s meaning the sub-

ject of each action is Welch, on the level of the locutions he is, in fact, only

once used as a subject. The effect is one of reification,5and the implica-

tion is thatWelch is a strange being whose reactions are irrational. Further-

4. This depends on the salience of the content of what they communicate. The concept of

salience, reminiscent of that of ‘‘unmarked’’ and ‘‘marked’’ scripts in semantic theory, refers

to ‘‘those characteristics which we would typically list on the spot if asked to state what we

believe is distinctive of [a] thing’’ (Bergman 1991: 487–88). It is not an absolute value butcontext-dependent, where context refers to the encyclopedic knowledge an individual brings

to the process of interpretation (including culturally shared beliefs or stereotypes), the lin-

guistic exchange under way, and background knowledge about the parties engaged in the

exchange.

5. We are reminded here of Bergson’s (1956 [1899]: 79) maxim: ‘‘the attitudes, gestures and

movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of

a mere machine.’’

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more, the predominant note struck is one of slowness, or lack ofmomentum

(‘‘gradually’’; ‘‘becalmed’’; the fact that animation should ‘‘gather again’’

implies that it had previously ceased; the beginning of movement of the‘‘slow old battleships’’).The impression thus created limits the connotationscarried by the last metaphor (potentially the richest), highlighting certain

aspects and obscuring others so that the image of a squadron of old battleshipswheeling round enhances the implicatures already generated: it suggests the

idea of cumbrous, clumsy, and complicated maneuvers and obscures any

other possible connotations, such as orderliness, impressiveness, or aggres-

sion. The effect of these metaphors in contact with each other in the con-

text, in short, is to throw up very marked salient features, each of which

reinforces the others. Together, they produce a striking hyperbolic effect,

which is typical of this type of text and which, in this case, contributes to

the caricaturization of Welch, the professor of history, as a slow-minded

individual of unfathomable mental processes.6

Strong implicatures are employed in most humorous novels not only on

a local level, as in the example given above, but also on a far more extensive

scale, in the depiction of character. In the initial chapters of such novels,

the main characters are established through a series of (frequently) ‘‘ellip-

tical implications’’ (Chatman 1990: 28), which allow the reader to form a

defined image of each of the personages in question so that specific expecta-

tions as to their behavior and reactionsmay be formed.These characters are

caught at a particular point in their lives and undergo an experience which

may, indeed, bring about an ultimate change in them, but as long as they

do not change—and frequently this does not happen until the end or near

the end of the novel—initial impressions hold. So the descriptions made of

them when they are first introduced will be valid to the reader throughout

and constitute an important element in the creation of much of the humor

around them. ‘‘Funny’’ texts, indeed, ‘‘encourage the reader’s tendency to

comply with the primacy effect by constantly reinforcing the initial impres-

sions’’ (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 120) and therefore generate a limited range

of implicatures as to the characters involved in them.

In this way, the very mention of a character’s name comes to conjure

6. I think it is easy to perceive that there is, indeed, incongruity in comparing someone’smen-

tal processes to themovements of ‘‘a squadron of old battleships,’’ especially if that ‘‘someone’’

is a university professor, belonging to a class of persons supposedly characterized by their

intellectual capacity.Welch, with his total unawareness of what is going on around him, his

self-centeredness, his irrelevant and meandering conversation, and his slowness of reaction

is in general incongruous with what our encyclopedic knowledge would lead us to expect of

a professor; but it is also worth noting that he corresponds to a comic stereotype (the absent-

minded academic), thus appealing to the reader’s generic knowledge of humor and helping

to situate him within the adequate genre for an efficient reading of this novel.

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up a specific ‘‘script’’ for that character in the reader’s mind, just as the

mention of the Scotsman does in the joke-telling context discussed above.

And in the same manner as in a joke, the plots of these humorous novels

play with the expectations aroused about the characters in ways surprising

to the reader and incongruous with his or her encyclopedic knowledge of

the real world and often also with the reader’s contextual knowledge of the

fictional world created earlier by the narrator. However, on examination,

the reader finds that the apparently incongruous situations which a char-

acter has gotten into or caused, and that character’s actions and reactions

to them, are, in reality, coherent with the initial script—in fact, they con-

stitute a further confirmation of that script. The reader’s expectations are

therefore ultimately satisfied, and all the elements necessary for the pro-

duction of humor are provided: incongruity, surprise, and satisfaction. In

this way, the specifications of cognitive-perceptual theories of humor are

fulfilled, namely, that humor must engage the receiver in a two-stage pro-

cess involving the discovery of incongruities which constitute a jolt to our

picture of the way things are supposed to be, and which is followed by the

resolution of those incongruities by the application of a different cognitive

rule (Zillmann 1983: 92).

For example, in Tom Sharpe’s Riotous Assembly (1971: 13), the redoubtableAfrikaner Konstable Els is introduced in the following way:

Els constituted no sort of threat to the Kommandant though a very considerable

one to nearly everyone else in Piemburg. His natural aptitude for violence and

particularly for shooting black people was only equalled by his taste for brandy

and his predilection for forcing the less attractive parts of his person into those

parts of African women legally reserved for male members of their own race.

Kommandant van Heerden had had to speak quite severely to him about the

illegality of this last tendency on several occasions, but he had put Els’ taste for

black women down to the undoubted fact that the Konstable was of mixed race

himself.

Immediately afterward the narrator, following a technique very frequent

in Sharpe, proceeds to elaborate on the propositions already offered in a

paragraph that describes Els’s ‘‘extraordinarily proficient’’ use of an ‘‘elec-

trical therapymachine’’ to extract totally false confessions from an innocent

native milk-delivery boy.This confirms the former statements, adding only

one new element of information: ‘‘Els had his virtues, not the least of which

was a deep if obscure sense of devotion to his commanding officer [van

Heerden]’’ (ibid.: 14). The passage is bracketed, so to speak, by incursions

into Kommandant van Heerden’s point of view, which generate implica-

tures not only about Els (his love of violence, especially toward ‘‘blacks,’’

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and his total lack of concern for ethical or moral values) but also about van

Heerden himself: the reader is led to conclude that the Kommandant con-

dones Els’s activities and, indeed, admires them. In this way, the narrator

gives us information as to the attitudes of both policemen toward ‘‘blacks’’

and toward the use of violence, which on the one hand constitutes a logical

grounding for what is to follow and, on the other, is confirmed again and

again by the ensuing action.

Further references to Konstable Els elaborate in different ways on the

notes already struck, and though incongruous with the reader’s text-

external sense of appropriateness,7they are nevertheless quite coherent in

view of the earlier propositions about this character. The way in which Els

deals with Miss Hazelstone’s report that she has murdered her Zulu cook

confirms his attitude toward coloured people: ‘‘Killing a white cook can be

murder. It’s unlikely but it can be. Killing a black cook can’t. Not under

any circumstances. Killing a black cook comes under self-defence, justi-

fiable homicide or garbage disposal’’ (ibid.: 16).8The exceedingly funny

episode of Els’s entanglement with Miss Hazelstone’s Doberman pinscher

also is charged with implicatures which both confirm and enrich what has

7. Leo Hickey (1989), in an article on the recently deceased Spanish playwright Torrente

Ballester, suggests the existence of a Principle of Appropriateness, which would apply to all

human acts and thus subsume pragmatic principles such as Grice’s Cooperative Principle or

Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Principle.The Principle of Appropriateness postulates that

in any situation people normally act in a way which is appropriate to that situation, includ-

ing, of course, in their use of the appropriate language. Appropriateness itself, according to

Hickey, would seem to be based on criteria referable to values—moral, aesthetic, political,

social, linguistic, and logical—and to have much to do with ‘‘expectedness,’’ since what is

expected is generally considered appropriate. Expectedness, in turn, depends on two factors:

past experience (which includes convention, statistical frequency, ‘‘rules of the game,’’ and so

on), and what is established by the situation as it has developed up to the moment (the con-

text established by the specific situation). Hickey (ibid.: 20) writes: ‘‘One of the properties of

the Appropriateness principle is that failure to fulfill it (inappropriate acts), whether through

simple violation (due to ignorance or carelessness), through opting out (in the sense of indi-

cating that one is unwilling to respect the principle), or flouting (blatantly contravening or

ignoring it without prior announcement), will stimulate in others a reaction somewhere in the

range from indignation to humor.What determines the point of the reaction on that scale . . .

is not yet clear, but it seems to depend not only on the gravity of the situation and the type

of act, but also on the onlooker’s ‘interest’ in the case. By this we mean whether his interest

is practical or aesthetic.’’ Humorous literature, he suggests, presents constant and deliberate

flouting of the Principle of Appropriateness, which can strike the reader as humorous only

because the reader is not in any way directly involved.

8. Again, implicatures are made here in parallel about van Heerden through the use of his

point of view: ‘‘The Kommandant listened to the conversation. . . . Konstable Els was per-

fectly capable of handling the matter. He had in his time as a police officer shot any number

of Zulu cooks.’’ When Miss Hazelstone claims to have shot the cook on the lawn, ‘‘the Kom-

mandant sighed. It was always the same.Why couldn’t people shoot blacks inside their houses

where they were supposed to shoot them?’’ (ibid.: 17). Further mentions of Els’s bloodthirsty

attitude toward blacks are made on pp. 41–42.

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already been said. The narrator’s mention of the Doberman’s training to

attack ‘‘persons of Negro extraction’’ (ibid.: 22) reinforces the information

given earlier about Els’s ‘‘mixed race,’’ and the Konstable’s tactics in the

fight recall his brutality, but the implicatures go further in his direct and

repeated comparison to this particularly bloodthirsty breed of dog:

On thewhole he [theKommandant] thought theywere pretty wellmatched both

in physique and in intellectual grasp of the situation. Certainly Els suffered the

disadvantage of a smaller jaw and fewer teeth, but what he lacked in biting power

he made up for in concentration and experience in castration. (Ibid.: 24)

Although vanHeerden is the focalizer at this point, for the reader the impli-

catures are quite clear: Els has both the small brain and the indiscriminat-

ing brutality of the animal. This is not only the Kommandant’s point of

view, but also a pretty objective view under the circumstances, as implied

by the narrator’s description of Miss Hazelstone’s reaction: ‘‘ ‘The best way

of separating dogs,’ she shouted above the growls and groans, ‘is to hold a

pad of cotton wool soaked with ammonia over their muzzles.They gasp for

air and you pull ’em apart,’ and so saying she clamped the wad over Kon-

stable Els’ already purple face’’ (ibid.).9The passage, apart from its intrinsic

humor (largely based on the incongruity of the Els/dog equation and the

surprise caused by the fact that Miss Hazelstone should apply the ‘‘treat-

ment’’ to him and not to her Doberman), also modifies previous implica-

tures: it makes the reader reinterpret the narrator’s reference to Els’s ‘‘deep

if obscure devotion to his commanding officer’’ and even the allusions to

his ‘‘mixed race’’ in a new (canine) light.

Reiterated again and again in the course of the novel,10the suggestions

thus made about Els provide more than an example of strong implica-

ture. They are also the source of a recurring joke, a technique very often

9. The humor here is enhanced by a double set of implicatures, which concern not only Els

but alsoMissHazelstone. She treats Els like a dog and even gives him the ammonia treatment

first, forcing him to release his grip on the Doberman, thus enabling the animal ‘‘to pursue

the advantage it naturally assumed it had won by the intervention of its mistress.’’ All this

points in the same direction as all the previous accounts of her dealings with van Heerden

and company—toward her absolute contempt for the South African police.

10. For example, ‘‘The Kommandant caught sight of Konstable Els approaching the house.

He had the air of a good dog that has done its duty and expects to be rewarded. Had he

possessed a tail he would undoubtedly have been wagging it. . . . ‘Konstable Els,’ [van Heer-

den] commanded. ‘These are your orders.’ The Konstable . . . came to attention eagerly . . .

he loved being given orders. They usually meant that he was being given permission to hurt

somebody’’ (ibid.: 32). And after the debacle Els has caused at the gates of Jacaranda Park,

he finds himself an alibi by, most aptly, pretending to have contracted rabies: ‘‘An hour later,

foaming at the mouth and exhibiting all the symptoms of rabies, Konstable Els presented

himself at the casualty department of Piemburg Hospital. Before they could get him into bed

he had bitten two nurses and a doctor’’ (ibid.: 64).

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employed in these novels to create humor and to play on the reader’s expec-

tations. In this way, every time Els and the Doberman come together, not

only does the reader know more or less what is going to happen, but the

reader also looks forward to the recurrence of the humor generated by the

earlier experience. At the same time, the initial propositions concerning Els

are reconfirmed.11

The other police characters in Riotous Assembly are dealt with in a simi-lar way and with similar effects. Let me give another example, in order

to extend my point about the use of strong implicature to other episodes

in the novel. The connotations of violence attached to the script for Kom-

mandant van Heerden have already been mentioned above. Indeed, when

the Kommandant is first intoduced, the narrator tells us that ‘‘it had been

felt at Police Headquarters in Pretoria that, while Kommandant van Heer-

den’s appointment [to his present post in Piemburg] might push the city’s

crime rate up, it would at least serve to lower the waves of violence and theft

that had followed his posting to other more enterprising towns’’ (ibid.: 10).

Although the Kommandant is thus immediately associated with crime, vio-

lence, and theft, the passage seems ambiguous as towhy this is so.The ambi-

guity is soon resolved by the addition of a new element to his script, namely,

incompetence: ‘‘it was too late for PoliceHeadquarters to do anything about

his inefficiency except put him in command of Piemburg’’ (ibid.: 11). And

this new element is reworked and emphasized during the incorporation of

a third characteristic:

Kommandant van Heerden admired the British. There was something about

their blundering stupidity that appealed to him. It called out to something deep

within his being. He couldn’t say exactly what it was, but deep called to deep. . . .

If he had one regret, it was that his own mediocrity had never had the chance

to express itself with anything like the degree of success that had attended the

mediocrity and muddle-headedness of the rulers of the British Empire. (Ibid.)

Leaving aside the criticism of the British expressed in the passage, it seems

quite clear that the narrator is implying (pretty directly, in fact) that this

something ‘‘deep’’ within van Heerden’s being is not mere inefficiency, but

also ‘‘blundering stupidity,’’ ‘‘mediocrity,’’ and ‘‘muddle-headedness.’’ This,

together with the narrator’s further comment that van Heerden ‘‘was cer-

11. Many of the caricatures in these novels, in fact, can be classified as such and cause humor

precisely because of the utter logic and predictability of how they act. Examples would be

the minor academic characters in Wilt, and Welch and Bertrand in Lucky Jim. In many ofthese cases the typical is suggested, the characters corresponding in some measure at least

to cultural stereotypes (the absentminded professor—Welch; the pretentious, promiscuous

artist—Bertrand; the jargon-wielding sociologist—Dr. Mayfield, the Head of Sociology in

Wilt). David Lodge makes blatant use of culturally established stereotypes in Small World.

Poetics Today



tain he could have done as well as Lord Chelmsford, whose forces had been

massacred by the Zulus at Isandhlwana. Stormberg, Spion Kop, Magers-

fontein,might have been evenmore appalling disasters had he been in com-

mand’’ (ibid.), cast a revealing light on the reasons for the waves of vio-

lence which accompanied his appointment to Piemburg and other towns

mentioned previously. Even if the reader’s encyclopedic knowledge does

not embrace the events which happened at the places mentioned in the last

quotation, the information given about Lord Chelmsford’s performance

at Isandhlwana and the narrator’s mention of ‘‘appalling disasters’’ are

enough to generate implicatures about van Heerden’s capacities as a com-

manding officer.

Van Heerden’s devotion to the British is elaborated on again in the de-

scription of his attitude to the elderly Miss Hazelstone of Jacaranda Park.

She constitutes ‘‘the corner tree of his interior landscape’’ (ibid.: 14) not

only because she is English but also because she represents the rulers of

the British Empire, being ‘‘the only daughter of the late Judge Hazelstone

of the Supreme Court, who was known in the legal world as Breakneck

Bill and who, in a Minority Report of the Commission on Traffic Conges-

tion, had advocated that flogging bemademandatory for parking offences’’

(ibid.: 15–16). Here the characteristics already incorporated into the script

for van Heerden are intertwined and again brought to the fore: admiration

for the British and for their ruling classes, however wrong-minded or vio-

lent, acceptance of an obviously ludicrous measure, also of unwarranted

violence (flogging for parking offences), and hence, by implicature, stu-

pidity, lack of discrimination, and, again, violence.

Given the Kommandant’s reverence for the English in general and for

Miss Hazelstone and her family as upholders of the law in particular, to-

gether with his attitude toward ‘‘blacks,’’ it seems logical that, when that

lady telephones the police station to inform that she has just shot her Zulu

cook, he should drive up to her house prepared to make the whole incident

appear as though it had happened in perfectly legal self-defense. However,

Miss Hazelstone, who, as it turns out, has been having an affair with the

cook, flatly refuses to accept any possibility of an alibi: she proudly asserts

that themurder has been a ‘‘crime passionelle’’ (ibid.: 26) and she will not haveit passed off as anything else.VanHeerden is shocked not by the violence of

the murder, which is considerable, but by Miss Hazelstone’s insistence on

detailing her sexual activities with the black cook and by the fact that some-

one of her race and family could possibly have indulged in such acts with a

‘‘native.’’ His reactions, then, confirm the information we have about him,

and, again, it appears as no surprise that he should decide that ‘‘the reputa-

tion of Zululand’s leading family, the whole future of South Africa clearly

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depended onMiss Hazelstone’s silence. His first duty was to ensure that no

word of the afternoon’s events leaked out of Jacaranda Park’’ (ibid.: 32).

In order to ensure absolute secrecy, he orders Luitenant Verkramp to

bring out the whole armed forces together with rabies and bubonic plague

signs, guard dogs, armored cars, and searchlights, and further, he posts Els

at the gates of Jacaranda Park armed with a powerful elephant gun and

instructions to ‘‘shoot to kill’’ if anyone attempts an approach (ibid.: 33).Van

Heerden’s actions at this point confirm and illustrate what the narrator has

already told us about him: that he is stupid, blundering, andmuddleheaded

(text-internal coherence). Moreover, it is obvious that, to the reader, the

measures the Kommandant adopts are absolutely ludicrous in the circum-

stances (text-external incongruity). Their incongruity, even as seen from

within the fictional world, is stressed by the narrator’s description of Ver-

kramp’s reaction: ‘‘The Kommandant’s final order trumped the lot. ‘Come

up here by a roundabout route. I don’t want to attract any public atten-

tion.’ And before the Luitenant could inquire how he thought it possible to

avoid public attention with a convoy of six armoured cars, twenty-five lor-

ries and ten searchlights, not to mention seventy guard dogs, and several

dozen enormous billboards announcing the outbreak of bubonic plague

and rabies, the Kommandant had put down the phone’’ (ibid.: 35).

At the same time that humor is created by the reader’s simultaneous

awareness of text-external incongruity and text-internal coherence, expec-

tations are aroused as to what is to follow. Given the type of narrative in

which we are engaged (a humorous one), and considering the characteris-

tics of the situation itself, we expect what is to happen to be both funny and

disastrous to the Kommandant’s intentions. The passage which describes

Verkramp’s progress toward Jacaranda Park amply fulfills our expectations

on every level. On the level of internal narrative coherence, the Lieuten-

ant’s predictions and those of the reader materialize, for widespread public

attention and panic are aroused by the expedition. On the level of humor,

laughter is produced not only by the incongruity of the situation with the

problem at Jacaranda Park and with van Heerden’s intentions, but also by

the specific details used by the narrator to depict the reactions of the public.

Like the punch line to an ‘‘Englishman, Scotsman, and Irishman’’ joke, they

both confirm our expectations and surprise us by their concrete material-

ization, which is even more exaggerated than what we expected.

Therefore, the whole plot of Riotous Assembly (including the massacre ofmost of the police force at the hands of Els, which occurs at the gates to

Jacaranda Park) is thus far logical, given the elements brought together in

the story (VanHeerden and Els working in conjunction). So, too, is the pre-

dicament Miss Hazelstone’s unsuspecting brother, Jonathan, finds himself

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in when he is discovered lying fast asleep and covered in blood in the guest

room of the house. Since it is totally beyond the Kommandant to believe or

accept Miss Hazelstone’s account of her sexual perversions with her Zulu

cook, or the fact that she has murdered him, he jumps to the conclusion

that the Bishop of Barotseland, Jonathan Hazelstone, must be the culprit

and that the latter’s sister is merely trying to cover up for him (ibid.: 39–

41). At the same time, vanHeerden’s realization of the havoc he has created

through his rash orders to Els (the slaughter of his own police force) makes

him only too willing to admit the evidence that Els, trying to exculpate him-

self from the consequences of his actions, plants onHazelstone (ibid.: 61 and

62–64). The totally innocent Bishop is thus taken in for ‘‘questioning’’ and

is finally charged with the murder of the cook and a series of various other

ludicrous misdemeanors in a process which makes his execution absolutely

inevitable.12

The example of Riotous Assembly may be a rather dangerous one in thatSharpe deals with a situation which is (or, fortunately, was) ethically and

morally unacceptable in an apparently somewhat frivolous tone.The work

is nevertheless useful because it shows clearly the effects of strong impli-

cature in the creation of character. However conscious the reader may be

of the situation created at the time by apartheid in South Africa (and the

reader must be conscious of this in order to make any sense of the text),

and however critical the reader is of racism, the narrator’s emphasis on

and constant re-creation of the main characteristics of his personages (not

only racism, but also stupidity and capacity for bungling) create situations

which are utterly ludicrous in view of the reader’s sense of appropriateness.

In this way the cognitive incongruity-based theories of humor outlined at

the beginning of this article would seem to be confirmed and illustrated in

the plot. Here we are, indeed, engaged in a two-stage process involving the

12. It is Els who is put in charge of questioning Jonathan Hazelstone. His abysmal ignorance

(true to character), combined with his eagerness to inculpate the Bishop for the catastrophe

at the gates of Jacaranda Park and thus to deflect suspicion from himself, produce a series

of accusations of hilarious incongruity: ‘‘genuflexion with a rubber prick’’ (ibid.: 151), ‘‘les-

bianism’’ (ibid.: 152), ‘‘necrophilia, flagellation and liturgy’’ (ibid.: 153) as well as, of course,

murder.The utter inevitability of Hazelstone’s fate is underlined by the narrator’s recounting

how the Bishop’s only hope—that the accusations will be so ridiculous that they will never

be accepted in court—is destroyed by the intervention of Verkramp and Boss, who, deciding

‘‘to intervene in the interests of Western civilization incarnate in the Republic of South Africa

and using the powers bestowed on it by Parliament, ordered the suppression of nine tenths

of the confession. Judge Schalkwyk was to try, convict and condemn the prisoner, with no

oportunity to appeal, on charges of murdering one Zulu cook and twenty-one policemen’’

(ibid.). Hazelstone is thus finally brought up before Justice Schalkwyk, ‘‘whose mother had

died in a British concentration camp and who was noted both for his deafness and for his

loathing for all things British’’ (ibid.: 150), and ‘‘a jury handpicked from close relatives of the

murdered policemen’’ (ibid.: 154).

Poetics Today



discovery of incongruities: a jolt to our picture of the way things are sup-

posed to be followed by the resolution of those incongruities via a different

cognitive rule (that which applies to the characters’ traits). It is the inter-

play of this text-internal level of narration with the reader’s text-external

sense of appropriateness that gives rise to Koestler’s ‘‘two self-consistent

but . . . incompatible frames of reference’’ through which ‘‘the event . . .

is made to vibrate on two different wavelengths,’’ while the element of sur-

prise, universally considered of paramount importance to the punch line of

a joke, and indeed, the punch lines themselves, are provided by comic set

pieces (e.g., Els’s encounter with the Doberman or the passage recounting

Verkramp’s progress toward Jacaranda Park), in which the reader’s contex-

tual expectations are confirmed in totally unexpected and exaggeratedly

incongruous ways.

Referring back, therefore, to Raskin’s semantic theory of humor, it seems

easy to appreciate that the element of strong implicature involved in the

creation of relatively simple, static characters or caricatures is necessary

for the creation of humorous situation. If (a) a joke-carrying text must be

‘‘compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts’’ (with the mean-

ing of ‘‘script’’ extended to situations like an individual’s encounter with an

aggressive dog), one of which is the unmarked script based on the reader’s

encyclopedic knowledge and the other suggested by the structure of the joke

itself; (b) both scriptsmust be easily and swiftly apprehended by the receiver

of the joke in the receiver’s search for relevance; and (c) the second script is

based, as I suggest, on an inner coherence provided by character, then the

characters concerned must be well defined and uncomplicated so that the

implicatures attached to the nameKonstable Els, for example, lead readers

to an immediate resolution of the incongruities present in the humorous

situation in which Els is involved.

The parallelism of my analysis with that of Victor Raskin, however, ends

at this point, since he is concerned with the short jokes normal in face-

to-face interaction and I am dealing with the more complex structure of

extended humorous narrative. He, as we have seen, attributes the humor-

ous effect of a joke to a ‘‘script-switch trigger’’ or punch line which comes at

its end and causes the receiver to change from a ‘‘bona fide’’ to a ‘‘non–bona

fide’’ mode of communication, thus going back over what the receiver has

heard and reinterpreting it. On the other hand, I hold that, in the overall

structure of humorous narrative, the opposite happens, though the tech-

nique that Raskin describes doubtless frequently occurs on a local ormicro-

level of discourse. On an extended or macro-level, the narrator’s use of

strong implicature in the depiction of characters causes the two scriptsmen-

tioned above to be always potentially present in parallel, humorous effects

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(the equivalent to the punch line) being caused at certain points in the plot

when the two scripts are simultaneously brought strongly into evidence.

The use of strong implicature, as I have described it, seems tome, indeed, to

be one of themain sources of the ‘‘nodal points’’ or ‘‘jab-lines’’ postulated by

Christopher Holcomb (1992) and Salvatore Attardo (1996), respectively, to

account for the humorous highlightswhich occur in the body of an extended

text. This use, further, gives rise to ‘‘strands,’’ described by Attardo (2001:

83) as ‘‘non-necessarily contiguous sequence[s] of (punch or jab) lines for-

mally or thematically linked’’ that are typically present in extended humor-

ous texts.

Pleasures and Tensions of the Text

If some of the pleasures to be gotten from reading humorous novels are

derived from the efficient resolution of incongruities and from the con-

stant confirmation of one’s expectations, yet another arises from the cre-

ation of a feeling of complicity with the producer of the text. Empirical

research carried out during the 1970s and 1980s on social-behavioral aspects

of humor established the efficacy of laughter and joking in bringing about

group cohesion and complicity (Kane, Suls, and Tedeschi 1977; La Gaipa

1977; Chapman 1983; Fine 1983) and also the importance for humor appre-

ciation of the receiver’s positive affective disposition to the producer of a

joke and negative affective disposition to its object or butt.To put it briefly,

the relationship between amusement and affective disposition may be for-

mulated in the following way:

Mirth . . . is said to vary proportionally with the negativeness of the affective dis-

position toward the disparaged party, and with the positiveness of the affective

disposition toward the disparaging party, and jointly so. (Zillmann 1983: 92)

Therefore, the narrators of humorous novels strive to create, from the initial

stages of their discourse, a common ground of reference with the reader by

appealing to his or her encyclopedic knowledge, a process designed to cul-

tivate a feeling of ‘‘positive identification’’ with themselves, and also, some-

times, with some of their characters, which will enable them to ‘‘carry’’ the

reader successfully through their narratives. This is so not only in obvious

cases where contemporary reference is important, as inRiotous Assembly, butalso where more general aspects of the reader’s knowledge and experience

are concerned.

In Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, for example, we have a third-person nar-rator who focuses or filters his narration through one character only: Jim

Dixon. The reader is made to sympathize with Dixon, sharing in his likes,

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dislikes, and prejudices to such an extent that any objective judgment is

obscured. Thus, the opening of the novel plunges the reader straight into

a speech delivered by Professor Welch that breaks most of H. P. Grice’s

(1975) Conversational Maxims. It breaks the Maxim of Quantity, because

the reader does not knowwhat the context of the discourse is, who the initial

‘‘they’’ are, or who ‘‘young Johns’’ is. It also breaks theMaxim of Manner in

that all these unknown references make the discourse obscure, and with all

its ‘‘you knows,’’ ‘‘of courses,’’ and ‘‘anyways,’’ its vague suppositions, and

its repetition of ‘‘young Johns,’’ it gives the impression of being meander-

ing and anything but concise. And it breaks the Maxim of Relation, firstly,

because Welch asks Dixon a question he cannot possibly answer and, sec-

ondly, because someone who is supposed to know who ‘‘Dowland’’ is must

surely know the difference between a flute and a recorder, so that Welch’s

explanation seems both irrelevant and pointless (Maxim of Quality). The

reader, albeit unconscious of the technicalities of Grice’s maxims, would,

in the normal course of events, expect to have most of these deviations

corrected by the subsequent discourse and Welch’s speech made relevant.

However, as we go on reading the text, we find that our search for relevance

is, at least for the time being, completely frustrated and that—on the com-

municative level of the characters—Welch’s interlocutor (Dixon) is affected

by the irrelevance of the professor’s speech to very much the same degree

as we are. His only contributions to the conversation are ‘‘I don’t know,

Professor’’ and ‘‘Oh?’’ (Amis 1977: 7): he resigns himself to being ‘‘present

and conscious while Welch talked about concerts’’ and wonders whether

the other noticed ‘‘who else was there while he talked, and if he noticed did

he remember, and if he remembered would it affect such thoughts as he

had already?’’ (ibid.: 8).The effect is reinforced when, after a brief interlude

of successful communication between the two characters on the subject of

Margaret, the professor launches into another maxim-breaking discourse

which is of total irrelevance to Dixon and to the situation, except to estab-

lish Welch as meandering, self-centered, and a bore. In this way an initial

sympathy is created between the reader and Dixon, since they are made to

coincide in their assessment of Welch, or at least of his conversation.

At the same time thatWelchmeanders, the voice of the narrator is clearly

heard shaping the reader’s opinion. It is particularly audible and explicit

in the physical description of the two characters, where the narrator stands

back from his filter to give us his own view. He initially compares the pair to

‘‘some kind of variety act’’ (8), thus orienting us almost imperceptibly to the

reception of humor.The adjectives applied toWelch have vaguely negative

connotations (he is ‘‘weedy,’’ with ‘‘limp whitening hair’’ (8), whereas those

applied to Dixon are chosen to give the impression of someone pleasant

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but not out of the ordinary, just like you or me, so to speak: ‘‘on the short

side, fair and round-faced, with an unusual breadth of shoulder’’ yet, the

narrator hastens to add, unaccompanied ‘‘by any special physical strength

or skill’’ (8). There are very few more interventions as explicitly external

to Dixon’s point of view as this in the novel. But the narrator’s presence is

constantly felt in the past tense and third person, in his use of the surname

‘‘Dixon’’ to refer to his protagonist (a conventional distancing device), and,

of course, in the texture of his narration or discourse, some examples of

which, in reference toWelch, have already appeared above inmy discussion

of strong implicature.

The discourse of ‘‘funny’’ novels, in short, is based on moral, social, cul-

tural, aesthetic, and even generic assumptions shared with the reader and

hence safely played on throughout their texts. To use the classification of

types of narration made byWayne Booth in his Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), thenarrators of such humorous novels as Lucky Jim and Riotous Assembly aspireto be close to the reader’s norms, though not to those of some (or any)

of their characters. This ‘‘shared value structure and understanding of the

world’’ (Chatman 1990: 153) contributes to the fact that they are regarded

by the reader as being ‘‘reliable’’ and therefore also close to the norms of the

implied author. In other humorous novels, however (e.g., Kingsley Amis’s

One Fat Englishman orMartin Amis’sMoney), incongruities with the reader’sknowledge or values may arise in the narrator’s own discourse. In this case,

if the reader is to see the text as funny, he or she must be able to resolve

the tensions created by the narrator’s discourse via the application of such

‘‘integrating measures’’ (Yacobi 1981: 114) as allow him or her easily ‘‘to

assume the existence of an implied (and by definition reliable) author who

manipulates [the narrator] for his own purposes’’ (ibid.: 123) and whose

‘‘value structure and understanding of the world’’ are, nevertheless, close

to his or her own. Since the resolution of incongruities and irregularities in

the narrator’s discourse then becomes another aspect of the resolution of

incongruities in general, it must be ruled by the general conditions of effi-

ciency, speed, and ease mentioned above and therefore must be resolved

through the application of ‘‘integrating measures’’ which are readily acces-

sible to the reader.These, to useYacobi’s classification, would generally be:

(a) the perspectival principle, which brings divergent elements into pattern

by attributing them, in whole or in part, to the peculiarities and circum-

stances of the observer—the narrator—throughwhom the fictional world is

taken to be refracted; (b) the functional principle, through which the goals

of the novel are seen as a major guideline to making sense of its peculiari-

ties; and (c) the generic principle, by which the reader recognizes in the

fictional construct a framework which dictates or makes possible certain

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rules of referential stylization, whose employment usually results in a set

of divergences from what is generally accepted as the principles governing

actual reality and which therefore makes the tension between text-internal

and text-external probability easy to account for. Through the application

of these ‘‘integrating measures,’’ the reader is enabled to appreciate the fun-

damental coherence of the text’s discourse and to interpret its ruptures as

winks addressed to himself or herself, which contribute to the creation of a

climate of complicity between himself or herself and the implied author. It

is, I think, essentially true of ‘‘funny’’ novels that ‘‘from the author’s view-

point, a successful reading of [them] must eliminate all distance between

the essential norms of [their] implied author and the norms of the postu-

lated reader’’ (Booth 1996 [1961]: 151).

Finally, another of the effects of strong implicature in humorous novels

and of the internal coherence created by it is the air of inevitability which

permeates their plots, generating a certain feeling of suspense. In almost

all of them, one of the characters, often the protagonist, seems unavoid-

ably drawn by the logic of circumstances to a bad end. In some cases, as in

that of Jonathan Hazelstone in Riotous Assembly already mentioned above,these circumstances are produced by the inner coherence of the personages

into whose hands the character falls. However, in others, generally where

the protagonists themselves seem endangered, it is not only the characters

around them who threaten their downfall, but also their own traits. In this

respect, the plots of humorous novels bear some resemblance to those of

tragedy, where the combination of the protagonist’s failings and circum-

stances (or simply the latter) lead him or her to certain misfortune. Robert

Murray Davis (1969: 10) writes: ‘‘Characters in the [humorous] novel for

the most part lack volition, or at least the ability to make their wills effec-

tive. Instead, they are pushed along by what might be called the pressure

of events: not exactly determinism in the mechanistic sense, but a set of cir-

cumstances produced by whim, coincidence, or manipulations by remote

or impersonal forces which the characters cannot control and often cannot

even perceive.’’ This ‘‘determinism’’ is due, I would argue, not to whim or

coincidence but to the workings of strong implicature as described above.

Let me illustrate the point with one last example.

In Amis’s Lucky Jim, the character of the protagonist, Dixon, and his cir-cumstances are established in the first chapter. This includes his negative

attitude to academic life and activities and to ‘‘intellectualism’’ in general,

his insecure situation at the university he is teaching at, made all the more

precarious by the ‘‘bad impression’’ he has created, his consequent depen-

dence on Professor Welch for the renewal of his contract and the hypoc-

risy this whole situation forces him into, the rage his own enforced hypoc-

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risy and that he attributes to others arouses in him, his relationship with

Margaret, and the fact, indicated by this relationship, that he is basically

a ‘‘good chap.’’ This rule applies even to apparently insignificant details,

which, however, are to play a part in the comic construction of the plot:

the facts that he smokes too much, that he is generally afraid of apologiz-

ing for his misdemeanors, and that he has a great capacity for anger, which

he usually vents through mimicry. Even the fact that he likes his drink is

subtly hinted at and confirmed immediately in the second chapter, when

we find him taking refuge from theWelches withMargaret in the local pub.

These elements recur in various ways throughout the novel, providing the

basic ingredients which combine to trigger some of the comic highlights

of the work and giving it a concatenation of cause and effect which largely

contributes to its air of ‘‘determinism.’’

The episode where Dixon sets fire to his bed while spending the weekend

as a guest of the Welches (Amis 1977: 54–64) is a case in point, combining

in its occurrence many of the features already associated with the protago-

nist: irate rejection of ‘‘intellectualism,’’ tendency to drink and smoke too

much, and reluctance to apologize and face the consequences of his actions.

Dixon’s situation, taking into account the damage done to the Welches’

property and his position as a guest in the house and also with respect to

Welch, is pretty horrendous. One of the effects the incident produces in the

reader is a sensation of hopelessness regarding the protagonist’s aspirations

at this point (and throughout much of the rest) of the novel: to retain his

job. Although Dixon has accepted the weekend invitation in order to try to

convince Welch that he is suitable for the post of university lecturer, he is

irrevocably what he is, as is confirmed by this incident and, further, by his

reactions to it (hiding the evidence of the accident instead of confessing and

apologizing). And that is precisely what Welch would not want.

The reader’s sensation of hopelessness as to Dixon’s chances of suc-

cess in retaining his job is heightened throughout the novel, mainly by the

repeated interaction of elements already established. Bertrand’s promis-

cuity and self-interest13throw Dixon and Christine together and lead to the

latter’s abduction at the May Ball, which in turn aggravates the situation

withMrs.Welch (who has obviously found out about the burned bedclothes)

and Bertrand (Christine is his girlfriend) and thus, potentially, withWelch.

At the same time, Dixon’s preparation of the ‘‘Merrie England’’ lecture,

which is to be his great test of suitableness for his post and which he is asked

13. These are established as characteristics pertaining to Bertrand from his first appearance

in the novel. His promiscuity is implicated by the mention of ‘‘the Loosmore girl’’ and by his

parallel relationship with Christine and Carol Goldsmith. His self-interest is suggested by his

egotistical, self-seeking attitude toward Christine’s uncle.

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to give in the first chapter of the novel, is constantly retarded by the pres-

sure of his sentimental life (his growing involvement with Christine), by his

own (typical) attitude of total lack of interest and irate scepticism toward

the subject, and by the interventions of Welch himself, who, true to the

description initially given of him as being utterly oblivious to anything but

his own interests and an ‘‘incurable evader,’’ foists onto Dixon the job of

‘‘pottering about looking things up in the library’’ (ibid.: 173) for him when

Dixon is, in fact, pressed for time to finish his lecture. Dixon, of course,

cannot mention this to Welch, because the fact that his lecture is not pre-

pared at such a late stage would, again, produce a ‘‘bad impression’’ on the

professor.The inexorable course of events, in fact, causes Dixon to get into

deeper and deeper waters and therefore to feel more and more obliged to

do what Welch wants, thus having less and less time to prepare his lecture.

This increases his nervous state, so he drinks more and more and heads

unavoidably toward the debacle which finally puts an end to his academic

aspirations and, apparently, to his professional future. The internal con-

text of the novel follows a strong cause-and-effect chain, which at the same

time allows the narrator the working and reworking of jokes. The internal

logic as against the external illogicality of the situation produces tension

and much of the laughter.

As in a tragedy, therefore, the plot of Lucky Jim creates in the readerexpectations of doom for its protagonist.What makes it funny is a combina-

tion of several elements. In the first place, the reader’s previous experience

of humor (previous both to the text and in the text) allows him or her to

place the novel unequivocally within a humorous genre so that the condi-

tions stipulated for humor by psychological ‘‘Relief Theories’’14are fulfilled:

we anticipate a ‘‘sequence of circumstances’’ prejudicial to Dixon, but the

humorous context in which the narrator has placed us makes it absurd to

attribute any real seriousness to Dixon’s plight.15On a smaller scale, the

14. ‘‘Relief Theory,’’ which sees laughter as the product of a building up of tension which is

released on seeing itself unjustified, has been adopted and adapted by numerous humanis-

tically inclined investigators of humor and comedy. Many of them are strongly influenced

by the criticism applied to tragedy and hence have adapted classical versions of catharsis to

produce concepts such as Elder Olson’s ‘‘katastasis.’’ Olson (1968: 16) defines the emotion of

laughter as ‘‘a relaxation, or, as Aristotle would say, a katastasis of concern due to a manifestabsurdity of the grounds for concern, and we may distinguish three things involved: (1) the

apparent or anticipated sequence of circumstances (agent, act, tec); (2) the factors of apparent

seriousness (good or evil of a certain magnitude, etc.); and (3) a real circumstance manifest-

ing the absurdity of attributing (2) to (1).This ‘real circumstance’ is like the factor that betrays

something as a lie, instantly replacing belief by disbelief; only here there is involved, not a

truth merely, but a feeling based upon a supposed truth, replaced by its contrary opinion ondiscovery.’’

15. In fact, of course, Dixon’s future, both professional and personal, is happily resolved by a

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conditions are also often fulfilled in individual incidents within the novel: in

these episodes, our apprehensions are disconfirmed quite logically from the

point of view of the internal context of narration and given the traits inher-

ent to the characters concerned but incongruously according to our knowl-

edge of the world outside the novel. Such is the case, for example, when

Welch summonsDixon to his study just after the sheet-burning episode and,

despite the latter’s worst fears and after a lot of typical beating about the

bush, it turns out that he only intends to warn Dixon about the somewhat

doubtful nature of Caton’s character and to urge him to try to press an

answer out of him about the article he is supposed to be publishing (ibid.:

80–87).The reader shares Dixon’s apprehension about the outcome of the

interview, but the grounds for his fears are misplaced, given the fact that we

are dealing with Welch and his typical vagueness and absentmindedness.

When the reader’s fears are confirmed, moreover, this event occurs with

a degree of hyperbole that makes the situation funny. Dixon’s ‘‘Merrie

England’’ lecture is an excellent example. The reader knows Dixon’s atti-

tude to the subject of his lecture; he or she also knows that it is, and that

the protagonist considers it, his main and last opportunity to impressWelch

and to hold onto his job. The reader is aware of the degree and nature of

the preparation which has gone into it and of the fact that all these circum-

stances, together with the momentous nature of the event (a public lecture

in which Dixon is to represent his university and which is attended by uni-

versity authorities and public dignitaries), naturally cause in Dixon a state

of nervousness. The reader also has gained experience, from the context

given by the narration up to this point, of Dixon’s propensity to disaster, and

the reader’s expectations of such are further built up by the narrator’s enu-

meration of the various drinks he has just before the lecture to give himself

confidence. It seems obvious that the whole thing is going to be a dire catas-

trophe. And, indeed, it is, but the materialization of the debacle exceeds all

our expectations.

Again, as in the passages already analyzed from Riotous Assembly, the epi-sode of the ‘‘Merrie England’’ lecture contains an interplay between coher-

ence on one level and incongruity on another. The fact that Dixon should

imitate first Welch and then the principal is congruous with his wish to

impress the university ‘‘establishment’’ and with his feeling that he, as him-

self, has nothing in common with it. Dixon’s imitations constitute, in the

last resort, a final attempt to fit into a pattern totally alien to him and have,

in essence, much in common with his former attempt at Welch’s arty week-

series of coincidences that fully justify the title of the novel and give it a comic closure which

has, on occasion, been criticized as frivolous (see, for example, Stevenson 1986: 125).

Poetics Today



end. This is confirmed by the fact that, when he sees that the situation has

reached an irremediable point, he decides to ‘‘suggest by his intonation,

very subtly of course, what he thought of his subject and the worth of the

statements he was making’’ (ibid.: 225). The effect of all this, however, is

totally incongruous both with Dixon’s intentions and with our concept of

how a public lecture should be delivered. We are made to laugh because

of our awareness of the incongruity of the whole situation, but at the same

time we are aware that the outcome is logical and inevitable.

The difference between tragic fate and humorous ‘‘determinism’’ lies,

of course, in the element of text-external incongruity which permeates

‘‘funny’’ novels. Whereas on the text-internal level of narration coherence

of character would seem to lead the protagonist of the humorous novel to

an inevitable fate, the awareness of incongruity created by the narrator’s

appeal to the reader’s encyclopedic knowledge and sense of appropriateness

presents this fate as ridiculous rather than tragic.The more so because the

external elements against which the ‘‘fated’’ character is pitched (van Heer-

den, Els, and Verkramp in the case of Jonathan Hazelstone and Professor

Welch and all his ‘‘intellectual’’ setup in that of Dixon) are made ludicrous

in themselves. Furthermore, the reader’s judgment in this respect is always

confirmed at the end of these novels, where the ‘‘positive’’ characters come

off well ( Jonathan Hazelstone finally escapes the claws of the South Afri-

can authorities, and Dixon, though he loses his university job, of course,

finally manages to get not only the much better post that Bertrand has been

after all along but also the latter’s girl), while the ‘‘negative’’ ones are left

in positions which are, at the worst, ridiculous.

Conclusions

As opposed to ‘‘serious’’ or ‘‘high’’ literature, whose authors communicate

thoughts ‘‘extremely rich and subtle’’ through the use of weak implicatures

(Pilkington 1996: 160), the sort of humorous literature I have referred to in

this article draws predominantly on the high organizing power of strong

implicatures.These strong implicatures guide and limit the reader’s search

for relevance in the text, transparently organizing the ‘‘meaning’’ of novel-

istic characters and the whole novel’s world and creating a fictional (but

clearly predictable) world which functions as a second ‘‘script’’ alongside

the first ‘‘real world’’ script that our encyclopedic knowledge brings to the

reading. This creation of a simple and clear-cut second script through the

use of strong implicatures would seem to be necessary for the creation and

maintaining of humor. Necessary, because humor is based on the apprecia-

tion and, above all, on the resolution of incongruity, and humorous texts,

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asVictor Raskin stipulates, must be compatible with two parallel but oppo-

site scripts, both of which must be readily accessible to the receiver, so that

he or she may solve the incongruity between them quickly and efficiently.

In this article I have argued that the functioning of humor in ‘‘funny’’

novels is based essentially on the same principles as that in jokes based

on cultural stereotypes. In these jokes, which are short and simple narra-

tions, an element arises, at or near the end, which appears incongruous

with the receiver’s encyclopedic knowledge of the world and his or her

sense of appropriateness (his or her ‘‘real-world’’ script) but which, on sec-

ond thought, the receiver finds coherent with the script for the stereotyped

image initially suggested. Amusement is produced not only by the receiver’s

appreciation of incongruity (which, on its own, would probably lead him

or her to discard what he or she has heard as irrelevant nonsense), but also,

and essentially, by the receiver’s satisfaction at having solved a problem (the

incongruity) efficiently and at having had his or her original stereotype con-

firmed. In ‘‘funny’’ novels, the use of strong implicature creates character

scripts which become, in the course of reading, as easily accessible to the

reader as any cultural stereotype so that the reader is able to solve those

incongruities which arise in the text in much the same way and with a simi-

lar feeling of satisfaction. At the same time, the pleasure of a ‘‘funny’’ text

is enhanced by the fact that the inner coherence created by the narrator

leads the reader to form expectations about the narrative plot which are

constantly confirmed, albeit frequently in totally unexpected and surpris-

ing (apparently incongruous) ways. As opposed to what occurs in jokes, in

longer narrative texts the punch line concept is no longer the crucial way

to embody the two-stage event of incongruity resolution; the clash between

Raskin’s opposite but parallel scripts, materialized by text-external/text-

internal scripts, or real-world knowledge and fictional-world knowledge,

is now embodied by those highlights in the plot in which the elements of

incongruity come to a head.

Another of the sources of satisfaction to be found in reading a funny novel

is derived from the relationship established between the narrator or implied

author and the reader. Just as, in jokes based on stereotypes, it is necessary

for producer and receiver to share the stereotype and resulting attitudes

concerned, so in funny novels the attainment of the desired perlocutionary

effect depends in a fundamental way onwhether or not the two parties share

the same values and worldview. Hence the narrator or implied author go to

great lengths to cultivate a climate of complicity which will carry the reader

through the text, aligning the reader with themselves and sometimes, also,

with some of their characters. Although this characteristic is by no means

unique to funny novels, it does seem to be of essential importance.Whether

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or not the reader ismade to sympathize with any of the characters, but espe-

cially in the affirmative case, a further source of pleasure comes from the

tension produced by the plot.The use of strong implicature to depict char-

acter creates chains of cause and effect which make events seem inevitable,

so that characters are caught up in unavoidable spirals created by them-

selves in conjunction with the other personages around them. The feeling

of ‘‘determinism’’ thus created, however, is itself very much a joke, and ten-

sion is pleasurably resolved, for the threats against which the characters are

pitched are usually made ridiculous in themselves or, in the case of ‘‘posi-

tive’’ characters, are dissolved at the end of the novel.

Finally, Pragmatics and Relevance Theory seem to define the intuitive

but intangible notion of what is ‘‘literary’’ and ‘‘poetic’’ in terms of the pres-

ence in texts of contextual effects characterized by their complexity and

multiplicity, which induce in their receivers correspondingly complexmen-

tal processes. Adrian Pilkington (1996: 160), for example, has written:

Poets (and novelists and playwrights) may spend a considerable amount of time

making sure the right words are placed in the right order.They take this trouble

because the thoughts they wish to communicate are extremely rich and subtle.

Only by . . . concentrating on thoughts as complex sets of assumptions of vary-

ing degrees of strength andweakness, interacting dynamically on-line with other

sets of assumptions, can justice be done to the complexity of the thoughts that

may be communicated.

In consonance with Pilkington, recent work on metaphor, such as that

mentioned earlier in this article, suggests that ‘‘poetic’’ metaphor and, by

extension, ‘‘literary’’ texts are marked by the communication of a wide

array of implicatures weakly communicated, which encourage a special

kind of pragmatic processing, involving a wide-ranging search through the

receiver’s encyclopedic entries of certain concepts for assumptions that

might be used in the process of interpretation. Funny novels, however, do

not, in general, answer to these specifications, because they are generically

marked, as AndrewGoatley suggests, by themore limited type of pragmatic

processing attendant on the appreciation of humor. This, I feel, may well

provide a reasoned explanation of why works of this type, irrespective of

their success within their genre, are not in general considered to qualify as

‘‘good’’ literature but are instead classified as ‘‘light’’ by-products of the far

more weighty novelistic genre.

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Documents

Funny Fiction; or, Jokes and Their Relation to the Humorous Novel