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“Each Time We Laugh” Translated Humour in Screen Comedy

Jeroen Vandaele

Literature on the translation of humour is almost non-existent, the most notable contributions to the topic still being those collected in Laurian (1986) and Laurian and Nilsen (1989). In Vandaele (1993: 7-42) I tried to demonstrate that most of these essays (a) argue from within prescriptive paradigms ⎯ telling the good from the bad — and (b) are “impressionistic” in the sense that they accept humour as an apparently monolithic and intuitive phenomenon.1 I find it difficult to compare ST and TT humour without any reference to a more explicit descriptive framework of humour per se. This article mainly presents a functional, though still tentative taxonomy for the description of humour in screen comedy.

My humour analysis draws on the well-known concepts of incongruity and superiority and argues that, when redefined, these notions do not represent incompatible views on humour but always refer to each other in very specific ways, thus contributing to a more complete description of the phenomenon. Analysing translational shifts will come down to comparing the different types of interaction between incongruity and superiority that are present in original and translation. While the main part of my essay is concerned with rendering humour describable, at the end I shall briefly demonstrate that the methodology does serve translational analysis. To illustrate all of this, sequences are taken from the films The Naked Gun and A Fish Called Wanda and the former film’s French and Spanish dubbed versions.

1. On technical concepts in the field of humour 1.0. Humour Physical laughter, that strange convulsion as an apparently unambiguous outcome and sign of a psychological reality2, or smiling, or even an “inner” feeling which comes close to laughter, makes the ordinary language concept of

1 For a full list of publications treated, see the Appendix. 2 And not of another physical reality, as is the case in tickling. Some writings

therefore explicitly refer to “humorous laughter” as opposed to other kinds.

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humour usually unquestioned. Nobody will deny the existence of humour, since we all easily detect the feeling it provokes.3 Still, things are not quite so simple: the feeling is supposed to be the reaction to humour; but can humour “be there” when the feeling is not? What seems obvious for common sense is in fact quite intricate when one has to define humour as a discursive object of study. What I posit, for methodological purposes, is that the feeling comes first. The feeling is what constitutes and institutes something as humour. Nothing is humour before the feeling confirms this. In practical terms, I only study what my “guinea pigs” reported as funny.4

Only after the feeling is it possible to relate to the feeling some technical concepts that describe its causes: the structure of the discursive stimuli; their perception and processing by an individual, who belongs to various groups; and the social context within which the stimuli are perceived5. Is this a strong enough argument to delimit an empirical domain called the field of humour? I think it is. This is true as long as we realize that the domain will always be an a posteriori one, for it will explain what has already happened. This is the strange situation of the humour researcher: the feeling happens, as if it were a “natural kind” and its causes were potential humour, to be described technically. Unfortunately, however, heuristics on the level of (discursive) stimuli has so far remained unable to build a conceptual construction which renders the exact correspondence of stimuli and reactions/feelings; exact meaning here explaining all such feelings and nothing but this type of feeling. For a historically very complete and conceptually detailed overview of humour theories, I refer to Keith-Spiegel (1972), Raskin (1985) and Attardo (1995). In spite of the diversity of approaches and terminology we find there, I remain 3 Many humour tests in experimental psychology accept the existence of this feeling.

Subjects have to fill out a questionnaire or are asked to rate humour on a preconceived scale. These introspective results are sometimes compared with observable laughter or smiling. For a review of the state of the art see Ruch (1993).

4 This uncritical move, meant to “grasp” a study object, involves a double épochè. First, I do not want to question this concept of “feeling” from the very start. I consider “mirth” indeed as a “natural kind”, easily recognizable when it happens, some instances being more prototypical than others and sufficiently described in physiological terms (see Chapman and Foot 1976). However, an a posteriori mind-oriented analysis will throw a new light on differences between what we first monolithically felt as “one thing”. Second, I do not consider the idiosyncratic nature of the feeling. While I will refer to the availability of cognitive schemes as an important aspect of humour understanding, I will not focus here on differences in “personality” as a factor of humour perception and appreciation.

5 “Perceiving” can be “seeing”, “hearing” or “reading”. In my filmic corpus, both visual and verbal humour are represented, but I have only stressed the images as far as they interacted with the words.

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convinced that mainly two imperfect concepts (or, if you like, two traditions built around a signifier) have been associated with humorous stimuli: incongruity and superiority. There are some difficulties with these terms: not only is it troublesome to separate from these two parameters some types of reactions which are not fun or laughter (e.g. “fear”, “disappointment” or “puzzlement” as a result of incongruity, or “euphoria” or “aggression” as a reaction to superiority), but I also find it difficult even to assess all tokens of laughter and fun in terms of incongruity and superiority. In short: humour is at different times either overdetermined or underdetermined by incongruity and/or superiority. Let us first consider this question for the case of incongruity. 1.1. Incongruity Incongruity stands not only for an eminent aspect of humour but also for a whole theoretical tradition which tends to accept incongruity as the only or the main generalizable feature of humour. Within this tradition, incongruity has too often been determined by authors who discuss a series of humorous examples, limited in number and in variation and sometimes chosen to fit into their theories. I will now present some of the more operational definitions within this branch. Chapman and Foot, two experimental social psychologists, defined incongruity as “a conflict between what is expected and what actually occurs in the joke” (1976: 12). On the one hand it is evident that this is a purely psychological definition (“conflict”, “expectations”); on the other, the definition implies that “expectations”, if they do not already exist in someone’s mind (in memory), must be created by a communicative stimulus to be, then, “countered” by a similar act of communication. It is this path that language-oriented researchers such as Kiken (1977) and Raskin (1985) implicitly followed. More specifically, they independently made quite similar attempts to pinpoint, for Modern English, the linguistic markers which carry the conflict (the incongruity) or, in more common semantic terms, the opposition. Unlike rather rough semantic explanations (Nash 1985, for example), they both refine their analysis to the level of semes. The following examples will make this clear:

Two dog owners are having a conversation: --Can you imagine, my Astor goes out for the paper on his own! --I know, my Rex told me about it yesterday (Kiken 1977: 45)

Kiken points to the seme [+human] of “to tell” and the seme [-human] of “dog” which are, as he calls it, “jammed” in the joke, this jamming being in fact the semic counterpart of the notion of incongruity and entirely responsible for the

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humour caused. A similar though more refined theory is set up by Raskin (1985) 6:

An English bishop received the following note from the vicar of a village in his diocese: “Milord, I regret to inform you of my wife’s death. Can you possibly send me a substitute for the weekend?” (1985: 106)

Due to its lack of referential precision, “substitute” can correspond to “vicar’s substitute” as well as to “wife’s substitute”. The first interpretation would then definitely have some connotative seme as [-sexual], the other one suggesting a rather [+sexual] connotation. Raskin integrates this semic analysis in a theory of script-oppositeness.7 Both scholars eventually propose a typology of incongruity based on the semic dichotomies they have found in their corpus.8 Raskin, for instance, induces the next, incomplete and further analysable series: [±good], [±alive], [±obscene], [±rich] (1985: 114)9 — where the [±sexual] opposition of the “vicar example” can be considered as a case of [±obscene]. Given the fact that their analyses consider incongruity to be the only factor involved in humour, their proposals can in a way be seen as typologies of humour. But while I will not criticize this premise for the moment, there remains an uncomfortable gap between theoretical constructions and humour experience. Regarding Raskin’s theory, which is undoubtedly the best one in the field, I have for the present purposes one critical remark.

It concerns the usefulness of his manner of representation for my aims. Even if Raskin does integrate Pragmatics in his theory, his approach is not “fully” pragmatic. His representational model of incongruity (or script-oppositeness) is ambiguous in this respect: first it brings in the complex script theories, but in one and the same movement it formalizes the specific findings into semic dichotomies, i.e. into purely semantic and highly abstract categories. My goal is not to describe humour semantically but to present a discourse analysis, and therefore it is inappropriate to account for full-fledged meaning

6 Refined in Raskin and Attardo (1991). 7 “Script” is to be understood here as “a large chunk of semantic information

surrounding [a] word or evoked by it” (Raskin 1985: 81). 8 Raskin does attack a notion of incongruity which is however different from the one

proposed by Chapman and Foot. In fact, I find that their definition of incongruity comes very close to what Raskin calls script-oppositeness. I believe that this oppositeness can be interpreted as a way to refine, in semantic terms, Chapman and Foot’s definition of incongruity. This belief is strengthened by similar views appearing in the discussion at the end of Raskin and Attardo (1991).

9 Raskin does not use the plus or minus sign but his categories are comparably dichotomic.

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(co(n)text, reference, semantic disambiguation and completeness, illocutionary force, etc.) in formalizing procedures. If we conceive of incongruity as a contradiction of cognitive schemes, as I will do in 2.1., we can see more clearly some domains of “oppositeness” that Raskin’s model does not cover. A discursive description of humour mechanisms cannot immediately reduce cognition and meaning to semes. 1.2. Superiority Superiority may in very broad terms be defined as “a ‘reinforcement’ or happiness increment” and a “heightened self-esteem” (La Fave, Haddad and Maesen 1976: 86). At first glance, this principle causes fewer problems than that of incongruity. Superiority defined “in this way” is to begin with a great deal easier to grasp by intuition than the other concept. If incongruity represents the more obscure, “black box”-like, cognitive aspect of humour, superiority highlights its very visible social functioning: being superior is always being superior-to-someone.

From introspection and literature we can already deduce that the causes of this feeling can be various. First, a lot will depend on the circumstances individuals find themselves in. Mulkay talks about the “emotional climate” (1988: 46), Freud refers to a stimulating “cheerful mood” (quoted by Raskin 1985: 12). Secondly, as we have seen previously, a great deal of humour involves problem solving. Jokes will often present incongruities which still need to be “explained” in one way or another; the understanding demands an effort, any failure of perception is easily noticed and increases the implicit social pressure.10 Finally, one can relate superiority to direct aggression. Here, we touch on aggressive humour in the sense of “laughing at”. Sarcastic irony, where a victim is explicitly targeted, is normally considered as an example of this. In section 2.2., I will further develop this typology from our corpus. Once again there is no one-to-one correspondence between superiority feelings and humour. While I am able to show further on that every instance of humour bears a moment of superiority, it is not true that the latter principle or concept provokes only laughter. Superiority is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for humour. After scoring, the soccer-player undoubtedly undergoes 10 It is very possible not to understand a joke, and this incomprehension is perhaps

socially more visible than other comprehension failures. We all know the fear of not understanding a joke. Some jokes are even inspired by it: a whole group, except for one person, knows that the incongruity at the end is not really a “punchline”. The unknowing person starts to laugh anyway, because everybody in the conspiracy does so, and his/her laughter is reason enough for the others to laugh at his/her vanity, at his/her unwillingness to experience the superiority of the others.

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an increase of self-esteem and happiness but almost never starts to laugh immediately. There is more involved in humour than superiority and it is this incompleteness of the concept of humour which I will try to fill out by a larger number of examples. 1.3. Interaction I hold that it is impossible to offer a satisfactory explanation of the field of humour by means of one of the two main principles alone. I shall prove this step by step in my own analysis. Right now, one short glance at Kiken’s and Raskin’s previously mentioned examples may be sufficient. The authors analysed them exclusively in terms of incongruity. However, the notion of superiority gives the humour some important new dimensions. The joke about the dog owners, for instance, has some undeniable cues of humour that create the right setting. The format of the beginning (“Two dog owners…”) introduces, in a way which is typical of jokes, elements that tell the listener “laughter” will be the appropriate reaction. This relates both to Freud’s cheerful mood and to the appropriate perception of what will be told; it relates to social conditioning. Semantically, the cliché of dog owners having a chat (and bluffing) can be interpreted as a ridiculous stereotype (see my section on superiority). Raskin’s joke about the vicar involves some inferential competence (social pressure on the cognitive capacities of the hearer as an element, again, of superiority strategies). In short, the field of humour consists at least of two basic explanatory subdomains. 2. Articulating the field of humour In the previous sections, I hope to have clearly marked some weaknesses of many descriptions of humour. In what follows, I propose an interactional incongruity-superiority framework which I believe reduces underdetermin-ation. It is induced from all instances of humour I have discovered in two case studies, the films The Naked Gun and A Fish Called Wanda, and in occasional complementary examples.11 Superiority and incongruity, and the respective subcategories I shall propose, must be interpreted as factors of humour rather than as essentialist boxes into which all instances can be put. Nevertheless, sections 2.1. and 2.2. present, for the sake of clarity, my concepts in a rather isolating mode, using

11 The Naked Gun, 1988, Zucker, Zucker and Abrahams; A Fish Called Wanda, 1988,

Cleese.

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somewhat prototypical examples. While talking about one category, linguistic incongruities for instance, I will only briefly indicate other elements, i.e. the significance of these linguistic schemes for social or aesthetic cognition and for superiority. Section 3 shows how a refined and explicit ST-TT comparison is made possible when the various branches of my descriptive device are combined. 2.1. Types of incongruity How can I now, as proposed above, base my typology of incongruity (incongruous humour) on full-fledged meaning? First of all, I have to represent that “meaning” in a more detectable way. That is why I would like to introduce the notion of cognitive scheme, which I define as “every mental construction a human possesses to relate and, thus, to give meaning to or interpret stimuli from the outside world”.12 It is a way of representing interiorized, interpreted reality. Smoke is not just smoke, it may be a sign of fire. Airport means planes. Dancing means music. Nixon stands for corruption. But also more evident and less explicit constructions: our planet implies gravity; bricks are not food for humans. The cognitive schemes constitute the constructions a person has learned to use in order to cope with the world he or she lives in.13

Incongruity is, in this perspective, a parasitic notion: if the cognitive 12 See, among others, Minsky (1975), Schank and Abelson (1977), Johnson-Laird

(1983) for an introduction to the notions of “frame”, “scenario”, “scheme”, “script”, or “mental model”.

13 I will not focus in this article on the question whether the meaning-giving structure I call “scheme” draws back on direct conventional links or on some kind of inferential process or on both. Nor will I differentiate between “norms” and “cognition”, as Luhmann (1995) does. From my point of view, the following terms all relate to what I generically call a “scheme”: association, induction, deduction, analogy, metaphor, convention, intention, scenario, inference, belief, bridging, story, protocol, grammar, maxim, guideline, principle, plot, situation model, script, scene, presuppositions, logic, felicity conditions, encyclopaedic knowledge, general background knowledge, rule, norm, conditioning, common sense, expectation, etc. This list can include everything that helps us represent and explain the meanings we give. In this respect, Artificial Intelligence has already learned that the most obvious and implicit knowledge patterns are very often also the most crucial ones. This “melting pot” of useful concepts does not imply that I deny the relevance of subtle technical distinctions between, e.g., scripts, stories, goals and schemata, as they have been made (for example by Abelson 1981 and Mandler 1984). Rather, at this stage of my research and for the present purpose, which is rendering humour describable, it seems wiser and possible to skip the whole issue: I merely hope to show that my general use of the scheme concept functions coherently as a tool.

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scheme constructs expectations (meanings)14 people entertain as a result of certain stimuli, then the incongruity can be considered as a contradiction of the cognitive scheme; in Wittgensteinian terms, as a rule that has not been followed.15 In this way, the mapping of cognitive schemes can indirectly serve as a descriptive and explanatory typology of incongruous humour. The above definitions make it easier to see some incongruities that Raskin’s theory (1985) does not cover. Quite apart from purely visual incongruities, an exclusively phonetic phenomenon can for instance be “perverted” in a meaningful way without direct bearing on locution (see 2.1.1. and 2.1.2.); or (film-)narrative structures, where language and image interact, can create inferential activities which may be exploited (see 2.1.3.). Longer texts can more easily exploit macrolevel patterns, for instance the knowledge people have about cultural genres (see 2.1.4.). Finally, one remark on the idiosyncratic nature of humour perception and, thus, of my approach. A stimulus can, along the lines of mental schemes, always yield different interpretations. A priori anything can be a sign of anything (Peirce’s “infinite semiosis”). Even if we deal here with strongly conventionalized communication, mainstream film comedy, naming the respective types of humour we encounter will turn out to be a border-crossing activity. This is because a good typology of humour would have to be a good typology of everyday cognition. Even if mass media probably aim at a very specific knowledge core, I cannot pretend to map this knowledge in an Archimedean way and the following “mapping” will certainly be based on some institutionalized categories in the Western world.16 In other words, my division is functional: it is applied to a filmic study object and it remains to be seen to what degree it can be adapted to other objects (such as the theatre or the novel). A lot will probably depend on the position of, for example, the novel in

14 Remember Chapman and Foot’s definition of incongruity: “[...] a conflict between

what is expected and what actually occurs in the joke” (1976: 12; emphasis added). 15 This is probably a more accurate account of what has sometimes been called the

“subversive” nature of humour. Note, however, that the idea of subversion goes far beyond “not following a rule”, for it is a social and “active” interpretation of it. The non-application of a rule is indeed subject to other, completely different “passive” interpretations, e.g. “stupidity”, “innocent playfulness” or “ridiculousness”. See below.

16 “Il y a par exemple des énoncés [mutatis mutandis cognitive schemes] qui se donnent [...] comme relevant de l’économie politique, ou de la biologie, ou de la psychopathologie [...]. Qu’est-ce que donc que la médecine, la grammaire, l’économie politique?” (Foucault 1969: 44-45) “[Sont-elles], dans leur individualité acceptée et quasi institutionnelle, l’effet de surface d’unités plus consistantes [?] Je n’accepterai les ensembles que l’histoire me propose que pour les mettre aussitôt en question; [...]” (Foucault 1969: 38).

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question within the social and cultural (sub)systems.17 2.1.1. Linguistic incongruities We all have some knowledge of what “normal language” is supposed to be. The phenomena I describe here as “linguistic incongruities” stand to some degree in opposition to these normal and, when rendered explicit, very trivial schemes. Mostly, the incongruous language will be subject to further interpretation, since it can generate social or “natural” incongruities (see below). Though it is important to insist again upon their factorial value, I will now present some of them in an isolating way, as if the linguistic layer of the examples were the only strange element involved. On a formal, phonetical level, we expect language to be fluid and as economical as possible. In this respect, stuttering can be regarded as an incongruity. Quite often, as in A Fish Called Wanda, stutterers appear in comedies and jokes. Evidently, if this articulatory problem is always different from the standard, it is not necessarily humorous by the same token. Here already, elements of superiority could help us out of explanatory troubles: cueing (“inoffensive and fictive comedy”), stereotyping (“the stutterer”), irony (through exaggerated imitation) and normalization processes may be built on stuttering, and make the pronunciation deficiency funny. Wanda, Otto’s girlfriend, gets orgasms when men start talking foreign languages. As a result, Otto addresses her in Italian. However, his Italian is lexically as well as syntactically very poor. Undoubtedly, a person who knows some Italian has a slightly different idea of what this language is like, i.e. much more complex, etc. Otto’s command of Italian breaks with our schemes:

OTTO: Un osso buco milanese con piselli, melanzane parmigiana con spinacio. Dov’ è la farmacia? Dov’ è la fontana di Trevi? Mozzarella, parmigiana, gorgonzola!

Here again, an exclusively incongruity-based analysis will not do. Superiority elements are, in short, the ridiculing of what we could call the “Assimil or Linguaphone language learning method”: how to order this, how to find that. Most of the time, it appears impossible to separate, even for expository reasons, form and meaning of a linguistic sign. Firstly, it is well-known that a linguistic form can, by its form, add meaning to its merely referential signification. In the next sequence, the signifiers do not just refer to feelings of regret but add sociolinguistic value to the scene. Otto, an American lunatic, threatens Leach, a British lawyer who likes Otto’s girlfriend, by hanging the 17 As such, my analysis does not obey to any supposedly necessary hierarchical order

of concepts, as happens in the taxonomy proposed by Raskin and Attardo (1991).

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latter head down outside the window. OTTO: You’re really sorry? LEACH: I’m really sorry. I apologize unreservedly. OTTO: You take it back? LEACH: I do. I offer you a complete and utter retraction. The imputation was totally without basis. In fact, it was in no way a fair comment and was motivated purely by malice and I deeply regret any distress that my comments may have caused you and your family and thereby undertake not to repeat any such slander at any time in the future.

Leach does apologize but there is more at stake: the situation, a complex stimulus created by images and language, does not require or even allow formal and juridical language forms. Cognitive schemes tell us so. Leach undoubtedly breaks this convention. Parallel to this, we expect his intonation and language register to be slightly more emotional in this dangerous situation. Again, our intuitions are countered. Note that superiority would once more deepen the description by accentuating the stereotype of British upper-class language behaviour. Cognitive schemes can refer precisely to the interactional relation between signifier and signified in natural languages. The basic rule we expect in this matter is a one-to-one correspondence — because that is what words are for, in common sense: “for each thing, a word”. Homonymy and, in oral speech, paronymy are transgressions of this scheme. In The Naked Gun, Jane Spencer, a blonde stupid vamp, has cooked for her newfound love Frank Drebin. She would like to know how he likes her cuisine:

JANE: How is your....meat? “Meat” refers both to the meat on Drebin’s plate and to Drebin’s sex. Here, as in the other cases, the humorous potential is far from fully explained once we have detected the linguistic incongruity of wordplay or referential vagueness — the frontier between these phenomena is not clear-cut. All homonymy-based incongruity will have to be supplemented by other criteria like institutionalization and problem solving (see below). We can conclude that the explanatory insufficiency of linguistic incongruity is general but that this does not mean the detected incongruities are unimportant: they are often the bases on which other mechanisms will operate.

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2.1.2. Pragmatic incongruities These anomalies are defined as elements which receive their humorous charge by breaking cognitive schemes concerning the actual use of language. Grice’s Maxims of Conversation18 are by far the most general pragmatic schemes to be transgressed, and are commonly accepted as a very powerful instrument for investigation into humour and irony. It was Grice himself who showed how flouting a maxim may lead to irony (1989: 34); for a thorough and critical application in the field of “laugh stories”, see Van Raemdonck (1986). Delabastita (1990) was right to remark that there exists in humour a tendency to “cue” that the author is aware of the broken rule; Grice says in this respect that flouting has to be “blatant”. In our case, the cueing is made obvious by the “blatantly” comic nature of the films.

The Maxim of Quantity, for instance, demands that the normal utterance be informative. By this rationale, Jane Spencer is breaking a law when she warns Drebin, cop, protagonist and Jane’s lover:

JANE (referring to “bad guy” Ludwig): He’s got a gun! Indeed, the images show there is no doubt whatsoever that the policeman himself and everyone else notices she is threatened by Ludwig’s Sten gun. Notice again the superiority effects: the dumb blonde shows she is unable even to be informative. In another example, Grice’s Maxim of Quality, which asks for truthfulness, is not obeyed. At a certain stage in the picture, a lorry transporting a missile crashes a factory where fireworks are manufactured. The spectacular consequences attract crowds of people. Still, Drebin tries to convince them:

DREBIN: All right, hold on. Nothing to see here. Please disperse. Nothing to see here, please.19

18 Grice (1975 and 1989) made an attempt to explicitate the hidden logics of “normal”

conversation. He finally came to four principles (“Maxims”) which may play a role in the interpretation and production of utterances. These Maxims, which together constitute “The Cooperative Principle”, guide the participants in understanding the implicit meanings (“Conversational Implicatures”) beyond the explicit ones: they help infer the speaker’s possible intention. Grice’s Cooperative Principle has been thoroughly criticized. Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) concept of “Relevance” covers in a more integrated (less atomizing) way the different Gricean Maxims. Moreover, Relevance is no longer a principle only of serious speech but also explains ironic communication. Nevertheless, in this article I preferred not to let go of the Maxims in our description: in practice, they have proven to be of more interpretative power than Relevance.

19 If this scene were not part of comedy, it would be interpreted as a lie. As a matter of fact, it is the cueing that makes the difference between funny/blatant transgressions

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Still another Maxim of language use is blatantly broken in what I found useful to call “binary discourse”, namely that of Manner, stipulating that one should “avoid obscurity of expression [and] avoid ambiguity” (Grice 1989: 27). Binary discourse refers to ambiguous language phenomena that can rest on “concrete” semantic mechanisms like homonymy or paronymy (wordplay or punning) and, on the other hand, on the semantic “emptiness” of signifiers (called “punoids” in Delabastita 1990). As we have seen in the previous section, these linguistic systems can be perceived by common sense as unwanted. Also, intended binary language use is exceptional and mostly incongruous. The more “static” kind of wordplay will be addressed later in the section on institutional humour; although we will keep for the time being to punoids, the following analyses also hold for the more creative types of wordplay. Punoids refer to binary discourse created by referential equivocality, referential vagueness or illocutionary ambiguity20, i.e. the possible blind spots of utterances. The next dialogue, taken from a sequence when Drebin and Jane are enjoying a romantic dinner, presents speech act ambiguity and referential equivocality. Jane has just asked what he thinks about the meat.

DREBIN: Mmmm...interesting. Almost as interesting as the photographs I saw today. JANE: I was young, I needed the work.

From the context, the audience understands Drebin is talking about pictures of the boat where his friend, Nordberg, was almost killed; hence, Drebin is purely informing Jane. However, the latter’s reaction implies that she thinks the lieutenant found pictures of her pornographic (?) past and considers his utterance an ironic reproach. The viewer processes Drebin’s utterance according to the most available script or frame (“the boat-frame”); logically, he or she is first puzzled by Jane’s incongruous reaction but finally resolves the problem by reprocessing “the photographs” via the implicit “porn-frame”. Many other factors play a role in this subtle reframing procedure (Jane is again

and the deceitful/hidden violations of Quality. Here, Drebin fails to hide his lie, and consequently makes fun of himself.

20 Referential equivocality arises from the fact that for reasons of economy the word “leg”, for example, can refer to a broken, extended or bent leg. Referential vagueness concerns personal, temporal and local deixis in words like “you”, “yesterday” and “there”. The term “illocutionary ambiguity” stems from Austin’s Speech Act Theory (1980: 98-101) and is well explained by Kempson (quoted in Delabastita 1990: 134): the utterance “There are four large bulls in that field”, pronounced by a farmer, can be interpreted as a warning, information, bluff or a threat. Along the same line, most sentences can be used to do many different things according to the pragmatic setting (context, intonation, relevance, etc.).

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stereotyped, the understanders’ happiness increases). However, in the present section I am stressing the pragmatic incongruities: ordinary cognitive processing of utterances, along frequent intratextual reference schemes, is countered by an incongruous utterance that demands a less obvious reframing. Below (2.1.3.), I will give an example of referential vagueness. Besides the general Maxims related to overall language use, more specific types of utterances often imply more particular cognitive schemes concerning their use. This is the case for metaphor, to which several pragmatic rules seem to be attached. A metaphor (or any comparison) formally brings together two concepts suggesting that a semantic similarity exists between them. This is a guideline we follow when we compare things, i.e. an interiorized scheme. Incongruity can, in this context, come from an absence of common seme(s) between the notions. In the next example, the so-called common ground or tertium comparationis is indeed lacking. Drebin thinks Jane has tried to set up an attempt on his life:

JANE: Frank, what’s wrong? DREBIN: A lot of things, sweetie pie. The little meeting that turned into a bigger booze session with bullets all set up by someone who’s been playing me like a violin on the annual saps convention.

True, on the level of signifiers Jane can “play Drebin” like she can “play a violin on the annual saps convention”, but is there really a metaphorical similarity between these two meanings of the signifier “play”? A second well-known rule with regard to comparison use tells us that a continued or complex metaphor does not accept an arbitrary mixture of metaphors (Van Gorp 1986: 245). So when Drebin is threatening Ludwig in the next passage, he is seriously trespassing on the dangerous territory of incongruous metaphor use:

DREBIN: It’s way past time we talked. The gloves are off. I’m playing a hard ball Ludwig. It’s fourth and fifteen and you’re looking at a full court press.

The “gloves” refer to martial arts, the “hard ball” comes from baseball, “fourth and fifteen” is American football terminology and it is usually in basketball that one can look at a “full court press”. A third type of incongruous metaphor plays on the scheme that normal comparisons ought to be either stereotyped (i.e. fixed) or “revealing” — in the case of “new-found” comparisons (see Van Gorp 1986: 248). The following monologue intérieur of Drebin, about a murder attempt on one of his colleagues, displays a “new” but rather trivial (not revealing) comparison:

DREBIN: The attempt on Nordberg’s life left me shaken and disturbed. And all the questions kept coming over and over again like bubbles in a glass of club soda.

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It is certain he had “many” questions, but why does he have to refer to this far-fetched image of bubbles in a glass of club soda? Far-fetched, since it does not reveal more than the word “many”. A final example of a still different pragmatic nature plays on a commonly known inventory of fixed language use.

VOICE IN A LOUDSPEAKER: Please disperse, please disperse. There’s nothing for you to see here. Keep moving.

One expects an incident that attracts many curious spectators; how else could they disperse? It is surprising, then, that the images of the scene in The Naked Gun show no more than two or three interested people. A stereotypical utterance immediately evokes an interpretation; the sentence is in fact conventionally “precontextualized”. 2.1.3. Narrative incongruities Humour is a complex thing and thus it would be erroneous to try and separate clear-cut categories. We have discovered how semantics and pragmatics may interact, how less expected language patterns open horizons for less obvious language use; I will now demonstrate how cognitive schemes on the level of image interpretation interact with pragmatic phenomena like referential vagueness. Indeed, in film understanding it is the film itself which, together with cognitive schemes stored in memory, constitutes the main context for the interpretation of dialogues.

After having beaten up in Beirut all “the world’s bad guys” (Amin Dada, Khomeiny, Gadaffi,...), Drebin arrives home at an American airport. A large number of people and the gathered press are waiting for him:

JOURNALIST 1: It’s a great day for America... JOURNALIST 2: There he is!! (image of Drebin coming of the stairs of the plane) (image of a woman with roses coming up the stairs) DREBIN: No, no flowers thank you. — And you came down here to get the hot story didn’t you. Pictures of me to set in your lousy newspapers. [...] Do any of you understand how a man can hurt inside?

Our interpretation schemes, applied to the words and images of the film, suggest until now a meaning that can be paraphrased as follows: Drebin is the hero of the day because he has beaten the bad guys; Drebin himself is also convinced that the public is there for him but, in a position of assumed superiority, gets angry. Only then the painful and ironic “reality” becomes clear, both for Drebin and the audience: images and a comment by Ed, another

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colleague of Drebin’s, explicitly show that Weird Al Yankovic (a pop artist) is the actual hero of the day. The “there” and “he” from the second journalist referred in fact to Yankovic. These semantically empty “shifters” (referential vagueness) permitted the binary interpretation and trigger laughter. The reader may notice I wrote “ironic” reality. Indeed, Drebin is victimized, which may be accounted for in terms of superiority. But more on this later. 2.1.4. Intertextual incongruities (or “parody”) The multilayered nature of humour undermines our isolating hypostasis. Intertextual incongruities are another case in point, for they are “parasites” by their very nature; parasites on the other types of incongruity. As such, they cannot be explained without referring to other categories. Let us consider the next example, in which Jane, hypnotized by the mean Ludwig, wants to shoot Drebin. The drama takes place in a football stadium and can be followed by an immense crowd on a huge screen.

JANE: I must kill Frank Drebin. I must kill Frank Drebin. DREBIN: No no. Don’t shoot. Jane, it’s me. Funny face. JANE: I must kill Frank Drebin. DREBIN: You love Frank Drebin. And Frank Drebin loves you. Jane, listen to me: if you don’t love me, than you may as well pull that trigger, because, without you, I wouldn’t wanna live anyway. I finally found someone I can love, good clean love, without utensils. JANE: I must kill Frank Drebin. DREBIN: It’s a topsy-turvy world, Jane. Maybe the problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans but, this is our hill and these are our beans. Jane, since I met you I have noticed things which I never knew they were there before: birds singing, dew glistering on a newly formed leaf, stoplights. JANE: I must kill... DREBIN: Jane, this morning, I bought something for you. This is not very much ah, but pretty good for an honest policeman’s salary. It’s an engagement ring. I would have given it to you earlier but, I wanted to wait until we were alone. JANE: I... DREBIN: I love you Jane. JANE: Frank!

A recurrent pattern of parody is the remarkably stressed difference between “allusive” and “transgressive” discursive elements, which I have represented in italics and underlined respectively. This well-known mechanism connects with

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incongruity as I have defined it. Allusive elements tend to recall certain discursive schemes that are stored in our memory; transgressive periods break with these evoked structures. Moreover, the structural use of hyperbole in the allusive parts of intertextual incongruity is important here. By being the same in nature but different in degree, hyperboles at the same time evoke and break certain rules. They are recognizable as, yet not fully compatible with, the target genre. In our fragment the hyperbole refers to romantic film scenes: pathos, drama with a happy end, a sort of a Natureingang (“...birds singing…”). On the other hand, periods of “pure” transgression can be based on various principles, as long as they do not match with the romantic script: reference to sadomasochistic details (“utensils”), total irrelevance of the argumentation (“our hill”, “our beans”), absurd reframing (“hill” and “beans” taken literally)21, parodic elements excluded from the Natureingang-script (“stoplights”), total lack of truthfulness (“alone”). And see what happens: these transgressions belong initially, so to speak, to other semantic domains.

First, none of them accords with Gricean Maxims22 or fits into the fixed romantic discourse (all pragmatic incongruities). And at the same time, the passage already refers to the next category of social incongruities. How can this semiosis from “the cultural/textual” to “the social” take place? Pierre Bourdieu’s oeuvre empirically demonstrated how the cultural field is divided into many subsystems (“champs”, as he calls them), relatable to different groups of people. Applying Bourdieu’s insights to our domain, one could for instance imagine an audience which identifies with soap series like The Bold and the Beautiful and another one which does so with comedy like Monty Python or A Fish Called Wanda. It might well be that the soap conventions (the generic and intertextual schemes) of the former series are “normal” for its public but “incongruous” in the system of the watcher of A Fish Called Wanda. This idea is easy to grasp while observing reactions of some intellectuals towards series such as The Bold and the Beautiful: in a sort of camp attitude they look at it in order to laugh at it23. If one laughs at the cultural products a

21 The fragment also refers to the film classic Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943):

“Rick (to Ilsa): It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world”. This is another kind of intertextuality which is less harmful since it does not use hyperboles. It only appeals to problem solving abilities (see my section on superiority).

22 The passages “utensils” and “stoplights” are irrelevant; “our hill” bears no information; “alone” does not care about Quality.

23 This example is not purely hypothetical. The camp strategy mentioned is attested among many young Flemish people I know, most of whom enjoyed higher education. A relation between education and aesthetic preferences has been shown by Bourdieu. Let it be clear, however, that this relation should not be seen as intrinsic: education does not tell us the truth about aesthetics; rather, it implicitly

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given social group identifies with, one laughs in fact, in a pars pro toto movement, at this particular group of people — in our particular case the romantic “softies”. More and more we enter the realm of social incongruity and the possibilities it opens for clearly focussed superiority feelings. 2.1.5. Social incongruities (or “satire”) The cognitive schemes involved in satire regulate lifestyles in society. Some may be more or less general, others will be applicable to more particular groups or/and situations. In this respect, Bourdieu (for example 1979) laid bare different corpora of schemes that identify and determine what he called people’s habitus, their “social practices”, and that constitute the common doxic core of the group to which they belong. In a commercial product like The Naked Gun, it is likely that the authors would want to break with social conventions shared or known by as many kinds of habitus (groups) as possible.24

In some situations, rules are respected by almost everybody. Such situation-bound schemes share a lot with protocol. As in our next example, people in the public space often create the situation. During an official press conference announcing a visit of the Queen of England, Drebin transgresses a very strict rule of protocol: even those negative opinions shared by almost an entire group of people are not to be openly expressed at official occasions.

DREBIN: Protecting the safety of the Queen is a task that’s gladly accepted by Police Squad. For however silly the idea of a Queen might be to us, as Americans we must be considerate and gracious hosts.

The situation as well as the people involved call for the reinforcement of the politeness-rule as present in Western societies25. Finally, these incongruities also offer possibilities for superiority feelings to appear. Both the Queen and Drebin can be considered the “butt of the joke”, the former for being “a silly

inculcates a dominant doxa.

24 My reference to Bourdieu does not imply that I fully accept his rather deterministic modalities of taste orientation. I do, however, see Bourdieu (1978) as a good illustration of empirical and methodical relatability of tastes and groups.

25 One could also term the incongruity “pragmatic”. According to Akmajian, Demers and Harnish (1988: 390-423), “politeness” is a pragmatic Conversational Presumption just like the Gricean Maxims, “morality” and “sequencing” (i.e. respecting the different “stages” in a conversation); see also Leech (1980: 79-118) and Brown and Levinson (1978). Leech would probably argue that, unlike Drebin, people would normally not tell the truth since “the maintenance of friendly, peaceful human relations” is prior to the Maxim of Quality (1980: 117).

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idea”, the latter for ignoring elementary social habits. Even the attending American officials visibly feel embarrassed about their compatriot’s behaviour. 2.1.6. “Natural” incongruities What is natural? This is a question I do not wish to answer. The nature-nurture question is a never-ending scholarly debate in many academic fields. Nonetheless, in ordinary thinking, the “natural” is an important idea. Often, it goes even far beyond what contemporary science would accept as determined by nature. I take a practical stance: what I call “natural” here is what the perceiver of humour would acknowledge as “proven under all circumstances”. This acknowledgement may but need not be based on explicit science. When the lawyer hangs outside a window (see 2.1.1.), every normal human being is aware in some way of the danger of gravity26. But Newton can in fact be left aside. The prestige, i.e. the strength, of claims present in natural sciences, and symptomatically formulated as “laws”, cannot be maintained in many other disciplines. Nevertheless, on the level of common perception by individuals-in-life, other domains of life can build up assumptions that are almost considered as a “law”. In everyday psychology, for instance, highly dangerous situations tend to provoke panic reactions. I would guess that when Archie is hung head down by Otto, his deadpan (i.e. his “cool” reaction in an emotional situation) is considered by many cultures as a psychological incongruity. On the linguistic level, this deadpan is articulated by the (too) carefully crafted language on both the phonetical and morpho-syntactical levels. This comic scene can thus be analysed as consisting of sociolinguistic and psychological incongruities. The frontier between logic in the broad sense and empirical knowledge is fuzzy. In the next example of logical incongruity, experience and reasoning are closely related. Ludwig threatens Jane with a gun in an attempt to keep off Drebin. The lieutenant reacts by pointing in turn at somebody unknown to either himself or the crook and replies:

DREBIN: Two can play at that game! Drebin does not understand the subtle rules of the cost-benefit game: Ludwig would not win the unknown person by liberating and losing Jane and does not feel threatened. Psychology and logic are woven together and transgressed by the protagonist.

26 This incongruity is much exploited in cartoons.

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2.2. Types of superiority I have first analysed incongruity in extenso and I have already pointed out how superiority is often closely linked to it. In this section I will briefly discuss some instances of superiority which have not yet come into play in previous examples and try to relate them to what we already know about superiority. As Attardo points out, the concept of superiority is a social phenomenon, whereas incongruity could be termed cognitive (1995: 47). Also, superiority may be more easily detectable, for the actors involved in humour undergo and feel it. However, “uncognitive” social interaction is as unthinkable as “unsocialized” cognition. It follows for the poetics of humour that superiority is as necessary a concept as incongruity. 2.2.1. “Negative” superiority “Negative” means here that a target can clearly be identified: a so-called “butt of the joke”. This is not the case in what we may call positive superiority (see below). Undoubtedly, one of the paradigm cases of tendentious or aggressive humour is (verbal) irony — although it is definitely not the only case: Otto speaking Italian forms an obvious target for the audience in a clear example of unironic aggressive humour. In this respect, Hutcheon correctly observes that the “humour/irony” problem is two-directional; that not all humour can be called ironic but that, also, “not all ironies are amusing […] — though some are” (1995: 25-26). To my knowledge, literature on this double delimitation problem is rather poor, since scholars deal either with humour or with irony and attempts to integrate both into one theory — or even to thematize the demarcation problem — are rare. Kaufer (1983: 455-462), for example, discusses irony as an “aesthetic opposition” between two “sets”. Although his descriptions are very revealing, they could easily be used for a variety of non-ironic humour. In Van Besien’s (1995) otherwise excellent summary on irony research, hardly any reference is made to humour and, vice versa, Attardo (1995) does not clearly position irony within the theories of humour he discusses.27 27 In fact, the irony-humour distinction is by no means the only delimitation problem.

Scholars also encounter difficulties in their attempts to differentiate between verbal irony, parody and satire (see Rossen-Knill and Henry 1997: 747-749). One could indeed argue that the scenarist of The Naked Gun was ironic when he/she conceived the parodic scene of Drebin and Jane in the football arena; and that the script of A Fish Called Wanda is ironic, instead of satirical, when Leach stays polite under all circumstances. As I hope to have demonstrated, these blurred boundaries are the result of (infinite) semiosis. Formally similar incongruities can be subject to

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Nevertheless, I believe that at least one question can be answered: why irony may be humorous. This is the question of which characteristics are shared by irony and humour. I therefore refer to Van Besien’s Ironie als Parasitaire Taalhandeling (“Irony as a Parasitic Speech Act”; 1995), which has excellently brought together the main elements from most well-known irony researchers28, and I will try to show which items of the irony analyses are not strictly ironic, in the sense that they are characteristic of aggressive humour in general. Van Besien characterizes verbal irony not only on the locutionary level but also on the illocutionary and perlocutionary ones. As such, irony is not only (1) an incongruity, an opposition or transgression of certain communicative norms and principles (see Grice and my section on pragmatic incongruities), it is also (2) an evaluative speech act (3) creating, as far as research goes, two possible effects: ridiculing someone/something (the target) or gaining sympathy (mostly with the audience). The description shows that irony not only entails more social and superiority-based aspects (sympathy or aggression through evaluation), but also lives off pragmatic incongruities. Moreover, the various roles, players and communicators Van Besien detected in irony can often be found in humour as well. The actors involved in irony are, mutatis mutandis, present in aggressive humour in general: ironist (or humorist), target and public.29 In short, irony can be humorous because it is based, as most aggressive humour, on in-group sympathy, out-group targets, untruthful behaviour and the unsaid.

The clearest examples of ironic humour can be found in A Fish Called Wanda, as in the next fragment when Leach, the lawyer who fancies Otto’s girlfriend Wanda, is reacting to Otto’s statement that Americans are “winners”.

LEACH (to Otto): Winners! Like North Vietnam!

No need to explain how many difficulties the US encountered in coping with this war. Leach affirms (“!”) Otto’s assumption that they are winners but clearly means the opposite. There is an opposition between Leach’s assertion and historical reality (it is the Americans who were beaten by the North

culturally different interpretations. Being ironic about artistic genres is parodic; when irony and parody are relatable to social groups, they are satirical.

28 Knox, Muecke, Booth, Kaufer, Fowler, Tanaka, Clark and Gerrig, Groupe µ, Kreuz, Long and Church, Groeben, Seemann and Drinkmann, Grice, Leech and Sperber and Wilson.

29 For fictional humour, we should in fact complement this phenomenology with a narratological distinction: extra- vs. intradiegetical. Certainly, if we compare everyday humour with film humour, we notice there is always “a communicative situation in the plot, between the characters”, mimicking everyday life. However, on top of that comes “the communication of the plot” between author(s) and audience. As a result, more persons can assume the three roles.

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Vietnamese). This flouting of the Gricean Maxim of Quality leads probably Otto and certainly the audience to construe the evaluative illocution of Leach’s words, strengthening in this way possible in-group/target feelings.

Hutcheon’s second question, about what differentiates ironic from unironic humour, is to my knowledge still unsolved and begs for more investigation: it is not the presence of a target, since Otto speaking Italian forms a clear target for the audience, yet nobody would find any irony here; it is not the transgression of Grice’s Cooperative Principle as such, since Jane’s “He’s got a gun!” violates Quantity and still provokes no irony; it is not the implicature30 which creates irony, for implicature and reframing are, as I have demonstrated, part of most verbal humour; nor is it the intention or effect of ridiculing and gaining sympathy, for the same can happen through humour; nor is it, finally, the presence of an audience or an identifiable attacker. For the moment, the appreciation of irony in humour remains a largely intuitive activity that should nevertheless not be ignored. 2.2.2. “Positive” superiority: mood, cueing, problem solving,

institutionalizing One does not need to find and destroy a target in order to feel superior. The non-aggressive varieties of superiority I have encountered go back to three broad categories: problem solving, institutionalization and general circumstances. First, I would like to bring some phenomena together under the heading circumstantial superiority. Superiority stands in this general sense for the absence of inferiority/anxiety before and during the moments of humour. In turn, this concept includes two humour-generating principles that have been described before in the literature, namely good mood31 and cueing. They are related because their function regarding incongruity can be conceived of in the same terms: they guide reactions to and interpretation of intended humour. As I mentioned at the beginning, “incongruous” stimuli can indeed provoke a wide spectrum of reactions. The receiver can interpret them as “rejectable”, 30 A conversational implicature in Grice’s sense, that is, a departure from the

Cooperative Principle that triggers a search for meaning: when an utterance at first seems not to be understandable, one tries other interpretations.

31 Mulkay: “[Humour] can be converted from a comic into a tragic or purely intellectual experience, based on the same logical pattern [...] by a simple change of emotional climate” (1988: 46). Freud (quoted by Raskin): “The most favorable condition for the production of comic pleasure is a generally cheerful mood in which one is ‘inclined to laugh...’” (1985: 12). A comedy takes advantage of a self-reinforcing process: former humour creates the good mood for what comes. The denser the film, the stronger this process is.

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“ridiculous”, “meaningless”, “incredible”, “disappointing”,32 “humorous”, “dangerous”,33 “insulting”34 and so on. What circumstances do is help sift out the right one at the right moment (“humorous”). The type of interaction between our two main concepts can be explicitated as follows: circumstantial superiority functions as a general background which makes the inference “incongruity→humour” more evident. In our case, the explicit comedy label functions as a reliable cue and generally creates the right mood. The second important mental process that is not directly aggressive I propose to call humour solving. In some way, it is similar to mood and cueing, for it can bring a certain feeling of safety, this time after a possible arousal involved in confronting joke problems. Indeed, most incongruities have to be solved (reframed)35, which is not always an easy task since often very specific cognitive schemes have to be known. Humour solving involves sometimes recognizing “in-group” allusive frames. And indeed, the more particular the references of parody and satire are, the happier the public is to understand, to be a member of “the happy few”. Consider the next case:

MAYOR: Oh Drebin, I don’t want any more trouble like you had last year on the Southside, understand? That’s my policy. DREBIN: Yes, well, when I see five weirdoes dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of the park in full view of over a hundred people, I shoot the bastards, that’s my policy.

Only the people who “know their classics” may find it funny to hear the stupid Drebin repeating this genuine Dirty Harry-reply in a genuine Dirty Harry-scene. The original goes as follows:

32 See Luhmann (1995: 321ff). 33 A large number of experimental psychologists interpret laughter as a process of

increasing emotions (“arousal”) — generated by incongruity, I suppose — countered by a sudden relief (“safety”). Therefore, I incorporate the term “dangerous”. See, for example, Chapman and Foot (1976). Neuropsychology confirms this vision: when information cannot be processed at first (it is incongruous, there is a lack of relevance, etc.), a sudden comprehension causes happy feelings which can be discharged by laughter (according to André Lefevere; CETRA Research Seminar, July 1995). As I have said, in comedy, the genre (the explicit label) is an initial cue for interpretation. For a more elaborate typology of cues, see Delabastita (1990: 182).

34 For an accurate analysis of the “amusing/insulting” interpretation see Zajdman (1995: 332-333).

35 In canned jokes, for example, we expect a punchline. Norrick describes very lucidly how “shaggy dog stories” skew “our expectations [i.e. schemes] about jokes” (1986: 242). They do so by going on and on and on and on, and ending in a trivial way. Indeed, even joke schemes can be food for “meta-jokes”.

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MAYOR: Callahan [=Dirty Harry], I don’t want anymore trouble like you had last year in the Fillmore District, understand? That’s my policy. DIRTY HARRY: Yeah, well, when an adult male is chasing a female, with intent to commit rape, I shoot the bastard, that’s my policy. (Dirty Harry, 1971, Don Siegel)

Consequently, the mayor’s “explanation” takes on for the happy few understanders a parodic value, whereas for the others the sentences only prepare the revealing of a logical incongruity committed by Drebin:

MAYOR: That was a Shakespeare-in-the-Park production of Julius Caesar, you moron. You killed five actors.

Understanding irony, for instance, also demands an extra effort compared to interpreting straightforward utterances: “It’s a lovely day for a picnic!” is incongruous on a rainy day and has to be reframed in the way I just explained.36 Thus, the type of interaction between our two general concepts can be formulated as follows: incongruity creates a difficulty that can be solved, this solution causing superiority feelings (heightened self-esteem).

Finally, one extremely important mechanism of humour deserves our special attention for, unlike most instances of superiority, it tends to free itself radically from interaction with incongruity. This institutionalized humour can best be explained by means of an example. In A Fish Called Wanda Otto, the very stupid bandit who nevertheless reads Nietzsche, repeats two sentences on several occasions:

(1) OTTO: What was the middle thing? (2) OTTO: Don’t call me stupid.

The first one he uses to camouflage his total incomprehension of previously explained malicious plans from his companions. The second one is a hysterical reaction to friends calling him stupid time and time again. It would be very difficult to detect any incongruous element in either of the sentences. However, the more often these sentences are repeated, the more they trigger laughter: the audience starts recognizing them and feels happy about it. In the series ‘Allo ‘Allo this technique seems central: “you stupid old bat!”, “you stupid woman!”, “good mörning” (sic), “listen to me very well, I shall say this only once”, “it is

36 The example is Sperber and Wilson’s (1986). Psycholinguistic research argues that

the processing effort is not higher for irony since experiments show that the time for understanding irony is not longer than for normal speech processing (Gibbs and O’Brien 1991: 525-526). First, I am not convinced that time is a good measure here: time can be the same but effort distribution over time can be different (hence the arousal-relief scheme of physiology during joke comprehension). Second, it is sufficient for superiority feelings to emerge if people commonly agree and think that irony means intelligence.

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I, Leclerc”, etc., are used all through the series and increasingly provoke “Pavlovian” humour. This is reflected furthermore in the traditional and “obligatory” catchphrases that British stand-up performers (used to) repeat from time to time.37 What happens is that after a while the scenarist/comedian expects the stimulus in itself to be a sufficient reason for laughter. The message is humorous sui causa or, to use a social metaphor, humour is institutionalized or conventionalized. For anyone not familiar with the convention, there is absolutely no evident reason for the sign to create the humorous effect. The inference “incongruity→humour” has been replaced by “normality→humour”. Besides institutionalizing sentences, a film (and a fortiori a series) is capable of doing the same with persons or characters. A person can systematically be associated with a certain type of anomaly (incongruity) in such a way that the mere appearance of the person creates comical potency. Before The Naked Gun existed, the same old Drebin had already appeared in the comical police series Police Squad. Indeed, some people in the audience know what he stands for (“Drebin means fun”) and start to laugh at his mere appearance. Further, stereotypes do not necessarily have to be created inside the filmic product. Alongside “internal” institutionalization, the origins of repetitive humour can be found in a more general cultural environment. I contend that themes like “sex” or “scatology”, integrated in comedy, should not necessarily be analysed as incongruities.38 The constellation of “vertical”39 wordplay combined with “sex” seems to constitute a rather institutionalized and expectable kind of humour. Let me give an example:

JANE (to Drebin): You said we should have dinner some time. Tonight

37 Sometimes, though, incongruous elements can be detected. “You stupid old bat”, for

instance, is quite an insult for a man to make to his wife, as is the case in the series. Moreover, as Van den Bergh (1972) points out correctly, the attitude of the people is very “unnatural” and similar to repetitive robots.

38 Raskin’s comments on sexual and ethnic stereotypes (1985: 149-221) are somewhat different from mine but very instructive. He detects in many jokes stereotyping sexual or ethnic scripts (like “genital size” or “British stuffiness”) which are opposed to more normal scripts. Dolitsky (1986) criticized this analysis for not being incongruity-based, for not analysing humour as an “act of breaking away from the script”. I think Raskin could even have stressed more explicitly the non-incongruous nature of stereotypes.

39 See Delabastita (1990). “Vertical” wordplay happens when one word bears two meanings which are in a way introduced vertically — one word simultaneously evokes two meanings. “Horizontal” puns use two or more words, which must have a different place on the linear syntactical line, in order to create two meanings (e.g. JANE: Can I interest you to a nightcap? — DREBIN: No, thank you, I don’t wear them).

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became some time. I’m boiling a roast. How hot and wet... do you like it?

The romantic dinner and Jane’s intonation add to the fact that words like “hot” easily tend to suggest another, sexual, meaning (“horny”) than the anaphoric one (“very warm”).

Cultural clichés (institutionalized opinions) that are humorous suorum causa can also be exploited. Consider this idea uttered twice by Otto:

OTTO: I thought Englishmen didn’t like women. OTTO: [...] talkin’ to a lot of snotty stuck-up, intellectually inferior British faggots! Jesus, they’re uptight!40

The typicality of persons need not exclusively come from inside the series. Jane Spencer represents for example the well-known stupid blonde vamp. 3. A complex case in English, French and Spanish I hope the above analyses have already shown I do not think of humour as a simple thing. My exposition was largely affected by my wish to set out some clear marks in a wide and dazzling field. Below I present a final, relatively complex sample of a translational description in order to show that my analysis can cope with multifaceted humour as it is present in different versions of the same film. The case is that Drebin tells Jane Spencer about his dramatic experiences in love:

DREBIN: It’s the same old story: boy finds girl, girl finds boy, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girl dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year’s day. JANE: Goodyear? DREBIN: No, the worst.

This “same old love-story” does indeed ring a bell in English; word by word it may go: “boy finds girl, girl finds boy, boy loses girl”. But there the story ends, whereas Drebin goes on. The three next steps (“girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl”) do not meet the formal, discursive expectations (pragmatic incongruity). The last perverting step (“girl dies…”) even abandons the expected three-word format by being much longer, is semantically too

40 Similarly, for the French and the Dutch, “les petits Belges” are often funny symbols

of stupidity; in Great Britain the Scottish are generally considered to be the skinflints of the joke, though in Belgium the Dutch are better candidates. For a detailed analysis of ethnic stereotypes I refer to Davies (1988).

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specific and thus completely absurd in a “typical” love story (all pragmatic incongruities). The sequence stresses a stereotypical and ridiculous characteristic of Drebin, namely his recurrent inability to practise figurative speech (thus victimizing and institutionalizing). Furthermore, the Orange Bowl is the place where students from different American colleges compete in a football championship game. The tyre-brand Goodyear provides a blimp floating above the spectacle from which aerial views of the game are broadcast. Only this specific information enables a complete understanding of what follows (humour solving and recognizing in-group elements). It shows that Jane’s question is a pun for it refers to the New Year and to Goodyear (a linguistic and pragmatic incongruity). In both frames, the question is irrelevant (pragmatic incongruity). Alongside these issues is the ever-present circumstantial superiority-cue of the Comedy genre and the internally, storywise institutionalized humour that Drebin provokes in general, as well as the culturally ridiculous stereotype represented by Jane Spencer. In the French video-circuit copy I obtained (Y a-t-il un flic pour sauver la Reine?) the fragment runs as follows:

DREBIN: Le schéma classique: moi vouloir elle, moi perdre elle, elle vouloir moi, moi balancer elle, moi rattraper elle, elle finir écrasée par un ballon dirigeable qui explose au-dessus du jardin. JANE: De gros dégâts? DREBIN: Non, les fleurs. [DREBIN: The classical pattern: me wanting her, me losing her, she wanting me, me throwing her out, me running to catch her, she ending smashed up by a blimp that explodes above the garden. JANE: Heavy damage? DREBIN: No, the flowers.]

The “schéma classique” is definitely less classical in French than the “same old story” is in English. The lower schematic force makes a pragmatic incongruity more difficult to establish in French. In fact, there is no clear break between “elle vouloir moi” and “moi balancer elle”. The other two pragmatic transgressions of the classical story (the ignored three-word format and the too specific content) are kept but also remain slightly weaker than in the original. On the other hand, it seems that the translator has wanted to exploit a different but also rather stereotypical inventory: that of petit-nègre French, an institutionalized linguistic incongruity that disparages certain sociolinguistic groups. Whereas Drebin’s original lack of proficiency in figurative speech connects with other similar instances in the American version (internal institutionalization), the sudden appearance of pidgin is not a recurrent characteristic of the French-speaking Drebin. Thus, while the original shows an

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incongruity-solution pattern in this respect (understandable strangeness), the translation is merely incongruous or weird and loses the solving superiority.

These phenomena are, however, overshadowed by yet another newly created joke, a case of wordplay around “balancer” (to end a relationship/to throw literally far away and high up in the sky). This pun might well be a compensatory insertion for the lost Goodyear pun, that has been replaced by humour based only on the irrelevance (or even impertinence) of Jane’s question, since “dégâts” informs about material damage rather than about human losses. It should also be noticed that Drebin’s specification “les fleurs” might actually imply that he felt sad about the lost flowers, since there is absolutely no need for such details in that type of story (socially incongruous thought). On a macrolevel, the success of the stupid-blonde theme will depend on the many possible francophone audiences. In this respect, one thing is for sure: the present translation is meant for a pan-Francophone version as the culture-specific sports event has been replaced by the “more universal” garden. Another macrolevel effect has proven less difficult to detect. It concerns the film’s membership of the genre of Comedy. If the film is undeniably offered as “blatantly funny”, the comic potential of its label is clearly reduced by the way the film has been received ⎯ in France at least and relying on the Francophone press. If many Americans, intellectuals and others alike, will easily admit having enjoyed the film, in France the film is basically ignored in specialized film magazines (Les Cahiers du Cinéma, for example) and my French “guinea pigs” felt the urge to stress the low quality of the jokes they nevertheless laughed at. In a Spanish dubbed version (Agárralo como puedas), broadcast in 1995 by the commercial station Tele5, the tragic dialogue goes like this:

DREBIN: La historia de siempre. Chico conoce chica, chico pierde chica, chica conoce chico, chico olvida chica, chico recuerda chica, chica muere en trágico accidente en globo anunciando pescao en Conserva del Norte. JANE: Bonito? DREBIN: No, fue horrible. [DREBIN: The same old story: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl meets boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girl dies in a tragic blimp accident while making publicity for canned fish from the North (of Spain). JANE: Tuna fish? (Or: Was it nice?) DREBIN: No, it was horrible.]

This version seems to be a more faithful rendition of the original, maybe because it did not choose to respect lip synchronization as much as the French

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translation did ⎯ for example, where the bilabial “m” of “moi” corresponds to the bilabial “b” of “boy”, the “ch” of “chico” has a completely different articulatory pattern. The pragmatic transgressions of the story format seem to be more foregrounded than in French, especially since no new overwhelming pun comes up, as was the case with “balancer”. The semantically too specific ending is the funny element here. Just as in the American script, Jane’s question is a pragmatic incongruity basically because it is not at all to the point. Whether or not it was tuna fish Drebin’s girlfriend was promoting when she died does not truly matter. Further, “bonito” conveys a double entendre in a way similar to the Goodyear pun. Although irrelevant, the first meaning that pops up in this context is that of “tuna fish”, due to the immediate presence of “pescao en Conserva del Norte”. As in the original film it is Drebin’s reply “horrible” that urges the audience to reframe the word as “nice”, another very common meaning of “bonito”. To complete the parallelism with the English text, the Spanish translator introduced a culture-specific Peninsular item (“Conserva del Norte”) where the Orange Bowl had been deleted. It remains to be verified in how far such macrolevel elements as Spanish taste, stereotyping and general reception are any different from American or French reactions but one thing becomes clear from our analysis: the Spanish translation is highly adequate (in Toury’s sense of the word) on the formal level of humour mechanisms in spite of a being acceptable (also in Toury’s sense) on the level of specific lexical choices. The French copy may well be “belle” but is not as “fidèle”; not even on the cognitive level. 4. Conclusions Research on the translation of humour is in the first place in need of an acceptable account of humour per se. Research on humour should start from observation but can only tackle humour via existing ordinary and more or less technical language. After humour has “happened”, two reshaped “traditional” concepts can partly account for it. First, incongruity, to be understood as a non-application of cognitive schemes. Second, superiority, to be understood as the social aspect of humour. Both are indispensable and relate in the following ways. (1) Normalization. Most acts of incongruity can be assigned to a social product and/or agent. Incongruities are therefore not merely cognitive, but also constitute products and agents as deviant and, in terms of normalization, as not well adapted, in other words inferior. According to cultural patterns, these incongruities and deviancies can be linguistic, pragmatic, narrative, intertextual, “natural” and social. Hence we can identify such categories as verbal humour, parody and satire, which, as we have seen, cannot be separated intrinsically. Extrinsic, historical, “plastic” cultural systems determine to what

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degree parody is, in a given situation, satire. Even when based on one single mechanism, instances of humour find their plural meaning in this social semiosis. (2) Evaluation through indirect communication. What is perceived as irony is in fact an intricate cluster of flagrant pragmatic incongruities indirectly resulting in an evaluative interpretation of the utterance. Strangely enough, it seems that some very specific and overtly committed pragmatic incongruities can be a sign of the social evaluation of the irony’s content. Further investigation should specify which are the exact characteristics of this irony cluster. (3) Solution. Incongruities are what they are: signs we did not expect. And what we do not expect, we do not immediately understand. A great deal of humour can only be solved through reframing ⎯ and reframing is commonly accepted as an important index of intelligence. Each time we laugh at humour, we testify our wit to our peers and take away their social pressure. (4) Conditioning. Prototypical humour feelings are spontaneous. One does not normally wonder whether schemes are really broken or patterns are indeed transgressed. One simply has or does not have “the humour feeling”. However, the humorist can never predict to the full whether his/her schemes and the listener’s are in effect compatible, whether the feeling will arise or not. That is why he or she can decide to “force humour” via cues as a more explicit invitation to humour. He or she can also play on the right preliminary conditions: the cheerful mood. Finally, he or she can fall back on humorous stereotypes that are funny suorum causa. A dumb blonde is funny because a dumb blonde is funny. Here, spontaneous incongruity has disappeared and humour has become through and through a social phenomenon. From the viewpoint of descriptive translation studies, awareness of these processes is necessary if we are going to compare original and translation. As such, a translational analysis is no longer restricted to comments in terms of “similar funny effect” or “lost humour” but is able to nail down which specific cognitive and/or social processes are at work in film copies that are presented as original and translation. For a translator in the field, it is important to realize that all kinds of schemes (and hence incongruities) are potentially local in some way. Linguistic schemes may only belong to one language, pragmatic schemes may be known by a particular group of speakers, aesthetics are well-known to be very local, social conventions are so by definition and even the knowledge constructed about nature and logics differ from culture to culture. Since these incongruities provoke superiority feelings and humour, it is time and time again up to the translator to predict (a) whether the target group possesses the schemes on which the source text plays and, if so (b) whether these schemes have a similar cognitive value, i.e. whether they are as normal for the target group as they are for the source audience. Solutions will not exclusively be acceptable or adequate. It may well appear that different words in different languages play on similar schemes in different audiences: cognitive adequacy,

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Appendix: works treated in Vandaele (1993)41 Alam, Q.Z. 1989 “Humour and Translation: Evidences from Indian English”, Meta 34:l,

pp.72-78. Ballard, M. 1989 “Effets d’humour, ambiguïté et didactique de la traduction, Meta 34:l,

pp.20-25. Bertaux, P. 1986 “Pour ce que rire est le propre de l’homme…”, in A.-M. Laurian (Ed.),

pp.23-32. De Bruyn, P. 1989 “‘My Grandfather the Hunter’: A Humorous Translation from

Afrikaans to English”, Meta 34:l, pp.79-83. Del Corral, I. 1988 “Humor: When Do We Lose It?” Translation Review 27, pp.25-27. Diot, R. 1986 “Chaos par K.O.: un exemple d’incompatibilité d’humour; le doublage

français des Marx Brothers”, in A.-M. Laurian (Ed.), pp.259-270. 1989 “Humor for Intellectuals: Can it be Exported or Translated? The Case

of Gary rudeau’s in Search of Reagan’s Brain”, Meta 34:l, pp.84-87. Draitser, E. 1989 “Comparative Analysis of Russian and American Humor”, Meta 34:l,

pp.88-90. Espasa Borrás, E. 1995 “Humour in Translation. Joe Orton’s The Ruffian on the Stair and its

Catalan and Valencian Versions”, in P. Jansen (Ed.), Translation and the Manipulation of Discourse. Selected Papers of the CERA Research Seminars in Translation Studies, Leuven: the CERA Chair for Translation, Communication and Cultures, pp.39-53.

*Grassegger, H. 1985 Sprachspiel und Übersetzung; eine Studie anhand der Comic-Serie

Asterix, Tübingen: Stauffenburg.

41 The titles most directly relevant to descriptive translation studies are marked with an

asterisk.

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*Hänninen, A. 1989 “A Pragmalinguistic Way of Looking at Humor”, in S. Tirkkonen-

Condit and S. Condit (Eds.), Empirical Studies in Translation and Linguistics, Joensuu: University of Joensuu.

Knight, M. 1989 “The Happy Adventure of Translating German Humorous Verse”,

Meta 34:l, pp.105-108. 1992 “The Happy Adventure of Translating German Humorous Verse”,

Meta 37:3, pp.474-481. Landheer, R. 1989 “L’ambiguïté, un défi traductologique”, Meta 34:l, pp.33-34. Laurian, A.-M. (Ed.) 1986 Humour et traduction. Humo(u)r and Translation. Actes du colloque

international 13-14 déc. 1985, special issue of Contrastes (hors série T2).

1989 “Humour et traduction au contact des cultures”, Meta 34:l, pp.6-14. Laurian, A.-M. and D.L.F. Nilsen 1989 Humour et traduction. Humor and Translation, special issue of Meta

34:l. Lazarus, S. 1986 “L’humour de Tchékov dans les traductions françaises” in A.-M.

Laurian (Ed.), pp.181-194. Leclercq, G. 1989 “Regard sur la poésie ludique ou le jeu est dans le jeu (et

réciproquement)”, Meta 34:l, pp.44-62. Leibold, A. 1989 “The Translation of Humor; Who Says It Can’t Be Done?”, Meta 34:l,

pp.109-111. Nilsen, D.L.F. 1989 “Better than the Original: Humorous Translations that Succeed” Meta

34:l, pp.112-124. Raphaelson-West, D.S. 1989 “On the Feasibility and Strategies of Translating Humor”, Meta 34:l,

pp.128-141. Sopeña-Balordi, A. 1986 “Bretecher ‘a la española’ ou le rejet d’une homéogreffe”, in A.-M.

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Laurian (Ed.), pp.237-256. Tavernier-Courbin, J. 1989 “Translating Jack London’ s Humor”, Meta 34:l, pp.63-71. 1986 “Hemingway’s Humor in ‘The Sun also Rises’: Is it Translatable into

French?”, in A.-M. Laurian (Ed.), pp.223-234. *Toury, G. 1986 “What Is It That Renders a Spoonerism (Un)translatable?”, in A.-M.

Laurian (Ed.), pp.211-222. *Tymoczko, M. 1987 “Translating the Humour in Early Irish Hero Tales. A Polysystems

Approach”, New Comparison 3, pp.83-103. Van Crugten, A. 1989 “La récré du traducteur”, Meta 34:l, pp.26-32. Von Stackelberg, J. 1988 “Translating Comical Writing”, Translation Review 28, pp.10-14. *Wetzel-Sahm, B. 1991 “Dead-Pan Emotionalized: American Humor in a German Translation

of Mark Twain’s ‘Journalism in Tennessee’”, A.P. Frank and H. Kittel (Eds.), Interculturality and the Historical Study of Literary Translations, Berlin: Erich Schmidt, pp.75-86.