Humour as Rhetorical Tool

“The sacred chain/ Of man to man”George Meredith’s ode “To the Comic

Spirit.”

• Aristophanes, Chaucer, Lyly, Shakespeare, Jonson, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Molière, Flaubert, Austen, Dickens, Clemens/Twain, Wilde, Joyce, Beckett, Amis, Capote, George Carlin, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, O’Rourke, Coupland, Sedaris, Will and Ian Ferguson, Rick Mercer.

• Aristotle argues in the Poetics that comedy arises from a perceived defect or ugliness that should not be so painful that we feel compassion, since compassion is the enemy of laughter.

• Gorgias’s maxim, referenced by Aristotle in the Rhetoric, “that one should spoil the opponents’ seriousness with laughter and their laughter with seriousness”

• Historically, the study of humour has been interdisciplinary; various fields such as philosophy, rhetoricians, linguists, psychologists, sociologists, literary theorists, communications theory, and marketing have examined its purpose and utility.

• 3 ways of categorizing or understanding humour: Incongruity, Superiority, and Relief.

Linguistic Theories of Humour by Salvatore Attardo

• Cicero in De Oratore understood jokes as differentiated by being verbal or referential, according to what is said or in regarding a thing. His distinction underscores humour as either a play on words or a play on situation.

• Cicero went on to identify two types of witticisms, those of words and those of content. Witticisms of content are anecdotes or witty stories, whereas witticisms of words are to be found in puns and “sharp-witted” comments.

Incongruity

• In 1790, Kant defined “laughter as an affection arising from sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.” Our expectation fails to match with the association presented.

• Schopenhauer builds upon this by describing laughter as “the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through in some relation.”

• Barbara Bush was invited to deliver the commencement address at Wellesley in 1990. “Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the President’s spouse—and I wish him well.”

• Incongruity subverts your expectations and gives you pleasure with the surprise.

Incongruity in J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World

• Christy Mahon:“Well, it’s a clean bed and soft with it, and it’s

great luck and company I’ve won me in the end of time—two fine women fighting for the likes of me—till I’m thinking this night wasn’t I foolish not to kill my father in the years gone by.”

Superiority

• Plato and Aristotle recognized a deformity in humour as a method of cruelty and act of aggression.

• Hobbes “sudden glory,” humour as a verbal way to trump/defeat

• Sociologists characterize “exclusive humour” as part of a corrective to maintain social stratification.

• Reagan and Mondale in 1984.• Lloyd Benson and Dan Quayle 1988.• Example on page 393 about the student

grading a professor’s op-ed piece.• “Playing the Dozens” uses insulting humour

competitively. “Your mama’s so fat she sweats Ragu.”

• Ridiculum acri fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat res.

“For ridicule often decides matters of importance more effectually and in a better manner, than severity.”

--Horace Sermones (1.10.14-15, c. 35 BCE)

Relief

• Humour reduces psychological stress and offers an escape from proper social conduct and anticipation. Humour acts as a liberation from the law of language.

• Freud tacitly accepted the verbal/referential model of humour.

• Humour and laughter may be separated.

• One of the early proponents of release theory is that of the ethical and aesthetic philosopher Shaftesbury (1727). His Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour. His theory is that when people are constrained by the world around them, whether physically or by words, they will use buffoonery, burlesque or mimicry to relieve the sense of constraint.

Freud discussed the power “tendentious” jokes, made with aggressive or sexual provocations, to elicit strong emotional

response.

• Freud considered humour to be rebellious, a defence mechanism, a means of establishing mutuality and it involves the superego.

• He was particularly interested in "broken humour", which he defined as "the humour that smiles through tears". He argued that this kind of humorous pleasure arises from the prevention of an emotion. A sympathy that the reader has prepared is blocked by a comic occurrence, and transferred on to a matter of secondary importance.

Political, Moral and Aesthetic Component to Humour

• Michael Billing argued in “Freud and the Language of Humour” that humour contains both rebellious and conservative utility. It also reveals repression.

• Scolds Freud for playing it safe.For instance: Two Jews meet outside a bath-

house. One asks the other,‘Have you taken a bath?’ ‘No,’ replies the second,

‘why, has one gone missing?

Humour forges group identity

• Garrett (1993) analysed the strategies and effects of ritualized humour games among African-Americans and gay men. She found that these groups used humour “not just for pleasure but to construct a community, to create an alternative source of ego-reinforcement, and to sharpen a weapon to be wielded against the outside world.”

To Joke or Not to Joke: A Diplomatic Dilemma in the Age of the Internet by Peter Serracino Inglott

“It takes you to an apparently unreasonable point from which the main road along which you have been travelling does not appear to be the only one. A joke is the best device to get you on the side track from where you can see that there are other ways of getting about than just the contraries forward or backward, or right and left. Joking involves glimpsing the improbable and using upside down logic. “

• A pure joke is one where anyone who knows the language of the joke will understand it. Conditional jokes are those that require something beyond basic language to be shared between the teller and the audience. The two types of conditional jokes are the hermetic joke (there must be common knowledge) and the affective joke (there must be a common emotional disposition).

“During an interfaith banquet, a Catholic priest told a Rabbi: ‘When are you going to give up your antiquated customs and eat some of this delicious ham?’ The Rabbi replied: ‘At your wedding, Father.’"

The Rule of 3 in Writing

• Humour/comedy, folklore, film, plays, and television rely on using three items in a series because three is the smallest number of elements required to make a pattern.

• Three act play or movie script, three blind mice, three little bears, three little pigs, three stooges, novel trilogy, “on the count of three,” Cinderella and Pan’s Labyrinth.

• “I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.”

--John Stewart

http://www.humorpower.com/art-rulethree.html

• Same category/same category/different category “I have t-shirts of my trips to world-class cities: Paris, Tokyo, Fargo.”

• Expected trait/expected trait/different trait “She was pretty, she was shapely, she was a man.” • Something beloved/something beloved/

something hated “A Las Vegas wedding package contains everything you will need: music, flowers, a divorce document.”

• Ordinary/Ordinary/Ridiculous “I go to Las Vegas to see the shows, eat at the buffets and visit my money.”

• Extreme/Extreme/Ordinary “Speaking to thousands, appearing on Oprah, taking a nap.”

• Rhyme/Rhyme/Rhyme (rhyming sets a pattern and can disguise or add a special twist to the third-item punchline). "The answer is…three things that describe Suzie Smith. And the question is, what are Nifty, Thrifty and Fifty."

George Carlin

• “There’s a thing called shaken-baby syndrome that people get upset about. Personally, I think you have to give ‘em a good shake, or they don’t bake uniformly.”

• “Why do they bother with a suicide watch when someone is on death row? “Keep an eye on this guy. We’re gonna kill him, and we don’t want him to hurt himself.”

Rick Mercer’s blog September 28

• http://www.rickmercer.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/9/28/Who-can-survive-a-good-googling

• Chris Reid, the recently dumped Conservative candidate in Toronto centre believes socialism has turned us into a nation of effeminates. How else, the longtime conservative activist argues, can we explain how a deranged killer managed to decapitate someone on a greyhound bus? It turns out that it's not the killer's fault. It is the fault of the limp wristed schmucks who were trying to catch some shut-eye between Portage la Prairie and Brandon, Manitoba. The solution, Mr. Reid believes, is to simply arm the population – or at least the women and homosexuals – with concealed handguns.

• Personally, I'm hoping that in the future this bright young man takes a run for the Conservative party leadership. It would make for an interesting campaign – homosexuals of Canada, lay down your Botox needles and pick up a Colt .45.

Are we a nation of effeminates as Reid suggests? I'm not sure. I do know that if I'm ever on a bus when the stabbing starts – call me whatever you want because I'll be the one screaming like a girl and heading for the exits.

“You can throw someone out of the library for how they sound but not for how they smell. A new law in San Luis Obispo says librarians can evict homeless people for their smell. Hey, lonely librarians—don’t think of them as homeless; think of them as single. I know most librarians won’t see much of a future with some babbling drunk with a drug habit and messiah complex, but hey, it worked for Laura Bush.” –Bill Maher.

http://afunnyguy.theledger.com/default.asp?item=2264199

• During the Aug. 30 call, Ritz called the outbreak "a death by a thousand cuts " or should I say cold cuts. “ And when told about a new death in Prince Edward Island, he blurted: "Please tell me it's Wayne Easter," referring to the Liberal agriculture critic.

--Gerry Ritz, Agricultural Minister.

Will & Ian Ferguson’s 12 ways to say “I’m sorry”

• The simple sorry.• The essential sorry.• The occupational sorry.• The subservient sorry.• The aristocratic sorry.• The demonstrative sorry.

• The libidinous sorry.• The ostentatious sorry.• The mythical sorry.• The unrepentant sorry.• The sympathetic sorry.• The authentic sorry.

• Use humour in your argument to build your character and establish goodwill with your audience.

• Use it to diffuse conflict and/or emotion.• Be careful not to offend your audience and

make sure that your humour is appropriate.• “Brevity is the soul of wit” as Polonius told

Hamlet. Concision is required to make humour effective.

• Like every other facet of life, humour has been historically gendered.

• Christopher Hitchens claimed only men are funny.

• Women as punchlines: Take my Wife, please.• Women “reported” to take more pleasure in

them. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/nov/08/science.research

Satire

• Uses humour in an argument to reveal and illustrate social ills.

• Rhetorical art of ridiculing a subject as a corrective to human vice and folly. Satire uses language as a weapon.

• Sarcasm and irony are often present.• Often employs an absurd logic in order to

establish a new perspective or point of view.

• “A Modest Proposal” (1729) by Jonathan Swift:

• Dave Chappelle’s “Racial Draft” satire:http://www.videosift.com/video/Chappelles-Show-The-Racial-Draft

Parody (Spoof, Lampoon, Burlesque)

• An argument conducted by using an existing example and twisting it to a ridiculous length for comic effect. A parody is only humorous if the audience recognizes the connection between the original and the imitation.

• http://jezebel.com/5060321/sarah-haskins-fiber-is-secret-code-for-making-you-poop

Sarah Haskins has humorous parodies of commercials in a series called “Target Women.”

Puns

• Play on words.• Homonym: One of two or more words spelled

and pronounced alike but different in meaning (as cleave meaning "to cut" and cleave meaning "to adhere.” Or pool of water vs. game of pool.

• Homophone: One of two or more words pronounced alike but different in meaning or spelling (as the words to, too, and two)

• “Fangtasia” bar in last week’s “True Blood.”

“Let’s talk about a very tattoo subject”—Ali G’s malapropism

• “Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.” --Fred Allen.

• "In the beginning was the pun.“—Samuel Beckett.

• Max: I like your nurse's uniform, guy.Peter: Actually these are O.R. scrubs.Max: Oh, are they? --Rushmore

Overstatement and Understatement

• A hyperbole overstatement which can be used to exaggerate facts for either serious, ironic, or comic effect. “You call that well done? I’ve seen cows hurt worse than that get well.”

• A meiosis or “lessening” is the reverse. Twain's “The rumours of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

• Litotes (Greek for “plain” or “simple”) expresses an affirmative by negating its opposite. “I was not a little upset.”

Amplification

• Methods for expanding your argument, explanation, description.

• “Our Perfect Summer” by David Sedaris.