theory of comic narrative: semantic and pragmatic elements

Theory of comic narrative:semantic and pragmatic elements

JERRY PALMER

Abstract

Theories of comic narrative are oftwo types: t hose basedon narrative formand those basedon theories ofthejoke. Both revealinadequacies, which canbe resolvedby recourse to a theory ofdiscourse. Such a theory dissolves thedistinction between thejoke äs a self-contained unit ofmeaning and narrativeäs a superordinate source of meaning. It also permits us to theorize therelationship between the comic text and the social circumstances under whichthe text is received by an audience, for the relationship between semanticand pragmatic levels of meaning is integral to a theory of discourse. Theimplications ofthis articulation of textual and social meanings are exploredthrough two briefexamples: the origins ofcomedy in ancient Greece and thetransformation of comic performance in seventeenth-century Europe.

Theories of comic narrative are predominantly of two varieties:Type (a) consists of theories which take äs their starting point one of the

traditional bases of literary analysis, such äs character or the shape ofnarrative äs a whole, and use such entities äs the basis of an analysis ofcomedy äs a genre.

Type (b) consists of theories which take äs their starting point thesemantic structure of the individual joke, or gag, and deduce from this theform of pleasure given by comic narrative.

Thus the aim of both types of theory is the same: the differentia specificaof comedy. The object of analysis, however, is fundamentally different,and it is small wonder that the resulting theories of comedy are verydissimilar.

As an example of type (a) theories we could take the influential chapteron "the comic rhythm" in Suzanne Langer's Feeling and Form (1953). For

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Langer — following Cornford and other Cambridge-school writers on theorigins of Athenian Old Comedy — the essence of comedy is the assertionof man's unsuppressible "life force" or vitality, and the feature of comicnarrative that distinguishes it from its opposite, tragic narrative, is that incomedy the threats to the hero's happiness which derive from the externalworld are never internalized; whereas in tragedy they are and äs a resultgive rise to the tragic agon, the fundamental self-questioning characteristicof this genre. One might contrast two literary examples of unhappiness tomake the point: first, the way in which David Copperfield reacts to themistake he makes in marrying Dora — whose incapacity äs a housekeeper,one suspects, is the real cause of her untimely demise — a mistake whichcertainly causes real unhappiness but which does not lead him to anyfundamental reorganization of his innermost seif, to any new projetfundamental, äs Sartre would have it; and second, the implosion ofOthello's psyche that follows on his discovery of how he has beendeceived. For Langer, such a distinction is the mark of the differencebetween comedy and tragedy. It follows from this that for her there is nointrinsic relationship between comedy and humor: some comedy is funny,certainly, but much of it is not; for example, she is able to argue that muchof French classical tragedy is really comedy, even though notablyunhumorous in tone.

Type (b) theories, on the other hand, assume an intrinsic relationshipbetween the nature of humor, or jokes, äs they exist in everyday life andthe nature of comic narrative. As an example of such an approach onemight take the first two chapters of Neu Schaeffer's Art of Laughter(1981). Ludicrousness, he argues, derives neither from the mind of theindividual who laughs, nor from objective features of the external world,but from the way in which things are presented to us; it arises in momentsin which things are presented to us in an incongruous light, an incongruitywhich derives from the associations with which things are culturallyendowed. In this respect humor is similar to metaphor, and whatdifferentiates them is the context in which they appear: the serious contextof poetry invites us to explore serious links within the poetic image,whereas the ludicrous context — presented in a series of cues — invitesus to enjoy the pleasure of nonserious connections. The mental processesby which incongruities are resolved are not different in serious andludicrous frames of reference, but the end pursued is different: in a seriousframe it is truth, in a ludicrous frame it is pleasure, which is a kind ofholiday from the demands of rationality.



Theory of comic narrative 113

It is tempting to say that these two types of theory are well adapted totwo different objects of study. Type (a) theories seem well suited tocanonical literature, where it is often the case, it seems intuitively to us,that there is not much relationship between the desire to amuse (in thehumorous sense) and the basic forms of comic narrative; in other words, iteasily seems that a theorist like Langer is right, provided we choose theright set of documents to check the theory against. Type (b) theories, onthe other band, intuitively seem more appropriate for much of the comicproducts of the mass media, based äs they are on the joke äs practiced ineveryday life, on the music hall and other similar nineteenth-centuryentertainments, and on the boulevard theater of Feydeau and similarwriters: the distinctive feature of such forms is that narrative — where itexists at all — is little more than a way of organizing äs many jokes äspossible into a conveniently short space of time. This tendency finds itslogical development in the Anglo-American form of the television Situationcomedy, or sitcom, in which a given group of characters act out a series ofsimilar situations in each episode, the similarity deriving from the fact thatthe characters are always in the same relationship to each other; underthese circumstances narrative is perforce minimalized.

However, in reality this solves nothing, for each type of theory ismarked by an inadequacy, which — if left intact — disqualifies it.

Type (a) theories, äs we have seen, assert a lack of intrinsic relationshipbetween comedy and funniness. As a result, they can say nothing aboutwhat the form of such a relationship is where it occurs — precisely becausethey insist that there is no necessary general relationship between the two— except insofar äs they rely on an entirely common-sense theory ofhumor to allow them to say that a joke is appropriate on such-and-such anoccasion. What is needed at this point, and cannot be supplied, is someStatement about why a joke is appropriate at this point, which in its turnentails a theory of the structure of the joke, since we clearly need to knowwhat a joke is before we can say why it is appropriate at such-and-such amoment. Common sense may appear to be adequate here, but in reality itis not because of the fundamental principle that the intention to joke is notenough for a joke to occur: it must also be understood and permitted,otherwise it may well fall flat or be regarded äs childish or offensive.1 Thesociological and psychological differences that underpin this principlerender common sense nugatory: just äs one man's meat is another man'spoison, so one man's joke is another man's offensiveness or boredincomprehension, and, most fundamentally, a joke may not even be



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recognized äs such; different jokes, or different types of joke (that is, jokeswith different themes) are appropriate for different sets of circumstances.That is to say, the reasons why such-and-such a joke element may havebeen inserted into a eomic text (in Langer's sense of the term) and theimpact this placing had for its intended audience may be nonrecuperablewithout a sense of the structure of humor under those circumstances. Thewell-known uncertainties about which bits of Shakespeare's comedies areor were intended to be funny is a clear Illustration of this principle, and weshall see other examples at the end of this essay. Moreover, we mustobserve that even if there are many examples in canonical literature ofcomedy which is not funny (and clearly not intended äs such, äs in theinstance of much French classical tragedy), there are also many indeedwhere funniness is extremely important in the structure of the narrative —nowhere, perhaps, more so than in the example which originally gaverise to the theory of unsuppressible vitality, Athenian Old Comedy, andespecially Aristophanes.

Type (b) theories, on the other band, suffer from the difficulty oftheorizing the manner in which jokes and narrative are articulatedtogether, for insofar äs they derive a theory of comedy from the semanticstructure of the individual joke or gag, there is apparently no room for anyStatement of the type of relationship that can obtain between them beyondvague generalizations about the "humorous context." In this respectFreud's theory is typical. As I have argued elsewhere (Palmer 1988:30-36), bis theory is marked by the necessity of an appeal to the semanticlevel of comic meaning, which is to be found in the individual joke(regardless of the many subvarieties of joke and jest that he refers to); bythis very token, his theory is rendered unsuitable for a theory of comicnarrative, despite many attempts to use it for that purpose.

However, we shall see that such difficulties in theories based on thesemantic structure of the joke are not insuperable, for reasons intrinsic tosemantics. The difficulty afflicting theories based on units such äsnarrative or character — any unit which is not theorized in terms of itsfunniness, in other words — is less easy to resolve. The first stage in itsresolution must be the recognition that it does indeed demand such aresolution — in other words, the recognition that any theory of comicnarrative imperatively demands a theory of funniness, some theory whichexplains the difference between what is funny and what is not; suchtheories are, of course, traditionally semantic in character, although weshall see that this restriction is unnecessarily limiting. In short, the answer




to our problems lies in the area between type (a) and type (b) theories: thearea of discourse (here I am defining discourse äs a field distinct fromsemantics, following MacCabe 1979 and Pecheux 1975).

This is easiest to demonstrate by considering the features of comicsemantics that force us to move outside the space of the individual jokeand beyond reference to its lexical features when accounting for itsmeaning.

Semantic theories of comic meaning conventionally refer to incongruityäs its basis — we have already seen this in Schaeffer, for instance; Freud(1976: 177-190) refers to the mixture of sense and nonsense, and my Logicof the Absurd (Palmer 1988: 39ff) refers to simultaneous plausibility andimplausibility. Now incongruity is not a feature of the natural world, itis a feature of the social world, and therefore all such meanings are dis-cursively organized. For example, a recent TV documentary concerningVenezuelan Indians who have converted to Catholicism told a story whichto Westerners appears comic but which involved no comedy for thetribespeople whom it concerned: this tribe, despite conversion, hasretaitied its beliefs in its former gods and has also noted that suicide is anabsolute debarment to access to heaven; äs a result, they have adopted aform of behavior that insures that if they do get to heaven, and if they donot like it, they are guaranteed an exit visa: they wear a thin cord aroundtheir necks so that they can say to God, "look, I committed suicide." Thisis a joke to Westerners because it is incongruous to believe that it ispossible to fool God and to believe that there could be anywhere betterthan heaven; such an attitude is, however, compatible with belief in morethan one religion.

Thus, clearly, jokes refer to discourses that have an existence indepen-dent of the joke. But jokes are themselves a form of discursive organiz-ation, in various ways. First, jokes are rhetorically constructad so that thepoint at which laughter is to be evoked is carefully placed in relation to therest of the story which leads up to it — everyone has had the experience ofhearing (or telling) a joke which has been killed stone dead by a misplacedor mistimed punch line. This indicates that the meaning of a particularword or phrase depends, in this context, äs much on its syntagmaticplacing äs on its lexical properties. Second, words have a plurality ofmeanings, especially connoted meanings; which meaning is mobilized inany particular context is dependent upon that context; for example, inthe story about suicide the term "suicide" only evokes its theologicalconnotations, and its other possible connotations (sadness, shame, hero-



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ism, ...) are left in abeyance. In both of these instances, meaning isindissolubly linked to discursive contexts.

Moreover, jokes refer to discourses in a further sense: any incongruityinvolves a twist to what the everyday world recognizes äs normality, butnot all such twists are funny — some may be offensive, or childish, orsimply insufficiently important to rate äs funny. In Poland, shortly afterthe Chernobyl disaster, I was told this joke: "What is a geiger counter usedfor in Poland?" — "To measure friendship." To appreciate this joke onenot only needs to know the special meaning of the word "friendship" inofficial Soviet discourse about the satellite Eastern European countries,but also one has to care about it in some way, either negatively orpositively: it has to enter one's frame of reference äs something worthy ofattention; if it does not, the joke will fail, not perhaps for lack ofcomprehension but for lack of relevance.

The last way in which jokes refer to discourse is this: jokes can bearranged in articulated sequences and, ultimately, in entire narratives insuch a way that the relationship between the Statements that composeindividual jokes serves äs the basis for further jokes or for nonhumorouselements of the narrative. For example, consider this sequence of gagsfrom Laurel and Hardy's From Soup to Nuts: Hardy, temporarily a waiter,enters bearing an enormous cream gateau, slips on a banana skin, anddives nose-first ftito the gateau; seeing the banana skin, he throws it acrossthe room in a fit of pique and exits to find a replacement gateau; in themeantime a small dog retrieves the banana skin and replaces it in exactlythe Spot where Hardy slipped on it; the latter reenters, with absolutelypredictable results; this time he carefully removes the banana skin andexits to find yet another replacement gateau, which he places on a trolleyand carefully brings into the dining room, without accident; many minutes(and gags) toter someone hits Laurel very hard, and he cannons intoHardy, propelling the latter face forward down into the seifsame gateau,still on its trolley. This form of gag — traditional in silent screen comedyand known äs a "running gag" — is in fact a miniature narrative, in whichthe comic impact of the later moments depends äs much upon theirarticulation onto the earlier ones äs upon any semantic structure. I haveshown in The Logic of the Absurd how this principle can be extended toprovide an account of how comic narrative and comic character in generalare built up (Palmer 1988).

So it is that we can see how reference to the theory of discourse iscapable of resolving difficulties in traditional theories of comic narrative.




Specifically, it is capable of telling us something about comic narrativewhich is rarely mentioned in such theories: the failure to arouse humor inthe audience. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, there is no theory ofcomic narrative (of type [a] or type [b]) that even attempts to deal with thistopic — though it must be said there is material on the subject derivingfrom the field of empirical psychology.2

Now the question of the failure of comedy to arouse humor is aprivileged topic of study for this reason: when we study it, we study therelationship between the form that comedy and humor take (the seman-tic/discursive model referred to above) and its reception by the audience;such an approach assumes neither that meaning resides entirely in the text,nor the opposite, that meaning resides in the reaction of the audience;"meaning" here is assumed to be the product of a "negotiation" betweenaudience and text, conducted upon the determinate ground of a discursivestructure. But just äs the textual ground upon which the negotiation isconducted is structured, so too is the audience, which should not beconsidered äs the universal subject of phenomenology but äs sociologi-cally specific; hence a further reason for privileging the study of themoments of the failure of comedy: at this point the study of humornecessarily opens out into the field of the sociological study of theaudience.3

Indeed, elements of modern linguistics have already alerted us to thenecessity of this step. The distinction in Chomsky between competenceand performance and the distinction between semantic and pragmaticmarkers both refer us to an extralinguistic dimension in the constructionof meaning: in both instances the pragmatic or performative dimensionrefers us to some aspect of the social Situation in which a Statement ismade that is the basis of the meaning of the Statement in question. Forexample, if I say to my wife, "John is coming to supper," the meaning ofthat phrase resides not only in the way in which the various elements thatcompose it are given meaning by their position in the language System butalso in the various elements of the social network that links me, my wife,and John — to use a caricatural Interpretation, this Statement could beeither a threat or a promise depending on whether John is a real friend orsomeone we have ambivalent feelings toward but feel obliged to entertain.

All Statements, according to this key element in modern linguistics, aremade comprehensible by some element in the Situation in which they aremade äs well äs by the semiotic paradigms that assign meaning to thevarious components of the Statement; this is äs true of humorous



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Statements äs of any other variety. However, our subject here is the veryspecial type of Statement constituted by comic narrative, and the questionto be asked by the rest of this paper is, what can the notion of linguisticPerformance, or of the pragmatics of language, teil us about comicnarrative?

In the first place, it enables us to deal with the awkward Situation of thejoke, or narrative, that is not found funny by the audience. Theories ofhumor and of comic narrative that are based on the notion of a semanticstructure proper to humor have always found it difficult tö deal withcomic failure, äs we have seen: the notion of performance shows us thatthe structure of meaning is inseparable from elements of the socialstructure, and thus that factors which derive from the social structure andwhich can be alleged to explain the failure of a joke are not external to themeaning System of the joke but are internal to it. Thus if we see that someelement of the social structure incapacitates a particular audience forenjoyment of a particular piece of humor, this is part of the same meaningSystem that enables another audience to enjoy the same joke. Thus, to takea hypothetical example (since I know of no study of the subject): anextremely fertile source of comedy in Western culture is the rivalrybetween two men for the same woman; presumably such a joke is la^gelylost on an audience in a society where polyandry is normal — I say"largely" because the nature of marriage in Western societies is only onevariable in such a joke: one would have to include the competitive elementin male relationships äs another relevant factor. Similarly, it was reportedin the British press in 1987 that the British satirical TV series SpittingImage had been withdrawn from transmission in the United States. Thisseries uses grotesquely caricatural puppets of famous political and show-business personalities, the British royal family, etc., and involves them inequally grotesque activities. When shown for the first time in the USA itattracted such an exceptionally high volume of complaints that it wasimmediately withdrawn. Apparently the complaints were about thetreatment of President Reagan äs a doddering old fool. Presumably in thisinstance the respect which some Americans feit was due to the Presidentmade what were intended äs jokes seem offensive, whereas an Englishaudience was not inhibited by this consideration. We could add thatEnglish audiences do not seem inhibited by equally disrespectful treat-ment of their own public figures: Danish friends with whom I discussedSpitting Image were amazed by the attacks on the English royal family andsaid that similar attacks on the Danish royal family would be unthinkable




on a Danish TV show. In each of these instances some feature of the sociallife of the audience turns a joke into something offensive.

A second way in which the pragmatics of language can be applied tocomic narrative is in the notion of occasions suitable for humor. MaryDouglas, quoted above, shows that a joke must be permitted äs well äsintended, and if comic theme is one reason for which jokes are notallowed, another is the occasion on which a joke is made (Douglas 1968:366). In Western culture there are various occasions on which it isimpossible (or at any rate extremely unlikely) that a joke — any joke —would be permitted: funeral Services, military parades, Job Interviews,police interrogations perhaps (here it would not be permitted on the partof the suspect, probably), etc. A sense of what sort of Statement isappropriate for what sort of occasion is an aspect of the performative levelof linguistic meaning, and although the examples quoted here aresomewhat caricatural, it is clear that a sense of when is an appropriatemoment for the injection of levity into an everyday conversation is anormal part of the rules of sociality

Moreover, these two applications of the notion of performance can becombined to explain why some jokes are suitable for some occasions andsome not. For example, it is well known that explicit jokes about sexualityare widely held to be more suitable for nonfamilial occasions than foroccasions typified by the presence of the family äs a unit; Sykes has shown,for instance, that a level of sexual humor is acceptable in the workplace,even between the sexes, that is not permitted in the home and is notpermitted even in the workplace between potential sexual partners (1966).Such jokes are held to be especially unsuitable for public occasions such ästelevision programs. It is perhaps a similar concern that explainsAmerican outrage at the Spitting Image treatment of President Reagan: nodoubt in private many such jokes and comments are heard, but to transferthem to the public sphere was perhaps considered excessive. An element ofour cultural history that is yet to be written would be the history ofcensorship and self-censorship of cinematic and broadcast humor (forbrief examples, see Aldgate 1981: 14; Appignanesi 1984: 153-159).

Such considerations have an obvious application to the study of humorin everyday life; to what extent are they relevant in the study of comicliterature?

The relevance derives from the observation that the arts are sociologicalentities äs well äs esthetic ones: it is a banality that they have to beproduced, paid for, displayed to an audience by some social mechanism or



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other; in short, that they are part of the general division of labor. Thefeature of their social existence which is directly relevant for our purposesis the fact that the "consumption" of the arts (if this term may be held tobe appropriate for what an audience, readership, etc., does with a work ofart) is also a social occasion: one goes to a theater, one sits down in theappropriate place and Switches on the TV, with or without Company, onedeliberately goes to a quiet place to read a novel, etc.4 In short, theconsumption of a work of art has to be socially organized in some form orother, and thus the moment when this occurs is a social occasion. Nowwhat the example of sexual humor used above suggests is that some formsof cultural activity are suitable for some occasions, and others for others:under what circumstances is comic narrative considered appropriate? Ingeneral, the answer is clear: on any occasion when entertainment isappropriate, comedy — one of the commonest forms of entertainment —is also appropriate. However, this simple answer conceals a multitude ofsocial-historical problems, which here can only be indicated in outline, onthe basis of brief examples.

These problems have a single focus: in our culture — by which I meanmodern Western industrial — the notion of entertainment makes sense;it is a category of social event which actually does exist, äs an entityseparate from other types of event. Notably, it is distinct from bothculture — in the post-Romantic, Arnoldian sense of the word — and fromritual; but this has not always been so, and it is the form that thisSeparation takes that is the focus of the problems I have referred to.

In its origins in Europe comedy was a part of religion. Although there isconsiderable disagreement among specialists about the details of theemergence of comedy äs a distinctive theatrical form, there is consensusthat it had its origin in Dionysiac ritual, whether we are talking about thesophisticated form that emerged in Athens during the fifth Century BC orthe cruder form that Aristophanes slightingly refers to äs Megarancomedy, a type of populär farce (Nichol 1931: 27); it is commonlysupposed that the procession in Aristophanes' Acharnaians is a goodindication of the nature of this ritual. Recent research into the actorsof ancient Greece suggests that in its earliest sense the komos (the wordwhich gave rise to the term "comedy") was a drunken phallus-bearingprocession in honor of Dionysus, involving merry "disordered" songs anddances äs well äs ritualized insults directed at unpopulär members of thepopulation (Ghiron-Bistagne 1976: 208ff). Such a procession was to betaken seriously — not, of course, in the sense of not arousing mirth, but in




the sense that it was considered a worthy, indeed central, part of culture —despite what would appear to the modern Western mind its unseriousnature, due to the presence of manifest mirth. The earliest-knownreference to a dramatic version of such a procession credits the poetSousarion with devising the Separation of the populär celebration intoindividualized roles in the form of an agon or confrontation (Ghiron-Bistagne 1976: 239).5

Whatever the exact nature of the origins of comedy, it is clear thatbetween the time of Sousarion's innovations (c. 580 BC) and the firstcomedy festivals in Athens in 487 or 486 BC, there had been enoughesthetic experimentation to give recognizably dramatic form to them andto separate comedy and tragedy into two distinct forms, presumably in thesame process that distinguished theatrical performance from poeticrecitation, thus creating the basic traditional literary genres (Ghiron-Bistagne 1976: 290ff).

Similarly, in tribal cultures humorous performance is frequently in-tegrally related to religious ritual (Apte 1985:151-176). What would in themodern Western world be thought of äs burlesques of religious ceremonialare regularly incorporated into the ceremonies themselves, or religiousceremonial incorporates forms of behavior that are clearly transgressive innature, and the transgressions are greeted with laughter by the popul-ation. Of course, this is not to suggest that humor in tribal societies occursonly in such settings: the point is that in these societies it is commonplacefor comic performance — in other words, a social occasion where there isa Separation between performer and audience, äs opposed to humor inordinary everyday circumstances, where such a Separation does not occur— to be closely associated with religious ceremony.

No doubt it is an oversimplification to refer to such similarities betweenancient Greece and Third World tribal societies, and no attempt will bemade here to suggest any further parallels. What we may learn from theseexamples relates to the notion referred to above that different types ofsocial occasion may produce different forms of humor, and here we cansee how this sociological notion can be mobilized to refer to specificallyesthetic properties of different comic narratives. For example, it has oftenbeen commented that Athenian Old Comedy — Aristophanes, forexample — is significantly different from the New Comedy that succeededit and that was widely imitated in Rome and subsequently in theRenaissance: the main differences appear to be a reduction in thebroadness, and especially the obscenity, of the humor and a retreat from



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the political engagement so typical of Aristophanes. This change, MmeGhiron-Bistagne suggests (1976: 136, 205), is part of the process ofsecularization of comedy, for the obscenity of the Old Comedy wasreligious in nature; this process was completed in the Roman Empire,where comedy rapidly lost any religious associations it may have had in itsorigins. Similarly, modern Western observers of the sacred clowns oftribal society, especially of Amerindian tribes, have frequently observedthat the level of transgression of what the relevant culture considersnormal — obscenity, scatology, etc. — is far more extreme than the levelof transgression allowable in public comic performances in our society.Theories purporting to explain the relationship between humor andreligious ritual are many and various (Apte 1985: 169ff), but withoutentering into anthropological and sociological controversies, we may atleast observe that such examples clearly demonstrate the proposition thattypes of humor vary with types of occasion.

The study of the development of comedy in postmedieval Europe leadsto the same conclusion.

In medieval Europe there existed a ränge of forms of performance thatwere gradually excluded from the arena of culture during the Renaissance.Such forms were the mummers' plays — crude (by classical Standards)plays based on traditional legends such äs Robin Hood and St. George andincluding farcical characters such äs Merry Andrew (Chambers 1909:eh. 17, passim); and the sotties in France — farces based upon nonsensicaldialogue (fatraisie) and social satire, prominently involving the characterof the fool (Swain 1932: ch.6, passim; Aubailly 1975: 103-109), amongothers. All of these forms were capable of performance in a variety ofcircumstances: fairgrounds, populär festivals associated with saints' daysand the like, the theater. In the seventeenth Century, the theater slowlycame to be defined äs a locus of polite entertainment, and thus it wasimportant to show that the audience for such entertainment and the placewhere it was undertaken were distinct from the noisy, ill-bred, rowdyrabble that patronized the traditional populär forms against which thepolite theater set out to define itself. As Stallybrass and White have shown,the traces of this effort of dissociation and distanciation are clearly to beseen in the prologues of many English plays of the period and sometimesin their very structure (1986: 62, 67ff, 84-94). In France, the sotties weresuppressed by the state and replaced by the polite theater of the classicalperiod (Swain 1932).

The forms of populär comedy appear from surviving examples to have




been very broad: verbal nonsense and knockabout farce were common-place elements in them.6 By contrast one of the defining features of thepolite theater was the exclusion of such broad features and theirreplacement with a refined wittiness and play of character. This is wellknown; the originality of Stallybrass and White's analysis is to insist thatthe change in style is a corollary of a change in public or — more exactly— part of a process of cultural scission in which a new public selectsitself by adapting its behavior to a new set of norms:

I think or hope, at least, the Coast is clear,That none but men of Wit and sence are here:That our Bear-garden friends are all away,Who bounce with Hands and Feet, and cry Play, Play.Who to save Coach-hire, trudge along the Street,Then print our Matted Seats with dirty Feet;Who, while we speak make love to Orange-Wenches,And between Acts stand strutting on the Benches:Where got a Cock-horse, making vile grimaces,They to the Boxes show their Booby Faces.A Merry-Andrew such a Mob will serve,And treat 'em with such Wit äs they deserve;... (Dryden, Prologue to Cleomenes,11.1-12; cited in Stallybrass and White 1986: 84).

Of course, the Situation implied here does not apply only to comedy:Dryden's play is a tragedy, and what is said in these lines should apply toall polite theater, indeed all polite pastimes. However, the rowdy part ofthe audience — the Bear-garden friends, who cannot or will not affordcoach-hire and whose manners are so deplorable — are dismissed äshaving a level of culture only fit for traditional farce, the Merry-Andrew:in this condemnation it is traditional comedy that is the mark of the Otherthat this new polite civilization is trying to evict. Of course, this is not theonly mark of this Other, äs Stallybrass and White make clear; however, itis one mark, and the implication is unmistakable: this form of comedyconstitutes a form of social occasion which is now considered incompat-ible with the style of social occasion that the new urbane, civilized societyof late-seventeenth-century England is trying to create for itself. Hereagain, we are in the presence of a direct relationship between forms ofcomedy and forms of social occasion.

This, then, is the final implication of the distinction between thesemantic and the pragmatic levels of comic meaning. We have seen thatcomedy is in its origins, at least in some societies, associated directly with



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religion; comparison of comedy in religious occasions with secularizedversions of it shows that the style of comedy varies considerably acrossthis contrast. Similarly, the exclusion of populär forms from the politeculture of post-Renaissance "civilized" society demonstrates that here toothere is a direct relationship between the form of a social occasion and thenature of comic performance that is acceptable. No doubt it would bepossible to study such correlations without recourse to the concept of thepragmatics of language — the proof is that it has been done. However, theadvantage of using pragmatics, or the performative level of meaning, isthat it enables us to draw a direct relationship between the semanticstructure of meaning and the social occasion upon which such meaning isachievable. Using this body of theory shows us how the social occasion isinscribed in the very grain of the text, and by the same token how the text— the set of discursive meanings that constitute it — is responsible forsome features at least of the social occasion in question.

The difference between art and entertainment is one which is basic toour culture, even though it has been somewhat elided since the 1960s: rockand roll is performed in concert halls to the kind of rapt attentionpreviously reserved for the classics; pop art and the various forms ofpostmodernist art knowingly and playfully mix elements drawn from thefine-art tradition with elements drawn from the populär arts, such äsadvertising and comics. The process which we have witnessed here isapproximately the obverse of the one that took place in the seventeenthCentury, in the establishment of "polite society." Where the study ofcomedy is concerned, this places certain traditional esthetic concerns in anew focus: it has been a commonplace of literary criticism that the comedyof— say — Moliere is superior to the comedy of boulevard farce; indeed,at one level, Langer's theory is intended precisely to consecrate such ajudgment by demonstrating the clear distinction between comedy and"mere funniness." However, to insist upon the intimate link between thetwo and to indicate that their Separation is historically and sociologicallyspecific is to insist that the esthetic judgment in Isolation is jejeune, that —at the very least — it needs to be paralleled by an answer to the question,"for whom, under what circumstances, is this judgment true?"

This paper has set out to demonstrate what forms of theory arenecessary to articulate studies of comic narrative. In particular its concernhas been to demonstrate the intimate link that exists between semantictheories — the traditional form that theories of humor have taken —discursive theories, and reference to extratextual variables, in this instance



Theory ofcomic narrative 125

historical and sociological. The purpose of such a demonstration is toargue for a less text-centered approach to the study of humor, for anapproach that is äs sensitive to the structure of occasion and audience ästo the structure of texts, not privileging one of these elements to thedisadvantage of the others.

City of London Polytechnic

Notes

1. See Douglas (1968: 366); compare the discussion in Palmer (1988: 21ff).2. Summarized in Palmer (forthcoming).3. This approach is broadly in line with recent British poststructuralist research into

"reading processes"; see for example Morley (1981) and Bennett and Woollacott (1986).4. One of the most interesting points in Radway (1984) is the extent to which the sheer fact of

reading, of deciding to isolate themselves in fiction, is one of the main functions of readingromances for the housewives that she studies.

5. There is a convenient summary of expert opinion on the origins and early development ofcomedy in Kenney and Clausen (1982) and Easterling and Knox (1985); I havesummarized those elements of the history of comedy relevant for an understanding ofcomic entertainment in the modern world in chapters 2 and 3 of my forthcoming TakingHumour Seriously.

6. For instances of such forms, see for example the discussion in Swain (1932) and Chambers(1909).

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