Analyzing jokes with the Intersecting Circles Model of humorous communication (original) (raw)

Lodz Papers in Pragmatics

In previous research, I have claimed that relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995) is a valid cognitive pragmatics framework to explain how humorous effects are generated, both from the processing of jokes (Yus 1997, 2003, 2008, 2012a, 2012b) and from the processing of longer discourses such as stand-up comedy monologues (Yus 2002, 2004, 2005). This paper aims to show how the speaker’s humorous intention is devised and how humorous effects are generated in the audience by analyzing 1000 randomly collected jokes and checking how they fit into any of the seven types of jokes that are predicted in the Intersecting Circles Model of humorous communication (Yus forthcoming). The paper is organized as follows: First, I provide a brief comment on the cognitive foundation of relevance theory and the inferential steps that hearers go through in the interpretation of utterances according to this theory. Second, I comment on how these steps can be manipulated for the sake of humor. Next, comments on a previous classification of jokes are provided. Finally, the Intersecting Circles Model of humorous communication (henceforth ICM) is outlined and the corpus of jokes is analyzed to check how they fit into the seven types of jokes that this Model comprises.

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