VANDAELE. Narrative Humor (I) PDF

Narrative Humor (I):
Enter Perspective
Jeroen Vandaele
University of Oslo, Spanish
Abstract What is narrative humor? With this question in mind, my essay (in two
parts) reviews several studies of narrative and humor. Part 1 discusses Edmond
Wright (2005), who argues that both humor and narrative crucially require audiences
or readers to switch between “intentional perspectives”: between the intentions,
goals, beliefs, motivations, emotions, and so forth of different agents or participants.
Although an important idea, it does not explain the difference between humor and
narrative or the composite concept of narrative humor. My essay shares Wright’s
intentionalist thrust but points out differences between humor and narrative. While
narrative has minimally two layers of intentionality (oriented to the action and to
its presentation), humor need not have them. While humor always requires agents
to perceive incongruity and induces (or confirms) feelings of superiority in them,
narrative is not defined by incongruity and superiority (although it can create those
effects). An intentionalist description of narrative humor—the composite concept—
now emerges: humor is narrative when it creates and/or exploits incongruity and
superiority relations between the participants (“agents”) of narrative texts: author,
narrator, reader, spectator, character. Thus to explain narrative humor is to show
how narrative enables its participants (“agents”) to produce humor. I analyze some
types of narrative humor: “metanarrative humor,” “comic narrative suspense,” and
“comic narrative surprise.” Some analysts add “comic character” and “comic action
logic” as forms of narrative humor. This is wrong, because narrative is not just story
I thank Meir Sternberg for his many detailed and thoughtful comments on several earlier
drafts of this text. Thanks also to Svetlana Rukhelman, Mieke Neyens, and Clem Robyns
for valuable suggestions.
Poetics Today 31:4 (Winter 2010) doi 10.1215/03335372-2010-011
© 2011 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
722 Poetics Today 31:4
(actions, characters) but discourse (narration) about story, although it is true (and
relevant) that narrators can back- or foreground themselves and their characters.
The narrator’s degree of fore- or backgrounding (i.e., of perceptibility) may influ-
ence the type of humor perceived in narrative (e.g., narratorial sarcasm or irony,
dramatic irony). Finally, I point out that the notion of narrative perspective com-
plicates Wright’s (or any other) definition of comic narrative in terms of “pleasure”
or “happy ending.” Part 2 of this essay will argue that such intentionalist analysis is
more basic than the psychoanalytic concepts that Alenka Zupančič (2008) brings
to bear on comedy. Also, the intentionalist framework will be contrasted there with
Salvatore Attardo’s (2001) and Isabel Ermida’s (2008) less intentionalist (“script-
based”) views on narrative humor.
How can the analysis of humor be a serious thing? Since humor itself is
not to be taken seriously, why would we take its analysis seriously? Con-
versely, if the analysis of humor aims at seriousness, does it not kill the
humor and thus stand opposed to its object of study? These two attitudes
or reactions to humor research—one despising the seriousness that the
other requires—may drive humor scholars to despair. Possibly as a result
many academic books and studies of humor carry such titles as No Laugh-
ing Matter (e.g., Legman 1982; Duncan and Feisal 1989; Hall 1993) or, less
frequently, Taking Humour Seriously (Palmer 1994) or “Taking Comedy Seri-
ously” (King 2002). Of the four relatively recent books on humor and nar-
rative under review here, none carries such titles, but two do take part in
the attempt to revaluate comedy and the joke as phenomena and fields of
investigations (Wright 2005: 1; Zupančič 2008: 10). The other two books
extensively reviewed here (Attardo 2001; Ermida 2008) are located within
humor studies, a firmly established academic field whose very existence
seems to make it unnecessary to revaluate humor, comedy, or the joke.
While I will sometimes refer to issues of academic legitimation and poli-
tics, my discussion will focus on what those four books say about the rela-
tion between narrative and humor.
I will start with an outline of Wright 2005 and then use some elements
in this argument to comment more critically on all four books, begin-
ning with Wright itself. Specifically, I will argue that Edmond Wright
develops a broad, emotional kind of “intentionality” that is essential to
a good understanding of comic narrative but is largely absent from the
other three volumes under review. Intentionality will refer to the fact that
persons have minds and bodies oriented to the world, that is, interacting
with the world and other persons in it. Examples are phenomena such as
mental acts, acts of perception, speech acts, (purposeful) intentions, goals,
beliefs, motivations, emotions, interactions between agents, and so forth.
To understand human intentionality is to have the capacity to make sense
Vandaele • Narrative Humor (I): Enter Perspective 723
of reality in terms of (configurations of ) agents, actions, situations, goals,

conflicts, collaborations, events, coincidences, and so forth. For the analy-
sis of narrative humor, I will argue, a broad notion of intentionality is
more to the point than the notion of “script” (as used in Attardo 2001 and
Ermida 2008) and more basic than the psychoanalytic concepts Alenka
Zupančič (2008) brings to bear on humor.
1. Thinking: Triangulation, Faith, Vulnerability
Wright aims at more than a theory of narrative humor per se. He develops
a “grand theory of discourse” (Brummett 2006: 471–72), which is a theory
of human thinking with discourse at its core. Yet Wright’s all-encompassing
framework, “triangulation theory,” does use narrative (“the Story”) and
humor (“the Joke”) as paradigm cases of human thinking in general and
therefore invites narratology and humor studies to see themselves as cru-
cial disciplines of the humanities. A summary of “triangulation theory” is
indispensable if we want to understand why Wright deems (the study of )
narrative and humor to be of the utmost importance. Moreover, since my
analysis will use ideas from Wright to comment on all four volumes, let us
discuss his major theses in some detail.
Wright subscribes to the idea that social discourse is the very motor
of human thinking and not merely its vehicle: discourse actively shapes
thinking processes rather than being the passive reflection and transmis-
sion of previously done private mind work. More precisely, says Wright
(2005: 103), Donald Davidson (e.g., 1991) correctly saw human thinking as
something social that happens in a triangle among two persons (or more of
course) and something to be known, on which each person tries to update
the other. However, Davidson and many other (especially analytic) phi-
losophers and thinkers are also wrong on two issues, according to Wright.
First, they are wrong to see the “something” to be known as an objective
“thing” or “singular entity” preexisting the thinking-cum-communicative
acts, and second, they are wrong to believe or imply that the two per-
sons remain stable, unaltered selves in and after the process of other-and
self-updating. The revisibility of knowledge makes all entities or identi-
ties unstable. The triangle of intersubjective knowing (subject-subject-
evidence) has “fuzzy corners” (Wright 2005: 104–20) or, to use another
image, is constantly shaking or adjusting on all sides and corners (Wright
2005: 117) in the mentation and communication process. By Continental
standards, this may not be too extreme a standpoint,1 but Wright develops
1. For example, post-structuralism makes comparable claims. Though heterogeneous

in many respects, this movement has clearly shifted the interest of Continental scholars
it mainly against analytic thinking, formal logic included. He argues, for

instance, that formal logic is not about the interesting part of thinking. It
starts only after logicians have decided that the categories worked with will
not change—and constant recategorization is precisely the most creative
or dynamic part of thinking.
Wright’s first criticism of Davidson et al.—of objectivism, the falla-
cious belief that there are objective objects—does not turn him, as one
might suspect, into a Berkeleyan idealist. He insists that reality exists but,
taking his cue from Roy Wood Sellars (1922), argues that our minds only
have indirect access to reality’s “flux”—via our brain sensations, which are
“structurally isomorphic” to the outside world yet meaningless (“know-
ledgeless,” “nonepistemic,” in Wright’s parlance) qua uninterpreted cor-
relations. He uses a metaphor to explain this structural isomorphism
between brain sensations and the outside world: the former are like green
images on a screen that is connected to an infrared camera (Wright 2005:
74). The images on the screen vary with the heat distribution captured by
the camera, yet these images have no intrinsic meaning (though human
minds can interpret them) nor do brain sensations, which are connected to
the external flow of reality (only human minds can give them any mean-
ing). A brain sensation, qua “natural sign,” “in itself contains no informa-
tion as such” (ibid.: 75).2 The senses merely provide ambiguous evidence—
never any preexisting objective objects—upon which our minds work in
collaboration with other minds. “The world is first of all sensed and not
known” (ibid.: 84).
From this evidence, the human mind can start building more or less
complex interpretations (objects of thought), such as “things,” “persons,”
“events,” “characteristics,” and so on. This view is not new, notes Wright:
it follows Immanuel Kant’s interactionist view of “intuition” (Wright’s
“brain sensation”) and “concept” (Wright’s “interpretation”): “intuitions
without concepts are blind” (Critique of Pure Reason, A51, B75; quoted in
Wright 2005: 166). Wright’s claims to originality lie elsewhere: he insists
from knowledge-transmitting communication between individuals with stable identities to

ideology-shaping discourse between persons with identities under construction.
2. Here Wright’s theory resembles other views on the mind’s intentionality. John R. Searle
(2002a, 2002b [1984]: 86–87; 2002c [1997]: 116–18), for instance, explains that human minds
have a special kind of intentionality not found in technological devices capable of generating
and processing abstract representations (TVs, thermometers, computers, or code switchers
in Chinese rooms). Only human subjects interpret data for original actions/intentions, i.e.,
wire representations to what Searle calls “original intentionality” (2002c: 116). He views the
latter as a special kind of causality—the object of “teleological explanations” (2002b: 87–88)
which are the focus of Diltheyan Verstehen (the sort of understanding that is essential to the
social sciences).
that emotion is the motor and steering wheel of knowledge and that prag-
matic faith in communication is constitutive of knowledge.
Regarding faith, Wright argues against objectivist realism that it is
important for human communicators to “assume” the existence of an object
referred to, but we have to realize that the seeming matter-of-factness of
this reference to an object is a foundational fiction. The objects we refer to
in communication are no more than an assumption, a working hypothesis
(ibid.: 123) based on the evidence provided by our senses. This assumption
is the necessary foundation of communication: we have to pretend that
we refer to the same object if we want to get communication started. It is
a leap of faith that allows us to start stating and triangulating about the
assumed object’s nature and characteristics. “Reason depends on trust and
not the reverse” (ibid.: 116). Language, indeed thinking, is a concatenation
of communicative statements (“utterances”), and all statements with mini-
mal relevance say something like this: “Do you see this bird? It is actually
something else.” The “bird” (even the one actually perceived) is the provi-
sional object that it is necessary to posit in order to be able to talk about
“it,” change “it,” or even undo “it” and call “it” something else.
Here is another example of an assumed object. When a mother says to
her daughter, “Dad is outside in the garden,” the apparently clear referen-
tial expression dad always has a different meaning for either of the perspec-
tives involved in the speech act (ibid.: 208). Not only is “dad” a complex
and evolving person, but the mother and daughter have partly overlapping
but also radically different experiences of him. We could perhaps interpret
Wright to say the following: the apparently unambiguous semantic mean-
ing of dad (“father”) and the felicitous reference of “dad” (to the man in the
garden) mask the fact that this concept has many different connotations
for different family members. Thus even if language is “coded” (Ferdinand
de Saussure) and not “private” (Ludwig Wittgenstein), the interpretation of
language activates a large amount of private meaning. In some commu-
nicative situations, the implicit differences between the daughter’s and the
mother’s concepts will not matter, but in others they may. In those cases,
triangulation will change the object and the subjects.
The positing of the object (“bird,” “dad”)—without believing in its tran-
scendence—involves a foundational act of intersubjective faith, and this act
produces vulnerability. For in triangulation each communicating human
being is always subject to constant updating and self-updating about the
evidence. There is always a risk of error in triangulation; we do not know
for certain if the communications move everyone and humankind as a
whole in the right direction. On a more interpersonal level, Wright points
out that drastic updates and self-updates (i.e., the vulnerability of hypothe-
ses) lead to conflicts between persons or even within one person—with

tragic effects if the conflict persists or comic effects if some reconciliation
is possible. Things and events believed to exist may not be there, or they
may turn out radically different than originally thought; persons may show
themselves partially or radically different from how we constructed them,
and so forth. In sum, faith in communication plays a crucial role in the
constitution of knowledge, and this faith is emotional in the sense that it
creates personal and global vulnerability.
Wright’s triangulating subjects are fully embodied forms of intention-
ality: the vulnerability of their thoughts should be understood in terms of
bodily pain and pleasure. Each individual mind at each moment in time
“is motivated by pains and pleasures, and by the memories of those [pains
or pleasures] now invested with consequent fear or desire to select por-
tions from [the] evidence” (ibid.: 41). A subject’s memory of the past is a
memory of pleasures and pains, and motivation in the present is memory
in action. Knowledge construction, including epistemic selection (perspec-
tive and attention) is fundamentally a form of motivated action, an attempt
to reduce pain and increase pleasure (ibid.: 93–94). Wright explains this
emotional and motivational grounding of perception and knowledge by
reference to the theories of Jean Piaget (1955) and Ernst von Glasersfeld
(1984). When elsewhere he states that knowledge at once creates and serves
desire, we understand that Wright (2005: 204) is as much a Nietzschean as
Michel Foucault, though he puts more stress on individual intentionality
and drive than on desire’s materialization or institutionalization in struc-
tures. Also, we find a striking similarity, noted only in passing (ibid.: 245),
between Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s dialogic thinking and Wright’s triangula-
tion. Bakhtin’s idea that thinking is action (response) and Wright’s moti-
vational approach to human thinking are both opposed to thought as an
unmotivated, emotionless representation system.
2. Triangulation and Vulnerability in Jokes and Stories
We can now begin to understand Wright’s interest in humor and narrative.

There, he says, ambiguous evidence receives its specific meanings through
various switches in intentional perspective. More or less cued by the com-
municator ( joker, narrator, speaker, author), the hearers or readers bring a
variety of perspectives to bear upon the ambiguous elements of stories and
jokes. Narrative and humor thus illustrate the general principle of think-
ing as triangulation. Moreover, they highlight the fact that triangulation
may incur vulnerability, hence conflict. Narrative and humor have a tragic
or a comic outcome, or—less dramatically—they have painful or pleasur-

able effects.
How does this actually work? How do jokes and stories present evidence
to be arranged and rearranged from different perspectives? In the little
joke “Why did the coal scuttle? Because it saw the kitchen sink,” many
“ambiguous elements” (pieces of evidence) are slanted by the many dif-
ferent perspectives which can be brought to it (ibid.: 13–14). Wright uses
the same (simple) schemata to visualize triangulations in jokes as in all
other domains (see figures 1–3). In the middle of the schema, we find the
(ambiguous, nonobjectlike) evidence, which is given specific meaning (rep-
resented in the lower part) by intentional perspectives that slant the evi-
dence (represented in the upper part). For the ambiguous elements sink
(/sink/) and scuttle (/skʌtl/) in the preceding joke, this gives:
Figure 1 Wright 2005: 13

“CIP” stands for “clues to intentional perspective”: these clues can be rep-
resented by words (“the coal scuttle” triggers /sink/’s interpretation as
“kitchen sink”), but they are generally “powerful scenarios” that may be
“absurd” yet “unconsciously” hover around the “complex of meanings”
(ibid.: 13). Thus the scenario of the “coal sinking its own ship” may lead
one to read /sink/ as “the kitchen sinking in the water,” and so forth.
Another narrative example, Aesop’s fable “The Wolf and the Shepherd,”3
gives the following triangulation scheme:
One might observe that Wright’s analysis of humor and narrative is not
very different from certain existing approaches. According to these, much
humor (especially jokes) and much narrative hinges on a sequential “frame
reversal” (e.g., Goffman 1974 on frame analysis); on “garden-path” telling
in which the reader or viewer is sent down the wrong interpretive path
before the right path is revealed (e.g., Jahn 1999); on initially and secretly
“gapped” telling, the sudden disclosure of previously suppressed informa-
tion throws new light on previous elements and readings (Sternberg 1978);
on quasi-simultaneous (instead of sequentially ordered) “frame shifting” or
“script/gestalt switching” (when what is evidence in one frame, e.g., for a
naive character, can be read as different evidence in a different frame, e.g.,
for an ironic narrator); on “incongruity-resolution” mechanisms, when
material that is strange or incongruous according to one script receives
3. “A wolf thought that by disguising himself he could get plenty to eat. Putting on a sheep-
skin to trick the shepherd, he joined the flock at grass without being discovered. At nightfall
the shepherd shut him with the sheep in the fold and made it fast all round by blocking the
entrance. Then, feeling hungry, he picked up his knife and slaughtered an animal for his sup-
per. It happened to be the wolf ” (Aesop, quoted in ibid.: 44).
some relatively coherent interpretation due to a second script (e.g., Ras-

kin 1985; Attardo 2001; Ermida 2008, discussed in Vandaele forthcoming).
Among these approaches, however, Wright’s analysis resembles less
those that focus on unmotivated and “emotion-low” cognition (e.g., Attardo
2001) than those in which cognition and emotion are twinned aspects of
the mind (see Sternberg 1978; 2003a: 353 ff. on the play of narrative emo-
tions). Wright’s “intentional perspectives” and “triangulations” are funda-
mentally tied to the emotions. Communicating minds are first and fore-
most parts of “concerned agents” with a past and long-term goals and
situational interests (Wright 2005: 111). What interpreting minds attend
to, refer to, and understand is coselected by other communicating minds
of course but also motivated by life experience and by present interests,
which can sometimes be manipulated by the other communicator (ibid.:
44, 95). Also, Wright’s intentionality does not reduce to a rationally agreed
upon framework of social rules adopted by individuals. It is both social and
individualized, “individualized” meaning “motivated” by the remembered
and embodied satisfactions, desires, fears, pains of an individual. Rooted
in motivational intentionality, in triangulation’s perspectival rearrange-
ments of life, narrative and humor are emotional events for concerned
agents.
I will make ample use of emotional intentionality in my discussion and
critique of Attardo 2001, Ermida 2008, and Zupančič 2008 (in part 2),
and I welcome it as a counterweight to any “nonmotivational” or non-
intentionalist cognitive view of narrative, humor, or discourse in general.
However, I will now argue (in part 1) that Wright’s schema also under-
represents aspects of intentionality in narrative and humor: the specific
agents involved, their specific relations, and the temporal unfolding of
their interactions.
3. Humor, Narrative, Intentional Perspective
Wright’s argument is very generalized. It argues that the above-mentioned

mechanisms (triangulations with perspective switching, faith, vulnera-
bility) operate in the joke, the story, and many other kinds: statement;4
pun (Wright 2005: 18); rhyme;5 play in animals (ibid.: 39); the (imagi-
nary) dismantling of an unknown bomb by two collaborating agents;6 ico-
4. “Saying . . . is a story or a tale being told” (Calvin Schrag, quoted in Wright 2005: 127).
5. “A rhyme can . . . be justifiably viewed as a mini-joke” (Wright 2005: 19).
6. “Mutual decisions have to be made about what is to be regarded as, taken to be, objects
in the field. Let us take it that the bomb is of an entirely new design, so that the bomb-
nicity, metaphor, and metonym (ibid.: 132); Kuhnian scientific advances

(ibid.: 140); poem and word (ibid.: 154);7 all communication (ibid.: 164);
Sigmund Freud’s child playing Fort-Da (ibid.: 227); and so forth. All these
phenomena are somehow cases of “evidence” that is being interpreted in
various ways by “concerned” agents or communication participants who
reveal or are driven by intentional perspectives.
The phenomena that Wright sees as cases of intentional perspective
switching are so diverse that it may be hard for his reader to find some-
thing common underlying them. If the same motivated intentionality plays
such an important role in all the above-mentioned kinds and processes,
why do we experience them as so different? What they have in common—
triangulation, the switching of intentional perspectives—cannot capture
their specificity, which seems more striking than what they have in com-
mon: humor and narrative are very different things, although Wright says
they thrive on the same principle. And since they are so obviously dif-
ferent, why should we believe that their common mechanism is a crucial
aspect of their definition?
Wright makes only occasional attempts to distinguish between subtypes
of triangulation, such as tragedy and comedy (and jokes). He thus argues
(ibid.: 45) that comedy (including jokes) opts for a pleasurable end and
tragedy for a painful one. However, I do not find this differential analysis
as satisfactory as his general discussions of triangulation and intentional
perspective. What is a “pleasurable” or “painful” end? For whom? For a
character in a story? For the reader of that story? Does this not depend on
the relation between character and reader? Is there necessarily empathy
between them? And on what or whom does empathy or distance depend?
What is the role of the narrator and of the author?8 How are these relations
constructed by different agents9 in different discourse types and situations?
disposers have the difficult task of making out what they are looking at . . . as in the Joke”
(ibid.: 97).
7. “We can see each new word as a poem in little [and] each is a story” (ibid.: 154).
8. It is commonly accepted that in fiction, as opposed to nonfiction, the author and the nar-
rator are in principle different sources of intentionality (see Cohn 1990: 792–800): the author
creates a narrator and should not be held responsible for what the narrator says. Authors
can even poke fun at narrators. On the other hand, the fictional narrator and the author are
often close collaborators: the narrator communicates what the author invents. In comic fic-
tion, e.g., we will see that the “superior” author can invent both an inferior/incongruous fic-
tional ontology and a “superior” narrator who communicates that ontology from the same
Olympian height. Such author-narrator collusion may tend to background the authorial
function and thus blur the author/narrator distinction.
9. A cautionary remark on terminology: For philosophers like Wright, agent nonproblemati-
cally refers to any person responsible for an intentional (i.e., action) perspective in or on a
world. We will see that narrative’s agents are, in this sense, the reader/spectator, author,
Wright’s general argument would have been even more powerful if it had
shown more clearly the unity and diversity of motivated intentionality in
various speech types and situations. A demonstration of variety in unity
might have strengthened even his general case for unity, for it would have
dealt with the objection that too many different phenomena are explained
by the same principle.
In my ensuing discussion of humor, narrative, and narrative humor (in
jokes and narrative fiction), I will try to complement and specify Wright’s
ideas rather than object to them. On the one hand, I will accept the
intentionalist-emotive thrust of his argument. Human understanding is
indeed trustful (hence vulnerable) communication in time between con-
cerned participants (“intentional agents”) who interpret evidence through
constantly shifting perspectives and who thus work from individual, emo-
tionally motivated intentionality toward impossible (yet necessarily and
playfully desired) perfect mutual and collective understanding. On the
other hand, Wright does not help us understand humor and narrative
(or any other subtype of triangulation) as different and combinable con-
cepts. Applied to these phenomena, a more differential—yet still emotive-
intentionalist—approach to triangulation may ask the following questions:
What participants (“agents”) are involved in the speech event (e.g., charac-
ters, narrators, authors, audiences)?10 What is their apparent concern, that
is, what are they apparently doing (e.g., acting in a story, making a joke in
real life, narrating a story, listening to a story)? How do they relate to each
other (e.g., as author to narrator, as narrator to character, or as character
to character)?11 How much time does the communication take (e.g., the
narrator, and character. Narrative theory, however, traditionally restricts the term agent
of narrative to the character(s) in action and action to what the characters act. Narratolo-
gists will prefer a term such as participant to agent or intentional perspective in a general sense
(including narrator, author, reader, and spectator). In my analysis participant and agent will be
the (interchangeable) terms for the general concept and thus will serve as reminders that
Wright and narrative theory offer compatible analyses. On the other hand, I will use the
term action in the restricted sense of character’s action, though narration is also a form of
action—interacting with the reader/spectator.
10. I should write “spectator” or “audience” when I refer to film and performance (e.g., the-
ater or joke telling) and “reader” when I refer to written literary communication.
11. “The act of narrative communication presupposes a complex of four basic components
or participants, namely, the author who creates the story, the narrator who tells it, the audi-
ence or reader who receives it, and the fictive agents who enact it. As regards informa-
tional privilege, therefore, point of view involves a set of no less than six closely connected
relationships, some of which may occasionally overlap, as when the narrator is practically
identical with the author or when he is himself one of the agents. Of these six fundamental
relationships, that between the author and the characters alone always remains constant in
its informational inequality, while the five others—between author and narrator, author and
short duration of a joke or the longer one of a novel)? Whose time are we
talking about (e.g., a character’s or an audience’s)? How vulnerable are all
the participants? Do they really work toward mutual understanding? Or is
some antagonism or hierarchy noticeable between them?
By attending to these questions, my discussion hopes to throw light on
narrative humor and the comedy/tragedy distinction. First, I will briefly
define humor and narrative as separate categories. Unlike humor, narra-
tive is by definition an evolving presentation of an evolving action world:
to understand a narrative is to understand the interrelated activity of nar-
rative participants (i.e., the narrator’s telling of the characters’ actions).
While narrative contains minimally two layers of intentionality (i.e., the
action and its presentation), humor is an interaction that does not by defini-
tion present a story world. Unlike narrative, humor always involves partici-
pants who create or perceive (and resolve) incongruity and who entertain
feelings related to superiority. No narrative layeredness is required for such
processes to happen, but neither does such layeredness hinder them—on
the contrary. An intentionalist description of narrative humor—the com-
posite concept—will then emerge: humor is narrative when it creates and/
or exploits incongruity and superiority relations among the participants of
narrative texts. In such cases, readers/audiences have reason to construct
authors who present incongruous (or comically inferior) narrators, or nar-
rators who present incongruous characters, or characters who present
themselves or other characters as incongruous (the narrator and the author
permitting), or readers/audiences who find that they have themselves been
fooled by the narrator or author.
4. Narrative and Humor: Apart and Together
4.1. Narrative
As Wright argues, stories and utterances have something important in
common: they are acts of communication, parole. Even a child’s first words
are “mini-utterances” (see also Tomasello 2003), and like stories, they are
acts asking for a relevant interpretation (Sperber and Wilson 1986). In both
cases, we understand speech as an illocutionary act, and such an under-
standing implies motivational (i.e., action-logical) intentionality—the
human capacity to make sense of reality in terms of agents, situations,
goals, beliefs, desires, intentions (purposes), actions, events, and so forth.
In more complex real-life communication, we even construct layered
reader, narrator and reader, narrator and character, and reader and characters—are flexibly
variable” (Sternberg 1978: 260).
forms of intentionality, as when we interpret someone who quotes some-

one else. Similarly, it is beyond doubt that action-logical intentionality is
a necessary component of narrative competence too (see, e.g., Zunshine
2006). Narrative represents or quotes thoughts, speech, and acts, and the
narrator may help us to some extent read intentionality into the situations
and actions described and narrated. In all forms of simple and complex
discourse, we find motivational or action-logical intentionality.
Nevertheless, a distinction should be made between action outside nar-
rative and action within narrative. To understand this difference, we should
explain the distinction between first-degree intentionality (acts, percep-
tions, thoughts, utterances, communications) and second-degree inten-
tionality (which reports about first-degree intentionality). When Peter says
“Hi!” to his friend, he is engaged in first-degree (speech) action; when he
tells me that he said hi, he is engaged in second-degree intentional action—
the reporting of his speech act. When Peter looks at Frank, he is engaged in
first-degree (perceptual) action; when I tell you that he gave Frank the evil
eye, I am engaged in second-degree intentional action. When Susan walks
in the city center, she is engaged in first-degree intentional action; when I
say that she walked to her work, I create second-degree intentionality. All
three first-degree actions (Peter saying “Hi,” Peter looking at Frank, Susan
walking in the city center) are intentional in the sense that they consti-
tute world-oriented activity, and they may exist both outside narrative and
embedded in narrative. When they are embedded in narrative, they are
one layer of narrative’s double intentionality (which includes a first-degree
doing and its second-degree reporting). In all three above-mentioned
cases, there is an agent or participant—the narrator—who reintentional-
izes a character’s first-degree intentionality from a perspective (i.e., from
an intentional context) that is not the character’s (since it is the narra-
tor’s). The narration takes as an object first-degree actions that can be
spoken/representational (Peter saying “Hi!”), or nondiscursive (silent; e.g.,
Peter looking at Frank), or even nonrepresentational (e.g., Susan walking).
Thus some narrated first-degree intentionality is intentional in the sense
of object-oriented (someone talking about something or looking at some-
one), while other represented or embedded intentionality is not object-
oriented (the woman obviously does not walk “about” something) though
still action-oriented (she may have a goal or a reason to walk).
Given this initial characterization of narrative, we can see why much
humor is indeed nonnarrative. A quip, or a pun, or a funny face as part
of a talk, or a mocking description may be intentional acts with action-
logical value in the first-order world but without necessarily narrating a
world or being part of a narrated world. When mockery, puns, quips, and
funny faces do not narrate a story world or when they are not part of a nar-
rated world’s action logic, they have no narrative value. We will say that
humor is only narrative when it is part of a narrative whole: part of the nar-
rated world, part of the narration, or part of what I will call a “metanarra-
tive” technique (i.e., one that flouts and so foregrounds the rules of good
narrative).
4.2. Humor
A funny face, a witticism, a practical joke, a pun, a lapse, a weird remark,
an incongruous piece of decoration, a good impersonation, a parody of a
painting: all these can be embedded in a narrative, but they have functions
in the action-logical fabric of real life as well. As “incongruity theories”
(see, e.g., Shultz 1976) explain, humor happens when the expectation of a
participant is frustrated, and expectations exist in real life’s action logic as
they do in narrative.
Humor has many possible functions in the action logic of extranarrative
life. Salvatore Attardo (1994: 322–28) sums up many of them. Humor may
serve as a captatio benevolentiae, as a way to check and establish normative
common ground, to create intimacy, to playfully shift the topic of conver-
sation, to convey norms in a playful way, to express lack of commitment to
what is said, to show cleverness, to compete playfully, to tease, to build an
in-group and an out-group, to let the communicating agents relax, to cope
with difficulties, to manage a conflict, to mitigate aggression or to make it
socially acceptable, and so forth. Many of these functions show that humor
is not just a frustrated expectation. It also involves (a mitigation of ) hos-
tility and antagonism, as so-called “superiority theories” of humor (e.g.,
Gruner 1997) have argued.
In such action-logical contexts, humor occurs as a short irruption or
in cumulative form. Accumulation is possible, for instance, when sharp
minds engage in a battle of wits. One quip may lead to another, chains of
puns may be created, one sarcastic remark may be met by an even harsher
one, double entendres may generate more double entendres of the same
thematic (e.g., sexual) kind, and so on. Some of the jokes may be little nar-
ratives in themselves, but even so their cumulative recurrence does not
automatically create a larger humor-narrative complex. Sheer length, con-
tinued playfulness, and thematic cohesion do not turn cumulative humor
into narrative humor.
4.3. Narrative Humor

What, then, does narrative humor mean? Humor is narrative when it is
part of a narrative whole with a central intentional agent: it is then part
of the narrated world’s action, of the narration, or of “metanarrative” acts

(which highlight the rules of narration). Thus when humor is narrative, it
should make sense to ask which parts of the narrative whole construct or
contribute to the humor? If we assume (with Wright) that the most impor-
tant “parts” of narratives are “intentional perspectives” of “concerned
agents/participants,” then it should be possible to show (again following
Wright) that comic narrative exploits the relations between its parts (i.e.,
intentional perspectives) to produce humor (i.e., incongruity and superi-
ority). This is what I will endeavor to show below: how narrative humor
sets up specific comic conflicts (i.e., incongruity and superiority relations)
between its intentional perspectives. Since narratives can contain many
participants (“agents”) and perspectives, there will be different types of
narrative humor.
I will describe several types of relations and their construction (i.e.,
types of narrative humor). In metanarrative humor (section 5), we will see that
the reader interprets deficient narration as an author’s or narrator’s comic
strategy, which mixes or competes with proper narration (and thus shows ex
negativo what proper narration is). In comic narrative suspense (section 6), the
reader or spectator learns from an authoritative (communicative, congru-
ous, and superior) narrator about incongruous (inferior) acts and thoughts
in the story world. Comic suspense, then, will be the reader’s or spec-
tator’s state of mind in which suspense (i.e., uncertainty about the story
world’s development) mixes or competes with a normative sense of superi-
ority and distance vis-à-vis that developing world. Comic narrative surprise
(also section 6) is a surprise about the action and/or its communication,
one which the reader or spectator attributes to (i.e., finds to be caused by)
an incongruous narrator and/or incongruous character (or action logic).
It is a complex and variegated phenomenon. It may produce our scorn-
ful surprise (superiority) vis-à-vis a character, but it may also induce in us
a sense of temporary foolishness (and later “regained” superiority). The
difference between metanarrative humor (section 5) and narrative humor
(section 6) is marked by a different power relation between humor and nar-
rative: in narrative humor, the narrative force constructively blends with
comic incongruity; in metanarrative humor, the comic conflict seriously
obstructs—or even destroys—the narrative enterprise.
The idea that irony and humor in narrative12 are a conflict between
12. In this essay I will ignore the (complex) difference and overlap between irony and humor.
I assume that irony is often humorous and note that it often shares important intentionalist
characteristics with humor: a congruous or superior subject (the ironist or humorist) dispar-
ages an incongruous and inferior object (the target) before an audience. The audience can
be the accomplice of the humorist-ironist (with a third party as the victim) or can double
intentional perspectives is not new of course. Benjamin Hrushovski (1979:

370) observed, for example, that “if a character is presented in an ironic
light, it may be either that the narrator is the source of the irony or that
the narrator is a naive observer and is viewed ironically in his turn by
the author of the text.” Unlike Hrushovski, however, many analysts (e.g.,
Palmer 1987) of comic narrative do not see this layered intentional struc-
ture behind it. Rather, they imply that comic characters and action logic
are immediate relations between the character/action and the reader or spec-
tator—and are therefore forms of narrative humor. In sections 7 and 8,
I will argue for the paradox that this analytic error sometimes points to
an important illusion. In the receiver’s illusive perception, narrative fore-
grounds or backgrounds different agents—to the point that narration may
seem to vanish and story world action appears on its own. This has conse-
quences for humor perception too: humorous narration may seem to van-
ish and the story world look comic per se. I will therefore explore which
factors give prominence to the narrator as a humorist or to the narration
as a form of humorous agency. One major factor will be the narrator’s per-
ceived degree of communication (versus manipulation), but other factors
of (im)perceptibility will also play a role.
Finally, to round off my elaboration of Wright, I turn to three topics
which this otherwise masterly book neglects or treats unsatisfactorily: the
relation between happiness and comedy (section 9), the joke/comedy dis-
tinction (section 10), and comic tone (section 11).
5. The Implied Author as a Humorist: Metanarrative Humor
If the communication is between the implied author and the implied reader at the
expense of the narrator, we can say that the implied author is ironic and that the
narrator is unreliable.
Seymour Chatman, 1978
Audiences and readers expect narrative texts, like all communication,

to be engaging and to make a point. In narrative, this point is mainly—
though not exclusively—thought to reside in interesting story agents and
events and perspectives on them. In other words, narration is supposed to
frame the story world in such a way that relevance or interest is created in
as the victim. The ironist can also target himself or herself. Even so, there is an important
difference between someone who is ironist and victim and someone who is merely the butt
of the joke (or the irony). Compare the incongruous “victim-only” George W. Bush of the
Bushisms with the same man as a self-ironist: “[Bush] went on to joke about the suggestions
that Mr Cheney was the man in charge at the White House: ‘To those people I say, I say . . .
Dick, what do I say?’” (BBC 2001).
its situations and developments. Metanarrative humor is a comic defiance

of such expectations.
Narration in comic novels, such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy,
creates metanarrative humor by denying the reader well-presented views of
interesting action logic. As Wayne Booth (1983 [1961]: 222–23) says, Sterne’s
narrator blatantly shows a constant “failure,” because his “telling” is not
“rhetoric to aid in the realization of dramatic elements”: “In some ways he
is giving us a novel like other novels, and in some ways he is not.” Booth
illustrates Tristram’s narrational failures with the following example:
In less than five minutes I shall have thrown my pen into the fire . . . —I have
but half a score things to do in the time—I have a thing to name—a thing to
lament—a thing to hope . . . and a thing to pray for.—This chapter, therefore,
I name the chapter of Things—and my next chapter to it, that is, the first chap-
ter of my next volume, if I live, shall be my chapter upon Whiskers, in order to
keep up some sort of connection in my works.
The thing I lament is, that things have crowded in so thick upon me, that I
have not been able to get into that part of my work, towards which I have all
the way looked forwards, with so much earnest desire; and that is the cam-
paigns, but especially the amours of my uncle Toby, the events of which are of
so singular a nature, and so Cervantick a cast, that if I can so manage it, as to
convey but the same impressions to every other brain, which the occurrences
themselves excite in my own—I will answer for it the book shall make its way
in the world, much better than its master has done before it.—Oh Tristram!
Tristram! can this but be once brought about—the credit, which will attend thee
as an author, shall counterbalance the many evils which have befallen thee as
a man . . . —No wonder I itch so much as I do, to get at these amours—They
are the choicest morsel of my whole story! (Tristram Shandy, vol. 4, quoted in
Booth 1983 [1961]: 222–23)
The humor of this excerpt is a consequence of (presumably intended) play-

ing with narrative’s framing techniques—so that successful narration is
obstructed but humor is created instead. When failed narration cannot
be reframed, it merely disorients and irritates audiences. However, when
the unsuccessful narrative discourse can be reframed as humor, receivers
may be pleasantly disoriented, because they find comic sense in the narra-
tive nonsense. Sterne’s novel indeed plays with the framing devices of nar-
ration, so that narration often breaks down in a comic way: “The reader
easily deduces that [the] infractions are not due to ignorance, carelessness
or uncooperativeness on Sterne’s part, but to an intention of comicality,
as [Mary Louise] Pratt (1977: 165) points out: ‘The violations themselves
are amusing, and since amusement is an accepted purpose of display texts,
Sterne implicates that his intent is to amuse us’” (Ermida 2008: 166).
Tristram Shandy’s humor is metanarrative, because it is a comic comment

on the rules and expectations of narration, just as wordplay is a metalin-
guistic phenomenon, because it highlights features of language that are
usually expected to be backgrounded in language use.
However, it is imprecise to state that the novel creates comic sense via
narrative nonsense. Intentionalist analysis allows us to talk with greater
analytic precision by focusing on parts of the novel, that is, on its inten-
tional perspectives. In metanarrative humor, indeed, the communica-
tive level above the narrator—here the implied author Sterne—is often
foregrounded as an intentional context. Tristram’s abortive narration is
embedded in a higher intentional level which allows readers to naturalize
or motivate the failure as comedy (rather than merely as failed narration).
The narrator’s failure is seen as the author’s comedy.
On the one hand, the author, with his comic intentions, overpowers
the narrator with his narrative aspirations. On the other hand, the narra-
tion does not have to break down entirely: genuine narrative interest may
arise at some points. At the very least, the narration is an intentionalist
background—the activity aimed at by the narrator—which is disrupted for
the sake of authorial humor. Thus the intentionality of readers switches
between a metanarrative interest in the author’s incongruities and a nar-
rative interest in the story world. Interestingly, Booth (1983 [1961]: 224)
suggests that the comic disruptions of narration can be placed on a con-
tinuum: from drastic to moderate interference with the (narration of ) the
action; from extreme kinds where “the manner . . . rival[s] with the matter”
to “the kind of monumental comic action [Henry] Fielding had revealed.”
Furthermore, Meir Sternberg (1978: 160) shows with reference to Field-
ing that metanarrative disruptions can do more than serve the implied
author’s humor. They can simultaneously have a properly narrative—
here suspense-creating—function by delaying a denouement. In a frantic
sequence of Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, for example, the narrator “leaves the
excited participants frozen in mid-stride, announcing that he would ‘make
a simile on this occasion’ were there not weighty reasons against it. And
he naturally feels obliged to set these reasons forth in full,” thus delaying
the communication of events (ibid.). In those cases, the narrator himself
or herself remains fully in charge of the narrative communication and its
comic disruptions.
Metanarrative humor involves acts and agents that fit incongruity and
superiority theories of humor. According to incongruity theories, humor
can play with any aspect of cognition and expectation: if specific contexts
activate cognitive rules that construct expectations, then an incongruity
can be regarded as going counter to the activated rule and the specific
expectation (see, e.g., Vandaele 2002a: 227). Usually, for instance, narra-
tion does not stop the action “in mid-stride” to make an irrelevant theoreti-
cal digression. Thus Fielding’s humor runs counter to normal narration
and is a comic comment on its rules.
Superiority theories, on the other hand, argue that humor is not merely
a rational cognitive operation. Comic incongruities usually assume mild or
strong normative connotations that also affect the agents responsible for
the incongruity. In other words, incongruities are also often “abnormali-
ties”: they “denormalize” their agents (Vandaele 2002a). Readers may, for
instance, motivate Tristram’s failure as mockery by Sterne and join Sterne’s
mocking, “denormalizing” take on his narrator. As Booth explains, how-
ever, other interpretations of Tristram’s failure—such as the consideration
that narration is a difficult enterprise—may counteract the mockery and
produce some readerly sympathy for Tristram. Similarly, in Elvira Lindo’s
popular comic narrative Manolito Gafotas (1994), the failures of narration
can be attributed to the fact that the narrator Manolito is only eight years
old and thus create sympathy for the little boy (albeit in a condescending
manner).
A full explanation of metanarrative humor—its mechanism of frustrat-
ing expectations with normative consequences for the agents—seems to
require an intentionalist framework. In metanarrative humor, readers moti-
vate communication by reflecting on the possible intentions of authors and
narrators—and (constructed) intentions are one important form of inten-
tionality as we defined it. Manolito’s errors of narration are the object of
playful communication between the author Lindo and her reader, whereas
the purposeful play with narration in Fielding arguably happens between
the narrator and the reader. Our minds always look for causes (e.g., inten-
tional perspectives), and the perception of a specific cause (e.g., a comic
author) influences our evaluation of the effects (e.g., narrative failures). We
see individuals as rich intentional contexts and powerful causes of things.
We ask ourselves who disrupts the narration and for what purpose?
I believe these ideas to be fairly obvious. However, with all the past
debate in literary theory on the (im)possibility of reading literary inten-
tions, I may need to defend my proposal further. I could point out that
my notion of intentionality goes beyond intentions stricto sensu (i.e., pur-
poseful intentions), yet this argument will not save me here: my “metanar-
rative” humor involves purposeful intentions. Another standard defense
against anti-intentionalists would be to say that readers are not always
certain about the intentions they have constructed. This is true and gener-
ally important in literary interpretation. Regarding humor, however, my
defense is that readers often do feel quite certain about the intentions they
constructed (i.e., that humor was intended). Booth (1974) argues that ironic
intentions are quite often “stable,” that is, detectable and interpretable.
Much humor is also stable in this sense, because it usually contains a “local
logic” that “brings some kind of explanation to the incongruity” (Ziv 1984:
90). To understand a joke, for instance, is to have some explanation for its
incongruous aspects, and we easily know if we have correctly constructed
this explanation. (If not, someone may have to “explain” the joke to us.)
Regarding humor, then, people often feel quite certain in constructing
either of the following communication types: (a) when there is obviously
no single agent (no centralized intention) behind the humor, we construct
a funny thing which may be comic for some perceiving intentionality (e.g.,
a funny shape in the clouds, an ironic series of coincidences or events);
(b) when there is an obvious intentional agent but no obvious humorous
intention and nevertheless a humorous effect, we construct unintended humor
(e.g., a remark made by a serious agent may be funny for another); (c) when
there is an obvious communicator, an obvious humorous intention, but no
humorous effect, we construct unachieved humor (possibly with other unin-
tended emotional effects, such as the would-be humorist becoming a tar-
get of mockery); (d) when there is an obvious communicator, an obvious
humorous intention, and a humorous effect, we construct achieved humor.
Humor in narrative requires such intentionalist talk. Readers try to
determine, for example, if metanarrative humor is an authorial or a nar-
ratorial strategy. They wonder how they should understand (motivate,
resolve) incongruous (deficient) narration. As Wright says, the same “evi-
dence” (e.g., deficient narration) can be related to different “intentional per-
spectives” so as to create counterpoint effects: the narration is understood
to be seriously intended by a mocked narrator and comically intended by
the mocking author (as in Tristram Shandy and Manolito Gafotas). More gen-
erally, readers of narrative can relate communication types (a), (b), (c), and
(d) to the different levels of narrative intentionality: implied author, nar-
rator, character. Not only can they find that authors poke fun at narrators,
they can find that narrators laugh at the intentionality of characters (see
section 6). Serious situations on the “intradiegetic” (i.e., the action) level
can have a comic effect on a higher, extradiegetic level of communication.
Dramatic irony, for instance, requires intentionalist analysis: unintended
events or seriously intended acts on the story level (situation a) can also be
forms of intended humor or irony (situation d) between the audience and
the narrator/author.
We will see that the discrepancy between intra-and extradiegetic inten-
tionality is not only a matter of intentions in the narrow sense (i.e., purposes)
but includes all forms of world-orientedness. Readers (audiences), narra-
tors, and characters may have different (and differently evolving) beliefs,
knowledge, emotions, attitudes, motivations, intentions—intentional per-
spectives that can switch. These perspectives and their switchings can be
turned to comic account, when they involve incongruity and superiority.
6. The Narrator as a Humorist: Comic Narrative Perspective
If the communication is between the narrator and reader at the expense of a char-
acter, we can speak of an ironic narrator.
Seymour Chatman, 1978
So the implied author can be seen as a humorist who pokes fun at an

incongruous narrator.13 When this is the case, the reader’s perception of
the narrator’s incongruity is not just a rational or “emotion-low” cogni-
tive process. It does not just involve the reader’s dry registration that a
narrative rule has not been followed, as when a computer program regis-
ters the incongruity of “two plus two is five” in a mathematical exercise.
In metanarrative humor, something more happens. The communication
and perception of incongruity also involves an emotive, interpersonal, and
attitudinal “superiority” relation of the author and the reader vis-à-vis the
narrator. This interpersonal and normative aspect of metanarrative humor
is present in most or perhaps even all humor.
Indeed, humor usually involves feelings of superiority (vis-à-vis an
inferior target), heightened self-esteem, a sense of intelligence (versus the
target’s stupidity), direct or indirect aggression/hostility, derision, dispar-
agement, deprecation, in-and out-group feelings, stereotyping, and overt/
covert cuing (e.g., blinking an eye) as mechanisms that establish com-
mon ground between agents or serve as discriminatory devices excluding
agents from group activity, and so forth (see Vandaele 2002a). It is true of
course that humor is often not found to be very aggressive, that its superi-
ority mechanisms are often softened by the lighthearted tone of humor (on
which more in section 11). Nonetheless, as Dolf Zillmann and Joanne R.
Cantor (1976) have shown in psychological experiments, antagonistic atti-
tudes between agents are often crucial in the appreciation of humor:
The intensity of the response to humorous presentations critically depends upon
the respondent’s affective disposition toward the protagonists involved. (Ibid.:
93)
13. Compare Fludernik 1993: 352: “If there is a textual speaker who utilizes contradictions
on whatever level, one can speak of narrational or narratorial irony; if the contradictions
are recognized only by the reader, and the ironic intent is hence attributed to the (implied)
author rather than the narrative voice, one can call this authorial humor.”
Mirth deriving from witnessing the debasement of an agent or object increases

with negative sentiments toward the debased agent or object. Mirth deriving
from witnessing an agent or object accrue benefits decreases with negative senti-
ments and increases with positive sentiments toward the beneficiary. (Ibid.:
111–12)
I insist on the emotive and attitudinal “superiority” side of humor,

because it has natural ties with narrative. Narrative is fertile ground for
humor, because like life it is packed with agents, attitudes, emotions, and
knowledge—with emotional intentionality, as Wright might call it. Like
life, narrative perspective creates likes and dislikes, unequal access to
information, and unequal interpretive skills. Unlike life, moreover, nar-
rative can orchestrate these perspectival features. As central creators-
communicators, the author and narrator can freely distribute knowledge
and arrange radical switches of perspective. Of all narrative agents, the
author has the highest command, and as we have seen, he or she can
create a communicative context in which the acts of the narrator seem
ludicrous—comically inferior. Yet narrators are not always the targets of
humor but can also be the humorists, who tell the incongruities invented
by the author. In such cases, they can use narration to produce humor or
establish the right setting for humor.
The first targets of narrators are the characters and their actions.
Indeed, qua quoter (or quotation), the narrator (or narration)14 develops
a stance toward the narrated character and the story world action logic,
and this stance can be comic or ironic. Stance taking applies to all quota-
tions (re-presentations) of verbal and nonverbal behavior (Sternberg 1982),
yet it is particularly important between narrators (or narrations) and the
intentional life of characters. Unavoidably, readers construct a narrator’s
attitude toward characters. In Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001),
for instance, the heterodiegetic narrator is felt to ironize the failing assis-
tant professor Chip and his leftist, dilettante psychoanalytic, “cultural
studies” approach to life and literature. To use Dorrit Cohn’s (1978) con-
14. In some forms (e.g., filmic narration), the narrator is very “covert” (imperceptible). Ana-
lysts of film comedy may therefore find it counterintuitive to say that certain comedies have
a narrator who is a humorist poking fun at his or her characters. They would suggest, as
Jerry Palmer (1987) does, that the characters make themselves ridiculous (see section 7). In
section 8 I will argue that in covert forms of narration characters may indeed seem to ridicule
themselves but that this is an effect of the narration. I will argue that the intentional activity
(i.e., the form of narration) may or may not foreground its responsible agent (i.e., a narrator)
and that this has typological consequences for humor. For now, I just argue that narration
(the activity of a narratorial intentionality) can produce narrative humor. Narrative humor,
then, is humor produced by a narration/narrator delegated by the author.
cepts, readers find that a character’s behavior, actions, and thoughts are
narrated by a “consonant” or “dissonant” (or mixed, evolving) narrational
intentionality. In the narration of Franzen’s novel, for example, the intradi-
egetic (i.e., story-internal) activity of Chip is recontextualized by the extra-
diegetic (story-external) communication between a heterodiegetic narrator
(or narration) and the reader or spectator. When such dissonance is ironic
(or comic), it takes the form of a narrator-ironist (or narrator-humorist) and
a character-target. Colluding with the author, the narrator (or narration)
then invites the reader or spectator to look down together on story world
activity and character(s). Yet in section 6.2 we will see that comic narration
may also take the spectator or reader as a target; and we should mention
for completeness that a narrator may be auto-ironic, that is, present him-
self or herself as an incongruous, inaptly narrating participant.
In narrative humor, we notice, the participants (“agents”) cast in the
discursive and actional roles (narrator, character, reader or spectator) are
also cast in humorous roles (humorist, victim, audience), with norma-
tive relationships (consonance or dissonance) emerging between them. To
understand the interplay between humor and narrative is to understand
the dynamics between these participants. The higher up we go in the inten-
tional hierarchy of narrative (from character to narrator and author), the
more narrative or metanarrative the humor becomes (or the more humor-
ous the narrative) and the more delicate the interplay between narrative
and humor. On the one hand, the interplay between humor and narrative
can be collaborative. As said, narrative is fertile ground for humor, because
it creates attitudes toward agents: the portrayal of Chip’s failures in life may
predispose readers to find his dilettante cultural analyses still more funnily
incongruous than when these analyses are considered out of context. On
the other hand, humor in narration is also a possible threat to the narra-
tive force of a text: narrative interest implies an involvement with charac-
ters, whereas the humor of a narrator suggests a playful disinvolvement
with story world activity. If the characters targeted by the humor are—like
Chip—central to the narrative, then the comic or ironic dissonance from
them might hinder the reader’s or spectator’s interest in their fortunes. The
art of narrative humor is to find a successful balance between comic dis-
tance and narrative interest. (Remember that the destructive, “antinarra-
tive” power of humor emerged clearly in metanarrative humor too.)
Indeed, comic narrative is a delicate thing. The humorous author-
narrator (or invention-narration) has to determine the blend’s specific
balance of comic distance and narrative empathy. The work can polarize
the sentiments of the reader or spectator by creating narrative empathy
with comically superior characters and narrative distance from comically

inferior ones. In Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959), for instance, the two
cunning and cross-dressed heroes are usually set off against the ludicrously
incompetent mafiosi. Also, one and the same character can be presented
now in a comically distant light and now with more empathy—as is the
antihero Bud Baxter in Wilder’s The Apartment (1960). Still another way to
strike a balance is to present the whole story world as comically incongru-
ous while preserving a minimal degree of narrative interest in how that
world develops. An example, Wilder’s farce Kiss Me Stupid (1964), is dis-
cussed below. In any event, it is important to see what value-laden char-
acteristics the author attributes to characters, how the narrator communi-
cates them, what roles (congruous or incongruous, superior or inferior) the
characters play in the comic sequences, and how these narrative and comic
forms of “(de)normalization” interact.
What I call comic suspense is a first form of narrative humor represent-
ing the author-narrator’s successful mix between narrative interest and
comic distance. We will see that it requires only a minimal degree of nar-
rative empathy. A second phenomenon, comic surprise, also brings together
comic distance and narrative interest. Here again, the balance may tip
toward comic distance (rather than narrative empathy), especially when
the reader or spectator feels fooled by a manipulative narrator.15 Third, I
will point out how “narration’s twin,” continuing characterization, speci-
fies the emotional load of narrative humor.
6.1. Comic Suspense

Narrative suspense in general (i.e., comic or serious) is characterized
by the eagerness of readers or spectators to learn more about the future
of a story world. As Sternberg (1978; 1992; 2001) explains, suspense is a
cognitive-emotive effect created by the movement (possibly chronologi-
cal, as in the story, fabula) of narrative communication (discourse, sjuzhet)
toward an opaque future in the narrated world. Readers and audiences
learn progressively—in communication—what progressively happens in a
story world. In other words, communicative suspense partly mimics real-
life suspense, because both real life and narrative evolve—event after event
in real life, event-presenting sign after event-presenting sign in narrative.
Sternberg adds that narration can enhance suspense in artful or “aes-
thetic” (i.e., less or “mimetic”) ways by artificially delaying the communi-
cation of the action development. Remember how Fielding’s narrator in
15. The reader’s “curiosity” about a story world’s past, Sternberg’s (1978) third narrative
core effect, will be much less present in my discussion. See also note 16.
Joseph Andrews performs this suspenseful retardation in a most comic way,

because his excuse for the delay is preposterous: he first wants to make a
comment on rhetorical techniques.
In any case, whether “aesthetic” or “mimetic,” narration can count on
the fact that (story) worlds are open-ended constructs until they are closed
in some aspects (if they are closed at all). New elements can always emerge
(be created by authors), situations and evolutions can be hoped for or
feared before they materialize (whether they materialize or not), unfore-
seen developments and interactions can always arise in the future, and
so on. Narrative suspense is the emotional (fearful, hopeful) calculation
of probabilities by readers or spectators who rely on whatever informa-
tion is communicated to them about the action in the world. This requires
them to understand and combine—and so (partially) to identify with—
the intentional perspectives of characters who are in a situation of pos-
sible change (e.g., danger, opportunity). Indeed, since narrative suspense
consists of the reader’s or spectator’s involvement in the fates of certain
characters, it seems to presuppose a minimal degree of empathy with the
character(s). Yet suspense does not require, or even usually rest on, per-
fect identification. The difference between the suspense experienced by the
reader (spectator) and the character regarding the future is not just that the
latter enacts the story world reality in life while the former learns about it
in communication—which is an important form of perspectival distance.
A reader or spectator also has different knowledge, norms, and goals than
the character, and as a result, his or her calculations and evaluations of
action development may differ from the character’s. Sometimes a charac-
ter does not even realize that he or she is at a crossroads or in a situation of
possibly important change.
Comic narrative suspense, I suggest, mixes a reader’s or spectator’s
strong normative sense of superiority—relating to humor—with a mini-
mal degree of narrative empathy or identification—relating to narrative.
For comic narrative suspense to arise, perspectival differences between
reader (spectator) and character concerning the future should elevate the
former to comic superiority yet preserve some degree of empathy (hence
suspense). More specifically, a tentative description of comic narrative
suspense may go as follows. Produced by superior and authoritative (i.e.,
presumably reliable) narration, comic narrative suspense is a reader’s or
spectator’s state of mind in which uncertainty (hope, fear) about the story
world development (i.e., suspense) mixes with a normative sense of superi-
ority and an amused distance from that world and its development. The
reader’s superiority and distance is caused by the terms of the development
(e.g., the logic of a character, the unlikelihood of events, the number of
coincidences), which are partly or radically incongruous with the reader’s

sense of normality and block any serious engagement with the future of the
story world.
Take Wilder’s farce Kiss Me Stupid (1964). In a remote village between
Las Vegas and California, a petty bourgeois piano teacher is unexpectedly
visited by a famous singer and womanizer, whose car has broken down.
The teacher makes a prostitute (Polly the Pistol) act as his wife and hopes
that his famous guest will make love to her. So, the teacher hopes, the
singer will stay for some time, collaborate with him, and hopefully bring
him glory and money. The authoritative narration communicates most of
the relevant information (about plans and identities) to the audience, and
it also communicates which character knows which parts of that infor-
mation. Yet the film arouses suspense, although the spectator is superior
in knowledge to any single character. On the one hand, indeed the audi-
ence wants to know, for example, if the fictional future will turn out as
the teacher hopes. Hence some kind of identification and suspense: we
minimally understand the ambitions and hopes of a frustrated teacher in
a forgotten village. On the other hand, the narration early on defines the
teacher’s intentionality as that of a nerd and a fraud with a preposterous
idea. Interestingly, to sharpen the contrast, a number of characters (e.g.,
the teacher’s real wife) serve as “reminders of normality” who bring out
the inferiority and incongruity of the teacher. While spectators may under-
stand his frustrations, they will not easily identify with his incongruous/
inferior plans and implementation. The suspense related to him is there-
fore experienced in a detached, comic manner.
Note that authoritative narration can enhance the superiority of readers
or spectators by giving them a slight epistemic advantage over the char-
acters. Although narrative suspense requires some open-endedness (e.g.,
opacity of characters, indeterminacy of events) for the audience too, comi-
cally suspenseful narration may help the audience make calculations
superior to those of characters. Or it may let readers or spectators experi-
ence a suspense of which the characters remain ignorant. Humor’s superi-
ority mechanism welcomes such forms of narration. As Sternberg (1978:
300) remarks, there is a natural connection among narratorial omnicom-
munication, readerly omniscience, and comic superiority (of the narrator/
reader vis-à-vis the character):
The reader may forget that omniscience is by no means man’s natural state
and consequently look down from his godlike altitude on the characters below,
who in their ignorance make much ado about nothing, commit flagrant errors
of judgment, and in general behave in an ill-considered and downright foolish
way. Where he aims (as Shakespeare often does in his comedies) at no more than
comic pleasure pure and simple, the author may of course wish to promote pre-
cisely this attitude of simple irony through the manipulation of informational
discrepancies.
In comic narrative, characters often have considerably less knowledge than

the readers (spectators), and genre can further widen that gap. In farce (i.e.,
unrealistic comedy), for instance, characters may simply not see what should
realistically be manifest from their perspective too: they have a perceptive-
cognitive deficit on top of the communicative-informational one.
It is evident that such perspectival hierarchies foster the superiority
mechanism of humor. In Wilder’s Kiss Me Stupid, for instance, the filmic
narrator mostly shares his position of superiority with the audience. We
see and judge characters attempting to master a situation and channel the
future toward their needs. Yet thanks to the generously communicative
narration, readers or spectators can sometimes expect a character’s “hope”
to be funnily misguided or a character’s “fear” to be comically unreason-
able. Our comic suspense may then consist in waiting for confirmation of
our superiority of judgment and in anticipating the reaction of the comic
character when the truth dawns on him or her. Our interpretive confidence
or sense of control, on the extradiegetic level, is higher than the equiva-
lents on the story world level. What is promising (or frustrating, strange,
disturbing) for the character is less promising (and so forth) from the audi-
ence’s broader, more informed perspective. In sum, the reader’s or specta-
tor’s normative superiority (or normality) is enhanced by epistemic superi-
ority—thanks to the narration’s communicativeness.
Thus one type of incongruity—normative incongruity—is the action’s
or character’s normative downgrading by authorial invention and nar-
ratorial mediation. This incongruity is a requirement of comic narrative
suspense, because the normative hierarchy creates the comic detachment
from the suspense. A second type of incongruity is an interpretive or episte-
mic inferiority born of narratorial mediation. This incongruity is an option
rather than a requirement in comic discourse, since it does not always con-
firm the normative hierarchy between the participants kept in suspense
(i.e., reader/narrator and characters), as we will now see. Comic suspense
is not killed indeed when the extradiegetic sense of control is lower than
the intradiegetic one. As the following joke shows, comic suspense still
thrives when the laws of story world development (e.g., the psycho-logic of
a character) are unpredictable or nontransparent for readers or spectators:
A Dutch salesman drives to Brussels for a meeting but does not find a parking
spot. Eventually he finds a spot but it is on the wrong side of a canal. He sees no
bridge, so he shouts to a local: “Can I easily get to the other side?!”
“But you’re already there,” the friendly Belgian shouts back in sur-
prise. (Adapted from a joke told by a Dutchman on Flemish national television)
When a joke is told, there is a high probability that its characters will
behave in incongruous ways. This possibility of action-logical surprise—
an interpretive hazard—does not at all eliminate the comic narrative sus-
pense. On the contrary, this position of temporary interpretive inferiority
enhances the state of suspense, while other discursive tools (the genre of
the joke, the Dutch clichés about Belgian inferiority-stupidity) secure the
comic distance from the communicated developments.
In sum, epistemic superiority is not a requirement for comic suspense;
the required feature is the normatively incongruous (downgrading) action
logic—as a reality (Kiss Me Stupid ) or a possibility (the Belgian joke). There
are obviously many ways to produce the feeling that an incongruous sort
of action logic is operative: genre expectations (e.g., a joke), clichés (e.g., a
story about a Dutchman in Belgium), strange details in the landscape (e.g.,
the abundant phallic objects in Kiss Me Stupid ), the setting of the telling
(e.g., a gathering of friends in a bar), the teller (e.g., the funniest friend),
and so on.
6.2. Comic Surprise

According to many incongruity theorists (see, e.g., Shultz 1976), humor
is caused by the perception of something unexpected (surprising), which
usually calls for a new and radically different framing. Thus surprise
(together with the reframing) is seen as a central mechanism of humor. Yet
surprise is also a central feature of narrative (which is probably why Wright
2005 treats both “the Joke” and “the Story” as paradigm cases of switching
intentional perspectives). Regarding stories, Sternberg (1978) argues that
surprise is—along with suspense and curiosity—one of narrative’s three
core effects. In Sternberg’s theory, narrative surprise is the effect created
by the sudden disclosure of previously suppressed information with new,
surprising light thrown on the narrated world. A surprise can be both nar-
rative and comic, as in the following joke:
“Is the doctor home?” the man asked in a whisper.
“No,” the doctor’s young and pretty wife whispered in reply.
“Come right in.” (Adapted from Raskin 1985: 100)
Indeed, to apply Sternberg’s (1978) definition of narrative surprise, the end

of the joke abruptly discloses information that drastically re-patterns the
story world as told before. To apply Thomas R. Shultz’s (1976: 12) much-
quoted definition of comic incongruity, we find here “a conflict between
what is expected and what actually occurs in the joke,” that is, between a
doctor’s visit and a love encounter. This joke, then, seems to be a clear-cut
example of comic narrative surprise.
Yet things are not so simple. Although we seem to have no difficulty in
applying Sternberg’s and Shultz’s definitions of surprise separately as well
as jointly, it is troublesome that two apparently very similar definitions
should account for very different things—narrative versus comic surprise.
That these two surprises are very different is illustrated by the fact that
many narrative surprises are serious and many comic surprises extranarra-
tive. They are distinct phenomena that can come together. Our main ques-
tion then becomes, when or why is a narrative surprise comic? Is it simply
when both the above-mentioned definitions apply? No, because Shultz’s
definition of comic surprise (“a conflict between what is expected and what
actually occurs”) is problematic. It is so general that it will always apply
to any surprise—narrative or extranarrative, serious or comic. A definition
of surprise in general, it has no distinctive capacity: it does not single out
comic surprise from all surprises or comic narrative surprise from all nar-
rative surprises. A more differential complement to the analysis seems to
be needed.
Moreover, in its generality Shultz’s definition disregards intentional per-
spective as a cause of surprise (and reframing). In real life, unmediated by
a narrator, one can say—as Shultz might—that a situation (e.g., a wedding
ceremony) arouses expectations for certain mind-sets and behavior (e.g.,
the clear will and determination of each partner) and that humor stems
from surprisingly different actual behavior (e.g., a mock hesitation). When
it comes to explaining narrative (narrator-mediated) surprises, however,
Shultz’s definition is not equipped to deal with the multiplication of per-
spectives: it disregards which participants/agents (i.e., narrator or char-
acter) of narrative texts are perceived by the reader (audience) to cause
expectations, surprises, and reframings. Worse, when applied to narrative,
Shultz’s definition will tend to create confusion, because one phrase (“what
is expected”) may be thought to refer to the discourse level (the narration;
what is communicated by the teller), while the other phrase (“what actually
occurs”) may be understood to refer to the story level (the action; what is
perceived to occur in jokes).
The phrases should therefore be replaced with the notions “what we
expect” and “what we actually learn” via discourse—notions which refer
to what the discourse says about the story. These notions signal that a
narrative surprise is not simply set up by a situation (e.g., a wedding) with
incongruous behavior (e.g., a mock hesitation) but is always set up by the
narrator’s discourse about story situations, which makes us expect things and
from which we learn things. The discourse itself may be a congruous (i.e.,
plainly communicative) narration of incongruous action (as in the Bel-

gian joke) or an incongruous (i.e., heavily distorting) narration of con-
gruous action (the doctor’s wife joke). Indeed, in the Belgian joke about
the Dutchman in Brussels, the surprise is perceived to be rooted in the
first-degree (story- or character-related) action logic (which “occurs,” in
Shultz’s phrase), while the narration is generally communicative (it does
not fool the readers or spectators). Similarly, the comic surprises of Kiss Me
Stupid are often rooted in unexpected intradiegetic action rather than mis-
leading narration. In the doctor’s wife joke, by contrast, the comic surprise
is produced by misleading narration/mediation. In other words, narrative
surprise can be caused by a (first-degree) incongruous action logic and a
(second-degree) incongruous narration. This is what Shultz’s definition of
surprise cannot explain. Wright does not systematically make such inten-
tionalist distinctions either, but his framework at least acknowledges their
importance in principle.
Coupled with a broad definition of humor (in terms of incongruity
and superiority), the distinction between first-degree (action-logical) and
second-degree (narratorial) intentionality will help explain how a narra-
tive surprise can be comic. Unlike Shultz and like Sternberg, we should
acknowledge that narration reintentionalizes (i.e., re-presents) the action,
and we should investigate how this re-presentation of action relates to fea-
tures of humor (“incongruity and resolution,” “superiority”). To explain
comic narrative surprise, then, is to answer the question, where in the sur-
prising narration of action can we find features that specifically relate the
narrative surprise to humor? Although I am aware of the difficulty of such
an undertaking,16 I will tentatively describe three patterns of such features.
One pattern will apply to secretly suppressive (hence surprise-preparing)
narration for which the narrator must take full responsibility: an “author-
like” narrator17 is a secretly filtering (“gapping,” maneuvering) agent with
16. A waterproof answer to this question is difficult, perhaps because humor in general
is difficult to define. It is said of funny things that they are “unexpected,” “incongruous,”
require a strange “reframing” or “solution,” express antagonism between agents, invert hier-
archies, etc. Yet this can be said of many unfunny things too and especially of serious narra-
tive surprise. In all narrative surprises (i.e., serious and comic), the narration creates inten-
tional perspectives on story worlds and then counters the communicational and/or actional
expectations produced by these perspectives. And narrative surprises quite often invert the
perceived chances (luck, opportunities) of characters. Nonetheless, since some narrative sur-
prises are obviously found funny while others are not, our enterprise is not a futile one. At
the very least, we should not define humor exclusively in terms of incongruity. Superiority is
no less important a component of humor.
17. I prefer “author-like” narration to Franz K. Stanzel’s (1984 [1979]) “authorial” narration,
because it is the narrator, not the author, who is the (powerful) filter of the story world. In
“figural” narration, a character functions as the (usually less powerful) filter of story world
elements.
aesthetic purposes. Another potentially humor-eliciting pattern will relate

to the “author-like” and communicative narration of surprising characters.
My third tentative pattern will concern the reliable quotation-narration
of a restricted, “figural” perspective. This pattern will show that in figu-
ral narration the humor-related features of the first two patterns can be
reshuffled into a different pattern. I will now introduce the first pattern by
describing it feature by feature, and I will then gradually build up the total
picture (for all three patterns).
The first potentially humor-eliciting pattern of narrative surprise is
illustrated by the joke about the doctor’s wife. There a new (surprising)
narrative perspective on a story world is comically incongruous, because
it has no action-logical connection with the old (expectation-raising) perspec-
tive on the same evidence, yet it is manifestly intended by the narrator,
who follows a different, farfetched logic (acceptable in humorous communica-
tion). Indeed, this joke shifts between two sets of intentional perspectives,
“someone going to the doctor” and “someone meeting a young and pretty
lover,” which do not meet in action-logical terms. The first action logic is
simply abandoned for a new, unrelated one. Nothing in the early narra-
tion indicated that the doctor’s patient (“the man”) had any other inten-
tions or plans than medical ones. The sexual intentions come as a total
surprise.
This comic narrative surprise depends on secretly suppressive (hence
surprise-preparing) narration, for which the narrator is fully responsible.
Through (presumably) omniscient discourse, the narrator creates the
impression of communicativeness, so that the reader or audience accepts
his or her (medical) perspective on the story world as a reflex of the per-
spectives within the story world. Next, however, the narrator’s characters
violate this perspective in such a surprising and preposterous manner that
the audience needs to build a new, different perspective on the spot—one
very different, incongruous in the sense that it is entirely unrelated to the
earlier (and cognitively persistent) action-logical context suggested by the
narration. The narrator appears here as the sole creator of setup, incon-
gruity (surprise), and resolution, since the whispering man and the doctor’s
wife may be totally unaware of the “medical” perspective. The audience
is therefore entitled to attribute the startling shift of perspective entirely to
the narrator.
Though surprising (far-fetched, incongruous) in action-logical terms,
the switch is secretly grounded in the many action-logical meanings of
a man whispering to a woman. This kind of secretive strategy and far-
fetched yet manifestly intended meaning is allowed or even encouraged
between participants engaged in joking. The audience understands that
the narrator has created incorrect intentional perspectives with the sole
“aesthetic” purpose of fooling it in a safe, harmless way. Safety or harm-
lessness are often considered important elements of humor, counteracting
its superiority-related or antagonistic tendencies.
The harmlessness is secured by two mechanisms. One consists in the
punch line’s relevance, however minimal. Thereby readers or audiences
recover a meaning that they can see as the intended one. Of course, the
narrative surprise makes them suddenly aware that their initial under-
standing was poor, but this awareness comes with a new sense of superi-
ority: now they understand things properly. In other words, harmlessness
can assume the form of regained superiority. A second, related guarantee
of harmlessness is provided by the genre of the joke, which makes us expect
the unexpected in a general way. We expect some resolved incongruity
at the end (i.e., a punch line). We realize that we may safely enjoy this,
because it is what we want joking narrators to do. So the genre of joking
sets the “minimal” standard of relevance for the second framing. In jokes, a
pun or pragmalinguistic ambiguity (e.g., the many pragmatic meanings of
a man whispering to a woman) rests on a spurious but acceptable logic—
acceptable enough to compensate for the initial and secret misleadingness
of narration, which prepared a surprise and required an action-logically
far-fetched reframing of a story world.
So much for the features of our first pattern. From now on, my discus-
sion will be comparative (or contrastive) vis-à-vis a second pattern of comic
narrative surprise (illustrated by the Belgian joke about the Dutch sales-
man in Brussels). A contrastive schema (see scheme 1) will bring out why
exactly the two surprise patterns are comic in a different way. But now let
me anticipate the analysis in plain language.
What does this comparison between the examples teach us? Whereas
the resolvable incongruities of the joke about the doctor’s wife were attrib-
uted to a manipulative, “aesthetically motivated” narrator, the incongruity
in the Belgian joke is the responsibility of a character straightforwardly
presented to the readers by a communicative, “mimetic” narrator. Here is
another example of the latter type of joke in a short comic narrative:
Five Poles came together to screw in a light bulb. One stood on a table and held
the bulb in the socket, while the other four rotated the table. (Adapted from
Attardo 2001: 22)
While the patient and the doctor’s wife did something unexpected within
the misleading frame set up by the narrator, the Polish and Belgian charac-
ters do something unexpected within a communicative frame. There the nar-
rator grounded a far-fetched action-logical switch in an ambiguous logic,
whereas here the characters behave unexpectedly within an action logic—

helping a foreigner, solving a technical problem—that stays in place.
This affects the relation between surprise and suspense. Whatever ini-
tial suspense there was in the joke about the doctor’s wife (about a sick
man going to the doctor) proved beside the main point in the sense that
it was not resolved in its own actional terms. The comic surprise bears
no relation to the suspense, thus reminding us of Kant’s (1951: 177) defini-
tion of laughter/humor: “Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden
transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.” Nothing—I would
add—related to the created expectation. In the other jokes, by contrast,
the action logic of the surprise is connected to that of the suspense: the
Poles “solve” the bulb problem (however odd) raised by the first sentence,
and the Belgian does not see the real problem (and suspense) of the Dutch
salesman. In other words, the action-logical or “mimetic” surprises are a
natural resolution (denouement or elaboration) of comic suspense, unlike
the narratorial or “aesthetic” surprise (which made the terms of the sus-
pense irrelevant).
In both kinds of joke, the surprising (incongruous) element can be
reframed (resolved) in some way, but this resolution happens on differ-
ent intentional levels. The Poles and the Belgian offer surprising perspec-
tives, which audiences may understand as a “special logic” pertaining to
the behavior of those characters. By contrast, the “special logic” of the
doctor’s wife joke (i.e., the ambiguity and the purposeful misleadingness)
belongs to the action of the narrator and so affects the relation with the
audience. In this joke, the audience has to regain superiority after feeling
maneuvered into inferiority by a smart narrator. Readers or audiences are
also cognitively challenged by the special logic of the Poles and the Bel-
gian, but they evaluate it as action-logically “inferior” to their own logic
and the narrator’s. Here they have not been fooled by the narrator. In the
doctor’s wife joke, the surprise has the audience as a temporary target; in
the Belgian and Polish jokes, the audience’s surprise is imported from the
action logic and has the character as an invariable target.
The narrator of each type of joke thus becomes a different type of
humorist. Like ironists, the narrators of the Polish and Belgian jokes take
the other’s (i.e., character’s) perspective to be so blatantly absurd that its
mere quotation already implies an evaluation. The narration colludes with
authorial invention and ridicules the narrated/invented characters. Like
“echoic” irony (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 237–43), the “mimetic” narra-
tion of action-logical surprises establishes an implicit relation of inferi-
ority/superiority among the perspectives of character, narrator-author,
and reader or viewer. In fact, the “mimetic” narrator is not like an ironist
but is an ironist when he or she presents a character’s surprising activity

that is inferior to the implicit action-logical norms shared by narrator and
audience. The mimetic narrator then presents a surprise that we attribute
to abnormal characters who provoke condescendence or scorn. In the doc-
tor’s wife joke, by contrast, the comic surprise is not “echoic” or “mimetic”
but the result of an “aesthetically motivated” narrator who misleads the
readers or spectators in order to amuse them. Rather than scornful sur-
prise with regard to the characters, the audience experiences baffled sur-
prise vis-à-vis the artful narrator. All these opposed features are summa-
rized in scheme 1.
This table may offer terms for a tentative definition and an initial
typology of comic narrative surprise. For the purpose of comprehensive
definition, its terms show that both narrative surprises relate in many
ways to distinctive traits of humor. Regarding typology, the table may
help explain two quite different kinds of comic narrative surprises. Gener-
ally speaking, a narrative surprise introduces a far-fetched incongruity in
regard to the action logic. Typologically speaking, the incongruity may be
a follow-up to the suspense or make the terms of the suspense irrelevant,
that is, related or unrelated to the ongoing action logic. Generally speak-
ing, again, there is a target attached to the action-logical incongruity, but
it may vary between the character (invariably) and the reader or spectator
(temporarily). In general, the latter will experience the speech action (i.e.,
narration) of the narrator in terms of superiority and inferiority. Typologi-
cally, the narration of the narrator-ironist differs from the artful joker’s.
The former narrates communicatively and mimetically some incongruous
action over which the character has no control; the latter communicates
with the aesthetic purpose of fooling the audience. The former produces
superiority tout court (i.e., scorn) in us, while the latter enables us to regain
superiority (after trickery). Yet both constant and regained superiority are
harmless states for the audience.
Regarding narration, the jokes concerned share an important trait: they
are told in an “author-like” style. In other words, the ironic narrator uses—
and the joking narrator abuses—a way of narrating that implies a good
knowledge and a generous communication of story world facts. The ironic
narrator uses this stance to ridicule a surprisingly incongruous character;
the joking narrator abuses it to fool the reader or spectator on a more tem-
porary basis.
Yet Sternberg (1978: 236–305; 2005) has argued that many narrative sur-
prises—especially those in long, modern narratives, as in Jane Austen or
Henry James—are created through “figural” rather than “author-like” nar-
ration. A narration is figural when its information is restricted to—biased
Scheme 1 Two “author-like” types of comic narrative surprise: mimetic-

echoic versus aesthetic
Example Belgian or Polish joke Doctor’s wife joke

1 Relation of the incongruity Related to the first Unrelated to the first
to the action logic actional frame actional frame
2 Relation of the surprise to Resolves/reinforces the Replaces the sus-
the suspense suspense pense and makes it
pointless
3 Agent responsible for Character (not in Narrator (in control)
the incongruity (i.e., the control)
reader’s or spectator’s
informational deficit)
4 Targeted agent Character Reader or spectator
5 Emotional tone of reader’s Scornful Fooled and
or spectator’s surprise enlightened
6 Duration of targeting Invariable Temporary
7 Reader’s or spectator’s Superiority Regained superiority
position
8 Relation between narration Mimetic Aesthetic
and action
9 Narrative strategy Communicative Suppressive and
misleading
10 Perception of the narrator’s Echoic ironist Aesthetic joker
humor
by—a character’s intentional perspective and so motivates any surprise (or

other suppression) through the focalizing character’s bias: “Sorry if I have
been sending you down the wrong track. You see, I was only following the
character.” While the doctor’s wife joke had a (temporarily imperceptible)
narratorial bias, the bias of figural narration thus lies in a character who
“focalizes” the story world or parts of it. Figural narration brings me to
the third kind of comic narrative surprise. Governed by a narrator who
chooses to motivate the story world through a character, the comic narra-
tive surprise here combines features of the two previous types into a new
pattern. As with scheme 1, let me describe this third pattern in plain words
and by means of an example (the Monroe/janitor joke, explained below).
In Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955), the married protagonist “focal-
izes” a story world that includes characters such as his attractive neigh-
bor (played by Marilyn Monroe). As he manages to fix a date with the
neighbor, we learn in considerable detail about his prospective fantasies—

and this arouses a comic suspense. Then the narration shifts back from his
subjective imagination to fictional reality. As in his fantasy, he now hears
the doorbell and runs to open it. Next, the spectators are surprised—with
him—to find the male, ugly, and unfriendly janitor behind it. This is a
moment of comic surprise induced by the figural perspective of the narra-
tion.18 An extension of our scheme 1, scheme 2 indicates why this figural
surprise—or, better, figurally mediated narrative surprise—is comic and
to what extent it shares its comic traits with the two types of comic narra-
tive surprise discussed above.
The bold full lines in between the columns indicate clear differences
from those two previous types. Some of the differences have already been
explained. In regard to points 9, 10, and 11, for instance, the new Mon-
roe/janitor joke is only partly mimetic or communicative, because it is
figural (i.e., it filters or focalizes the world through a character). Points 3
and 4 relate this new feature of narrative perspective to the creation of
surprise: in Wilder’s film, a figural perspective on an open-ended (multi-
agent, unpredictable) world containing several characters allows for sur-
prises along with a character (e.g., the neighbor) who does not foresee the
actions of other characters (e.g., Monroe and the janitor).
The gray areas (in points 1, 2, and 8) indicate common features between
the figural surprise and the author-like ones. On the one hand, the features
in 1 and 2 are common to “mimetic/author-like” and “mimetic/figural”
comical surprises: like the mimetic/author-like surprise of the Belgian and
Polish jokes, the mimetic/figural surprise of the Monroe/janitor joke con-
tains an incongruity that resolves or reinforces the suspense by adhering to
the ongoing action logic. On the other hand, the trait in point 8—regained
superiority—is shared by “mimetic/figural” and “aesthetic/author-like”
comical surprises: like the “aesthetic” surprise of the doctor’s wife joke, the
surprise of Wilder’s spectators involves regained superiority after a tempo-
rary moment of baffled inferiority.
The bold discontinuous lines, finally, indicate where the “figural” sur-
prise combines aspects of both mimetic and aesthetic “author-like” narra-
tive surprise. The targets of Wilder’s narrator are both the audience (tem-
porarily) and the focalizing character (invariably) (points 5 and 7): in the
Monroe/janitor joke, the audience’s experience moves from a sense of ridi-
cule (because it was for a while fantasizing with the character) to regained
superiority (because it is not the one responsible for the fantasy) and pos-
18. I will not analyze here how figural narration is accomplished in film. On this topic see,
e.g., Wilson 1986.
sibly to scorn (because the character’s ideas are normatively incongruous)

(point 6). The spectators realize that they were fooled together with an
incongruously biased character-focalizer rather than by an incongruously
acting focalized character (such as a dumb Belgian) or a playfully mislead-
ing narrator (points 4, 9, 10, and 11). The narrator is partly a joker—for
he could have warned us against the surprise—and partly an ironic com-
mentator on the irony of events—for he does give his audience the benefit
of normative superiority after bringing epistemic enlightenment through a
janitor.19
In longer narrative of course, comic surprise does not exclusively arise
from biased figural narration but can just as well find its origin in author-
like “aesthetic” narration, where an intentional agent “above” the char-
acters is responsible for fooling the reader or spectator (as in the doctor’s
wife joke). In David Lodge’s Therapy (1995), for instance, a radical hoax is
set up by the implied author and authorial narrator of the novel. At first,
the narration seems to do nothing except convey to the reader fragments
of what characters tell others or themselves: the suspense and surprises
are rooted in this story-internal (“intradiegetic”) narration. The first chap-
ter, for instance, is a diary of the self-narrating protagonist, who gains our
partial sympathy. Through his own (i.e., figural) perspective on his mari-
tal and professional lives, a partly comic suspense is built, and some sur-
prises arise. Most noticeably, at the end of the chapter he writes with great
surprise—and to the surprise of the reader in turn—that his wife wants
a divorce. He had reported some signs of tension but nothing that would
warrant a divorce. Chapter 2 offers reports, monologues, and dialogues
with stories about his life as a separated man. One comically embarrass-
ing surprise after another is thereby produced about his behavior. A police
report states, for example, that he entered with a pair of scissors into the
bedroom of his former wife’s tennis coach (who turned out to be gay).
At the beginning of the third chapter, the implied author’s and autho-
rial narrator’s hoax—the “aesthetically” manipulated comic surprise—is
revealed. The comically painful narrations of chapter 2 were actually not
reports, monologues, or dialogues by other characters about the protago-
nist. They were all diary exercises in self-mockery by the protagonist himself.
19. Note indeed that readers or spectators are differently surprised than the neighbor. He is
disillusioned and angry; we are amused and filled with schadenfreude. Though epistemi-
cally restricted to his perspective, we remain normatively superior to him. This is so because
we are at a (comic and fictional) remove from his world and because the narrative perspec-
tive—its characterizing power—has already forged a not entirely positive image of the pro-
tagonist. As said, comic narrative perspective is a blend between narrative empathy and
humorous distance. The Seven Year Itch presents the neighbor alternatingly in a comically dis-
tant light and with some more empathy (see also section 6.3).
Scheme 2 Comic narrative surprises, “figural” surprise included
Belgian or Monroe/janitor Doctor’s wife

Polish joke joke joke
1 Relation of incon- Related to the first actional frame Unrelated
gruity to the action to the first
logic actional frame
2 Relation of the Resolves/reinforces the suspense Replaces
surprise to the the suspense
suspense and makes it
pointless
3 Agent responsible Character (not Open-ended Narrator
for the incongruity in control) world (character (in control)
(i.e., the reader’s or 1 + character 2,
spectator’s infor- etc.)
mational deficit)
4 Reader’s or specta- Surprised by Surprised with Surprised
tor’s surprise as a acting character focalizing charac- directly by
function of inten- ter 1 and by focal- narrator
tional perspectives ized character 2
5 Targeted agent Character The first character Reader/
and the audience audience
6 Emotional tone of Scornful Fooled and Fooled and
reader’s or specta- enlightened, also enlightened
tor’s surprise scornful
7 Duration of Invariable Invariable for the Temporary
targeting character; tem-
porary for the
audience
8 Reader’s or specta- Superiority Regained superiority
tor’s position
9 Relation between Mimetic Mimetic in part Aesthetic
narration and
action
10 Narrative strategy Communicative Partially Suppressive
communicative and misleading
11 Mediation Author-like Figural Author-like
12 Perception of the Echoic ironist Ironist and joker Aesthetic joker
narrator’s humor regarding events
Of course, since the protagonist is unaware of any real reader in another

world (such as ourselves), he is not to be blamed for not signaling the ironic
status of his pieces. It is the implied author/authorial narrator who knows
that everything is communicated to the readers of his novel, yet he long
delays the disclosure of the real origin, nature, and function of these ironic
pieces with enormous narrative impact. The hoax of the implied author
(qua supreme narrative force) comes to the readers as an extreme case of
aesthetically motivated comic narrative surprise. The surprise involves a
change of intentional perspectives not concerning one or two sentences (as
in the doctor’s wife joke) but regarding a whole chapter. The author first
implied a setup for the second chapter—a figural interpretation attached
to the characters around the protagonist. Then he quoted a surprising sen-
tence uttered by the protagonist—“Being the sort of writer I am, I couldn’t
just summarize other people’s views of me, I had to let them speak their
thoughts in their own voices” (ibid.: 212). And this presses for a resolution,
which reinterprets the entire chapter.
Rather than being “dryly” cognitive, these surprises and reinterpreta-
tions involve a very emotional process, showing the variety of humor/nar-
rative interactions. The first chapter presents a fairly positive image of the
protagonist, so that the announcement of the divorce does not come as a
very comic surprise. In chapter 2 we read hilarious reports or embarrass-
ing stories that other characters tell about him. At that point, we experi-
ence a mixture of continuing empathy with the protagonist (Sternberg’s
[1978: 93 ff.] “primacy effect”) and a new ironic distancing by other nar-
rators, possibly involving schadenfreude (a “recency effect”). The effect
of the hoax’s disclosure in chapter 3 is even harder to pinpoint, but it
hints at least at a difference in emotivity between “aesthetic” surprises in
short jokes and those in long comic narratives. Lodge’s novel differs from
the doctor’s wife joke, because the surprising comic decommitment (dis-
sociation) from the previously believed reports by and about agents is not
total: it is counteracted by the reader’s continuing narrative interest in the
action. While we could not care less about the fate of the doctor’s wife and
the patient, Lodge’s comic surprise works on a narrative interest that does
not fade easily, because it has been in our minds for a long (reading) time.
Rather than dissipating our narrative interest in the original action logic,
the surprise re-patterns the ironic-comic suspense and surprises that have
been produced for a whole chapter: the bad things happening may not
have happened at all (although we cannot be wholly sure), and the reports
do tell us something about the protagonist’s state of mind. The reader, who
has accepted the authorial narrator’s invitation to learn about the protago-
nist, now turns out to have been the main target of authorial-narratorial
humor. A sense of foolishness now mixes with some relief about the mis-
read (erased?), originally embarrassing events.
In sum, a difference in emotivity between the “aesthetic” joke and the
“aesthetic” comic novel is rooted in the power relations among the nar-
rative’s intentional levels—characters, narrators, (implied) author. In the
joke, the action logic of the setup is subordinated to the comic narrative
surprise; in the novel, the surprise re-patterns the persistent action logic.
This shows that the interplay between narrative and humor knows many
successful varieties. (On the distinction between jokes and comedy, see also
section 10.)20
6.3. Previous Characterization

The narration of actions minimally implies an agent who is characterized
by the actions he or she performs: “[Characterization] is based on infer-
ence drawn from individual acts of the [narrative agent], details of his
looks and setting, etc.” (Margolin 1986: 205). As an integral part (or effect)
of narration, continuous characterization plays a crucial role in specifying
the interplay between humor and empathy, because it creates the inten-
tional agents required by the comic (suspenseful or surprising) situation,
namely, the characters. Therefore an account of a comic sequence has to
include the features of characters represented by the narration up to that
point. When the piano teacher in Kiss Me Stupid makes a wrong calculation
about his real wife (who eventually ends up in bed with the famous singer),
20. As said, narrative “curiosity” has no prominent place in this discussion, although it must
exist in comic narrative too. “Both suspense and curiosity are emotions or states of mind
characterized by expectant restlessness and tentative hypotheses that derive from a lack of
information,” writes Sternberg (1978: 65). “Both thus drive the reader’s attention forward in
the hope that what will resolve or allay them lies ahead. They differ, however, in that sus-
pense derives from a lack of desired information concerning the outcome of a conflict that is
to take place in the narrative future; whereas curiosity is produced by a lack of information
that relates to the narrative past, a time when struggles have already been resolved, and as
such it often involves an interest in the information for its own sake.” A story discussed by
Attardo, Alphonse Allais’s Han Rybeck; ou, Le coup de l’étrier (1989), illustrates how curiosity
can be comically exploited. Allais’s narrator tells about a “ridiculous enterprise” undertaken
in Iceland by the Norwegian king Polalek VI: “Upon his orders, wolves were brought in the
peninsula of Lagenn-Houyer . . . . From the sea’s end, fishermen in great numbers had for
mission to corral . . . the greatest number of seals they could” (quoted in Attardo 2001: 160).
Readers are curious to know why. As it turns out, Polalek had wanted to create the cross-
breed “loup-phoque” (wolf-seal), meaning “crazy” in French (loufoque), which finally elicits
the following comment by the narrator: “Between us, wasn’t Polalek the real loup-phoque?”
(quoted in Attardo 2001: 158). This surprising resolution of curiosity makes the curiosity
about the story world’s situations and developments pointless from that world’s perspective
and highlights the narrative power of the narrator (in collusion with the author). It is com-
parable to the doctor’s wife joke (in section 6.2) but partly replaces the latter’s suspense with
curiosity.
this leads to schadenfreude, because the narration has by then character-

ized the teacher as a preposterous fraud and the wife as a woman in her
right mind. The specific humor of the comic surprise is produced by char-
acterization, that is, by the fact that a not entirely sympathetic character
is suddenly thrown into an inferior position in favor of a nicer character.
(The parallel with the case of Monroe’s neighbor is clear except that no
other character is favored by his surprising defeat.) Inversely, when the
reasonable wife makes a wrong calculation about the teacher (because he
has weird plans), we feel scornful surprise with the wife about (i.e., against)
the teacher. The specific emotive features of the comic surprise are thus
produced by the continuous characterization.
This process of characterization depends upon narrative perspective—
the selection and ordering of information about the story world. Indeed,
what we think about a character depends on (normative) character traits
and on the narrative perspective, that is, on what we know that the char-
acters are, want, and (think they) know and on what we (think we) know
better. Wright (2005: 59–61) addresses this topic with his most complex
example of ironic, narrative tension—Austen’s novel Emma, with its vari-
ous, intersecting intentional perspectives. As Sternberg (1978: 157–58)
shows in more detail, Austen’s narrator only gradually discloses the infor-
mation that is incompatible with Emma’s viewpoint, so that the reader
only gradually comes to read Emma’s views on things from an additional
(ironic and superior) vantage point—and our sympathy for Emma has by
then been ensured:
On the one hand, foreshadowing devices place the reader in a position where he
is able to enjoy the human comedy of errors, to comprehend the heroine’s fal-
libility against the background of her world as a whole. . . . On the other hand,
the modes of temporal ordering—keeping the reader, too, in a crooked corridor
of curiosity, suspense, bafflement, or surprise—help to ensure our participation
and help to counteract the temptation we may feel to smile down condescend-
ingly on the heroine.
In long narratives such as Emma, the perspective has time to develop,

so that narration-characterization can subtly interact with humor. If the
author-narrator aims at comedy that avoids farcical polarization, then a
well-timed characterization will be required from him or her—with more
empathy early in the discourse and more irony later. What we (think we)
know about a character at each point will condition our (mildly) support-
ive or disapproving response to characters in surprising and unsurpris-
ing situations. In The Corrections, when Franzen’s narrator pokes fun at the
unsurprising and surprising events of Chip’s life, he has already secured
the reader’s or spectator’s attachment to the character through the narra-

tion of traits (independence, self-madeness, uncertainty) that many readers
will like. Given the fact that superiority is such a critical component of
humor (as, e.g., Thomas Hobbes [1840], Zillmann and Cantor [1976], or
Charles R. Gruner [1997] observed), studies of narrative humor will do
well to investigate humor in relation to continuous characterization.
7. Comic Characters and Comic Action Logic
Many analysts (e.g., Palmer 1987; Zupančič 2008) suggest that “comic
characters” and “comic action” are forms of narrative humor. They sug-
gest that character and action logic (i.e., elements of first-degree intention-
ality) have the power to generate—by themselves—comic narrative cohe-
sion. The humor of comic narrative is then seen to reside in character
gestalts (e.g., Monroe’s mad neighbor, the crazy piano teacher, Therapy’s
seemingly naive protagonist) that embody the incongruity within a narra-
tive, or else the humor of comic narrative is said to reside in an autono-
mous (i.e., apparently unmediated) comic chain of events (as when the
neighbor fantasizes about Monroe, tidies up his apartment, checks his own
looks, opens the door, and sees the janitor; or as when the piano teacher’s
wife is sent far away from the womanizing singer but eventually lands in
bed with him). Especially theorists of film comedy, such as Jerry Palmer
(1987), tend to make such one-level or “single-track analyses” of comic or
other narrative (on single-track analysis, see Sternberg 2003b; 2009: 460 ff.
and references there). These analyses focus exclusively on the first-degree,
action-and-agent level and take an effet du réel for a real thing—the only
thing to consider. As we will now see in more detail, Palmer (1987) refers
to this single level when he claims that narrative humor can result from
actions and events as well as from the agents (the characters).
Comic action logic. Narrative, says Palmer (1987: 147), can contain humor
that ties in with the overall action logic of a scene, of several scenes, or of
the whole story world. He distinguishes it from comic moments in narra-
tive that have no direct causal function within the plot (although, more
indirectly, they may have to establish character and canons of probability).
He illustrates plot-related humor from a scene in Woody Allen’s Hannah
and Her Sisters (1986). Hannah’s husband is in love with his younger sister-
in-law. When he is for a moment alone with her, “he says in voice-over that
now that he has the opportunity to speak he is terribly embarrassed and
that whatever happens he must be extremely circumspect. Immediately
after saying this he grabs her, kisses her passionately and then says he loves
her madly, all to her evident bewilderment.” As Palmer (1987: 148–49)

notes, this scene “inevitably links the hilarious action with the sequence
of preceding and succeeding actions.” Comic moments with such high
action-logical value have a larger impact on the “light emotional tone” of
a film than comic relief without action-logical value (ibid.: 149).
Comic character. Palmer (ibid.: 148) also states that the kissing scene “is
central to the way in which the . . . character develops.” And one might
elaborate on his single-track analysis of comic character. Being the sum of
their past actions, characters create vague or precise expectations about
their future actions. Comic characters are the sum of accumulated incongru-
ous acts and embody a logic by which incongruous acts are congruous with
their incongruous inner selves. So they can even make the weirdest actions
“understandable” from their own perspectives. For instance, Hannah’s
husband’s kissing act may be incongruous with respect to certain norms,
but the action also builds a character from whom weird actions may now
be expected. Yet such characters can also be unpredictable, gapped. Comi-
cally incongruous characters may unexpectedly do the things that people
or characters in their right minds do, or they may do even weirder things
than usual.
Further, certain incongruous characters are more aware of their incon-
gruous behavior than others; compare realist with farcical characters.
Also, characters can be funny as humorists (i.e., as producers of comedy)
rather than as targets of humor (i.e., embodiers of incongruity). They can
be consciously witty and laugh at other characters in their story world.
What are we to make of such “autonomizing” (or single-track) descrip-
tions of comic characters and action logic? On the one hand, they make
intuitive sense, as I have just tried to illustrate. On the other hand, the
autonomous comic (or other) power of characters and action logic is an
illusion and, as section 8 will suggest, an important illusion. Narration is
always present in narrative, hence comic narrative is always a double-track
phenomenon (i.e., narration of action). But discourse can signal the action
and the narration perspectives to varying degrees: (comic) narrative’s unity
resides in the narration’s perspective on the action perspective, (comic)
narrative’s variety resides in the perceptibility of the narration’s and the
action’s perspectives. Hence the importance attached to the signals of nar-
rative perspective and narration’s perceptibility (“overtness,” “audibility,”
“visibility,” or “voicing”). To some extent, the important illusion of action-
logical autonomy and immediacy already arise when we remark that cer-
tain narrators are more “mimetic,” “communicative,” or “straightforward”
and others more “aesthetic.” Indeed, the embedded action level can be
foregrounded as a causal mechanism of humor when the narration chooses

to operate in the background, thus mimetically or straightforwardly pre-
senting the funny case—and vice versa.
What discourse factors give prominence to the narrator as a humorist or to
the narration as a form of humorous agency? The short answer is the same
factors that give prominence to a narrator/narration tout court, namely,
what makes it perceptible as an intentional perspective to whom/which we
can attribute humor or irony. The larger answer of course involves specify-
ing the factors concerned. To go by our discussion so far, the background-
ing versus foregrounding of narration’s frame correlates with the narra-
tion’s communicativeness versus misleadingness. Thus in the doctor’s wife
joke the manipulative narrator is foregrounded as a comic agent, while in
the Belgian and Polish jokes the characters are given comic agency by a
communicative narrator. The action logic of Kiss Me Stupid is comic, while
its communicative (author-like) narration works in the background; the
action logic of The Seven Year Itch is also comic, but the less communicative
narration there slightly foregrounds its own comic agency.
Yet the perception of who or what causes humor is not determined by
this narrative variable only. After all, many will not perceive much differ-
ence between the omnicommunicative parts of Kiss Me Stupid and the less
communicative sequences of The Seven Year Itch. It seems that the more
general perceptibility of narration (of which communication/manipula-
tion is one important variable) determines the perception of comic agency.
This especially—though not exclusively—depends on the forms of quota-
tion, which range from the less to the more perceptible: from (i) the dra-
matic narration of film and theater, through (ii) free indirect narration, to
(iii) diegetic narration. I will now argue that the general perceptibility of
narrations/narrators, different in each form, partly correlates with comic
narrations/narrators being perceived as “sarcastic,” “ironic,” or “joking”
and that different forms of quotation—different “voicings” of perspec-
tive—illustrate how narrative perceptibility can affect perceptions of nar-
ratorial comic agency.21
21. It is obviously the combination of content manipulation and specific quotational forms
that determines the perception of (comic and other) narration. So far I have talked about
narratorial manipulation (vs. straightforward communication) of first-degree intentional
content. Now I will focus more on forms of quotation as elements that increase the narrator’s
perceptibility and so the perceived comic agency. Future “double-track” reader-response
studies may investigate how other formal and more content-related resources textually inter-
act to create perceptions of comic agency. Thus narrators are more perceptible (1) when they
narrate and/or comment in the first person (and especially in the present tense); (2) when
they are a character in the story they narrate (i.e., they are “homodiegetic”); whatever the
temporal-experiential gap between narrator and character, the “two selves remain yoked
8. Perceptibility: Comic Perspective versus Comic Character
To repeat the question, is Palmer’s “single-track” analysis valid? Can we

analyze (comic) characters and actions as autonomous intentional perspec-
tives? No, we cannot. As Sternberg (e.g., 2009, with earlier references)
argues, a story always has an overarching, framing, controlling, subordi-
nating, higher-order intentionality: it is told by a narrator (and, if fictional,
invented by an author who quotes a narrator). Even when narration (qua
quotation, framing) is formally imperceptible or hardly perceptible, its
impact always remains there and is often overwhelming (e.g., inverting the
intentional meaning of the quoted perspective). In combination with genre
selection (comedy, farce, satire), narration can turn a bad surprise for the
neighbor of Monroe into a funny surprise for the audience: the narrating
text and context suggest a frame that “revalues” the narrated (quoted)
material. As already said, narrative recontextualization is the integration
of first-degree intentionality (originally part of an intradiegetic contextA )
into a second-degree intentional act (within an extradiegetic context B). In
narrative humor, the recontextualization may lead readers or spectators to
construe contextB as superior/congruous and contextA as inferior/incon-
gruous—or vice versa if the implied author re-recontextualizes the narrator
and the narrated (as sometimes happens with the naive young narrator of
Manolito Gafotas). Indeed, these are standard normative operations for nar-
rators and readers/spectators of comic narrative fiction.
The recontextualizing narrator may be explicit about the normative
superiority of contextB to contextA. The narrator’s ironic or humorous
stance may, for instance, veer toward sarcastic commentary. As Booth
(1983 [1961]: 272) says, however, “With commentary ruled out, hundreds
of devices remain for revealing judgment and molding responses.” Nar-
rators may, for instance, count on the implicit norm systems of the audi-
ence. They may also promote the superiority of the frame by enhancing
the inferiority of the framed material or perspectives. In general, authors
create normative responses by inventing—and narrators by communicat-
ing—story world intentionality; and narrators may use for the purpose
by the first-person pronoun” (Cohn 1978: 144); (3) when they make explicit comments and
evaluations on the story world in a more objective form (i.e., without speaking in the first
person); (4) when they paraphrase or “translate” rather than literally quote the speech of
characters; (5) when they perceptibly summarize, skip, select, and shuffle elements of the
(verbal and nonverbal) action; (6) when they paraphrase or “translate” rather than quote
the thoughts of characters; and (7) when they summarize, skip, and select elements of the
setting. “Hundreds of devices remain for revealing judgment and molding responses,” says
Booth (1983 [1961]: 272). Similarly, many specific discursive devices must exist to highlight
and mold the narrator’s comical identity.
low-profile “showing” (covert narration) or high-profile “telling” (overt

narration). In short, characters and actions cannot have autonomous
intentional perspectives.
Or can they? After all, the autonomous comic power of characters and
action is an important illusion in some sorts of comic discourse; we can say
of some framed action that it “is” comically inferior to our norms (without
mentioning the discourse norms); and among the narrations that comi-
cally target characters, some are found less “sarcastic” or “ironic” than
others. These shifting labels (“sarcasm,” “irony,” “joking”) seem to indicate
that some narrators or narrations are indeed less perceptible than others—
which would explain (though not justify) the spread of single-track anal
yses focusing on comic character and action on their own. I therefore sug-
gest that the (im)perceptibility of narration plays a role in the reader’s or
spectator’s experience of comic narrative, and this relative perceptibility—
the presence of or absence of discursive signals of framing—is meaningful
for the experience of narrative humor. To develop this idea, I will address
the following questions: What participants (“intentional agents”) are fore-
grounded or backgrounded in different forms of quotation-narration? Do
such differences in intentional salience correlate with different types of
humor or irony? In other words, can the relative (im)perceptibility of nar-
rative intentionality affect the interpretation of narrative humor?
I will first present the forms of quotation-narration as separate cate-
gories: from (i) the dramatic narration of film and theater, to (ii) free
indirect narration, to (iii) diegetic narration. Let me emphasize, how-
ever, that most novels combine these forms (with varying holistic effects),
whereas film and theater privilege form (i) as their macrodevice that extends
throughout the whole work, though even they may deploy overt narration
to some degree.
8.1. Covert Form: Dramatic Narration (Film and Theater)

It seems that comic characters in drama “show themselves” instead of
being shown and that the “shower” or narrator is effaced. Therefore it
is often—and erroneously—believed that in theater and film there is no
mediator between the audience and the fictive scene. The causes of this
illusion have been diagnosed by lucid poeticians. George M. Wilson (1986)
argues, for example, that film does not usually foreground a narrator,
because besides the characters there is no intentional agent who actually
performs speech acts. Seymour Chatman (1999: 441–42) notes that film
images do not “assert” (as verbal utterances do) but merely “present” states
of affairs—a fact that tends to background the narrator or narration. In
this sense, classical film narration is said to be self-effacing: audiences may
feel that they are merely located at the so-called “fourth wall,” confront-
ing unmediated scenes. They may feel that they have a direct perspective
on the characters.
Both film and theater performance can combine media which allow for
various forms of narrator-effacing “mimesis.” Indeed, speech can “repro-
duce” speech, and the images or enactments can “reproduce” mute inten-
tional acts. To be sure, various types of shots and camera movements cre-
ate “ostension” (showing), which is no less a narrator’s communicative act
than is assertion. And theater has similar ways to attract attention to the
relevant aspects of its world—most obviously via the sequencing of actors
who come onstage and go offstage and technical devices (e.g., lighting).
What I stress here, however, is that film and theater narration does not
require a speech agent—a speaking narrator with a voice—to perform the
narratively relevant communication, and so the (inevitable) frame seems to
vanish.
Does this narrative illusion mean anything for narrative humor? I
believe so. It means that characters can be felt to make themselves ridicu-
lous or seem funny on their own. When we see the hotel owner and man-
ager Basil at work in Fawlty Towers (1975, BBC), we do not constantly have
the impression that some narrator is turning him into a target of mockery.
Rather, our attention is focused on the character making himself ridicu-
lous. The ridiculing is felt to be an unmediated process, because no overt
mockery by a narrator is perceived. It seems as though the viewer auto-
matically finds the right normative framework by which to judge Basil’s
behavior. A film world is often produced intentionally by an extradiegetic
participant/agent (the filmic narrator) who is so imperceptible that irony
or humor can be perceived as “dramatic” (action- or event-based) rather
than voiced. By “dramatic” I mean apparently inherent to the charac-
ters, actions, and events in the story world. (Of course, perceptible voice-
over narrators do exist in film and theater and will lessen the “dramatic,”
“autonomous” quality of the comic action.)
In novels, the apparently unmediated mimesis is limited to speech, for as
Gérard Genette (1980 [1972]: 164) observed, “mimesis in words can only be
mimesis of words”: verbal narration can hide behind quotes when it nar-
rates speech acts but has to narrate overtly nonverbal action. If such quota-
tion of speech is “continuous” throughout, then “the authorial”/narratorial
“figure” “withdraws to the implicit frame behind the scenes” (Sternberg
1982: 109). Most novelistic (i.e., nontheatrical and nonfilmic) narration,
however, involves more overt (diegetic) forms of narration. Thus if plain
narration appears early in the discourse, a novelistic narrator is bound to
be generally more perceptible than the filmic narratorial instance—even
behind the direct quotes. In my discussion of diegetic narration (section

8.3), I quote some passages from Don Quixote to illustrate the effects this has
on humor perception.
The mimetic illusion—including dramatic humor—is a matter of degree.
Readers and viewers may sense that the story world is narrated by the nar-
rator—and invented by the author—when the coincidences and individual
acts nicely serve an overall plot, as when certain characters (e.g., Basil and
his wife), who have certain (e.g., opposed) plans and a certain (lack of )
mutual knowledge, happen to come together or might come together in a
situation with foreseeable or unforeseeable consequences. Audiences may
sense the control of narration when the pieces fit together, as they usually
do in emotionally and comically engaging plots. A tight plot, in short,
heightens our awareness of the implicit narration and authorial invention,
because discourse (communicative decisions) and plot point to an overall
narrative intentionality. Even covert narration betrays its presence when it
creates narrative humor (comic suspense and surprise).
8.2. Semicovert Form: Free Indirect Discourse

On the one hand, free indirect discourse (FID) is a technique that can
make narration semicovert when it does without signposts of framing,
which are often present in direct and indirect discourse. Such FID has no
explicit marker of syntactic subordination of the framed (quoted, narrated)
to the framing (quoting, narrating) discourse; part of its deictic orienta-
tion, especially concerning time and space, may be borrowed from the
quoted discourse, nor need it manifest explicit verbs of intentionality (say-
ing, thinking) to refer to the discourse acts of characters (see, e.g., McHale
1978; Sternberg 1982: 111–12; Fludernik 1993). FID is therefore considered
a technique allowing for relatively covert narration.
On the other hand, narratorial irony (or sympathy) is a frequent effect
of FID (Cohn 1978: 116 ff.; Fludernik 1993: 6, 350–59), whereas the irony
or humor in film or theater is often felt to be “action-based,” that is, a
“dramatic” effect of the events or a matter of purposeful humor or irony
between characters (as argued above). This must mean that the narrator’s
intentionality is often more perceptible in FID—even the austere FID
variety without verbs of saying or thinking—than in continuous dramatic
narration (i.e., the “showing” of film or theater). In what follows, I will
suggest that FID’s tension between overtness and covertness can produce
specific forms of humor or irony and that there may be a slight difference
between FID of thoughts and speech, depending on how the reader can
motivate the narrator’s FID.
Thus Cohn (1978: 169) argues that the narrator can be very elusive in
FID of thoughts: it can create “the illusion of a fiction that ‘tells itself,’ with-
out the ministrations of a narrator,” or a “monologic effect” (ibid.: 116),
although the discourse is covertly bivocal (quotational).22 The formal fea-
tures of FID do not foreground the narrator as an intentional perspective
on the narrated scene in a way comparable to the filmic narrator in film.
Still, two facts do foreground the FID narrator of thoughts relative to the
filmic or theatrical narrator. First, the narrator’s capacity as a mind reader
is antimonologic, because mind reading is an activity in which an audi-
ence can engage only thanks to the privileged, omniscient narrator: “One
of the most obviously artificial devices of the storyteller is the trick of going
beneath the surface of the action to obtain a reliable view of a character’s
mind and heart” (Booth 1983 [1961]: 3). Second, FID of thoughts “cast[s],”
as Cohn (1978: 117) says, “the language of a subjective mind into the gram-
mar of objective narration” and thus “amplifies” emotions and “false
notes.” Translation and amplification imply a translator and amplifier.
Here is an example from Lodge’s Nice Work (1988), where the narrator
often uses FID to render the sarcastic thoughts of his protagonist Vic. At
one point Vic, a middle-aged businessman, can no longer force himself to
have sex with his wife:
It was years since he [Vic] had felt any unforced desire for Marjorie, and now he
couldn’t even force it. When she seemed to be going off sex because of her time
of life he’d been secretly relieved. The buxom dimpled girl he’d married had
become a middle-aged podge with tinted hair and too much make-up. Her roly-
poly body embarrassed him when he happened to see it naked, and as for her
mind, well, that was almost as embarrassing when she exposed it. (Ibid.: 165)
The narrator enters into Vic’s mind and additionally uses some semantic
clues—Vic’s “amplified” negative emotions—to signal that his character is
responsible for the thoughts expressed. A small-scale reading exercise with a
questionnaire revealed that some readers of this fragment focused exclusively
on the ridiculing of the wife by Vic. Others found, however, that the ridicul-
ing of Vic himself by the covert ironic narrator—some wrote “author”—was
at least as important for the fragment’s humor (Vandaele 2002b).
22. Yet Sternberg (2005: 242) warns that to take the illusion of “single-voicedness” for actual
“narrator-free” narrative is to commit a basic fallacy: “How, in reason, would events ‘narrate
themselves’?” as Émile Benveniste notoriously suggested. How, in reason, would a charac-
ter’s intentionality (spoken, thought, or mute) in a world actually narrate itself ? Even Cohn
(1978: 188 ff.) seems to believe in this possibility, says Sternberg. Yet even when a novel only
consists of the words of one character (e.g., a diary writer, an interior monologist), that char-
acter is not narrating for us, the audience. It is the author (and his or her delegate, the nar-
rator) who has us as an audience and whose intentions we project upon his or her quoting of
the character. At the very least, however, Cohn and Benveniste illustrate once more that the
monologic illusion can be important.
The filmic or theatrical narrator is a more elusive participant than the

FID narrator, who is often more elusive than an overt narrator. Since
agents or participants are intentional contexts of communication, their
relative overtness or covertness affects our experience of the irony or
humor they produce. In theater and film comedy, the viewer judges the
story world’s incongruous behavior and speech according to a superior
norm that is apparently not dictated by a superior participant (the theatri-
cal or filmic narrator). The reader of comic or ironic free indirect thought
has at least some awareness of an authority who semicovertly represents a
norm other than and superior to the quoted character’s. Overt narrators
grow still more perceptible, so that the irony is also possibly “stable” (i.e.,
clearly interpretable, in relation to a normative participant).
As I said, however, FID rarely occurs as the exclusive form of narration
in a novel but usually alternates with overt telling, that is, with statements
clearly made by the narrator in his or her own voice. Thus “the monologic
effect . . . vanishes the moment fictional facts reappear” (Cohn 1978: 116).
A few lines further in Lodge’s (1988: 165) novel, for example, we read that
Vic drives to the house of a younger university lecturer with whom he is
in an exchange program and whose ideas differ radically from his: “Even
that arrogant, interfering women’s libber from the University was more
of a turn-on than poor old Marjorie. . . . She’d looked a bit more normal
in her bathrobe, when he drove round to her house that evening in a cold
fury, taking hair-rising risks with the Jaguar in the ice and snow, and prac-
tically battered her door down.” Especially in those last few words (“prac-
tically battered her door down”) we can read a statement of fact that brings
“Vic the ironist” down to the level of “Vic the clown.” The slightest hint of
intentionality—a narrator’s voice verbalizing a fact—foregrounds mock-
ery of the character.
Monika Fludernik (1993: 6) points out that FID is often ironic when
applied to speech and sympathetic when applied to thought. Though
mind-quoting FID can also lend itself to ironic readings (as the Lodge
example shows), this is certainly more often the case with free indirect
speech. An explanation of Fludernik’s observation could be that the FID
quoter is more foregrounded when quoting speech than when representing
thought. An asymmetry makes a difference here: there is a well-known,
easy, and literal quoting style for speech but none for the “less verbal”
mind. Even though internal monologue certainly exists (as we learn from
introspection), we also know that it does not come in a language that suits
traditional narrative. Thus the reader may feel that in FID of nonverbal
thought the quoting narrator is forced to the foreground, whereas in FID of
speech the narrator chooses to come to the fore: being always avoidable, it
becomes conspicuous when used. The irony of free indirect speech, then,
rests on the reader’s vague (but constant) intuition that its choice is moti-
vated by the narrator’s intention and not forced by the mind’s nonverbal
working. This vague sensation is yet sufficient to create a constant perspec-
tival tension between two voices or intentional perspectives, especially in
alternation with more overtly diegetic passages.
8.3. Overt Form: Diegetic Narration

Narrators can foreground themselves in many ways, such as making
explicit evaluations and “telling” rather than “showing” the facts of the
story world. The narration is then called “diegetic” rather than “mimetic”
(e.g., Chatman 1990: 114). In this form, the narrator is often very present
as a perspective on the world and does not try to hide while presenting the
intentional acts of characters.
On the one hand, of course, diegetic narration is not automatically
more ironic or critical (“dissonant,” in Cohn’s [1978] term) than mimetic
narration. The former can be perfectly “consonant” and the latter highly
ironic (see Sternberg 1982: 113–19). Moreover, many traces of diegesis are
motivated by necessity, not choice or agency, and readers or spectators
are aware of this. An example of such necessity in omniscient (not figu-
rally mediated) novels is the spatial descriptions. Although indicating that
a narrator mediates the narrated world, these descriptions often seem
“less to reveal the narrator than to cope with the exigencies of the [ver-
bal] medium” (Chatman 1978: 219). Likewise, temporal summaries may
seem functionally necessary (“nothing happened for a while”) rather than
openly subjective (“nothing interesting happened according to the narra-
tor”). On the other hand, if the narration is contextually ironic or humor-
ous, an overt diegetic narrator can more easily be held responsible for such
dissonance than a covert, mimetic one. The ironic or humorous intent can
then readily be anchored in the intentionality of the narrator. Rather than
just seeing the ironized or comic character, readers will perceive the narra-
tor as well as the character. The narrator becomes perceptible as a humor-
ist or ironist—and, when extremely overt and superior, as a sarcastic one.
Sarcasm is the perception of comic agency with marked superiority.
We may say, for instance, that at the start of Don Quixote, Cervantes’s
narrator has an overtly comic, and sometimes sarcastic, take on his incon-
gruous hero. Although the “facts” he selects for “showing” are already
slanted toward comedy, overt evaluation is ubiquitous in his diegetic dis-
course—and this enhances the perception of comic agency with marked
superiority, that is, of sarcasm. The diegetic evaluations concern Don
Quixote’s habits (“And so, let it be said that this aforementioned gentle-
man spent his times of leisure—which meant most of the year—reading

books of chivalry with so much devotion and enthusiasm that he forgot
almost completely about the hunt and even about the administration of his
estate” [Cervantes 2003: 20]); or his mental characteristics (“His fantasy
filled with everything he had read in his books, enchantments as well as
combats, battles, challenges, wounds, courtings, loves, torments, and other
impossible foolishness, and he became so convinced in his imagination of
the truth of all the countless grandiloquent and false inventions he read
that for him no history in the world was truer” [ibid.: 21]); or his actions
(“And the first thing he did was to attempt to clean some armor that had
belonged to his great-grandfathers and, stained with rust and covered with
mildew, had spent many long years stored and forgotten in a corner” [ibid.:
22]). The overt narrator also uses diegetic discourse (summary) to agree
with Don Quixote’s antagonists (“The language [i.e., Don Quixote’s],
which the ladies did not understand, and the bizarre appearance of our
knight intensified their laughter, and his annoyance increased” [ibid.: 27]);
and he mixes diegetic with mimetic (i.e., direct) discourse to mock the
hero’s pseudo-eloquent speech (“‘I would consume any fare,’ replied Don
Quixote, ‘because, as I understand it, that would be most beneficial now’”
[ibid.: 28]). In the narrative whole, however, the mimetic direct discourse
is no less sarcastic than the diegetic: the perception of comic agency is
a holistic effect, depending on the alternation of quotational-narrational
forms in a certain context.
Cervantes’s narrator is sarcastic here because of his open judgment of
his famous story world agent, making explicit commentaries in order to
enhance his character’s incongruity. These intentional characteristics may
partly explain why the early narrative does not read as the story of a fool
(i.e., with Don Quixote alone in focus) but as the comic perspective on a
character made to seem foolish. Had the narrator done without the overt
evaluations, he would have slightly moved to the background in order to
foreground the character (as usually happens in film and TV comedy).
As the narrative stands, however, both the character and the relationship
between narrator-humorist and character-target are clearly perceptible.
Cervantes’s narrator becomes almost like a “dramatized character” “to
whom we react as we react to other characters” (Booth 1983 [1961]: 212).
Thus the perceptible, high-profile narrator is not only a mediating or
focalizing subject but also a clearly identified object of readerly contempla-
tion—with consequences for humor or irony appreciation. The more fore-
grounded a narrator, the more he or she can turn into an object of readerly
and authorial comedy (and/or empathy). The overt narrator plays the dan-
gerous game of all ironists or humorists: either he or she achieves irony or
humor (and figures as the ironist-humorist), or he or she fails (and becomes

a target). Human (rather than godlike) narrators are particularly likely to
become the incongruous (unreliable, biased, childish, unreasonable) tar-
gets of authors and their readers. In Lindo’s Manolito Gafotas, for instance,
Manolito is quite often a blatantly and comically unreliable narrator. The
author thus reveals Manolito’s funnily biased mismatch between told (or
story) time and telling (or reading) time. Here Manolito speaks about a
psychotherapeutic session that is supposed to cure his logorrhea: “Well, I
told her everything I could remember up to the age of three or four. Then
Miss Esperanza, looking as if she was still in limbo, told me I could go”
(ibid.: 30; my translation).
By means of the zoom-out word then (entonces in Spanish), Manolito sug-
gests that he did not speak too much during the session and that the thera-
pist Miss Esperanza is easily bored. Next, however, Lindo has Manolito
quote Miss Esperanza directly: “You are telling everything very well . . . but
one and a half hours have passed” (ibid.). Through the quote, he betrays
himself as a naively unreliable narrator—here in the word entonces (then)—
while trying to disparage someone else.
Manolito’s readers easily pick up any cue offering a higher perspective
on his perspective: a slip of the tongue, an internal inconsistency, a quote
from another character, an exaggeration, an improbability. And even
beyond unreliable homodiegetic narrators, says Booth (1983 [1961]: 369),
“we are not stopped” in “our pervasive irony-hunt” “by the most explicit
rhetoric” of “even the most obviously omniscient and reliable narrator.”
On the contrary, perhaps, narration or narrators—whether omniscient or
human—become especially vulnerable when they come to the fore through
explicit rhetoric, slips, inconsistencies, exaggerations, improbabilities, and
the like. In any case, to understand the irony and comedy of a narrative
text is to construct and interrelate more and less perceptible intentional
perspectives—perspectives of/on characters, narrators, and authors.
Finally, to finish my discussion of Wright, I turn to three topics that this
otherwise impressive book neglects or treats unsatisfactorily: the relation
between happiness and comedy (section 9), the joke/comedy distinction
(section 10), and comic tone (section 11).
9. Comedy: Whose Happiness?
Let me stress, first, that Wright is certainly interested in relations between

narrative perspectives. In a TV advertisement, for instance, a man man-
ages to make a girl believe that his instant coffee is the “real coffee” she
has been longing for. Wright (2005: 49) shrewdly observes that we know
as much as the man (i.e., that it is instant coffee) and more than the girl,
creating for us “the pleasure of superiority of judgment.” Also, he suggests
the concept of “plotless story,” defining it as a story in which “rival clues
may be present throughout and never be seen together by the characters
themselves” (ibid.: 65): this hints again at different levels of information in
narrative. Wright thus confirms that the superior knowledge of readers or
spectators creates a specific type of emotional involvement with the story
world’s agents.
The problem is that he does not always keep in focus these layers of nar-
rative perspective. He thus compares jokes and stories to a good shot in
a tennis match, saying that “the applause is loudest when the second clue
that forces the reversal of the definition is completely unexpected and yet
ideally appropriate” (ibid.: 41). However, he does not stress the important
fact that, in stories and jokes, the readers can be on either side of the net:
either they know what the winning player (performer, author, narrator)
will do, or they do not. They may feel, in the first case, suspense with the
attacking player (“will it work out?”) and, in the other case, surprise with
the player under attack (“I didn’t see that one coming”). In many narra-
tives, the discourse or sjuzhet repeatedly drags the readers or spectators
from one side of the net to the other, so to speak.
Wright (ibid.: 66–69) does mention the “fabula/sjuzhet” (action/pre-
sentation) contrast as an “addendum” to the story chapter, yet he does not
really put it to use. Thus he defines comedy (versus tragedy) in terms of a
pleasant (versus painful) ending without clearly indicating if this criterion
refers to the end of the fabula (i.e., of the action logic) or to the end of the
sjuzhet (i.e., of the text) or to both. Yet “pain” or “pleasure” can operate
on these two levels: the happiness or catastrophe in the action and the set-
tling to a favored gestalt or not by the reader or spectator. Due to the dif-
ferent perspectival devices available, the feelings on the two levels need not
coincide. As we have seen, tragedy or catastrophe for the characters (e.g.,
Monroe’s neighbor) can be comedy for the audience, and continuous char-
acterization plays an important role in this duality. Nonchronological tell-
ing can also contribute to such emotive differences between the two levels.
In Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), for instance, the heroes are alive
and kicking in the last sjuzhet shot, though on the fabula level the char-
acter played by John Travolta has been violently killed. In other words,
Wright’s criterion for comedy (“happy” closure) can work on the sjuzhet
level only, while the fabula ends in disaster. In section 11, moreover, I will
argue that “tone” is another perspectival device that can (help) convert an
entirely catastrophic story world (fabula) into the object of either a tragic
or a comic telling (sjuzhet).
At least implicitly, Wright (2005: 45) engages in “single-track” analysis

when he explains the difference between “the Tragic” and “the Comic”
(which he also calls “the Joke”): “the meaning” or intentional perspective
“shifts from happiness to catastrophe” or the reverse, respectively. The cri-
terion seems to work for a chronological Japanese folktale he quotes, “The
Crows and the Archers.” There the young crows are victorious at the end
of text and action alike, so that a happy reading is quite unproblematic.
Indeed, the crows are the goodies from beginning to end (and the archers
the baddies) on both narrative levels: both the text and the action world
develop so that the crows are first in a predicament because of the archers
but triumph in the end.
The criterion also works for some genres of comedy, especially “roman-
tic” comedy, which have made the happy ending (in discourse and story)
their hallmark. Perhaps this is because romantic comedy, like tragedy,
involves a great deal of empathy and vulnerability: the generically guaran-
teed happy ending may then be a way of reassuring the audience. Nonethe-
less, comedy in general cannot be defined as happiness for all intentional
perspectives involved, nor can humor in general. This will be an important
(though not new) point to remember when I discuss Zupančič’s 2008 book
in part 2 of my essay (Vandaele forthcoming). In principle therefore narra-
tive analysis should make clear to which intentional level a certain pain or
pleasure applies.
Further, even when the concepts of “painful ending” and “happy end-
ing” unambiguously refer to the discourse level, they have no straight-
forward defining power for tragedy and comedy. “Pain to pleasure” or
final pleasure is certainly not a sufficient condition for comedy. Wright
may note that the Japanese folktale is not a comic story at all but has a
very serious, almost moralizing tone. Moreover, pain to pleasure or final
pleasure is even a possible feature of tragedy. As Sternberg (2003b: 625)
reminds us, Aristotle considered the ending of Iphigenia in Tauris ideally
tragic, although it is a “happy” one. This is so, suggests Sternberg, because
the preceding parts of the story are sufficiently painful and full of tragic
tension for heroes and audiences. The end of the action and of the telling
are indeed very important narrative moments, yet they do not necessarily
cancel the emotions experienced in all the other narrative moments.
10. The Joke
So far we have left aside the difference between (short) jokes and (long)
comedy, and neither does Wright thematize this difference. In our discus-
sion of comic surprise, for example, we have said that both jokes and com-
edy are narrative about action worlds. Moreover, just like some humor in
comic narrative (e.g., Manolito Gafotas, Tristram Shandy), some jokes are also
forms of metanarrative humor. Neal Norrick (1986: 242) thus describes how
“shaggy dog stories” skew “our expectations about jokes” by going on and on
and ending in a trivial way. Indeed, even jokes can be food for “metajokes.”
Yet jokes and comedy are also distinct in a way that Wright’s one-level
analysis of narrative—or, better, his wavering between one-level and two-
level analysis—cannot explain. Wright’s analysis obliterates the joke/com-
edy distinction, because this distinction depends on the interplay between
narrative’s two levels: narration and story world. Recall, for instance, that
the narrative surprise in Lodge’s long comic narrative Therapy forced us to
re-pattern the action world, whereas the surprise of the short joke about the
doctor’s wife basically killed our growing interest in that medical world. A
brief characterization of jokes will bring out this difference more clearly.
A short joke does not create much emotional involvement of readers
with its sketchy story agents. In a joke, indeed “happiness” or “satisfaction”
is crucial on the level of the telling/understanding but not on that of the
action, which is less an end in itself than a means to tell a joke. We expect
the joke’s punch line to defeat, in some locally plausible way, our provi-
sional expectations concerning the joke world or the telling, but we are not
too interested in what happened to its characters (the doctor’s wife, the
husband, the American, the Belgian). All we want is to grasp the alterna-
tive—often spurious—logic of the joke. The action and its characters are
so uninteresting per se that it is a category mistake to say that a joke has or
does not have a happy ending in terms of its story world.
Even in a joke like the following, it is an exaggeration to say that it has
an unhappy ending:
Guardian Angel: “Careful, Fabian, it is decreed that you will die the minute you
pronounce the word ‘Doyen.’”
‘‘‘Doyen’?’’ says Fabian, intrigued.
And he dies. (Wright 2005: 67–68)
We do not know Fabian, and our understanding of the joke mostly involves
very general ideas (perhaps even the use/mention distinction). The same
applies to the coal/scuttle-kitchen/sink joke analyzed by Wright. We may
perhaps personify coal, kitchen, coal scuttle, and kitchen sink, but do we
really care much about their story world? What counts in this joke is the
narration (or verbal art), not the agents (or action world). And this is true,
to a considerable extent, of more clearly narrative jokes too (e.g., that
about the doctor’s wife). In short jokes, the action is the means and the
narration the end.
In longer narrative, by contrast, the “telling” is “rhetoric to aid in the

realization of dramatic elements” (Booth 1983 [1961]: 223). In longer narra-
tive, the telling forms a rhetoric to create empathy with (or distance from)
the dramatic elements. A reversal of a protagonist’s emotions on the story
level (from misery to happiness or vice versa) can be felt, because readers
are at least minimally involved with that character. In a long narrative, as
opposed to a joke, authors and their narrators have time to highlight the
emotional intentionality of characters as well as their own intentionality.
Comic novels may offer a gradual (e.g., Austen’s Emma) or sudden (e.g.,
Lodge’s Therapy) disclosure of an alternative perspective on the deeply
known intentional agents of the narrated world. In short, comic novels dif-
fer from short jokes in that their shifts on the level of narration (discourse,
sjuzhet) have a re-patterning (rather than a nullifying) impact on the (here,
important) level of the action (story, fabula). Indeed, no analysis of narra-
tive humor can ignore the recontextualization (re-patterning, nullification,
distancing, empathizing) generated by narrative perspectives.
Finally, let me argue that “tone” is another perspectival device that can
(help) convert an entirely catastrophic story world (fabula) into the object
of a tragic or comic telling (sjuzhet). The use of comic tone is not limited
to narrative humor, but it is abundantly used there—especially in fictional
comic narrative.
11. Key or Tone
Emotions in narrative are not only caused by the fate of characters (as
single-track, action-logical accounts suggest) and by the narrative perspec-
tive (as I have been suggesting). Any narration of an action can be made
comic or tragic for audiences just by changing the “tone” or “key” of the
narrative communication. Black comedies like Burn after Reading (2008) by
Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, for instance, show that constant pain and final
catastrophe—on the story level—may go hand in hand with tremendous
laughter—created by the discourse level. In Manolito Gafotas, Manolito’s
mother slaps her child quite often, while the father is hardly ever at home,
and if he is, he falls asleep in front of the television and spoils Manolito to
compensate for his absence. Nevertheless, the world of Manolito Gafotas is
a funny one for many readers. This is so, in part, because the tone of the
narrative is comic.23
23. Few have so insisted on laughter as tone as did Bakhtin, especially in his Rabelais and His
World (1984) [1965]. Yet Bakhtin was notoriously normative in this respect: the tone of true,
subversive laughter is not superficial but fundamentally questions and subverts the powers
that be. By contrast, my definition of comic tone will leave aside the issue of subversion.
A comic tone can be defined as a lightheartedness (as opposed to gravity)

that authors and author-like narrators suggest as the right attitude toward
a work or parts of it—even when they accomplish this via an exaggerat-
edly serious tone (so that the lightheartedness is in the exaggeration).24 It
serves to soften the antagonistic, hostile, or hierarchical tendencies often
attached to humor. If accepted by the audience, such a tone can over-
ride story world pain by reducing serious readerly empathy. Given these
powers, comic tone is an instance of what Erving Goffman (1974: 45) calls
“keying”: when a serious activity is keyed in some way (as a fantasy, story,
joke, etc.), “participants . . . are meant to know and to openly acknowledge
that a systematic alteration is involved, one that will radically reconstitute
what it is for them that is going on.”
More specifically, the comic key or tone seems to be a subspecies of
the playful key, in which the effects of what is said or done are some-
how (intended to be) mitigated. In felicitous playful or comic communi-
cation, the participants acknowledge and assume others to acknowledge
that something (e.g., an attack, a slap, a death) will count as something
else—a playful or funny act or event. As a form of shared intentionality,
playfulness is already present in higher animal life but humans are “pre-
sumably . . . best at it” (ibid.: 186). The comic tone invites the participants
to find humor in what is communicated—to seek incongruities, to find
superiority relations, to lower empathy, and to relax about things.
If the comic tone is a general intentional background, which can to
some extent be established by metacommunicative conventional signposts
(especially indications of genre), then humor is a more local and irresist-
ible phenomenon—it is the mirth-creating, incongruity- and superiority-
generating communication itself. Deprived of a more general comic tone,
humor is usually a very local phenomenon: a nice quip or a funny mistake
do not automatically produce mirth beyond the immediate laughter or
spontaneous smiling. A serious tone can usually block the further spread of
mirth. In successful comedy, however, comic tone and instances of humor
together create laughter in a circular process: if a tone is successfully estab-
lished, the humor will come more easily, and if the humor is good, an
overall comic tone can be created and maintained. Tone is the intentional
or dispositional background, humor is the event, and they reinforce each
other: a comic tone signaled by convention is empty without specific cases
24. On the other hand, a serious tone (metacommunication) cannot always override humor
(communication). Since “laughter is under weak conscious control” (Provine 2000: 49), audi-
ences may laugh when the communicator is serious or even when they themselves intend to
be serious. Communication and metacommunication can obviously be at odds.
of successful humor, and humor without an overall comic tone is bound to

be an isolated phenomenon.
Given a comic tone, contagion is the mechanism by which mirth- or
laughter-creating humor contributes to the maintenance or enhancement
of the comic tone. Originally an animal call (Deacon 1997), laughter is con-
tagious in the sense that a person who has just laughed will tend to laugh
more. And when mirth accumulates, the comic tone is extended. Conse-
quently, the timing of humor is important in the creation of a general tone.
Strategic irruptions of humor are especially important at the beginning of
a text due to the cumulative effect of mirth, though of course their effect
may find no sequel (in Philip Roth’s longish American Pastoral [2005] {1997},
chapter 1’s mildly ironic humor never recurs). Laughter is contagious in a
social sense too: “The sociality of laughing [is] striking. (Sociality refers to
the ratio of social to solitary performance of a behavior)” (Provine 2000:
43–44). In other words, laughing is clearly one of those activities that we
perform more often in a group than alone. Thus drama or film audiences
experience together social forms of contagion—and tone creation—that
are unknown to the solitary reader of a novel.
Though contagion usually requires temporal proximity to the feeling of
mirth, it can also work via memory. When a stimulus is frequently asso-
ciated with laughter, then the mere recall of that stimulus sometimes pre-
disposes us to laugh again. I have previously called this the “institutional-
ization” of humor (Vandaele 2002a: 243). Comic tone or disposition can
thus come to be attached to catchphrases, repeated jokes, and specific
intentional agents, and it can even create actual laughter. A narrative par-
ticipant can be so systematically associated with a certain type of incon-
gruity that his or her mere appearance produces humor. In Mario Var-
gas Llosa’s novel La tía Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,
1977), for instance, the character Pedro Camacho is recurrently presented
as a ludicrous clown, while other parts of the novel are more serious or
less clownishly comic. When a specific character or narrator (a fool or an
ironist, for instance) is typically responsible for a certain humorous touch,
he or she can intermittently instill a comic tone in a narrative. All these
mechanisms of contagion are important in comic narrative.
How does the idea of comic tone relate to Wright’s analyses? On the one
hand, this idea is compatible with emotional intentionality as Wright sees
it. Tone is created by intentional agents (author, narrator, character) and
guides the audience’s attitudes toward events, actions, participants, agents.
On the other hand, Wright’s problem of generalization arises again. While
Wright regards any type of communication as a form of “faithful play”
between agents, I insist (with Goffman 1974) that there are huge differ-
ences between playful (comic, fictional) and serious interactions. Success-
ful tragic and comic tones are very different things. To live up to its tragic
tone, narrative requires deep empathy—which takes time to create—and
a character’s vulnerability. Empathy with a vulnerable character makes his
or her painful end (or suffering elsewhere) painful for the reader or specta-
tor too. The comic tone, by contrast, invites participants to lower empathy
and relax about things in order to find and enjoy incongruities and superi-
ority relations.
Different comic genres have different ways to establish this tone. Jokes
are simply too short to induce deep empathy, and they tend to use their
minimalist story worlds as a mere means to a narrational end. Farce is
longer, but its overall tone blocks such empathy and vulnerability—its
characterizations are superficial and produce a normative superiority vis-
à-vis the characters. In dark comedy, it is often a similar light, farcical tone
that limits our empathy and the characters’ vulnerabilities. Romantic com-
edy involves higher degrees of empathy, but the vulnerability of characters
is lower than in tragedy, because the tone is more cheerful and the genre is
known to opt for a happy discourse and story end.
Intentional perspectives operate in all narrative genres but in differ-
ent ways—creating different kinds of pains and pleasures as well as differ-
ent tones, different levels of empathy and vulnerability. Since “pain” and
“pleasure” cover different phenomena in different genres and individual
stories, there is no easy comparison between tragedy and comedy in such
terms (e.g., pain-to-pleasure versus pleasure-to-pain movement). The pain
in comedy can be entirely pleasurable for the reader or spectator, and com-
edy’s world can consist largely of such pain. Narrative perspective and
tone give pain and pleasure their contextual narrative sense.
12. Summary
What is narrative humor? With this question in mind, I have discussed

Wright (2005), who argues that both humor and narrative crucially require
audiences or readers to switch between “intentional perspectives” (inten-
tions, goals, beliefs, motivations, emotions) of different agents. Although
an important idea, we have seen that it does not explain the difference
between humor and narrative or the composite concept of narrative
humor. I have maintained Wright’s intentionalist thrust while focusing
on differences between humor and narrative. Whereas narrative contains
minimally two layers of intentionality (i.e., the presentation of action),
humor need not have them (although it can). Whereas humor always
requires agents to perceive incongruity and induces (or confirms) feelings

in them, narrative is not defined by incongruity and superiority (although
it can produce them in the mind).
An intentionalist description of narrative humor—the composite con-
cept—then emerged: humor is narrative when it creates and/or exploits
incongruity and superiority relations between the participants (“agents”)
of narrative texts. Thus readers/audiences construct authors who present
incongruous (or comically inferior) narrators, or narrators who present
incongruous characters, or characters who present themselves or other
characters as incongruous (the narrator and author permitting); or readers/
audiences find that they have been fooled by the narrator or author. In
different types of narrative humor, audiences/readers encounter narrative
participants (“agents”) in different humorous roles. Explaining narrative
humor is showing how narrative enables its participants to produce humor,
that is, incongruity and superiority.
I have attempted to describe some types of narrative humor, that is, to
show how narrative perspective enables agents to be humorous. In “meta-
narrative humor,” the reader interprets deficient narration as an author’s
or narrator’s comic strategy that mixes or competes with proper narra-
tion (and thus shows ex negativo what proper narration is). In “comic sus-
pense,” the reader or spectator learns from an authoritative (congruous,
superior) narrator about incongruous (inferior) acts and thoughts in the
story world. Comic suspense is the reader’s or spectator’s state of mind in
which suspense (i.e., uncertainty about story world development) mixes
or competes with normative superiority and distance vis-à-vis an incon-
gruously developing world. “Comic narrative surprise” is a surprise about
the action or its communication that the reader or spectator attributes to
(i.e., finds to be caused by) an incongruous narrator or action. It is a com-
plex and variegated phenomenon. It may produce a reader’s or specta-
tor’s scornful surprise at a character (a superiority feeling), or it may make
the reader or spectator feel foolish (until he or she “regains” superiority).
In any event, all forms of narrative humor are specific instantiations of
Wright’s idea that humor and narrative crucially require a reader or audi-
ence to switch between intentional perspectives.
Some analysts also regard “comic character” and “comic action” (with-
out reference to the discourse) as types of narrative humor. Although this
“autonomizing” or “single-track” view of character and action is wrong,
because narrative is a form of double intentionality, it is true that narrators
can background (or, inversely, foreground) themselves, so that the charac-
ters are foregrounded (or, inversely, backgrounded) as sense-making inten-
tional perspectives. Such fore- or backgrounding (on the narrator’s part)
may influence the type of humor perceived in narrative (e.g., sarcasm, nar-
ratorial irony, or dramatic irony). It is influenced by the narration’s com-
munication strategies, the forms of quotation-narration used, and a variety
of other devices.
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Narrative Humor (I):

of reality in terms of (configurations of ) agents, actions, situations, goals,

1. Thinking: Triangulation, Faith, Vulnerability

1. For example, post-­structuralism makes comparable claims. Though heterogeneous

it mainly against analytic thinking, formal logic included. He argues, for

from knowledge-­transmitting communication between individuals with stable identities to

ses) lead to conflicts between persons or even within one person—with

2. Triangulation and Vulnerability in Jokes and Stories

We can now begin to understand Wright’s interest in humor and narrative.

or a comic outcome, or—less dramatically—they have painful or pleasur-

Figure 1 Wright 2005: 13

Figure 2 Wright 2005: 14

Figure 3 Wright 2005: 44

some relatively coherent interpretation due to a second script (e.g., Ras-

3. Humor, Narrative, Intentional Perspective

Wright’s argument is very generalized. It argues that the above-­mentioned

nicity, metaphor, and metonym (ibid.: 132); Kuhnian scientific advances

4. Narrative and Humor: Apart and Together

forms of intentionality, as when we interpret someone who quotes some-

4.3. Narrative Humor

of the narrated world’s action, of the narration, or of “metanarrative” acts

intentional perspectives is not new of course. Benjamin Hrushovski (1979:

5. The Implied Author as a Humorist: Metanarrative Humor

Audiences and readers expect narrative texts, like all communication,

its situations and developments. Metanarrative humor is a comic defiance

The humor of this excerpt is a consequence of (presumably intended) play-

Tristram Shandy’s humor is metanarrative, because it is a comic comment

6. The Narrator as a Humorist: Comic Narrative Perspective

So the implied author can be seen as a humorist who pokes fun at an

Mirth deriving from witnessing the debasement of an agent or object increases

I insist on the emotive and attitudinal “superiority” side of humor,

with comically superior characters and narrative distance from comically

6.1. Comic Suspense

Joseph Andrews performs this suspenseful retardation in a most comic way,

coincidences), which are partly or radically incongruous with the reader’s

In comic narrative, characters often have considerably less knowledge than

6.2. Comic Surprise

Indeed, to apply Sternberg’s (1978) definition of narrative surprise, the end

plainly communicative) narration of incongruous action (as in the Bel-

aesthetic purposes. Another potentially humor-­eliciting pattern will relate

whereas here the characters behave unexpectedly within an action logic—

but is an ironist when he or she presents a character’s surprising activity

Scheme 1 Two “author-­like” types of comic narrative surprise: mimetic-­

Example Belgian or Polish joke Doctor’s wife joke

by—a character’s intentional perspective and so motivates any surprise (or

neighbor, we learn in considerable detail about his prospective fantasies—

sibly to scorn (because the character’s ideas are normatively incongruous)

Scheme 2 Comic narrative surprises, “figural” surprise included

Belgian or Monroe/janitor Doctor’s wife

Of course, since the protagonist is unaware of any real reader in another

6.3. Previous Characterization

this leads to schadenfreude, because the narration has by then character-

In long narratives such as Emma, the perspective has time to develop,

the reader’s or spectator’s attachment to the character through the narra-

7. Comic Characters and Comic Action Logic

her madly, all to her evident bewilderment.” As Palmer (1987: 148–49)

foregrounded as a causal mechanism of humor when the narration chooses

8. Perceptibility: Comic Perspective versus Comic Character

To repeat the question, is Palmer’s “single-­track” analysis valid? Can we

low-­profile “showing” (covert narration) or high-­profile “telling” (overt

8.1. Covert Form: Dramatic Narration (Film and Theater)

behind the direct quotes. In my discussion of diegetic narration (section

8.2. Semicovert Form: Free Indirect Discourse

1. For example, post-structuralism makes comparable claims. Though heterogeneous

from knowledge-transmitting communication between individuals with stable identities to

Wright’s argument is very generalized. It argues that the above-mentioned

aesthetic purposes. Another potentially humor-eliciting pattern will relate

Scheme 1 Two “author-like” types of comic narrative surprise: mimetic-

To repeat the question, is Palmer’s “single-track” analysis valid? Can we

low-profile “showing” (covert narration) or high-profile “telling” (overt

humor (and figures as the ironist-humorist), or he or she fails (and becomes

At least implicitly, Wright (2005: 45) engages in “single-track” analysis