VANDAELE. Narrative Humor (II)

Narrative Humor (II):
Exit Perspective
Jeroen Vandaele
University of Oslo, Spanish
Abstract This is part II of a two-part essay on narrative humor. Part I appeared

in Poetics Today 31:4; it explained Wright’s (2005) idea that both humor and narra-
tive require audiences/readers to switch between “intentional perspectives,” that is,
between the cognitive-emotive states of mind of agents (participants). Second, it
distinguished between humor and narrative: while narrative contains minimally two
layers of intentionality (oriented to the action and its presentation), humor can but
need not involve those two layers; inversely, while humor always requires subjects
to perceive incongruity and feel superiority, narrative is not defined by incongruity
and superiority, although it can produce them. Third, part I went on to redefine the
composite concept “narrative humor,” describing it as the production and/or exploi-
tation of incongruity and superiority relations among the participants (agents, inten-
tional perspectives) of narrative texts: author, narrator, reader/spectator, character.
Fourth, it analyzed some types of narrative humor, mainly “metanarrative humor,”
“comic narrative suspense,” and “comic narrative surprise.” Part II surveys and com-
pares other approaches to humor in/and narrative. In the philosophical and psycho-
analytic study The Odd One In (2008), Zupančič suggests that comedies involving
unhappiness deserve more attention than they have received. The idea that come-
dies are compatible with unhappiness is interesting, yet Zupančič overlooks the cen-
tral mechanisms behind the idea: perspectival mechanisms, which foster incon-
gruity/superiority between participants in a narrative and thus enable comedies to
turn someone’s unhappiness into a funny thing. Also, Zupančič mistakes causal and
temporal development for a feature of tragedy as against comedy, rather than identi-
I thank Poetics Today’s readers, and especially Meir Sternberg, for many precise comments on
previous versions of this text.
Poetics Today 33:1 (Spring 2012) doi 10.1215/03335372-1505540
© 2012 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
60 Poetics Today 33:1
fying such development as a feature of narrative in general; by the standards of seri-

ous narrative, comic plots can even unroll “incongruously” many causal-temporal
developments (as when farcical plots run wild). More generally, Zupančič shows
little awareness of existing research on humor and comedy. Humor Studies may
erroneously regard such books as representative of humanist-interpretive analyses of
humor in general—and therefore keep excluding cultural and literary studies from
their interdisciplinary enterprise. Yet Humor Studies likewise betrays problems in
the face of narrative humor. As with Zupančič, those problems (visible in Attardo
2001 and, less so, Ermida 2008) are related to a neglect of intentional perspective,
a poor grasp of narrative’s perspectival makeup, and a lack of interest in poetics.
1. Narrative Humor: A Complex of Emotions and Its Participant Structure
What is narrative humor? With this question in mind, part I of my pro-

grammatic review essay (Vandaele 2010) discussed Edmond Wright’s
(2005) wide-ranging book. Wright argues that our interaction with the
world, including our cognitive activity, is fundamentally motivational/
emotive and that narrative and humor are important evidence of this fact.
Human activity is “motivated by pains and pleasures, and by the memories
of those [pains or pleasures] now invested with consequent fear or desire”
(ibid.: 41). Our cognitive activity, including the epistemic choice of per-
spective and attention, is fundamentally a form of motivated action. It is
the fallible attempt, says Wright (ibid.: 93–94), to reduce pain and increase
pleasure. Humor and narrative fundamentally exploit (hence illustrate) the
fact that our cognitive fallibility goes with emotional vulnerability: our
interpretations were and are often wrong, they can always be wrong in the
future, and through our emotions we are in touch with actual and hypo-
thetical errors and successes. Humor and narrative teach us this lesson
because they are cognitive/emotional processes requiring readers to switch
between “intentional perspectives”: between the intentions, goals, beliefs,
motivations, emotions, and so on, of different agents—all possibly wrong
or right, miserable or happy, and so on.
Humor is certainly not just a rational or emotion-low cognitive process
occurring in one’s mind, although this is what the core ideas of promi-
nent contemporary humor theories seem to suggest (e.g., Raskin 1985 and
Attardo 2001, discussed below). Humor is not just a state of mind dryly
observing that its expectation has been frustrated and subsequently refram-
ing the situation, as “incongruity theories” of humor argue (see, e.g., my
discussion of Shultz 1976 in part I of this essay, especially 2010: 748–62).
The cognitive effort involved in humor is also an emotive phenomenon
associated with human situatedness in—and adaptability to—a world that
is largely social (or antisocial). As Salvatore Attardo (1994: 322–28) points
Vandaele • Narrative Humor (II): Exit Perspective 61
out, humor can serve to create intimacy, to convey norms in a playful way,
to disclaim commitment to what one says, to show cleverness, to compete
playfully, to tease, to build an in-group, to make the communicating agents
feel relaxed, to cope with difficulties, to manage a conflict, to mitigate
aggression, and so on. Some of these functions clearly suggest that humor
can be a matter of antisocial behavior: conveying norms is antagonistic if
other participants have different norms; a speaker’s noncommitment may
be shockingly frivolous for other participants who are strongly committed
to what that speaker says; competition may be antisocial; exhibiting clever-
ness may have competitive purposes; an in-group may imply an out-group
that is present; to mitigate a highly aggressive message can be a way to cre-
ate a space for a latently aggressive message.
Indeed, as Thomas Hobbes already noted, humor is by no means always
collaborative. In Leviathan, he contended that humans laugh “by the
apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof
they suddenly applaud themselves” (1840b [1650]: 46). In Human Nature,
he noted that “men laugh at mischances and indecencies,” “at the infir-
mities of others,” and “at the follies of themselves past” (1840a [1640]: 45,
46). Humor may indeed involve superiority feelings (vis-à-vis an inferior,
e.g., stupid, target), heightened self-esteem, direct or indirect hostility,
aggression, derision, disparagement, in-group (and correspondingly out-
group) feelings, stereotyping, and overt/covert cuing (e.g., blinking an eye)
as mechanisms to establish common ground between agents or to serve
as discriminatory devices to exclude agents from group activity, and so
on. Humor may help to cope with an agent’s vulnerability, yet it may also
create or stimulate the audience’s vulnerability by exposing and exploit-
ing the assumed inaptitude of people, their characteristics, their behavior.
In any event, it is wrong to define humor as either a cognitive incongruity
happening in a solipsistic mind or a feeling of superiority (i.e., any social
or antisocial effect, intention, or cause that humor may have) happening
in a social setting. Humor always involves both things—incongruity and
superiority (Vandaele 2002a).
In humor, incongruity has at least four intimate links with superiority:
(1) Perceived incongruity can be interpreted as abnormality (inferiority),
mostly attributed to a social act and/or agent. (2) Ironic incongruity is
controlled or calculated abnormality, signaling superiority, not inferiority
(e.g., because the ironist is quoting some inferior discourse). Again, the
affect is very much part of the humor. (3) Incongruity can in most cases
be resolved, thus producing a sense of superiority in the resolving subject.
Reframing is commonly taken as an important index of intelligence—and
can create a minimal in-group (of humorist and understander). Each time
we laugh at humor, we demonstrate our wit to our peers and diminish the
social pressure they may exercise on us, and we show appreciation for the
humorist’s wit. (4) Some incongruities have been socialized (conventional-
ized, socially institutionalized) as humorous. Indeed, humor can be con-
ventionally forced via cues, the right preliminary conditions or humor-
ous stereotypes that are supposedly funny per se (see Vandaele 2002a for
details and examples).
Affect cannot be omitted from the definition of humor—not even by
stipulation. For instance, instead of using the term humor broadly to refer
to both cause (stimulus) and effect (feeling), we might stipulate that humor
strictly refers to the cause and that some other term (e.g., mirth) denotes
the feeling that humor produces. Yet this stipulation does not exclude
affect from humor, which is now the sort of stimulus that has the poten-
tial to elicit a specific feeling that (unlike such feelings as anger, sadness,
and so on) does not have an encoded name: mirth, perhaps, or amusement,
or exhilaration (Ruch 1993), or the humor feeling (Vandaele 2002b), or the feel-
ing of nonseriousness (Chafe 2007). The feeling involved is a complex men-
tal and bodily event: it happens in one who experiences a physiologically
specific, spontaneous (i.e., uncontrolled), bodily change of state and who
attributes this change to an external cause considered to be funny (humor-
ous) and to induce a mental (cognitive/affective) mode different from the
serious default mode (Chafe 2007: 63, 65). After the feeling has occurred,
researchers can relate to it some technical concepts that describe its causes:
the producer’s features; the structure of the discursive stimuli; their per-
ception and processing by a receiver, who belongs to some group; and the
context(s) within which the stimuli are produced and perceived (Vandaele
2002a: 222). Thus humor’s social and emotive aspects arise again, even
regarding the stimulus, because the stimulus is always produced and pro-
cessed by someone with emotive and social characteristics, and often in a
communicative context involving further intentional agents (participants).
Indeed, the attempt to separate cause (stimulus) and effect (feeling)
should not lead us to impose a single cause-effect chain (cognitive cause,
emotional effect) on a cause-and-effect complex with closely connected
“motor, affective and cognitive components” (Fried et al. 1998; quoted
in Chafe 2007: 63). The cognitive “mode of thinking” (Chafe 2007: 64)
and the emotive “feeling of nonseriousness” are two sides of the same coin
(humor’s mode of thinking/feeling) and sometimes involve a chicken-or-
egg relationship: cognitive mind work may indeed induce the feeling, and,
inversely, a cheerful emotional state may also trigger an adequately relaxed
(e.g., disbelief-suspending) mode of cognitive processing. (A largely emotive
predisposition toward a stimulus may thus orient our cognitive/emotive
processing of the stimulus and create or enhance its comic effect.) Whether
this “mode of thinking/feeling” (or key, to use Erving Goffman’s [1974]
term) has a contextual starting point (e.g., a literary genre, a relaxed situa-
tion) or a textual one (a powerful stimulus, discourse), once the mode is
established, further communication will more easily be found humorous
(see Vandaele 2010, section 11).
Narrative, Wright’s (2005) second paradigm case of human thinking, is
also cognitive and emotive at the same time. This is confirmed by Meir
Sternberg’s (e.g., 1978, 2003a, 2009) theory of universal narrative effects—
suspense, curiosity, and surprise—in which cognition and emotion are
twinned aspects of the mind. Narrative suspense, for instance, makes
readers or spectators eager to learn more about the future of a story world.
It is a cognitive-emotive effect created by the movement (possibly chrono-
logical, fabula-like) of narrative communication (discourse, sjuzhet) toward
an opaque future in the narrated world. It involves an emotive (fearful,
hopeful, and so on) calculation of probabilities by readers or spectators
who rely on whatever prospective information is communicated to them at
any given moment. Similarly, narrative surprise is the affect-laden effect
created by the sudden disclosure of previously suppressed information
that throws new, unexpected light on the narrated world. Note once more,
as in the characterization of narrative curiosity below, the combination
of cognitive-informative and emotive-empathic ingredients. “Curiosity,”
writes Sternberg, “is produced by a lack of information that relates to the
narrative past, a time when struggles have already been resolved” (1978:
65). “On those universals of experience as mobilized by narrative suspense,
curiosity, and surprise” Sternberg (2009: 471–80) has “based the [narra-
tive] genre’s dynamics of emotion and its emotion/cognition interdynam-
ics.” If Chafe (2007: 1) argues that feeling (“the feeling of nonseriousness”)
may be the most basic fact underlying humor and laughter, then Sternberg
(2003a: 383) notes that emotion is inevitable in matters of life and narrative
experience: “while affectless cognition is humanly impossible . . . cogni-
tionless affectivity is a fact, and always a factor, of experience.” “Discount-
ing [emotive] predisposition at large,” in narrative mind work
cognition [may] indeed . . . come first, to provide matter and impetus for
emotion. [H]owever, once emotion has been aroused, it would in turn oper-
ate on all subsequent cognition: the two-way traffic, or feedback, . . . would
reestablish itself. . . . Such running bilateral influence between faculties of the
human mind is necessarily the rule, however numberless its options in prac-
tice. The . . . concept-hence-affect order of mental workings holds at most . . .
for the first occurrence, or better, the first registering, of the first world-item
encountered. (Ibid.)
The proviso concerning predisposition parallels the idea that the humor
complex can be triggered by a preexisting mood or key or feeling or atti-
tude as well as by the stimulus. And generally, the narrative “two-way traf-
fic” between reason and affect parallels the fact that in humor the cognitive
“mode of thinking” and the “feeling of nonseriousness” are in a chicken-
and-egg relationship.
So humor and narrative are paradigm cases of the human mind’s affec-
tive and cognitive nature. They are cognitive and emotional processes
requiring audiences or readers to switch between “intentional perspec-
tives”: between the intentions, goals, beliefs, motivations, emotions, and
so on, of different agents—all possibly wrong or right, painful or joyful,
and so on. Humor and narrative show us that knowledge is revisable and
that this epistemic revisability is also a vulnerability that we feel. But these
important ideas do not yet explain the difference between humor and nar-
rative, nor the composite concept of narrative humor—that was the focus of
part I.
I first described in theoretical terms the intuitively obvious difference
between the two. Whereas narrative minimally contains two layers of
intentionality (i.e., the storyteller’s presentation of characters in action),
humor does not by definition include those two layers (although it can).
Whereas humor always requires subjects to perceive incongruity and
induces superiority feelings in them, narrative can but need not create
these mental states. An intentionalist description of narrative humor—
the composite concept—then emerged: humor is narrative when it cre-
ates and/or exploits incongruity and superiority relations between par-
ticipants (agents)1 or intentional perspectives as they appear in minimally
two-layered action/discourse texts. Thus, audiences may construct authors
who present incongruous (or comically inferior) narrators; or narrators
may present incongruous characters; or characters may present themselves
or other characters as incongruous (the author and narrator permitting);
or audiences may find that they have been fooled by the narrator and/or
author. In different types of narrative humor, audiences may find narra-
tive participants in different humorous roles, in different incongruity and
superiority relations with other participants.
1. I should repeat part I’s cautionary remark on terminology. For philosophers like Wright,
agent nonproblematically refers to any person responsible for an intentional (i.e., action-
oriented) perspective in or on a world. Narrative’s agents are, in this sense, the reader/spec-
tator, author, narrator, and characters. Narrative theory, however, traditionally restricts the
term agent to the character(s) in action and action to what the characters perform. Narratolo-
gists will therefore prefer a term such as participant to agent or intentional perspective in the gen-
eral sense (including author, narrator, reader, and spectator).
I have attempted to describe some types of narrative humor, that is,

to show how narrative enables or causes participants to be humorous—
and I have observed both compatibility and competition between narra-
tive (which induces attitudes and requires minimal empathy) and humor
(which also induces attitudes, yet often has a distancing effect). In “meta-
narrative humor,” I suggested, the reader interprets deficient narration as
an author’s or narrator’s comic strategy that mixes or competes with nar-
ration proper. When narration is not deficient, its narrative effects may
still mix or compete with humor. This happens with the narrative effect of
suspense (as described by Sternberg [1978]). “Comic suspense” is the audi-
ence’s state of mind in which suspense (i.e., uncertainty about the story-
world development) mixes or competes with normative superiority and
distance vis-à-vis an incongruously developing world. In comic suspense,
I suggested, we learn from an authoritative (congruous, superior) narrator
about incongruous (inferior) acts and thoughts in the story world. Narra-
tive surprise, a second narrative master effect defined and demonstrated
by Sternberg (1978), also mixes with humor. A “comic narrative surprise”
is an unexpected disclosure about the action linked to the defining traits
of humor, namely, incongruity and superiority. The audience attributes
comic narrative surprises to the incongruous narrator and/or to the action
logic. Comic narrative surprise is a complex and variegated phenomenon.
It may produce an audience’s amused and scornful surprise at a charac-
ter (a feeling of superiority); or it may make the audience itself feel fool-
ish (until it “regains” a sense of superiority).2 All forms of narrative humor
are specific instantiations of Wright’s idea that humor and narrative cru-
cially require an audience to switch—cognitively and emotively—between
intentional perspectives. My analysis specified that idea, so as to reveal
humor and narrative as different and yet combinable phenomena.
Some analysts (e.g., Palmer 1987; Zupančič 2008, discussed below) also
consider “comic character” and “comic action logic” to be sources of narra-
tive humor, as if the comic world ( fabula) were independent of its presenta-
tion by discourse (sjuzhet). Although this “autonomizing” view of character
and action is wrong, given the narrative frame, it is true that narrators (nar-
2. The audience’s “curiosity” about the story world’s past, Sternberg’s (1978) third narrative
core effect, was much less salient in my discussion—although it exists in comic narrative too.
I only mentioned the example of Alphonse Allais’s Han Rybeck; ou, Le coup de l’étrier (1989),
discussed by Attardo (2001), which makes readers amusedly curious about the “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 100 seals they could”
(quoted in Attardo 2001: 160). I will also refer to the comic narrative curiosity produced by
Ermida’s main example, Woody Allen’s “The Lunatic’s Tale” (1980c [1975]).
ration) can background themselves (itself ), so that their (its) characters are
foregrounded as sense-making intentional perspectives. I suggested that
such fore- and backgrounding (the narrator’s/narration’s degree of per-
ceptibility) may influence the type of humor perceived in narrative (e.g.,
sarcasm, narratorial irony, or dramatic irony; see Vandaele 2010: 762–73).
I will now argue that such intentionalist or perspectival analysis is more
to the point than the psychoanalytic concepts that Alenka Zupančič (2008)
brings to bear on comedy. Next, I will go into the differences between my
(intentionalist, cognitive-emotive) approach and Salvatore Attardo’s (2001)
and Isabel Ermida’s (2008) barely intentionalist and emotion-low frame-
works for the analysis of humor in narrative texts.
2. Does Psychoanalysis Rule Out Poetics?
Zupančič’s book creates certain initial expectations. Its subtitle is On Com-

edy, and according to one endorsement on its cover it is “the great theory
of comedy that we have been waiting for.” Also, some chapter titles (espe-
cially “Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical”) seem to
promise an analysis of humor in narrative—or of narrative humor—and
so apparently intersect with this essay’s main concerns. Yet the book does
not live up to those expectations. It makes, as I will illustrate, norma-
tively biased statements about “true” and “false” comedies; it also makes
unoriginal claims (e.g., concerning humor and dogma); it shows no aware-
ness of comedy’s perspectival mechanisms and their effects (especially the
above-mentioned comic versions of the three universal narrative emo-
tions); it offers incomplete views of some comic techniques (e.g., repeti-
tion and variation); and it proposes a problematic tragedy/comedy dis-
tinction. In occasional disclaimers (e.g., on p. 9), Zupančič suggests that
her concern is psychoanalysis and philosophy rather than literary analysis.
Against these disclaimers, I want to argue that she does engage in poetic
analysis, but in a way that shows little awareness of the existing scholarly
work on humor, narrative, and comedy. What I shall engage with is her
poetic claims about comedy. A summary of Zupančič’s argument will also
point at other notable weaknesses of the book—its obscure language and
its symptomatically short bibliography.
To begin with my last criticism, Zupančič ignores most existing research
on the poetics of comedy3 and as a result presents familiar ideas as novel
claims. Thus, against the “humanist-romantic presentation of comedy,”
represented by Umberto Eco’s (1983) hero William of Baskerville, she
3. Good bibliographic starting points are Attardo 1994 and, more recently, Weitz 2009.
argues that laughter does not necessarily liberate or distance humans from
ideology and dogma. A cogent point, but it has already been made in
Humor Studies (e.g., Ruch 1998: 10) and by Bakhtin scholars (e.g., Mor-
son and Emerson 1990: 445) regarding Rabelais and His World (1984 [1965]).
Even Eco (1984: 6–7) himself noted that “carnivalization,” Bakhtin’s ver-
sion of liberating laughter, “is acceptable when performed within the limits
of a laboratory situation (literature, stage, screen)”—a remark that con-
siderably diminishes its claim to liberation or subversion. Linda Hutcheon
(1989: 99) formulates this restriction in temporal terms: “Bakhtin writes:
‘While carnival lasts, there is not other life outside it.’ True, perhaps; but
that ‘while’ is significant.” Despite Zupančič’s interest in humor’s ideo-
logical effects, her study contains no references either to Bakhtin, who
originated the modern debates on laughter and dogma, or to scholars who
improved on him.
So, indeed, laughter and comedy are not universally liberating (subver-
sive, in Bakhtin’s sense). Nor is it true, according to Zupančič, that the
comic always means to soothe us: to make us accept “the fact that we are
only human, with all the flaws and weaknesses,” or “finitude,” involved
(46). Comedy is not fundamentally about finding consolation or learning
to live in resignation. More precisely, given Zupančič’s openly normative
approach, “true” comedy does not reconcile us with the limits of life. She
admits that there exist “false” comedies (31), which are about such “human
finitude,” but these seem negligible: she gives no examples of them. Never-
theless, one may infer from other parts of the book that Zupančič targets
especially romantic comedies—or all comedies with endings that restore
order, or focus on happiness, or call for the acceptance of life. Indeed, we
find in her book general but strong condemnations of “conservatism” and
the “happiness culture” of “our late capitalist society” (5–8, 31, 71, 83, 197).
This society “promotes happiness as its Master-Signifier” (8), almost as a
new form of racism—with good, happy, and successful characters at the
top, and bad, unhappy, and unsuccessful ones at the bottom. False come-
dies allegedly perpetuate or reinforce this society’s ideology, which leaves
no place for negativity (unhappiness, failure, and frustration).
In focusing on comedies of negativity Zupančič certainly defies defi-
nitions of comedy in terms of (overall or final) happiness (e.g., Wright
2005).4 Her true comedy’s unhappiness is supposedly rooted in human
desire, which makes it impossible for human beings to accept life’s fini-
tude: hence comedy’s “failed finitude,” resulting from the “radical nega-
4. We should add, however, that the unhappiness usually pertains to the characters rather
than the readers, and that perspectival devices create this dissimilarity—on which more below.
tivity” of human desire (52). Desire and its drives are radically negative in
that they “gnaw away at this finitude from within, erode it, put it into ques-
tion” (ibid.). Despite the elusive language (here as elsewhere),5 it seems
clear at least that desire bears a Lacanian sense: as the human subject’s
impossible demand for unconditional love from the Other—initially, the
mother. An eternal lack, it drives us humans from one specific object to
another, although we can never find real, final satisfaction or fulfillment.
For Zupančič, then, the difference between “false” (conservative) and
“true” (subversive) comedy is that the latter manages to enact this frustrat-
ing condition humaine (51). The intangible desire that drives the subject turns
into a more tangible comic “thing,” a traceable split between obsessive
desire and its impossible satisfaction. Therefore “true” comic characters,
such as those in “the better Woody Allen movies” or in Molière’s The Miser,
Dom Juan, and The Misanthrope (67), often obsessively engage in irrational
activities: they are all comically relentless incarnations of human desire.6
Good comedy “objectifies” desire through characters that represent the
failed finitude of humans, with their constant state of unhappiness (71).
In Molière’s Tartuffe, for instance, the pater familias Orgon is so obsessed
by a pious-looking stranger (actually an impostor, Tartuffe) that he wants
to marry his daughter to him and leave him his fortune. According to
Zupančič, the humor of act I, scene V (partly quoted below) springs “from
Orgon’s absolute lack of interest in . . . his wife’s health, contrasted with
his infatuation with Tartuffe” (70). This contrast is verbally objectified by
Orgon’s repeated comments (“Poor man!”) and questions (“And how about
Tartuffe?”) in his dialogue with Maid Dorine:
orgon
Has everything gone well these last two days?
What’s happening? And how is everybody?
5. Quite apart from its Lacanian jargon, the book is replete with obscure claims and opaque
terms, whose explanations usually make the text less rather than more intelligible. Consider,
for instance, how the author conveys “a point that is essential for the understanding of com-
edy”: “‘man,’ a human being, interests comedy at the very point where the human coincides
with the inhuman; where the inhuman ‘falls’ into the ‘human’ (into man), where the infinite
falls into the finite, where the Essence falls into appearance and the Necessary into the con-
tingent” (50). Nor, I suspect, will the context in Zupančič make readers much wiser.
6. Though Zupančič discusses only “good” or “true” comedy, her references go beyond
highbrow culture. She certainly likes Molière (67, 73, 81, 93, 125), Shakespeare (89, 97, 169,
175), and Marivaux (103), but she also refers to the Marx brothers (79, 121), Some Like It Hot
(1959, directed by Billy Wilder) (48), films by Ernst Lubitsch and Charlie Chaplin (37), and
Borat (2006, directed by Larry Charles) (32), and at times even to graffiti (59) and to jokes
taken from the Internet (see below). In any case, “a good comedy is—and has always been—
a fairly rare thing” (8).
dorine
Madam had fever, and a splitting headache
Day before yesterday, all day and evening.
orgon
And how about Tartuffe?
dorine
Tartuffe? He’s well;
He’s mighty well; stout, fat, fair, rosy-lipped.
orgon
Poor man!
dorine
At evening she had nausea
And couldn’t touch a single thing for supper,
Her headache still was so severe.
orgon
And how
About Tartuffe?
dorine
He supped alone, before her,
And unctuously ate up two partridges,
As well as half a leg o’ mutton, deviled.
orgon
Poor man!
(Quoted in Zupančič 2008: 69)
Such examples clarify certain theoretical points but also undermine

Zupančič’s disclaimers about poetics: she is doing poetic analysis—and
this is what my discussion will now focus on. Indeed, to say that verbal
repetition objectifies comic obsession is to engage in poetic analysis, to
invoke a mechanism of literary interpretation. Yet the analysis misses a
number of more crucial poetic points, as a comparison with Wayne Booth’s
(1983 [1961]) reading will suggest. In Tartuffe, he argues, we find the “tra-
ditional comic action,” one “viewed by spectators who know better than the
character” (ibid.: 230; my emphasis). For instance, we experience “dra-
matic irony . . . when we see Tartuffe making love to Orgon’s wife, know-
ing, as Tartuffe does not, that Orgon is under the table: that is, we laugh at
him, and we look forward to his comic unmasking” (ibid.).
Within my emotive-intentionalist approach to narrative humor, which
focuses on incongruity and superiority relations developing between nar-
rative participants, Booth’s explanation of Molière’s comedy makes better

sense than Zupančič’s. Unlike her, Booth explains why Molière’s audiences
can poke fun at the misfortunes of some characters. Indeed, the narra-
tion of these “tragedies” is comically moving because we stand above the
characters in Tartuffe and hope that the less sympathetic and more cun-
ning one will eventually be unmasked by the more “obsessed” and inno-
cent one: amused scorn and hopeful comic suspense are the cognitive-
affective ingredients of our mental state. It is true that Orgon behaves in
an obsessive way, but it is not only his obsession—or his repetitions—that
makes him foolish. The comedy also stems from the spectators enjoying
a superior perspective on the narrated situation. They know more about
what happens than all the characters do. On the one hand, audiences do
see the stupidity of Orgon’s intentional life—his actions, thoughts, plans,
and desires. On the other, they still want the good character (relatively, at
least) to prevail over the evil impostor. They experience a form of comic
suspense, in which normative distance and superiority vis-à-vis the story
world mixes with narrative interest and hopeful empathy with Orgon—or
at least against Tartuffe.
Nonperspectival analysis (like that of Tartuffe) and unoriginality (as in the
laughter-and-dogma analysis) are recurring problems of Zupančič’s study.
Unoriginally, she writes that in comedy “master-signifiers” are “repeated”
as well as “subjected to other comic techniques” (177), such as “comic accel-
eration or exaggeration” (58). Sure—repetition, acceleration, and exag-
geration are all well-known mechanisms of comedy and humor. Regard-
ing exaggeration, for instance, Freud asks how it is that we laugh at it.
He answers, “By making a comparison, I believe, between the movement
I observe in the other person and the one that I should have carried out
myself in his place” (1976 [1905]: 250). Concerning acceleration, Gerald
Mast (1979: 12) says about film comedy, “There are no formulas as to what
techniques and methods will or won’t inevitably produce comic effects,
but that the union and combination of lighting, camera angle, décor, edit-
ing rhythm, music, and so on do shape the way we respond is undeniable.”
More recently, N. J. Lowe (2008: 1–2) writes: “Pacy physical action is a
trademark [of comedy].” The screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s—
a genre later revived by Billy Wilder and nowadays practiced by the Coen
brothers—are nice examples of exaggerated comic pace in the action and/
or dialogue.
An interesting question is in what terms such frantic rhythm can be
motivated by the audience. It can, for instance, be seen as a generic cue
to diminish realism and heighten the willing suspension of disbelief; or it
can promote realistic characterization, as when “physically active, vital . . .
screwball heroines” seem to express “a more equal relationship with men

than found in earlier generations of film comedy” and thus allude to “femi-
nist calls for equality” (King 2002: 56). So acceleration or exaggeration are
indeed important devices of comedy, with a variety of emotive/ideological
motivations. But Zupančič often presents such ideas as novel—an obvious
consequence of her short reference list.
Another technique, which Zupančič calls humor’s “sudden intrusion of
the other side” (56), has also been named and explained before. Thus, in
incongruity views of humor, something contextually unexpected—a “sud-
den intrusion”?—is the root cause of humor. Or, if “sudden intrusion” is
a very new concept, why does she not distinguish it from existing humor
concepts in other contemporary theories? But Zupančič does not clearly
define her own terms. The Lacanian term master-signifier, for instance, is
used ambiguously throughout the book. Sometimes it seems to refer to the
expressions (key words and phrases such as the repeated “How about Tar-
tuffe?”) that are most crucial for the creation of humor in a particular text;
at other times, it refers to words encoding society’s main values and taboos
(such as “happiness” in late capitalist society).
One comic technique on which Zupančič may claim some novelty is
repetition, though it has been observed, of course, that repetition is omni-
present in comedy. One of Zupančič’s sources, Henri Bergson (1999 [1900]:
55), views repetition as a standard device of classical comedy. Attardo
(2001: 85) also finds repetition “very significant in longer texts” and “a well-
known feature of comedy,” or even (according to Maurice Charney [1978:
82], whom he quotes) “the single most important mechanism in comedy.”
Ermida (2008: 172) sees the “recurrence” of “scripts” as a major principle
of humorous narratives. And Eco (2002: 233) explains why variation-in-
repetition is important to the comic effect of Raymond Queneau’s Exercices
de Style (1947):
if the collection were comprised of ten rather than ninety-nine exercises it
would be less entertaining (and, apart from a problem of tolerability, it would
be even more entertaining if it were comprised of ninety-nine thousand exer-
cises). The comic effect is global and born of the rhetorical device of accumulatio:
all the exercises contribute to its effective deployment and are, simultaneously,
overshadowed by it. (2002: 233)
Yet Zupančič highlights repetition and variation for special reasons.

Repetition, first. Repetition interests her as a (salutary rather than neu-
rotic) manifestation of human drives. By contrast, Henri Bergson’s (1999
[1900]: 29) formula of comic repetition—du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant,
“something mechanical incrusted upon the living,” in Zupančič’s trans-
lation (111)—says that “vital, living beings” wrongly behave in comedy

as “lifeless machines” (111–19). Wrongly, because, for Bergson, laughter
apparently signals how human beings ought not to behave: the laughter of
others serves as a social corrective device, operating against our machine-
like conduct (see, for instance, the beginning of chapter 3 in Bergson 1999
[1900]). For Zupančič, by contrast, repetition can be something good and
truthful: the sign of a persistent, “stubborn,” and odd (desiring) aspect of
ourselves (154) that deserves our attention, the “odd one in” (as the title
of the book goes) that true comedy presents as an object. In a Lacanian
ethics of desire, repetition becomes a replaying of the split (Spaltung) in our-
selves, a replaying of our fundamental alienation from the mother (168);
in Zupančič’s own words, our “genesis” as “a subject” “always and neces-
sarily involves a leap, and repetition at its fundamental is repetitious jump-
ing, going back and forth between the edges of this leap” (169). And while
adults usually like variation, “comedy is precisely a return to this kind of
repetition” (173). Though Zupančič cites no comic examples here, I assume
that Molière’s and Woody Allen’s comic protagonists are repetitive in this
sense: they keep reenacting the Spaltung in themselves, the struggle between
an inside that desires (“the odd one in”) and an outside that prohibits.
Certain comedies—“true” comedies, Zupančič calls them—doubtless
represent such a struggle. However, since tragedies or serious narratives
can also represent this type of struggle (as Zupančič seems to admit with
reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet [169–70]), one must wonder how a
comedy makes it funny. Repetition per se is not the answer, we will see,
because repetition is usually a local device that receives its meaning from
the larger frame. Instead, as suggested in part I of my essay, such feats
are accomplished through narrative perspective and fictional/generic dis-
tance. Comedy is a narrative mediation of a fictional story world and, as
forms of motivated intentionality, both this world and its mediation exhibit
implicit and/or explicit normative (emotive, affective) features that cre-
ate and exploit incongruity and superiority relations. Regarding (comic)
fiction, what (comic) characters are to an audience is not what suffering
clinical subjects are to a concerned family member, for instance, or to a
therapist. In each situation, different relations exist—are discursively con-
structed and/or conventionally agreed upon—between different partici-
pants with different knowledge, emotions, motivations, roles, and degrees
of vulnerability. Zupančič, for her part, seems to observe no such essen-
tial difference between comic and clinical desire-related repetition—another
example of her nonperspectival approach.
Rather than emphasizing that perspectival devices (the author’s fiction
and the narrator’s discourse) play a constitutive role in comic narrative
humor, Zupančič conflates (telic, narrated, invented) story and (possibly

atelic, non-narrated, noninvented) real life. Her comparison of humor and
revolutions exemplifies this mixture. She argues that good comic repeti-
tions are “stubborn” like history’s proletarian revolutions (152–53), whereas
bad comic repetitions are “farcical” or “empty” like bourgeois revolutions
(149, 152–53). What are we to make of this reversed Marxist7 metaphor
(without examples), which likens and reduces poetic decisions to historical
events? Psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and continental philosophy often
unearth interesting meanings beyond the more evident, ordinary ones,
but this metaphor is not a case in point. It does not go beyond the more
straightforward perspectives on meaning mechanisms (e.g., intentional
perspectives); rather, it erases them. An intentionalist approach to repeti-
tion in comedy would pursue different issues. It would note that readers/
audiences are very good at ascribing thoughts to different agents and that
they will thus try to motivate repetitions by attaching to them some sort
of intentionality (e.g., a neurotic or ironic character, narrator, or implied
author).8 Repetition has a role to play in comic narrative, but that role is
complex because it depends on narrative perspectives.
So far for repetition per se. But Zupančič is interested in variety-in-
repetition too—again, for a special reason. For her, this is an important
manifestation of subjectivity: a first step toward becoming an individual
person. To learn to see small differences in repetition is an important part
of a child’s mental life, because differentiation reveals to the young sub-
ject the disturbingly radical diversity of the Real (173). This explains, for
instance, why a child wants the same bedtime stories to be read time and
again: the child knows that each performance involves slight variations,
which are small surprises (181). While older children and adults usually
7. “Reversed,” because Marx (1914 [1852]: 7) compared historical events to poetic genres:
“Hegel bemerkte irgendwo, daß alle großen weltgeschichtlichen Tatsachen und Personen
sich sozusagen zweimal ereignen. Er hat vergessen, hinzuzufügen: das eine Mal als Tra-
gödie, das andere Mal als Farce” (“Hegel noted somewhere that all great world-historic
facts and persons appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy,
the second time as farce”; my translation, adapted from www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm).
8. Zupančič also erases the telic/atelic distinction in another comparison—between jokes
and love encounters. She states that jokes, like genuine love encounters, satisfy “something
in ourselves that we didn’t even demand to be satisfied” (134–35). Yet she ignores the fact that
jokes (unlike love encounters) have a teller who is in command of the situation, a dependent
audience, and a clear purpose: the teller uses discourse elements to raise expectations in the
audience about a comic punch line. The participant structure of genuine love encounters is
entirely different, since there is more communicational symmetry between the participants:
both suffer from an initial lack of knowledge; they learn from each other in a reciprocal
relationship; they do not need a mediator; they have to establish and negotiate their goals
progressively; and so on. Omnis comparatio claudicat, but some limp more than others.
learn to focus on what is more radically new (variant rather than repeated),
comedy is the “return” to the “demand for textual repetition” (173): it
“repeats and satisfies this demand—in the ‘laboratory conditions’ of its
genre but not outside any relation to the Real” (181). This return, Zupan-
čič claims, has to happen in the comic mode because it concerns the “very
kernel of our being,” namely, our individuality, “the subject in her very
constitution” (182).
So now we see that her analysis does refer to fictional perspective—to the
distance from reality that comedy establishes—but that it commits a new
error against common poetic practice. Zupančič suggests that discursive
forms of comedy (i.e., small textual variations) have a certain meaning (i.e.,
they inherently bring back childhood encounters with exciting diversity)
rather than being interpretable as such. She does not consider the possi-
bility that the same form (repetition with or without small variations) may
have well-documented different comic, as well as extracomic, expressions
or interpretations (irony, parody, satire, and so on);9 nor does she consider
that a formal device other than repetition (some more radical textual defa-
miliarization) may express the same function (i.e., give a sense of exciting
diversity). The literary theorist Stanley Fish (1980: 75) has warned against
“the establishing of an inventory in which formal items will be linked in
a fixed relationship to semantic and psychological values,” because many
forms can contextually acquire many meanings. “The Proteus Principle” is
what Sternberg (1982: 112) calls the principle of “many-to-many correspon-
dences between linguistic form and representational function,” a contextu-
alist principle he has also brought to bear on repetition-with-variation in
(biblical) narrative (Sternberg 1985: 365–440).
If we agree that readers or listeners (as persons and subjects) are cru-
cial contextual factors that confer meaning on form, it becomes conceiv-
able that bedtime story variations that excite the very young bore the
adult subject to death. Conversely, if small variations of comedy do not
bore adults, this may be for reasons irrelevant to children noticing small
variations in bedtime stories. Any relevant comparison should be drawn
not between formal features per se but between form/interpreter inter-
actions—and these are more difficult to establish. Adult implied readers
are supposed to know, for instance, that different voices within narrative
texts (characters, narrators, authors) can “repeat” (quote, recontextualize)
words in slightly different ways for many different purposes (on euphe-
mistic grounds, for reasons of politeness, as a form of critique or aggres-
9. Nor is it true that “tragedy cannot stand textual, mechanical repetition” (174). Repetition,
even of a mechanical sort, can be made to serve any intentional perspective, from the tragi-
cally obsessed mind to the comically possessed body.
sion, and so on). They are assumed to know that even verbatim repetitions
can receive mildly or sharply different readings because they are uttered
in a different discourse segment. As irony and parody illustrate, different
agents with different norms—or the same agent in a different context—
can give different meanings to the “same” repeated form. Regarding nar-
rative humor for grown-ups, therefore, is not this recontextualizing power
of quotation a most important parameter of research on repetition and
variation-in-repetition?10 Does it not make sense to interpret repetition in
terms of comedy’s intentional perspectives (participants, actions, sayings),
their relations and (inter)actions?
Zupančič’s general lack of interest in perspective vitiates not only her
comments on repetition but also her tragedy/comedy distinction, which
is no less problematic. She comments on F. W. Murnau’s tragic film The
Last Man, about an elderly hotel porter who has to become a cleaner and
is therefore no longer allowed to wear his nice uniform. The porter there-
fore “goes through some complicated arrangement in order to be able to
keep wearing the uniform on his way to and from work” (195). It is an
“extremely sad and moving film,” but according to Zupančič, “this same
theme could . . . have been shot as a comedy” (194–95). And the differ-
ence between a tragic and a comic version, she says, “would surely not be
in the hero’s less serious attachment to his uniform” (195). Whereas I have
been arguing that such a difference would lie in the audience’s less serious
attachment to the character (and his attachments), that is, in a lowering of
empathy accomplished through the perspectival mechanisms of narrative
fiction, Zupančič sees other grounds on which to distinguish between com-
edy and tragedy:
Both the “tragic” and the “comic” rendering of the story would revolve around
some trait that is insignificant in itself [the uniform, in our example], yet becomes
a pivotal point of someone’s existence or destiny. A tragic story will usually
show us how this [shift from insignificance to importance] happened . . . and,
above all, narrate the individual destiny that follows. . . . In the comic render-
10. Zupančič’s discussion of (comic) repetition could also profit from a distinction I made
between “controlled” (i.e., calculated) and “uncontrolled” incongruity. Irony accordingly
differs from clownish comedy “in the speaker’s obvious control over transgression,” meaning
“perceptible [visibly purposeful] intentionality and critical distance” from the perpetrated
incongruities—even when the speaker targets himself or herself, as in self-irony (Vandaele
2002a: 241). In his “bushisms,” for instance, George W. Bush was manifestly not in control
of his incongruities, unlike a self-disparaging, self-ironic Bush (see Vandaele 2010: 735–36).
Uncontrolled incongruity can be partly motivated by viewing the agent’s behavior as repeat-
edly stupid, or machinelike, or desire-driven, or just as a generic trait of farcically unrealistic
comedy. Controlled incongruity can be motivated by reference to the agent’s distance, criti-
cism, or playful repetition (as in irony, parody, and satire).
ing of such a theme, on the other hand, the emphasis is not on how this general
functioning of the Symbolic [e.g., the quintessential uniform] can affect the
particular human being, but on the fact that it does so, and that it does so all the
time. (Ibid.; original emphasis)
This suggests, first of all, that themes or traits (losing a job, or a uni-
form) do not distinguish comedy from tragedy. Instead, second, the nar-
rated extent of temporal and causal progression produces this distinction.
Unlike comedies, tragedies narrate the story world before the shift (i.e.,
how a trait shifted from insignificant to pivotal) and after the shift (i.e.,
the destiny that follows from the shift); unlike tragedies, comedies will stay
focused on the shift, on the fact that an apparently insignificant trait is piv-
otal “all the time.”
I can accept the first point: a comedy and a tragedy can have the same
theme (although Zupančič mentions the film’s summary rather than its
theme). I disagree, however, with the second idea. Temporal and causal
evolution do not distinguish tragedy from comedy. Billy Wilder’s Some Like
It Hot (to quote an example Zupančič discusses elsewhere) is certainly a
comedy—even a farce—yet for the characters it is also very much about
the individual destiny that follows from their (causally explained, i.e., life-
saving) cross-dressing: while escaping from the Mafia, one cross-dressed
hero falls prey to—and next falls in love with—a retired millionaire who
does not care that his beloved turns out to be a man (“Nobody’s perfect!”).
Especially in comedies, moreover, it often takes more than a hundred
words to write a synopsis—a possible outline of the succession of causes
and consequences—because the summary reflects and the sjuzhet embodies
whole series of comic surprises and reversals. In fact, since incongruity is
a law of humor, I would suggest that comedies and farces get away more
easily with plots running wild than tragedy does: a genre tolerating and
stimulating farfetchedness, farce enjoys more poetic license than tragedy,
which depends more on credibility.
In comic narrative, “comic” means that readers are just as relaxed about
these reversals as they are about everything else in comedy; that they are
maneuvered into a position superior to the characters; that they are invited
to enjoy inferior and incongruous characters, acts, or intentions, and hence
their own superiority; that they may even be invited—pace Aristotle (Poet-
ics 49a)—to derive pleasure from characters who are in pain (as when Billy
Wilder’s protagonists in Some Like It Hot truly fear for their lives and truly
have to suppress their sexual feelings), since humor and reduced empa-
thy often go hand in hand. What distinguishes comedy—and especially
farce—from tragedy is certainly the lower level of empathy with charac-
ters in trouble, which turns the humorous feeling into a peculiar emotion:
mildly or radically nonempathic with the incongruous object, the experi-

encing subject now concentrates on his or her own feeling and, in commu-
nicative situations, on his or her bond with the humorist.
Zupančič’s neglect of perspective also affects her analysis of comic char-
acter. On the one hand, she observes that “although comedy, in its bur-
lesque version, can be ‘put together’ by the simple means of a serial accu-
mulation [of gags]” (65), its instances of humor are usually interrelated.
Character, she says, is one “comic device” that links together different
jokes and thus “stretch[es] the momentariness of the [comic] short circuit”
(65–66).11 I interpret this to mean that different instances of humor in one
work are unified through the conscious and—given the author’s psycho-
analytic thrust—unconscious life of comic characters. On the other hand,
Zupančič fails to distinguish between a character’s perspective in a world
and the audience’s perspective on that world. Comedy, she claims,
moves broadly into the register of success, not in the register of failure and of the
hero’s not being up to his task. The task might indeed be much too big for the
hero, and the action full of various misunderstandings, intentions that misfire,
and so on, yet comedy is still essentially governed by what, in and through all
these misadventures, inevitably succeeds. (159)
Her analysis does not explain, however, why we seem to derive pleasure
from comedy’s “failed finitude,” which, after all, is a negative condition in
her view: true comedy not only reminds us that we are finite but also tells
us that we want to be infinite.
To repeat, the feelings—negative or positive—elicited by “failure” or
“success” depend very much on the perspective from which one views fail-
ure or success. Feelings such as Schadenfreude or vergüenza ajena (Spanish for
“secondhand embarrassment”) illustrate this very nicely. In a poetics of
comic narrative, questions to be asked include these: Whose incongruity
is the audience or reader dealing with? Is it the incongruity of a mean
character (e.g., a mafioso in Some Like It Hot), or of a morally ambivalent
antihero (e.g., Bud Baxter in Wilder’s 1960 comedy The Apartment)? How
does this incongruity matter to us? Indeed, a failure for a character can be
either a pleasure (Schadenfreude) or an embarrassment (vergüenza ajena) for
an audience. In Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), nothing much suc-
11. “Short circuit” is an allusion to the MIT Press book series to which Zupančič 2008
belongs. In the book’s foreword, the series editor, Slavoj Žižek (2008: ix), suggests that “the
shock of short-circuiting,” which is a “faulty connection . . . from the standpoint of the
network’s smooth functioning,” is “one of the best metaphors for critical reading.” Thus,
Zupančič’s book is meant to be a new critical reading of comedy. In the current quote from
Zupančič, “short circuit” probably refers to the fact that (true, good) comedy and its charac-
ters are also faulty, hence endowed with critical value.
ceeds for many characters in the story, but most of the action is pure joy
from the vantage point of the audience. It is insufficient to say, as Zupan-
čič does, that “comic satisfaction” and “pleasure” thrive on a “host of mis-
encounters, misunderstandings, miscalculations, mistakes, misstatements,
misrepresentations, misplacements, mismovements, misjudgments, mis-
interpretations, misdoings, misconducts, and misfirings” (130). One should
also ask: From what perspective do thoughts become “misinterpretations”
and actions “misdoings”? From what point of view is someone’s inten-
tionality (comically) wrong? How does the fictional narrative perspective
mediate our feelings toward those story-world intentionalities?
Let me give one more example of this problem with Zupančič. She dis-
cusses a joke that circulates on the Internet:
george
Condi! Nice to see you. What’s happening?
condi
Sir, I have the report here about the new leader of China.
george
Great. Lay it on me.
condi
Hu is the new leader of China.
george
That’s what I want to know.
condi
That’s what I’m telling you.
george
That’s what I’m asking you. Who is the new leader of China?
condi
Yes.
george
I mean the fellow’s name.
condi
Hu.
george
The guy in China.
condi
Hu.
george
The new leader of China.
condi
Hu.
george
The Chinaman!
(Zupančič 2008: 137–38)
And so on.
Zupančič writes: “A Master-Signifier that pops up in comic sequences
is immediately transformed into a comic object that both protagonists
[George and Condi] try to appropriate for themselves” (147). Here, the
“Master-Signifier” produced by the initial joke is “who that replaces Hu”
(146). By contrast, what counts in my view is that the protagonists are
completely unaware of this being the “Master-Signifier.” It is the author-
narrator or the reader who laughs, from a different context, at the incon-
gruous behavior of the characters George and Condi. As on many other
occasions, Zupančič’s analysis, with its psychoanalytic talk of characters
appropriating master-signifiers, is overingenious and basically wrong—
since we should first ask whose incongruity is perceived by whom (char-
acter, filmic narrator, audience) and with what effect (e.g., identification,
distance, superiority). In the above dialogue, George and Condi are not in
control of their incongruities. The audience or readers, on the contrary,
have full epistemic insight into the situation: they know that Hu is not who.
Like a masking (and unmasking), the “Hu/who” confusion (and resolution)
is a device which allows the author and narrator to divide crucial informa-
tion unequally between audience and characters—thus creating congru-
ous (superior) and incongruous (inferior) intentional perspectives (knowl-
edge, intentions, actions, desires, beliefs, and so on). And this shows again,
in line with Wright (2005), that the intellectual operations underlying nar-
rative humor are also emotive: the audience’s cognitive switching between
interpretations is also an emotive (inter)action that establishes incongruity
and superiority relations.
3. Humor Studies
One can easily imagine some reactions to Zupančič from within Humor
Studies12—written with capitals because the term designates a specific,
12. The place where such reactions might eventually appear is the peer-reviewed journal
Humor (on which more below). So far, up to its August 2011 issue, Humor does not seem to
have given any attention to Zupančič’s book.
institutionalized academic paradigm (for an overview, see Attardo 1994;

Martin 2007; Raskin 2008; Ruch 1998). Many scholars from Humor
Studies, who are often sciences- rather than humanities-oriented, will find
the book’s obscurity even more unbearable than I do; and when its mean-
ing is clear, they will often find it self-evident. They will read, for instance,
that for Zupančič humor is “somehow right” (19) or “somehow works” (57)
despite its incongruity or absurdity. And they will point out that Humor
Studies knows this mechanism as Ziv’s (1984: 90) “local logic,” which says
that humor has a logic “appropriate only in certain places . . . because it
brings some kind of explanation to the incongruity.” They will add that
this mechanism is also often called the “resolution” of the incongruity.
At other times they will see obscure formulation and self-evident con-
tent combined. What Zupančič calls the “intrusion of the other side” (56),
a “fundamental comic procedure” which represents “two excluding reali-
ties” in one scene, will leave them puzzled, until they read the following
example. In a funny commercial, a secret lover hides in the bedroom closet
as the husband arrives. The lover receives a call, but his cell phone is still
in his clothes next to the bed. He steps out of the closet, apologizes for
any inconvenience, answers the call, and steps back into the closet while
continuing his phone conversation (57). Two “excluding realities,” the dis-
covery of adultery and the apology for a phone call, are represented in
one scene. Scholars from Humor Studies will then understand the phrase
intrusion of the other side and rephrase it: in this commercial, two incom-
patible “frames” or “scripts” are combined into one joke—an obvious case
of incongruity; but why the idiosyncratic phrasing? Or they might per-
haps say that this comedy is a case of someone (i.e., the lover) “ignor-
ing the obvious” (i.e., the gravity of a husband finding his adulterous wife
in flagrante) (Attardo 2001: 27). I fear, indeed, that works like Zupančič’s
are ideal excuses for Humor Studies to keep excluding cultural and liter-
ary approaches to humor from its interdisciplinary endeavor. The last two
studies I will discuss (Attardo 2001; Ermida 2008) do belong to Humor
Studies and will illustrate, among other things, to what extent and effect
this paradigm marginalizes literary approaches. We will see that literary
approaches to narrative humor are explicitly banned from Attardo but that
Ermida’s study keeps a more open mind toward narratology.
What is Humor Studies, then? What binds its researchers together,
besides the object of investigation? And is this paradigm any better than
Zupančič’s at describing the mechanisms of comic narrative?
Researchers of Humor Studies share a commitment to scientific, empiri-
cal methodology. They have produced interesting results in the medical,
sociological, and psychological subfields of humor research. Medically,
they argue, for instance, that humor sometimes has therapeutic value
(Martin 2007: 331–33 and references there); socially, that humor has many
functions in the workplace (ibid.: 361–68 and references there); psycho-
logically, that people have different styles of humor production and appre-
ciation according to their background and personality (e.g., Ruch 1998),
and so on. (See also Raskin 2008 for an overview of many theories and
hypotheses.) Such empirical research, however, is not the concern of this
article. The remainder of my discussion will focus on the more problematic
linguistic subfield of Humor Studies. After briefly introducing this subfield,
I will argue (following Wright’s [2005] lead) that it is especially inadequate
when it tackles humor in narrative texts.
The linguistic subfield has from the outset played an important role in
Humor Studies. The latter was cofounded by the semanticist Victor Ras-
kin, founding editor of the peer-reviewed Humor: International Journal of
Humor Research (1988–present) and author of the seminal Semantic Mecha-
nisms of Humor (1985), the first serious linguistic analysis of verbal humor.
Not recommendable as a first book for beginners in the field today, it was
one of the first books on humor I read as an undergraduate student. Back
then I could immediately see what was valuable in it (the large number of
examples, the overview of humor theories, the attempt to develop a clear
conceptual framework), but I also found it unsatisfactory when applied
to film comedies (the object of my master’s thesis). Semantic Mechanisms
of Humor is a book on short narrative jokes and contained “abstractions”
that hindered “a global understanding” of humor in film comedy (Van-
daele 1993: 96; my translation). Of the many ideas advanced by Raskin,
the more abstract and “hindering” ones have nevertheless had the most
influence on the linguistic branch of Humor Studies: starting from Raskin
1985, via Attardo and Raskin 1991, then via Attardo 1994, to Attardo 2001
and Ermida 2008. Thus, I cannot comment on the last two books without
first going back to Raskin’s main points.
As was common practice in structuralist and certain generativist work
in semantics, Raskin makes frequent use of dichotomies. Consider how he
analyzes the following joke (which my part I discussed in adapted form
[Vandaele 2010: 748–57]):
“Is the doctor home?” the patient asked in his bronchial whisper. “No,” the
doctor’s young and pretty wife whispered in reply. “Come right in.” (Raskin
1985: 100)
For Raskin, the humor in this text is created by an interpretive overlap

and a semantic opposition between the scripts sexual and nonsexual or,
more precisely, between the scripts medical (or doctor) and adulter-
ous (or lover), which instantiate the sexual vs. nonsexual script oppo-
sition. The joke creates this comic overlap-and-conflict by initially pre-
senting words that are interpretable as nonsexual, subsequently words
interpretable as either sexual or nonsexual, and finally words inter-
pretable as sexual only. The “interpretive overlap” occurs in the words
interpretable as either sexual or nonsexual, which are first interpreted
as nonsexual and then reinterpreted as sexual. In the verbal jokes of
Raskin’s large corpus (for instance, the doctor’s wife joke above), words
are interpreted one way and/or another (for instance, nonsexually and/
or sexually) because they evoke complex cognitive “scripts,” which Raskin
defines as “large chunk[s] of semantic information surrounding a word or
evoked by it” (1985: 81).13 According to him, serious speech usually com-
bines words so that they unambiguously point at an intended script (ibid.:
86), whereas jokes combine words to refer to two scripts that are semanti-
cally opposed and textually overlapping in part (ibid.: 99).
As a rule, then, a text is “single-joke carrying” if (or rather, iff ) “(i) the
text is compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts” and “(ii) the
two scripts . . . are opposite” (ibid.). Thus, the doctor’s wife joke
is at least partially compatible with both the scripts doctor and lover. . . .
The first sentence [of the joke] evokes and corroborates [the doctor script].
The second sentence loses some of the compatibility with [the doctor script]
and acquires the strong compatibility with [the lover script] instead. (Ibid.:
99–100)
Thus, the language of jokes partly activates one script, partly a contrary
script, partly the two scripts, and the punch line makes the reader switch
from one script to another.
Though intuitively appealing and theoretically informed, Raskin’s
analysis nonetheless has a fundamental weakness (at which Wright [2005:
170] points without going into details), one that is difficult to pinpoint
although it affects the whole framework. In brief, its weakness is a concep-
tual ambiguity: between seeing narrative jokes as a phenomenon of langue
(or “scripts” defined as “chunks of semantic information surrounding a
word or evoked by it”) and seeing narrative jokes as a discourse phenome-
non (i.e., as texts organized to activate cognitive-emotive intentionality
and intentional switches, texts that bring langue or “scripts” in touch with
participants in [inter]action). What we may call Raskin’s “core theory”—
his two “conditions” of verbal humor that became canonical in the linguis-
13. “For instance,” Ermida (2008: 84) explains, “a word like check-in will evoke the travel
script, and this, in turn, will evoke the ways to go about that situation, such as queuing at a
counter and producing tickets.”
tic branch of Humor Studies—fails to resolve this basic ambiguity. It does

not unequivocally state, as it should, the relation among discourse, dis-
course participants, langue, and mental scripts (and this has led, as we will
see, to conceptual confusion in later studies).
In my view, this relation is as follows. Narrative humor arises when a dis-
course participant (author, narrator)—using some langue—invites other dis-
course participants (audience, reader) to activate general (action-oriented)
scripts for specific narrative situations and actions (involving agents), thus
trying to cognitively and emotively commit the reader or audience to inten-
tional perspectives on/in specific narrative situations and actions, with a
view toward creating (or promoting) or changing incongruity and superi-
ority relations among the intentional participants (author, narrator, audi-
ence) (see Vandaele 2010 for details). By contrast, Raskin’s core theory—his
two necessary and sufficient conditions for a joke—marginalizes the inten-
tionalist (discursive, situation-specific, action-oriented, emotionally engag-
ing) components of narrative humor. It offers mainly a nonintentionalist
(abstract, mostly nondiscursive) analysis of linguistic material, which can
only be a medium of humor, not its cognitive-emotive mechanism. Ras-
kin focuses on semantic instruments that facilitate humor, thereby neglect-
ing the actual humor mechanisms facilitated by these instruments. Yet, we
will see, Raskin’s core theory is promoted by later theorists (Attardo 2001;
Ermida 2008) as a theory of humor, not just of humor’s language.
True, Raskin’s study is full of references to pragmatics and includes
statements such as
There are no sentences in isolation. . . . The native speaker or any user of a lan-
guage cannot possibly be interested in the meaning of a sentence in isolation.
In discourse, every sentence comes surrounded by other sentences, preceding
and/or following the sentence in question. . . . [T]he usefulness of the notion of
isolated meaning is highly dubious. (1985: 63)
For a semanticist who takes Noam Chomsky, Jerrold J. Katz, and Janet D.
Fodor as reference points, Raskin certainly showed courage in insisting
that linguistic meaning needed to become more contextualized than was
customary in generative linguistics. In a way, indeed, Raskin’s seman-
tic analysis of humor does bring discourse into the picture: he states that
his theory formulates the conditions “for a text to be funny,” he speaks of
“interpretive overlap,” and of words retrospectively assuming new meanings
(ibid.: 99; my emphases). He also says that “script oppositions” are mostly
what he calls “local antonyms,” that is, oppositions existing only in a cer-
tain stretch of discourse (ibid.: 108): this statement shows Raskin’s inter-
est in discourse but also, once more, his conflation of abstract concepts in
memory (“scripts”) and specific discursive (“local”) understandings of con-

cepts (“antonyms”) (on which I say more below).
Generally, indeed, the discourse elements he mentions are forced into
a semantic theory. Raskin the semanticist adheres to “necessary and suffi-
cient conditions” and “formalization” as scholarly standards of excellence,
and this scientific drive may have kept him from really addressing (comic
narrative) discourse on its own (intentional, actional) terms, rather than in
the non- or less-intentionalist terms of langue. Thus, Raskin declares that
a text’s funniness is entirely a function of a “competence system” in some-
one’s mind, just as grammaticality is a function of the grammatical compe-
tence of native speakers. In chapter 2, for example, he says that his “seman-
tic theory of humor” is “designed to model the native speaker’s intuition
with regard to humor, in other words his humor competence” (ibid.: 58)—
as if there were a grammar of humor in our heads, so that the funniness of
a discourse were determined by a finite set of rules similar to the set that
determines the grammatical form of a sentence. At best, we can say that
Raskin’s approach shows theoretical wavering between langue (or “compe-
tence,” since Chomsky is the main point of reference) and discourse.
The details of Raskin’s core theory (i.e., his semantic conditions for a
text to be funny) further illustrate his wavering between discursive and
langue-focused analysis, between a focus on motivational intentionality
(communication, action) and a reduction of intentionality to language fea-
tures. On the one hand, Raskin seems to suggest that discourse (“text” in
his parlance) activates experience-oriented schemas (i.e., “scripts”), hence
that each instance of verbal humor is a discursively constructed experience,
rather than an abstract opposition of semantic features: a text is “single-
joke carrying” iff the text is compatible, fully or in part, with two different
scripts and iff the two scripts are opposed (ibid.: 99). On the other hand,
in his attempt to produce a formalized theory, Raskin reduces the experi-
ential effects of humorous discourse to binary semantics (sexual vs. non-
sexual, and so on). In other words, despite talk of complex scripts and text
interpretation, his analysis actually describes humor as clashes between
(what seem to me) semantic features such as “sexual” or “nonsexual”—
clashes that are represented as semantic dichotomies (sexual vs. non-
sexual, and so on).14 Once more, Raskin analyzes parole—discourse, com-
14. Ermida (2008: 85) defends Raskin on this point, as showing what “a script analysis of
humor requires”: that “the scripts be simplified and ‘discretized’ artificially despite their
inherent continuous and multidirectional nature.” To my mind, what actually “discretizes”
scripts in comic narrative (i.e., gives them precise value, experiential quality) is discourse
specifically organized about specific action (see also the next footnote). In their generality,
scripts are not “discretized.”
munication involving motivated intentional participants—with concepts

originally designed for langue. Experiential schemas are impoverished by
reduction to the status of features; nonschematic, specific experiential
readings are left out of the core theory altogether.
In leaving out the motivational intentionality that discourse participants
project through/on langue, Raskin illustrates a type of analysis that has
been fiercely criticized by the Bakhtin circle. “In actuality,” writes V. N.
Voloshinov,
we never say or hear words [or semantic features, or featurelike scripts, for that
matter], we say and hear what is true or false, good or bad, important or unim-
portant, pleasant or unpleasant, and so on. Words are always filled with content
and meaning drawn from behavior or ideology. That is the way we understand words,
and we can only respond to words that engage us behaviorally or ideologi-
cally. (1986 [1929]: 70; original emphasis)15
Wright (2005) likewise argues that Raskin does not sufficiently investigate
how humor exploits and shapes relations between motivated and moti-
vating agents; he thus underplays the emotive-intentionalist nature of
humor. Though the script-opposition analysis of Raskin seems to share
with Wright the central notion of cognitive switching, the former’s view of
switching is more decontextualized, less motivational than Wright’s. Ras-
kin is not much concerned with context, acts of communication, motiva-
tions, emotions, humor as interaction. As we have seen, he treats scripts
(e.g., going to the doctor, meeting with a lover) more as semantic features
than as experiential, practical, action-logical routines that are related to
cognitive-emotive perspectives of agents.
Perhaps this is because Raskin limits his analysis to short narrative jokes,
a corpus that suits his nonintentionalist semantics—or that may have mis-
led him. Indeed, since the discourse time of such jokes is too short for
audiences to develop much emotional involvement with the (sketchy) story
agents (see Vandaele 2010, section 10), the narrative participants (author,
narrator, character, audience) and their potentially complex relations may
not spring to the analyst’s eye. In such jokes, for instance, the Bakhtinian
discourse values (e.g., “deception,” “happiness,” “satisfaction”) on the level
of the telling/understanding tend to overshadow the values of the action,
since the action is less an end of joke telling than a means of joke tell-
15. This is the core of Bakhtinian thinking. As Michael Holquist (1999: 88–90) points out,
the Bakhtin circle sees such responsive, “dialogic,” motivational, attitudinal thinking as the
“glue” between the mind’s “categories” and “the dense particularity of unique experience.”
Language is always inscribed in such thinking. It is always intentional (oriented toward
action in a world); its user always does something with it.
ing. Nonetheless, my part I (especially Vandaele 2010: 748–60) attempts

to show that even in such jokes the narrative participants are crucial for
understanding the incongruity and superiority relations that develop
between them.16
In a more Bakhtinian—or “Wrightian”—spirit, my overall character-
ization of narrative humor (beyond jokes) gives center stage to emotive
and motivational (in Voloshinov’s terms, “behavioral” and “ideological”)
aspects of comic discourse about action or discourse about comic action.
Intentionality (narrative participants), confidence (in the narrator), expec-
tation (regarding the action world), vulnerability (of an audience, at the
mercy of a humorist), surprise (of the audience), superiority/inferiority
(of various participants), perceived playfulness (of the interaction): such
notions helped me to discriminate between types of narrative humor—
metanarrative humor, comic suspense, comic surprise (of various sorts),
comic curiosity, comic characterization, and the relative (im)perceptibility
of the narrator and/or implied author in narrative humor. Research on
narrative humor is meant to explain, I suggest, how communication cre-
ates a composite emotion—the blend of humor and narrative. Only discur-
sive, intentionalist (action- and participant-centered) analysis can explain
how langue acquires comic and/or narrative quality: narrative humor is the
creation of a specific intentional perspective (associated with a narrative
participant) that can prove incongruous (to the surprise of a character and/
or audience) or can prove normatively and epistemically inferior (so that
the audience enjoys constant or regained superiority), and that can exploit
and/or create a comic “key” or “tone” of communication (as defined in
part I; see Vandaele 2010: 778).
Thus, a fully motivational-intentionalist explanation of the joke about
the doctor’s wife should refer to values (attitudes, emotions, responses) on
the level of both narration (i.e., communication) and action. The narra-
tor’s discourse first commits us to a world in which a man is ill and is expected
to do the things a patient does; in that specific context, the narrator lets us
discover the incongruous behavior of the doctor’s wife; and as we recontextual-
ize the narrative situation (“they are lovers”), we suddenly realize that the
narrator was fooling us for comic purposes. This is a legitimate switch in the
genre of jokes. The many italicized components of this description illus-
trate how intentional/motivational/emotive/attitudinal our understand-
ing of this joke really is: they refer to evolving relations of incongruity and
superiority. Taken together, these components show us that the joke is an
16. In longer humorous narrative, as discussed by Attardo (2001), the negative results of
neglecting discourse and the action/discourse interplay will become more blatant.
example of “aesthetic” (that is, “aesthetically motivated”) comic narrative

surprise (see Vandaele 2010: 750–60). More generally, a text’s semantic
material creates narrative humor insofar as the audience is able to project
intentional perspectives on it and relate them in terms of incongruity and
superiority.
Raskin’s dichotomies between semantic feature–like “scripts” (non-
sexual vs. sexual) turn this interpretive process into something abstract
and static. As a discourse-mediated, action-based, evolving, belief- and
emotion-inducing mental event, narrative humor does not lend itself to
static dichotomies (“This is a nonsexual vs. sexual joke,” to paraphrase
Raskin). As it turns out, in a book otherwise replete with dichotomous
analyses, one page in Raskin—a page not canonized by later Humor
Studies—does identify the real, intentionalist humor mechanisms of the
doctor’s wife joke:
The joke begins innocuously by describing a standard situation which immediately
evokes an easy and standard doctor script from the native speaker’s com-
mon sense. The script is repeatedly evoked by three words in the first sentence,
“doctor,” “patient,” and “bronchial.” The question asked by the patient is the most
natural question to ask in the situation. . . . The negative answer he receives is unfor-
tunate but also natural. The fact that the doctor’s wife turns out to be young and pretty
does not seem to be relevant to the situation and to the script it unambiguously evokes
but there is certainly no contradiction or incongruity between this fact and the
situation. Her invitation to come in, however, while the doctor is not at home
must strike the hearer as somewhat odd. (1985: 105; I have emphasized the markedly
intentionalist, cognitive/motivational/emotive parts of the analysis)
So Raskin does not entirely evade emotive/motivational discourse

analysis (as Wright [2005: 170] suggests); rather, he wavers between the
principles of parole and langue. Regarding pragmatics, Raskin does observe
that messages that include an ambiguity and require a script-switch flout
H. Paul Grice’s Cooperative Principle for bona fide communication (1985:
101, 103). In other words, the incongruous semantics of “non–bona fide com-
munication” encourages the reader to infer a different pragmatic fram-
ing to what is communicated: the communicator must be joking. This is
indeed a possible semantics/pragmatics interaction, although it minimizes
the role of pragmatics—context, agents, actions, intentionality, contracts,
conventions, norms, (assumed) thoughts and goals, motivations—in nar-
rative humor. Even in Raskin’s joke about the doctor’s wife these prag-
matic elements have to be constantly kept in mind and monitored: readers
note, for instance, that the narrator starts communicating in a confidence-
inspiring, authorial style, but they also assume the joke’s generic conven-
tion that its narrator may have less transparent goals. In longer comic nar-
rative, such factors grow in number and complexity.
More important, after recurrent wavering between parole (pragmatics)
and langue (semantics), Raskin is ultimately drawn to semantics when he
defines humor in terms of two necessary and sufficient semantic conditions
(a joke’s text “is compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts” and
“the two scripts . . . are opposite”). Given this definition, the pragmat-
ics is only derivative: it is forced upon us by the “semantics scripts,” the
supposed source of humor and the cornerstone of Raskin’s core theory.
Pragmatic phenomena such as maxims, he says, “do not really provide
an explicit account of the semantic mechanisms of humor,” which “are,
of course, based on the scripts” being combined and opposed (1985: 104).
What Raskin seems to mean is that pragmatic maxims do not belong in his
semantic “core theory,” which suffices to explain humor.
The communicative side of Raskin’s theory is not only impoverished
and marginalized but, as Wright (2005: 170–71) notes, is also wrong in
some details. Grice’s (1975, 1989) well-known “Cooperative Principle” and
the notions of bona fide and non–bona fide communication have led Raskin
to believe that jokes usually trigger non–bona fide interpretations. Consider
this example: “A: My wife used to play the violin a lot, but after we had
kids, she had not much time for this. B: Children are a comfort, aren’t
they?” (Raskin 1985: 102, quoted in Wright 2005: 170). For Wright, B’s joke
does not mean, as Raskin believes, that either A is lucky, in B’s view, to be
spared his wife’s music (= B is non–bona fide) or children are a comfort (= B is
bona fide) and that “the non-bona-fide communication becomes preferable”
because the “transition between the two sentences is too sharp” (Raskin
1985: 102). Rather, says Wright (2005: 171), the remark may have these two
interpretations plus the fact that for the very first time B jokingly commu-
nicates to A that “A’s wife’s playing is generally regarded as bad, and cer-
tainly by B.”
Although Raskin is sensitive at times to pragmatics and often to moti-
vated intentionality, two facts clearly indicate his priorities. First, the
reductionist core of the book is what Raskin maintained and helped can-
onize in Humor Studies (notably in Attardo and Raskin 1991, of which
Attardo 2001 is a further descendant; see below). Second, even in his 1985
volume the dichotomizing analysis receives much more attention than the
experiential schemas activated by discourse: large sections are devoted to
enumerating the semantic dichotomies that most frequently occur in jokes:
dumbness vs. smartness (ibid.: 211), irreverence vs. blind obedience
(ibid.: 231), goodness vs. badness (ibid.: 236), normality vs. possi-
bility (ibid.: 127), life- vs. death-r elatedness (ibid.), and so on. With
these dichotomies, Raskin suggests that there is an abstract semantic sys-

tematicity to the incongruity of jokes and narrative humor: their mecha-
nism is statically semic (dichotomous) rather than dynamically discursive
(emotive-experiential), and the varieties of this mechanism refer to a set of
dichotomies that are also “the relatively few binary categories . . . essen-
tial to human life” (ibid.: 113). This set of dichotomies betrays once more
Raskin’s wish to treat discourse as semantics, or at least his strange hover-
ing between discourse analysis and semantics. On the one hand, Raskin
(ibid.: 108) admits that any pair of scripts in our cognitive universe (e.g., a
doctor script and a lover script) can be made “locally opposite” (non-
sexual vs. sexual)—where “locally” has to mean “by discourse or in dis-
course context” (which is of course infinitely variable). On the other hand,
as we have just seen, he treats these infinitely variable discourse oppositions
as “script” oppositions (understandable as a relatively invariable, limited
set of semantic dichotomies). His notion of script thus also strangely wavers
between specific discourse-bound framing and general semantic knowl-
edge of words.
In my view, the explanation of narrative humor requires both more and
less than a limited set of dichotomies. First, we need less, because narra-
tive humor in general is a mechanism of dynamic participant interaction
explainable without reference to specific semantic content. To repeat, nar-
rative humor is the discursive creation of a specific intentional perspec-
tive (associated with a narrative participant) that can prove incongruous
(to the surprise of a character and/or audience), that can prove norma-
tively and epistemically inferior (so that the audience enjoys invariable or
regained superiority), and that can exploit and/or devise a comic “key”
or “tone” of communication. The outcome of this discourse interaction is
comic narrative surprise, suspense, or curiosity—the three main proces-
sual types of narrative humor in its distinctive narrativity. As for the means
of accomplishing such a comic narrative event, we may indeed add that
participants make use of scripts (and other abstract mental schemata such
as norms, principles, felicity conditions, categories, logic, and so on) to
construct incongruity and superiority among these narrative participants.
Second, a lot of variation in narrative humor conceptually requires more
than a set of dichotomies: variation regarding the medium of discourse, or
the specific (and infinitely variable) narrated situation, or the specific dis-
course framing of that situation (also infinitely variable), or the cognitive
tools for building a specific expectation (e.g., scripts, norms, logic, psycho-
logic, and so on). Since incongruity and superiority can manifest them-
selves in an infinite range of discursive, intentional configurations and inter-
actions, narrative humor is not reducible to any limited set of dichotomies.
In short, an explanation of narrative humor needs to identify, on the one

hand, a narrative’s specific incongruous and superior perspectives and, on
the other, the cognitive tools (e.g., scripts) through which the narrative dis-
course projects (or is thought to project) incongruity and superiority on the
perspectives.
This view—that narrative humor is dynamic (discursive, emotionally
evolving) rather than static (semic, dichotomous)—does not dismiss scripts
(and language) as instruments of narrative humor, yet it anchors scripts
and language in communication and motivation. So, in Raskin’s example,
the doctor and lover scripts certainly help the author-narrator to pro-
duce a surprise, if we understand a script in Schank and Abelson’s (1977:
17) original sense: as an intentionalist (action-oriented) memory block that
the author-narrator evokes to create expectations about story-world action.
Scripts store in memory “what behavior is appropriate for a particular situa-
tion” (ibid.: 36; my emphasis): if a discursively evoked narrative situation
activates a script, then certain scripted behavior will be expected within
the evoked situation (e.g., when people go to the doctor, they may have to
wait in the waiting room, then see the doctor, be examined, offered a treat-
ment, given a prescription). But contrast Schank and Abelson’s “appropri-
ate behavior in a situation” with Raskin’s nonintentionalist (non-action-
oriented) definition of a script: “a large chunk of semantic information
surrounding a word or evoked by it” (1985: 81).17
Given Schank and Abelson’s definition of script, it is easy to see that
activated scripts play a role in narrative humor. They contribute to read-
erly (frustrated) expectations concerning an action, and they are instru-
ments that a discourse employs to accomplish the required incongruity
and superiority of a perspective (e.g., that of frustrated reader and/or the
oddly deviant character). Discourse gives such scripts specific experiential
properties via intentionalist framing devices: the joke lies in talking specifi-
17. This is the definition that has survived in Humor Studies (e.g., Attardo 2001 and Ermida
2008, discussed below). To be fair, Raskin adds more intentionalist elements to this core
definition. He also explains script knowledge as the “knowledge of certain routines, standard
procedures, basic situations, etc., for instance, the knowledge of what people do in a certain
situation, how they do it, in what order, etc.” (1985: 81). However, Raskin mostly divorces
the script concept from the action and motivated intentionality: when he says that scripts
should ideally allow “a computer system” to “function” as “smoothly” as “a native speaker”
(ibid.: 96), he erases the human being’s (“native speaker’s”) “original intentionality” (Searle
2002 [1997]: 116), which drives human intelligence (see my part I). In human beings, infor-
mation and memory serve action—or at least the evaluation of action. Geared to Artificial
Intelligence research of the 1980s, Raskin’s script concept lacks any intentionalist orienta-
tion: “formally or technically, every script is a graph with lexical nodes and semantic links
between the nodes” (1985: 81). Next, “script” is further reduced to one semantic feature
(sexual, lover) of a dichotomy (sexual/nonsexual).
cally about a man who is a patient of some doctor with a pretty wife in that
narrative world, and so forth. Scripts are general frames (mental struc-
tures); discourse is the specific framing (mental, cognitive-emotive process-
ing). Scripts belong to our general mental repertoire and also guide us in
the activity of framing specific discourse and situations, but they are not
the whole story either. I am interested in the specific, emotionally engag-
ing framing activity in which scripts play a role—among other devices. One
other framing device in the doctor’s wife joke is the narrator’s objective,
“authorial” style, which initially inspires confidence, so that we under-
stand this joke as a story about a patient going to the doctor. Another, rival
framing device is the comic “key” or “tone” attached to the genre of joke,
so that author-style statements are always regarded with some suspicion.
These pragmatic devices, rather than being subject to semantic analysis,
guide the intentionalist interpretation of the semantic material.
In the doctor’s wife joke, then, a participant’s (i.e., author/narrator’s)
discourse certainly activates experience-based scripts regarding a narra-
tive action world, so that these scripts cobuild the audience’s expectations
and comic surprise. There is nothing wrong with such a description of
that joke. Yet the joke in question illustrates only one variety of narrative
humor, for the description contains at least three variables—the medium
of the discourse (words or images), the cognitive tools that build the expec-
tation (scripts, situations specified by discourse, framing devices), and the
specific comic narrative emotion (comic narrative surprise, suspense, or
curiosity). First, and obviously, verbal discourse is not the only way to acti-
vate experience-based scripts in a specific intentional context. Remem-
ber Zupančič’s (2008: 56) funny commercial: a secret lover hides in the
closet as the husband arrives in the bedroom. The lover is unfortunate:
he receives a call, but his cell phone is still in his clothes next to the bed.
He steps out of the closet, apologizes for any inconvenience, answers the
call, and steps back into the closet while continuing his phone conversa-
tion. This whole comic scene, including the lover in closet and urgent
phone call scripts (or whatever you may wish to call them), can entirely
unroll in visual discourse (say, a mute film). This fact alone should show to
Raskin that the explanation of (narrative) humor does not call for linguistic
terms such as dichotomous features.
Second, expectations and surprises are not produced only by abstract
experiential scripts (stored in long-term memory). Indeed, they can also
arise from specific experiential situations and participants (found in dis-
course). In Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955), for instance, the rather
neurotic protagonist has a date with his beautiful new neighbor (played by
Marilyn Monroe). The film discourse explicitly (i.e., perceptibly) restricts
focalization to the guy, showing in full detail how he is anticipating this

date in his imagination, when the doorbell suddenly rings. He expectantly
opens the door, and, with the audience, is surprised to see the janitor
instead. This twist frustrates an expectation raised by a specific discourse-
mediated imaginary situation, rather than by abstract scripts stored in
audiences’ long-term memory (see also Vandaele 2010: 755–59).18 Comic
narrative surprise can also arise from implicit (temporarily imperceptible)
narrative framing devices, rather than either mental scripts or perceptibly
restricted focalization. In David Lodge’s Therapy (1995) (also discussed in
part I: Vandaele 2010: 757, 759), chapter 3 creates a partly comic surprise
by revealing belatedly that the assumed communicators of chapter 2 were
not really the communicators. The narrative situations that we believed to
be part of the fiction’s (painful) “actual” world suddenly turn out to occur
in an invented (hence less painful) play by the fiction’s protagonist. This
new communication does not change the specific makeup of chapter 2’s
(narrative) situations or (cognitive) scripts, but modifies the ontological
(hence emotive) status of the experienced situations.
Third, and finally, narrative surprise is not the only possible and existing
form of narrative humor. A “superior” reader/audience can also experi-
ence humor without being surprised. Recall Wilder’s Kiss Me Stupid (1964)
(see Vandaele 2010: 746–47). There, we often laugh at the piano teacher
from our Olympian height, and it would be hard to describe all our mirth-
ful mental states in terms of comic surprise. If we are as ignorant as the
characters, yet normatively superior to them, we experience comic narra-
tive suspense (as when we see the teacher oddly struggle to become suc-
cessful). If, moreover, we foreknow the outcome of the action, we enjoy
an even more radical state of superiority vis-à-vis the characters—that of
comic narrative prescience (as when we know that some of the teacher’s
actions will fail). In short, Raskin’s joke about the doctor’s wife is not rep-
resentative of narrative humor in toto. As explained above and more fully
still in part I, the above examples (i.e., the closet joke, the Monroe/janitor
joke, the half-funny revelations in Lodge, the piano teacher’s life with a
prostitute and his wife’s affair with a famous singer) illustrate different sub-
types of narrative humor, constructing different cognitive-emotive rela-
tions between narrative participants. Yet they would all seem to fall under
18. As a way to rescue script theory in the face of discourse-driven humor, Attardo (2001)
and Ermida (2008) would perhaps propose that “scripts” include such discourse-mediated
situations. However, such an extension of the script concept virtually erases the distinction
between communication (discourse) and memory (mental structures). Below it will become
clear that “scripts” and “script oppositions” receive a variety of meanings in Attardo and
Ermida.
Raskin’s single category of sexual/nonsexual humor; and some he

might not even consider humorous, since they do not all involve a “script
overlap” and a surprise.
Generally, Wright’s verdict on Raskin (and Attardo) is short and not
very mild. “In purely verbal theories of humour of a type that identifies
incongruities between existing ‘scripts’ as the basic source of humour in
language,” he writes, “speakers and their motivations have disappeared,
for humour is presented as being explicable by the clash of ‘scripts’” and
“la langue . . . is presumed to be the ground of these clashes” (2005: 170).
In other words, Wright finds Raskin’s theory too semantic (langue-based)
and lacking a motivational or intentionalist component: it is insufficiently
grounded in the lives, mind-sets, and purposes of agents. Oversemantici-
zation and undercontextualization are, however, not the only or even the
main trouble with Raskin’s analysis; the root cause of these troubles is
the restriction of his corpus to short jokes. Since these texts have a funny
punch line as their discourse purpose and do not develop complex char-
acters and narrators, their layered intentional structure does not spring
to the eye. The flaws identified by Wright are more visible in the analysis
of comic narrative texts longer than the joke, such as comic novels (e.g.,
David Lodge’s) involving many intentional agents with more complex pur-
poses and mind-sets. As I argued throughout part I of my essay, how can
we even begin to make sense of congruity and incongruity, superiority and
inferiority, irony and self-irony in comic stories, especially longer ones,
if we neglect the various—and sometimes complex—intentional agents
that provoke those judgments? The problem with this neglect will become
apparent when Attardo (2001) applies his framework—an extension of
Raskin’s—to such longer comic narrative.
A better candidate than Raskin (1985) and Attardo (2001) for an intro-
ductory work, though, is Attardo’s Linguistic Theories of Humor (1994). It
offers a balanced and comprehensive overview of humor theories devel-
oped until then; one chapter (chapter 6) reveals, furthermore, the very
strong connection between Attardo and Raskin. There, and in an earlier
article (1991), Attardo and Raskin proposed to improve on Raskin’s (1985)
“Semantic Script Theory of Humor” (SSTH) by moving to what Attardo
called the GTVH, or “General Theory of Verbal Humor,” which, like the
SSTH, is based on the analysis of short jokes.
Before I start discussing the GTVH, let me reiterate that Wright (2005:
27) remains very critical about Raskin’s and Attardo’s theories in general.
He states that “those linguists who have produced verbal theories of humor
have been misled by the very limits of their discipline,” because they
“ignore the fact that humour needs a wider explanation than that involv-
ing words” (original emphasis). On the positive side, as Wright (ibid.: 171)
notes, Attardo’s 1994 book does mention the possibility of combined bona
fide and non–bona fide interpretations (ibid.: 287), and, I would add, Attardo
also makes intentionalist analyses in a number of essays: he investigates
the idea of “cooperation” (i.e., bona fide communication) to excellent effect
(Attardo 1997a), and later he characterizes irony in pragmatic terms as
communication that is at once “relevant” and “inappropriate” (Attardo
2000). Indeed, when not working on humor, Attardo adopts some of the
concepts that I would like to see included in a theory of narrative humor:
intentionality, communication, motivation, context, participants, perspec-
tive, attitude, dynamics, and so forth.
However, Attardo’s GTVH, even more than Raskin’s approach, has
moved away from such issues. Its goal is to offer a “metric” (2001: 68),
that is, a framework meant to measure to what extent instances of ver-
bal humor are (dis)similar. To this end, the GTVH allegedly identifies
humor’s six characteristic “knowledge resources” or parameters of humor
(27), which accord little importance to intentionality, communication,
motivation, emotion, and perspective. Their labels for the six are “script
oppositions,” “logical mechanisms,” the “situation,” the “target” of the
joke, the “narrative strategy,” and the “language” of the humor (all to be
explained). The values for these parameters vary for each specific instance
of humor (e.g., a script opposition can have the specific value “sexual/
nonsexual”); yet whatever the specific value, the “parameters” together
are said to characterize the whole of verbal humor, so they constitute the
core of the GTVH. Hence, according to the GTVH, verbal humor gener-
ally contains script oppositions, logical mechanisms, and so forth, although
they may vary among different types of verbal humor. Therefore, the met-
ric has typological force: since a parameter (e.g., script oppositions) has
variable values (e.g., sexual/nonsexual or real/unreal), each specific
instance of verbal humor has its own configuration of values—and some
instances of humor share more values than others; they are typologically
more similar. Moreover, some parameters (e.g., script oppositions) have
more typologizing value than others (e.g., logical mechanism). Though all
or most parameters are said to usually be present in verbal humor, they are
also hierarchically ranked for typological purposes.
Raskin’s “script oppositions” (e.g., doctor vs. lover or dumb vs.
smart) are imported into the GTVH as the most characteristic parameter
of humor (Attardo 2001: 27; see also Attardo and Raskin 1991). Since a spe-
cific variation on a joke’s lower parameters, such as “target” (e.g., a dumb
Pole or Belgian), does not change the semantic type of humorous opposition
(i.e., dumb vs. smart), script oppositions are associated with fundamental
aspects of verbal humor: ceteris paribus, a different target does not make a
very different joke, but a different script opposition does. Although Ras-
kin (1985: 132) originally claimed that his script theory is “completely neu-
tral with regard to the major theories [of humor],” Attardo later seems to
admit that Raskin basically offers a “linguistic treatment of incongruity”
(1997b: 398). So do the “script oppositions” in the GTVH.
The second most important parameter of humor is the “logical mecha-
nism” that resolves that incongruity (Attardo 1997b: 409, 2001: 27–28).
The logical mechanism tells us what kind of reasoning the verbal humor
demands from its interpreter: a “figure-ground reversal,” “garden-path rea-
soning,” “exaggeration,” “reasoning from false premises,” and so on (see,
e.g., Attardo 2002: 180). A dumb Pole may, for example, show exaggeratedly
dumb behavior that can be understood through a figure-ground reversal:
“How many Poles does it take to screw in a light bulb? Five. One to hold
the bulb in the socket and stand on a table and the other four to rotate the
table” (ibid.: 181). As noted, the GTVH hierarchizes its parameters. Thus,
according to the GTVH, informants find more similarity between two
jokes that share a script opposition and a logical mechanism (e.g., dumb/
smart and “exaggeration” above) than between jokes sharing only a script
opposition. In turn, jokes that share only a script opposition (e.g., dumb/
smart) will be found more similar than jokes which share only a logical
mechanism (e.g., figure-ground reversal). Hence, according to the GTVH,
the former creates stronger subtypes of humor than the latter.
The less important parameters are, in descending order, the “situation,”
the “target” (the butt), the “narrative strategy,” and the “language” of
humor. By “situation” Attardo means “the props” of the joke: “the objects,
participants, instruments, activities, and so on” that are “mentioned in
the text” (2001: 24). Some jokes present more elaborate situations, with
more (or more types of ) props than others. For example, “the doctor’s wife
joke [creates] a fairly elaborated set-up” and contrasts with another joke
that exhibits a less elaborate situation: “Can you write shorthand? Yes,
but it takes me longer” (ibid.). Attardo adds that almost no research has
been devoted to this parameter. The neglect is hardly surprising, I would
say, because the GTVH attaches more importance to the upper—and less
intentionalist, or agent-oriented—parameters.
Next, the “target” parameter specifies “the names of groups or indi-
viduals with (humorous) stereotypes attached to each. Jokes that are not
aggressive (i.e., do not ridicule someone or something) have an empty
value for this parameter. Alternatively, one can think of this as an optional
parameter” (23–24). Being an incongruity theory of humor, the GTVH
thus downplays the importance of targets in humor (as stressed by superi-
ority theories; see Vandaele 2002a, 2010: 734). It also reduces targets to
stereotyped targets, though in fact someone may be a target without being
a stereotype: such a target may say or do something stupid once, and suffer
ridicule.
Attardo’s fifth parameter, “narrative strategy,” is totally puzzling. It is
defined as a text’s “form of narrative organization” (so far, so good) and
exemplified by mutually exclusive subcategories such as “simple narrative”
(left unexplained), “dialogue,” “riddle,” a “conversational aside,” and so on
(23). These subcategories raise several questions that remain unanswered.
When is a narrative simple or complex? And why does such a distinction,
whatever its criteria, have only low relevance? (Part I [Vandaele 2010] ana-
lyzes how comic narrative can become complex—i.e., enact many inter-
actions between participants—and argues for the relevance of such an
analysis in research on narrative humor.) Furthermore, can a dialogue
not be a simple narrative, according to the GTVH? (Recall the dialogue
between Condi and George shown above. If it is not a simple narrative,
why not—and does its simplicity or complexity play a role in our inter-
pretations?) When is a “conversational aside” a form of narrative orga-
nization (and why is it, allegedly, never a “simple narrative”)? Whatever
the answers, “narrative strategy” is among the least important parame-
ters in the GTVH, which means that it is deemed to have a low influence
on the type of humor encountered by a reader or audience. If it were a
properly defined category, it could challenge my argument in part I that
various types of humor (comic suspense, comic surprise, comic characters,
comic action logic, metanarrative humor) are specifically narrative; that
their degree of complexity depends on interacting intentional perspectives;
and that such types of narrative humor (and their varying degree of com-
plexity) play a central role in the interpretation of comic narrative.
Language, finally, is the GTVH’s least important parameter, because
most instances of humor can be differently phrased without affecting the
type of humor: the same joke can be told in many ways. Again, the low
importance of language for humor is debatable. Although not unsympa-
thetic to the GTVH, the cognitive linguists Eleni Antonopoulou and Kiki
Nikiforidou (2009; see also Antonopoulou 2002) argue, for instance, that
language is not a “low parameter” of verbally communicated humor but a
pervasive source of humor in verbal comic narrative.
More generally, “parameters” in a “metric” suggest objectivity. Even
more than Raskin, however, the GTVH is biased—against intentionality
and its discourse construction. The Theory suggests, for instance, that clas-
sifications of humor should take, as the most relevant parameter, not the
supposedly lower-level “target” but the higher-level “script opposition.”
Yet much humor has in common the disparagement (by various means) of
specific people, groups, and institutions, rather than any shared technique
or topic. The Theory, moreover, finds story-world participants a relatively
unimportant “prop,” and even less central as potential “targets” of humor.
Yet humor is obviously a normative event among participants, who signal
and/or notice the incongruity or inferiority of other participants’ behav-
ior, thinking, character, and so on. The Theory, by contrast, has largely
divorced incongruity from intentionality, normativity, and superiority.
With intentionality (e.g., agents, contexts, actions) relegated to the lower
parameters, the Theory yet somehow accommodates the normative char-
acter of humor elsewhere in the metric. Like Raskin, indeed, Attardo
claims that our value-laden interpretations such as “normal,” “actual,”
“good,” “bad,” “dumb,” “smart,” and so on, are in fact semantic scripts. Yet
how can semantic scripts be truly value-laden by themselves, when unat-
tached to intentional agents and contexts? Who else but agents in (discur-
sively constructed or otherwise existing) contexts creates normative per-
spectives? It is true that certain behavior may be found more universally
“bad” or “stupid” than other behavior, but usually context plays an enor-
mous role in ethical evaluations. And besides broadly institutionalized cli-
chés, which indeed play a role in humor, scripts (e.g., the “travel” or “res-
taurant” script) do not simply have fixed normative qualities. Humor’s
incongruity, dumbness, wrongness, or abnormality depends on intentional
perspectives that are (as I argued in part I) (con)textually constructed
among readers, authors, narrators, and characters. In comic narrative, for
instance, readers may have (or not have) the right information to see the
incongruity (“abnormality,” “badness,” and so on) of certain intentional
behavior. When some narrative participant “is” dumb, it means that he
is found to be dumb by someone. And we should ask: By whom? Which
acts—including acts of narration—establish this dumb/smart relation?
How have the dumb and the smart participants been characterized so far?
These narrative questions are not Attardo’s (2001) concern, however.
As the volume’s very first sentence indicates, the interest resides in the
GTVH’s concepts and the challenge that length might pose to them: “This
book presents a methodology to extend the analyses of the General Theory
of Verbal Humor to all texts, regardless of length” (vii). Next, Attardo does
specify his text corpus in terms of genre: “I set out to investigate humorous
narratives (and by that I mean other than jokes, taking length as a defining
feature of this genre)” (viii); yet he makes it clear that we should not expect
narrative concepts to be central in his book: “I intend to analyze not nar-
ratives per se but only narratives as they are humorous” (ibid.). And here is
why he explicitly refuses aid from literary studies for his enterprise:
Narratologists openly acknowledge (e.g., Bal 1977: 9) that large parts of their
analyses are performed intuitively. I reject this approach. In the present method
of analysis no part of the text is left unanalyzed or given less attention because it
is intuitively less significant. . . . [M]ethodologically it seems to me very impor-
tant that we approach the text with a blank slate and build the analysis from
the morphemic level up. Using computer jargon we could say that I propose a
bottom up approach, while traditionally narratology has been top down. (33)
Genre theory is a subfield of literary history which classifies (historical mani-
festations of certain) text types. Their interest is, at best, tangential to humor
research. (23)
So, whatever the 2001 book (and its 2008 summary) adds to the original
GTVH arises from within the GTVH itself—not from narrative or poetic
theory. Attardo does not critically examine the existing General Theory in
the light of new (longer) comic narratives and theories of narrative; rather,
he mainly applies the earlier metric for short jokes (see Attardo and Raskin
1991; Attardo 1994) to longer comic narrative.
Specifically, Attardo analyzes instances of humor “along the text vec-
tor, i.e. its linear presentation” (30), and thereby discovers a small num-
ber of new phenomena, such as “jab lines” and “strands.” “Jab lines” are
much like the punch lines of short jokes but are located in a textually non-
final position: they are instances of humor that occur before the end of
the (longer) narrative. Three or more “related punchlines” or “jab lines”
are called “strands,” where “related” means that these humorous “lines”
have corresponding values in the metric, especially concerning its higher
parameters (they have the same script oppositions, for instance). A strand
is a series of at least three lines that have corresponding script opposi-
tions, logical mechanisms, and so on. Attardo’s approach goes as follows:
he reads the comic narrative text, he attends to his laughter and smiles
(which indicate punch and jab lines), relates the lines to the parameters,
and then counts and charts the comparable instances of humor (which also
leads him to discover humor “strands”).
Occasionally Attardo does mention elements of narrative theory, but in
reference to the story level ( fabula) only. He mentions, for instance, that
the “tripartite” structure of “set-up,” “disruption,” and “restoration” has
been called both a narrative and a comic sequence, but that this tripartite
organization is in fact narrative, not comic (vii; 88). Attardo did not learn
from narratology, however, that narrative is best defined as a discourse
representation of a story world (see, e.g., Chatman 1978), not as a tripartite
story/world structure, nor that there exist far more story-world structures
than the tripartite one. Complex narrative worlds, like real worlds, can
evolve in infinitely many ways, and the discourse can additionally dechro-
nologize or distort the evolution of the open-ended world.
Regarding comic narrative, too, Attardo states that “a typical Wode-
house novel may be given a totally unfunny summary. That corresponds
to the amount of serious narrative development in a text” (89). He thus
implies that such a summary retains the serious structure of narrative and
loses whatever caused the original text’s humor. Yet narrative theory (e.g.,
Sternberg 2003b: 597–600, 2009 and references there) shows that sum-
maries do not usually preserve the specific effects of the summarized origi-
nal whether they are seriously narrative or comic. Even when summaries
preserve the overall story world in brief, their discourse structure does not
create similarly refined, forceful attitudes and attitude shifts in audiences:
shifts in perspective, knowledge, emotion, empathy, sympathy. Each new
discourse representation of a story world creates new reader responses.
Summarizing narratives are a type of discourse that tends to create few
emotionally engaged (e.g., serious or comic) responses—or not unless we
are already very familiar with the story world’s inhabitants (e.g., friends,
family members, acquaintances).
We do find in Attardo some relevant—though at times also obvious
or questionable—ideas and questions about longer comic narrative. For
instance, is a longer text with a punch line at the end an “extended joke”
(89–90)? (When it is, says Attardo, we understand the text before the
punch line as an “introduction” that is “stretched out” [90]. But accord-
ing to what criteria does a text before a punch line become its “stretched-
out introduction” rather than a main text in itself, followed by a joke?)
Again, Attardo claims that the beginning and the end of a narrative are
special positions for a joke (91). (They are indeed, since beginnings and
endings are special narrative positions generally; and we also need to spec-
ify whether we mean the discourse’s end and/or the story’s—see Vandaele
2010: 773–75.) Moreover, according to Attardo, a mere sequence of jokes
is not necessarily narrative as a whole (91). (Indeed, it is not [see Vandaele
2010: 732–36].) The picaresque contains humor “here and there” (90), as
do serious texts, like Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1983: 98). (True. Hence
it is worth researching what interactions between narrative and humor
exist besides the blends [Vandaele 2010: 741–62] and tensions [ibid.: 735,
738–39, 743, 757] I have described in part I.)
Furthermore, Attardo finds Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Pro-
fessor Fether” (1984 [1854]) to be “structurally similar to a joke,” “because
of the systematic withholding of information” (93). (This suppression is
indeed the crucial mechanism whereby the discourse prepares for comic
and/or narrative surprise [see Vandaele 2010: 748–60 and references

there]. In Attardo 2001, the mechanism receives a casual remark.) Narra-
tive humor can be metanarrative, as in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
(94). (Yes, but as we will see below, Attardo’s use of the term metanarrative
is problematic.) A fabula can be funny, Attardo suggests, when “the central
narrative complication the fabula revolves around is itself humorous” (97).
In Oscar Wilde’s “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” (1995 [1891]), for instance,
the soon-to-be-married protagonist, Lord Arthur, decides to commit a
murder because a fortune-teller has predicted that he will and because the
Lord feels he cannot possibly marry his fiancée before he has carried out
this duty. This central plot element, Attardo explains, is a comic “reason-
ing from false premises,” including “duty/murder” and “good/bad” script
oppositions (177). (Attardo’s idea of a funny prediscourse fabula is inter-
esting and resembles Palmer’s [1987] concept of comic scenes with high
action-logical value [see Vandaele 2010: 762–63]. On the other hand, lifted
from its original discourse, as done in Attardo’s analysis [and my current
discussion], Lord Arthur’s idea already loses much of its comic force.) We
also read in Attardo that humor can disrupt the realism of a narrative (98).
(This is indeed an important kind of tension between narrative and humor,
illustrated in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, where the narrator thus
comically disrupts the mimetic narrative suspense he has been building
up; Sternberg [1978: 160] discussed in Vandaele [2010: 738].) Furthermore,
argues Attardo, think of Fawlty Towers and you will realize that coinci-
dences are central in comic narrative (99). (Exactly. Since incongruity is
a law of comic discourse, the number of coincidences may be high there,
and they are meaningfully ascribed to the (implied) author [cf. Vandaele
2010: 740, 745–46, 768].) Also, devices of ambiguity—called “disjunctors”
by Attardo, “ambiguous evidence” by Wright, and “Master-Signifiers” by
Zupančič—are important for comic switches of interpretation; and, when
verbal, such devices can range from one word, through a sentence, to the
whole text (103–4). (True, of course, because ambiguities generate feel-
ings of superiority in those who resolve them. Nonetheless, much verbal
and other narrative does not depend on ambiguity to produce incongruity
and superiority [see Vandaele 2002a].) Furthermore, though language is
the least significant parameter in his metric, Attardo acknowledges that
effects of sociolinguistic register are important in certain comic narrative
(105). As an example, he quotes from a short story by Woody Allen (1980b
[1975]: 6): “[H]e was halfway through a new study of semantics, proving
(as he so violently insisted) that sentence structure is innate but that whin-
ing is acquired.” Following Alexander (1984: 60), Attardo notes the clash
in register between whining and the rest of the sentence. (Register is indeed
potentially important in comic narrative—and in humor outside narrative

as well.) Attardo also points out that irony often contributes to the per-
ceived humorousness of a text (122). (Hutcheon [1994: 26] observed that
“not all ironies are amusing . . .—though some are.” As I indicate in my
2002a essay and in part I [Vandaele 2010: 735n12], the humor/irony dis-
tinction is not easy to draw.)
The problem of this book is not the lack of observations and questions,
but, as I have been arguing, a framework or metric which does not prop-
erly integrate—and even refuses to theorize—narrative’s intentional per-
spectives. I will now show that this framework results in a text exegesis
which does not get the intentional terms of analysis right and therefore
makes basic interpretive errors. These errors, in turn, largely invalidate the
answers that the book provides to its general questions. Let me illustrate
from the book’s inadequate definition of narrative and from a typical erro-
neous analysis.
Attardo’s idiosyncratic definition of narrative states as a general rule that
“[t]he narrator is a character in the story, which may or may not ‘explicitly’
say anything. Its [the narrator’s] presence is axiomatically necessary for
a text to be narrative (it has to be narrated )” (80). But according to narra-
tive theory, only some narrators (“homodiegetic” ones, as Gérard Genette
[1980 [1972]: 245] would say) are also characters. In other words, homo-
diegetic narrators are a subgroup of narrators, and the opposed (“hetero-
diegetic”) subgroup of narrators do tell a story without participating in it
as a story-world agent.
Perhaps because Attardo is uninformed about narratological debates on
narration (“voice”) and focalization (“perception”) (see, e.g., Hühn et al.
2009), his definition is imprecise—and confused—about the relationship
between narrators and characters and the nature of their activities. As
explained in my part I, a narrator is a source of intentionality who pro-
gressively communicates an evolving action. Verbal narration communi-
cates in a narrower, medium-dependent sense (i.e., in the sense of “utter-
ing words”), and this includes a still narrower form of “saying” that is
verbalizing narration, which verbally conveys nonverbal realities. So narra-
tion is communication to us readers or audiences (the wide “saying”); verbal
narration is communication in language (the narrower “saying”); and ver-
balizing narration communicates action world’s mute reality in language
(the narrowest “saying”). These are the ways in which narrators can be
said to say something. For characters, things are different. They do not
“say” anything in the widest sense to us readers or audiences (except qua
narrators), not even when they do “say” in the narrower sense of uttering
words. First, when they address words to other characters—whether or
not about an action—these words reach us through the narrator’s quota-

tion—whose “saying” then is a (re)uttering for narrative communication.
Second, when characters remain “mute” ( just perceive, think nonverbally,
act), their behavior, appearances and thoughts are likewise mediated by
the narrator, who can verbalize them in and for narrative communication.
Nor is the implied author mentioned in Attardo’s definition of narra-
tive. Of course, strictly speaking, he can leave the implied author out of
this concept, since it crucially applies to narrative fiction, not to narrative at
large. More idiosyncratically, however, Attardo posits an “implied narra-
tor,” which he opposes to the “actual narrator.” Yet, except for saying that
“neither is the actual author” (80), Attardo does not define these narrators.
Indeed, not narratological, this framework, and highly confusing.
Attardo’s (2001) constant disregard for narrative intentionality—as
explained by narratology—has damaging effects on his analytic practice.
Consider the following (typical) example, from the beginning of Oscar
Wilde’s “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime”:
It was Lady Windermere’s last reception before Easter, and Bentinck House
was even more crowded than usual. Six Cabinet Ministers had come on from
the Speaker’s Levee in their stars and ribands, all the pretty women wore their
smartest dresses, and at the end of the picture-gallery stood the Princess Sophia
of Carlsruhe, a heavy Tartar-looking lady, with tiny black eyes and wonderful
emeralds, talking bad French at the top of her voice, and laughing immoder-
ately at everything that was said to her. It was certainly a wonderful medley
of people. Gorgeous peeresses chatted affably to violent Radicals, popular
preachers brushed coat-tails with eminent sceptics, a perfect bevy of bishops
kept following a stout prima-donna from room to room, on the staircase stood
several Royal Academicians, disguised as artists, and it was said that at one
time the supper-room was absolutely crammed with geniuses. In fact, it was
one of Lady Windermere’s best nights, and the Princess stayed till nearly half-past
eleven. (Wilde 1995 [1891]: 190; quoted in Attardo 2001: 163–64, my emphasis).
Attardo’s discussion is puzzling. About the italicized sentence, for instance,

he says that its “language” is “irrelevant,” that “the narrative strategy” (of
this sentence?) is “metanarrative commentary” (?), that the “target” of its
humor is “the implied author” (?), that there are “no logical mechanisms”
involved in the humor, and that the “script oppositions” in this “jab line”
are “best/worst, serious/ironical, normal/abnormal.” These binary met-
ric values are explained as follows: “we have here an example of metanar-
rative irony in which the implied narrator [sic] . . . is saying something that
the reader can tell is inappropriate. Therefore we have to either assume
lack of control of the author, or postulate an intermediate implied author
being made fun of by the author” (164).
This analysis is so wrong, or incomprehensible, that the only words that

make sense in it are the oppositions “best/worst” and the rest—if we (unlike
Attardo) associate them with the right intentional participants. In the
latter terms, the implied author, some version of Oscar Wilde, establishes
an ironic narrator, and neither of them is a “target” of the other. At this
point in the narration, there is such consonance between them that readers
may even come to see them as one joint gestalt. Some of this authorial nar-
rator’s supposedly positive comments (“all the pretty women,” “smartest
dresses,” “a wonderful medley of people,” “gorgeous peeresses,” “eminent
sceptics,” “a perfect bevy of bishops,” “geniuses,” “best nights”) are readily
construed as ironic echoes of what characters in the scene (especially Lady
Windermere) must have thought (about) themselves. Lady Windermere
may indeed have thought that it was one of her “best nights,” and in that
case the sentence appears in free indirect discourse, a richly intentional
device that effectively exposes the GTVH’s main weakness: neglect of
intentionality.19 Even Attardo’s concept of “script oppositions,” encom-
passing “normal” and “abnormal,” for instance, neglects the real source of
the opposition (the interactions among the narrative participants involved)
and the form of communication that enables the reader to project these
sources on the text (free indirect discourse). In this respect, the language
is important (“best nights” may evoke Lady Windermere’s own language),
and readers will find this sentence to be part of a “narrative” rather than
a “metanarrative” strategy. We may begin to sense, for instance, that mis-
fortunes lie ahead for the Lady or her guests. Or perhaps not—but at the
very least a setting for an evolving world is presented from the viewpoint
of a character and a narrator. This would be my analysis at this early stage
in the narration. Perhaps the author/narrator/characters relationships
change later on. Or the narrator may come to be seen as nonironically
echoing Lord Arthur’s incongruous views (e.g., that one has to carry out
predictions)—in which case the implied author ironizes both the narrator
and the protagonist. If this is what Attardo means, however, he does not
clearly express it. And it is not obviously true at the beginning of the telling
(i.e., in the excerpt quoted above).
19. Asimakoulas and Vandaele (2002) already pointed out the GTVH’s neglect of free
indirect discourse (FID), but Attardo (2008: 113) judges our critique to be “strangely mis-
guided,” because “at best, humorous FID would simply add another category to the list
above.” I am uncertain what list he means, and I believe that our critique was indeed mis-
guided—not because it urged the GTVH to take phenomena such as FID seriously, but
because it believed (with the GTVH) that narrative perspectives could be thought of as
scripts. Extending the meaning of scripts may be a way to rescue script theory, but it comes
at the cost of erasing fundamental distinctions, such as that between the narrator’s discourse
and the reader’s mental structures (see also the previous footnote).
Dimitris Asimakoulas and I (2002) previously wrote that Attardo’s

Humorous Texts was a good book. We liked its many ideas and questions and
the fact that Humor Studies moved there from jokes to longer comic texts.
Perhaps it is not even a bad book by its own criteria, that is, as an applica-
tion of the GTVH. As part of my ongoing contacts with narrative theory,
however, I have come to realize that Attardo’s theory is largely inappropri-
ate for the analysis of humor in narrative. Ironically, it illustrates the kind
of interdisciplinary approach explicitly condemned by Raskin (1985: 53): in
“ill-advised applications” of a theory, “the interest is usually in extending
the use of one’s favorite method to some new material without much con-
cern for the real need of the field to which this new material belongs.” Par-
ticipants, motivations, intentionality, values, inferiority, superiority, and so
on play a fundamental role in narrative humor and hardly any role in the
GTVH. In “canned” (i.e., prefabricated) jokes, intentional agents and con-
texts may spring to the eye less often than semantic or cognitive clashes,
yet they remain incongruity’s and superiority’s basic condition of possi-
bility. There is no incongruity and superiority (humorous or otherwise)
without an intentionality that establishes and contextualizes the “nor-
mal,” “congruous,” “correct,” and so on. Raskin’s and Attardo’s most fre-
quent script oppositions (dumb/smart, normal/abnormal, good/bad, and
so on) are not features of words but of action logic, being-in-the-world,
intentionality, discourse, and normative behavior generally. From my (and
Wright’s) perspective, the understanders of humor are empathic, evaluat-
ing persons—not metric users—and this means that the reading of humor
in narrative is slanted by motivation, emotion, intentionality, identities,
people, characters, narrators, authors, implied authors, imagined readers,
friends, foes, victims, butts of the joke, viewpoints, speech genres, unequal
distribution of knowledge, different goals, conflicts, and so on.
Many of these concepts (e.g., identity, author, narrator, character, view-
point) are holistic framing devices that probably go against Attardo’s
empiricist (“bottom-up”) tendencies. Yet are his categories (“script oppo-
sition,” “logical mechanism,” “situation,” and so on) more bottom-up than
intentionalist and narratological concepts? The application of all cate-
gories, narratology’s and Attardo’s included, is always a “top-down” prac-
tice, in the sense that it sees what is specific to the text in more general
terms. If anything, narratology derives its general categories from all kinds
of narrative texts, whereas Attardo’s GTVH concepts—already developed
before the 2001 volume, from Attardo and Raskin (1991) onward—are
derived from one object ( jokes) and then merely applied in 2001 to another
one (longer comic texts). Thus, it is to be expected that longer texts would
reveal the problems with the categories of his metric. For example, a “tar-
get” (i.e., butt, victim) is not a “low-level” parameter of humor but often an
important and possibly complex factor in comic narrative: if the character-
ization is complex, so is the targeting (see Vandaele 2010: 760–62). Longer
texts also show that “repetitions” are interesting insofar as readers attempt
to motivate them by reference to some kind of intentionality. In the Gen-
eral Theory of Verbal Humor, by contrast, they remain pseudo-objective
data (e.g., “strands”) in a positivistic framework that is unrelated to what
readers think and evaluate. Important questions about readerly activity
are not central in the GTVH: What role do victim and ironist/humorist
occupy in the action logic? Are they a protagonist, an antagonist, a minor
character, and so on? What part does characterization play in the humor
creation at any particular stage of reading? What effect does the humor
have on characterization? How painful is the humor? For whom? And, in
our own intentionalist framework, which does not find “genre theory” “tan-
gential at best” to the study of comic narrative (23), we do ask whether the
genre’s tone—satirical or farcical—reduces the level of painfulness for the
reader/audience (see Vandaele 2010: 777–80).
Again, I do not mean that scripts—usefully defined—are without use
for the analysis of humor in narrative. Rather, the point is that scripts are
a means for creating intentional perspectives, and incongruity and superi-
ority relations between them. As internalized patterns of frequent or well-
known sequences of events/acts, scripts are cognitive tools that may help
to generate intentional readings of both serious and humorous texts, if a
discourse force activates them: the doctor script helps the narrator to tell
about a situation and its characters (a patient and a visit to his doctor) and
helps audiences to construct characters (a patient and a doctor’s wife); the
sex script helps audiences to reconstruct the characters’ behavior and the
whole situation. There is no opposition, however, between these scripts
as such. Instead, there is a reader’s expectation, derived from the action-
logical perspectives (which the doctor script helped to build), followed
by a reaction of surprise or bafflement (temporary readerly inferiority)
and reframing (regained readerly superiority). Although scripts may help
to build specific perspectives, a perspective in discourse is not a general
script, but a specific framing activity. And this discourse-driven cognitive
and emotive activity, rather than an abstract script opposition, is humor’s
mechanism.
Isabel Ermida, an exponent of Humor Studies, will also propose scripts
and script oppositions as a basic theoretical category for the explanation
of humor. There, however, the meaning of scripts will include various new
things.
4. A Better Script?
Ermida’s The Language of Comic Narratives (2008) starts with a balanced sum-
mary of existing general and linguistic approaches to humor (1–110), Ras-
kin’s and Attardo’s theories included. As the author explains, “the incon-
gruity theory [of humor] naturally becomes predominant in a script-based
approach like [hers]” (14), thus correcting Raskin’s (1985: 132) claim that his
script analysis was “completely neutral with regard to the major theories
[of humor].” However, Ermida also discusses views of humor as “dispar-
agement” (15), “superiority” (18), and “release,” that is, “escape” from “the
inhibitions that society imposes” (22). As a result, her preliminary review
carefully includes the most famous theorists of humor and comedy (Cicero,
Hobbes, Kant, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Freud, and so on). “The theory of
hostility / disparagement / superiority,” she argues, “is particularly useful
for a sociolinguistic approach” to humor—which does not describe hers—
and she acknowledges a point that fits superiority (rather than incongruity)
theories of humor: that “instances of hostile comedy are also present in
literary comedy” (21). Under “release” theories of humor, Ermida brings
together ideas mainly from Bergson and Freud, who see humor in relation
to society’s inhibitions. Given these social restrictions, humor and laugh-
ter allow “energy or tension” to be released (24). She paraphrases Bergson
as saying that “by laughing . . . we manage to disconnect ourselves from
reality and to break loose from its logic” (22): Bergson indeed expresses
this idea, and it seems to contradict his better-known view of laughter as a
corrective device (see my discussion of Zupančič 2008). “Release theory,”
writes Ermida, “is interesting insofar as it explains the motivation process
underlying wordplay, as well as phenomena like the infraction of Grice’s
Cooperative Principle” (24), because puns and floutings subvert “linguistic
rules” and “the communicational contract” and hence set people free (25).
Yet at the end of her review, she stresses once more that “the present book
does not deny the centrality of the concept of incongruity” in a cognitive,
script-based sense (30)—a centrality that superiority theories would deny
(see Vandaele 2002a).
Moreover, Ermida, like Raskin, puts a largely theoretical stress on prag-
matics—that is, she discusses pragmatics and insists on its importance, but
her analysis does not really incorporate it. Together with incongruity, she
claims, “the communicative dimension of humor” is “crucial” for her work
(34). In chapter 1 she notes, for instance, that “the psycho-cognitive frame
that predisposes—or indisposes—the subject before the humorous stimu-
lus . . . includes pragmatic elements such as one’s familiarity with humor
as a special mode of communication” (37). In other words, the frame that
predetermines one’s response to a potentially humorous message is at least

partly pragmatic, depending, for example, on one’s previous exposure
to and acceptance of specific discourse modes. In this light, it is some-
what strange that the next chapter, on “linguistic resources of humor”—
phonetic puns, rhyme, alliteration, graphological games, morphological
play, syntactic ambiguity, lexical puns, nonsense, possible-world contra-
dictions, and so forth—presents these verbal resources out of context, that
is, out of their narrative frame. The reader of a book subtitled Humor Con-
struction in Short Stories would expect it to analyze the interplay between the
narrative frame and the linguistic play. Observations such as “the sentence
is a humor-friendly dimension” (60) may be true, but the more relevant
questions are these: What kind of “dimension” does narrative add to the
humor-friendly sentence? Does the narrative presentation of a character’s
sentence (or utterance) affect the reader’s appreciation of the character’s
(linguistic or other) humor? And conversely, does the (linguistic or other)
humor contribute to the characterization of a character or a narrator? For
instance, does wit gain sympathy for a character or narrator? In Jonathan
Coe’s The Rotters’ Club (2001), to give one example, the wit of schoolboy
Doug Anderton impresses his schoolmates and amuses the reader, whereas
the pedantically literate teacher Miles Plumb is ridiculed by the author
and narrator yet adored by his platonic mistress (the mother of another
schoolboy). We will see that narrative considerations gain importance only
later in Ermida (2008).
In chapter 3, Ermida reiterates—with Raskin—that genre and the
pragmatics of communication are fundamental to her research. Against
Wright’s (2005) view and my own, she states that Raskin “duly integrates
the pragmatic dimension of humor production and reception as well as the
context in processing the joke text” (84; my emphasis). But then, Ermida
has a different view of pragmatics than Wright and I do. What I would
see as partly pragmatic, that is, contextually established, aspects of a text
(the perception of text’s “genre,” its “illocutionary” force [83–84]) is, for
Ermida, entirely a product of semantics:
[Raskin’s] Semantic Script Theory of Humor . . . aims at establishing the joke
as a specific type of text—in other words, as a genre. . . . [W]hat matters [for
Raskin] is [a joke’s] humorous illocutionary potential. In this light, Raskin sets
out to determine the “necessary and sufficient conditions” . . . for the semantic
structure of a text to be considered humorous. (84; original emphasis)
Yet it is unclear to me how an approach that determines these “necessary

and sufficient conditions” for humor can “integrate” pragmatics into the
analysis—unless integration equals subordination to semantics. In line with
Raskin, who attempted to treat discourse (pragmatics) as langue (semantics),

Ermida seems to assume that semantic oppositions always determine the
pragmatic (re)framing of a “joke text”—from bona fide to non–bona fide. Yet
the power relation between pragmatic framing and semantic reasoning is
often the exact opposite. As Charles R. Gruner (1997: 15) notes, “[A] joke-
ster . . . would ordinarily ‘set the stage’ for play with an introduction of some-
thing like, ‘I just heard a good one . . .’ or ‘Did you hear the one about . . .’ or
even, ‘I read a good joke in Playboy the other day. It seems that . . .’”
Nonetheless, the book promises to be more than an uncritical applica-
tion of Raskin’s and Attardo’s theories.20 Ermida announces that Rachel
Giora’s (1991) cognitive view of jokes will also be crucial to her analysis.
(Note, by the way, that Ermida’s book becomes increasingly top-heavy. We
have arrived at page 100 now. Her applied analysis will only start on page
174.) Giora argues that jokes based on a latent semantic ambiguity have
specific characteristics or conditions of well-formedness. For example:
“Did you take a bath?” a man asked his friend who had just returned from a
resort place.
“No,” his friend replied, “only towels.” (Quoted in Ermida 2008: 98)
Since a message’s informativeness corresponds to the number of conceiv-

able options it eliminates and to the unexpectedness of the answer it does
give, the answer “only towels” has a very high informativeness or sur-
prise value. It is surprising because it eliminates a “yes” or “no” answer
and replaces it with an unpredicted answer. Any answer staying with the
“discourse topic” of bathing in a resort (e.g., “yes” or “no”) would have
been more or less informative in a usual way. By contrast, “only towels” is
“markedly informative” (97), as Giora puts it, because the answer “taking
towels” is a marginal member of the prototype that we expect to contain
the answer. This activated prototype could be described as “the range of
activities that one can do in a resort place” (ibid.: 98) or, in my view, the
range of activities that one is expected to acknowledge openly (e.g., taking or
not taking a bath) or, if we strictly adhere to the activated discourse topic,
“Yes, I took a bath” or “No, I didn’t. [I took a shower].” “Only towels” is
perhaps not very relevant, says Giora (1991: 470, quoted in Ermida 2008:
97), but it is “not irrelevant, that is, not entirely distant [from] or unre-
lated” to the discourse topic. “Only a bus,” on the contrary, would “not be
a joke, since ‘taking buses’ is not eligible for inclusion in the resort place
category—actually, it is unrelated, hence irrelevant” (98).
20. Chapter 3 closes with a friendly summary of the latter’s GTVH, which we need not
repeat here.
This idea of minimal yet manifest relevance corresponds to what Ziv

(1984) calls the “local logic” of humor, and to what Booth (1974) sees as
the interpretability of stable irony (discussed in my part I). People know
when they understand a joke or stable irony—when they are able to fill the
gap, in Giora’s words. Conversely, “explaining a joke kills it by filling the
gap”—explaining the odd relevance—in too explicit a way (Giora 1991:
483). To Giora, furthermore, “emotional detachment” and “ease of pro-
cessing” are equally important requirements for jokes (Ermida 2008: 99).
This theory about jokes with a latent semantic ambiguity makes sense,
although one might point out some further elements of analysis. The
answer “Only towels” is not so “minimally” relevant, because it connects
well with humor’s superiority side: it brings into the open and presents
as normal and unproblematic what people may consider a private taboo
truth—that stealing towels from a holiday resort is standard practice or
at least a tempting idea. Relevance theorist Francisco Yus Ramos (2004:
338) calls this mechanism “the joy of manifestness”—the communicators’
joy of making mutually manifest what are believed to be private “cultural
stereotypes,” and it is this mechanism that “Only a bus” does not acti-
vate. Nonetheless, “Only a bus” may have some comic effect, since it plays
with humor’s incongruity (unexpectedness) and since this incongruity can
be made minimally relevant by motivating it as the joker’s intention to
engage in purely absurd wordplay.
Although Ermida adopts both Giora’s and Raskin’s frameworks, she
points out the profound incompatibility between them: “Giora dismisses
Raskin’s notion of script opposition”—his most crucial concept (next to
“script overlap”) (99). In Giora’s own words, “opposition does not nec-
essarily pertain to asymmetrical relation” (1991: 474; quoted by Ermida
2008: 99). I am not sure that I understand this sentence, but I take Giora’s
necessary “asymmetry” to mean that the answer “Only towels” should
be discursively less expected than—rather than script-opposed to—any
answer (e.g., “yes,” “no”) that will occur to readers due to the preceding
discourse. If this understanding is correct, I am tempted to relate Giora’s
remark to my critique of Raskin: narrative humor is not the binary (“sym-
metrical”) opposition of featurelike mental structures (scripts in long-term
memory). Rather, the narrative discourse suggests clues to the intentional
perspectives of narrative participants, and thus attaches the audience to
these perspectives, creates expectations, possibly counters them, possibly
resolves them, in ways that establish incongruity and superiority relations
between the participants. As an instance of language’s loose form-meaning
associations (Fish 1980; Sternberg 1982), the semantic ambiguity of words
is one way in which discourse may give rise to incongruity and superiority
between participants. The suddenly open reference to assumedly shared

taboo behavior is another. Surprisingly, however, Ermida does import
both Giora’s and Raskin’s ideas into her own theory.
Ermida does not say whether Giora’s theory is also in conflict with
Attardo’s General Theory, yet it should be, since Attardo takes script oppo-
sitions to be the most important parameter of his GTVH metric. Ermida
does criticize Attardo on another issue. “A linear approach along Attardo’s
lines helps to uncover some specificities of the humorous narrative (such
as parallelism and recurrence),” but “it is essential that a supra-sequential
approach be applied, so as not to reduce the text to a succession of autono-
mous joke-like structures” (111). It is here—at the end of chapter 3—that
Ermida’s theorizing of narrative starts. In chapters 4 and 5, she recognizes
that narrative theory offers more holistic concepts for text analysis and she
makes a much greater effort than Attardo to incorporate narratological
approaches into her study of narrative texts. Thus, Gerald Prince’s Dic-
tionary of Narratology (1987) has inspired Ermida’s holistic insight that “the
comic narrative constitutes a whole resulting from the organic integration
of multiple parts, and not a fortuitous succession of heterogeneous units”
(115). She therefore defends a conception of “narrative structure” as an
“organic and dynamic” set of “interdependent units” (117). As part of such
an approach, she suggests “two methodological perspectives” on narrative
structure (118) to which we will soon turn, for they are—beyond the purely
theoretical statements I have just mentioned—the operational part of her
narrative framework.
Furthermore, Ermida, unlike Zupančič, is aware that incongruities
(or “transgressions”) in narrative texts “are expressed at two levels”: the
reader’s and the character’s (145). With Mary Louise Pratt (1977: 165), who
refers to Tristram Shandy, she is also aware that there may be differences
between the sorts of “undeliberate” and “intentional” “maxim infrac-
tions” that readers attribute to characters, narrators, and authors, and that
readers may motivate these infractions in different ways. In this respect,
Ermida (167) mentions an article by Haruhiko Yamaguchi (1988) that
develops the “Character-Did-It Hypothesis” for some jokes: in some jokes,
characters may be uncooperative while narrators are not. Ermida adds to
this the possibility of a “Narrator-Did-It Hypothesis” or even a “Speaker-
Did-It Hypothesis” for other jokes, but evades discussion of these terms.
Yamaguchi’s and Ermida’s right intuitions here are not well informed by
narratology’s insights into narrative participant structure. Large sections
of my part I explain who does what in various types of narrative humor. My
analysis shows, among other things, that intradiegetic characters cannot
be “uncooperative” toward the extradiegetic reader or audience, although
they can be unpredictable—and like a narrator’s extradiegetic uncoopera-

tiveness (aimed at the reader), a character’s intradiegetic unpredictability
(aimed at another character or unintended) makes it possible for surprises
to arise. A closely related participant-oriented idea that Ermida theoreti-
cally adopts from narrative theory is the story-discourse ( fabula-sjuzhet)
distinction. She even mentions Genette’s (1980 [1972]) tripartite distinction
between story, text, and narration (114).21
Operationally, however, Ermida’s analysis is not always informed by
narratology’s advances beyond structuralism. First, despite her state-
ments about intentional levels, discourse, dynamics, and narrative part-
whole relations, Ermida mainly opts for the least intentionalist (i.e., least
subject-oriented) branches of narrative theory: structuralism (including
Genette, Prince, Roland Barthes, Vladimir Propp, and Claude Bremond
[114–23]), story grammar (124–25), and Teun Van Dijk’s (1980) emotion-
low, informational concept of reading as the construction of a “macro-
frame” or “macroproposition” (126–27). Second, a related point: her argu-
ment constantly shifts back to one-level or single-track analysis—with an
emphasis on the fabula (story), rather than the fabula and sjuzhet (story and
discourse) pair. Moreover, it turns out that her two operational planes of
narrative analysis—the “two methodological perspectives” on narrative
structure—are not story and discourse, either. The analytic options are
“first, to regard the narrative units as . . . entities at the level of action, that
is, the level where the text is organized sequentially; second, to do so at the
level of theme” (118; original emphases). Story/discourse gets replaced by
story/theme.
21. Though Ermida offers a balanced overview of humor theories, I sometimes had the
impression that the author was writing with the handbrake on regarding narratology, know-
ing that she had to produce a book for Mouton de Gruyter’s Humor Studies series. The
current exclusion from humor studies of a whole range of research done in the humanities
raises questions about this “interdisciplinary” series (edited by Victor Raskin and the psy-
chologist Willibald Ruch) and its companion journal, Humor. One result and measure of
this exclusion is the series’s latest publication, a reference work titled The Primer of Humor
Research (Raskin 2008). It describes the state of the art of humor research as Raskin and
Attardo view it. In one chapter, “Humor in Literature” (Triezenberg 2008), literary scholar-
ship is absent and the main references are instead Attardo, Raskin, and other scholars asso-
ciated with Humor Studies. In another chapter, “Literature and Humor” (Nilsen and Nilsen
2008), literary studies are mentioned but not applied. So this primer for research offers no
approach to comic narrative (narrative humor) in terms of both narrative theory and humor
research (as I have attempted to do in Vandaele 2010). In Humor, editor in chief Attardo is a
science-oriented linguist with no high regard for most literary research. Since 2002, when he
assumed editorship, only three literary contributions have appeared in the quarterly journal
(Delabastita 2005; Pye 2006; Seaver 2005). Interestingly, poets (rather than poeticians) do
take pride of place in Humor’s August 2009 issue (volume 22, number 3). Yet even there you
will need a fine-toothed comb to find references to studies in poetics.
The latter is, for Ermida, the “hierarchical” (rather than “sequential,”
action-logical) aspect of text organization and includes cognitive schemata
that “preside” over narrative meaning-construction: macrostructures,
macropropositions, scripts, and frames (118). Even so, it is difficult to see
why this “hierarchical” perspective can be “methodological[ly]” (ibid.)
separated from sequential analysis. Rather than being different method-
ological lines, general mental scripts and specific text sequencing are in my
view components of one analysis, and, as I already said, they are related
as follows. The sequential discourse framing (of evolving perspectives on a
specific evolving narrative world) activates scripts (that is, general memory-
based framing schemas that are also often sequential, like the doctor or
restaurant scripts) for specific use, and so generates narrative expec-
tations. Imperceptible information gaps in the discourse and misguided
expectations (based on whatever information and scripts are available
at the time) lay the ground for comic narrative surprises. Like Raskin,
Ermida seems to yoke together “scripts” understood as general mental
structures and “framing” understood as action-world construction guided
by discourse. Thus, like Raskin, Ermida fails to distinguish clearly between
dynamic parole (discourse events) and static langue (internal schemas).
Furthermore, despite mentioning the discourse/story pair in her theo-
retical discussion, Ermida reduces the sequential aspect of narrative to
“action,” an autonomous, unmediated layer—possibly “presided over” by
a higher-order theme. Following Propp (1928), she defines action as a chain
of “functions,” that is, of acts performed by characters: “the analyst’s task”
is to determine “the specific relationships that those functions establish
with other functions and with the progress of the global action” (118–19).
The example she gives clearly shows that her “action” concept is autono-
mous, because unmediated by discourse: “buying a gun is meaningful in
narrative terms only insofar as the gun gets to be used; otherwise, to refer
to such an action becomes pointless” (119). But a discourse reference to
someone buying a gun can have perfectly good narrative value even if the
gun is not used. For instance, narrative discourse can report this action
to create suspense about a coming event (as in thrillers), or to throw sur-
prising light on a past situation (as in detective stories), or to signal the
ironic potential of America’s pro-gun ideology (as when Michael Moore,
in Bowling for Columbine [2002], receives a free gun in a bank for opening an
account and thus becomes a potential bank robber).
Actions or “functions,” then, are not the unmediated units of the narra-
tive sequence. They receive their full narrative meaning through the dis-
course that represents them. Ermida, however, constantly shifts back and
forth between a theoretical acknowledgment of such narrative layering
(e.g., 122, 136–38) and a practical neglect. For instance, she briefly returns
to the idea of “temporal deformation” in narration (122), but only to con-
clude, with Van Dijk (1980) and others, that the logic of the story corre-
sponds to “exposition + complication + resolution” (123)—or some varia-
tion on this scheme (e.g., “resolution” followed by a new complication).
Again, a one-level analysis, restricted to the action.
In chapter 6, Ermida’s argument culminates in a five-part definition
of the narrative humorous text, which bundles together ideas from vari-
ous theories (despite apparent conflicts between Giora and Raskin, for
instance). A narrative text, she claims, is fundamentally (rather than spo-
radically) humorous if it exhibits
1. Raskin’s script oppositions
2. A hierarchy of scripts (higher and lower scripts, “supra-” and
“infra-scripts”)
3. “Recurrent instantiation” of the higher scripts by the lower ones
4. Giora’s “marked informativeness” concept, namely, that “[a]t a
final stage in the story, a non-gradual, hence unexpected, supra-
script inversion occurs, whereby the most informative—that is, most
improbable and marked—suprascript of each opposition suddenly
gains the upper hand, thus surprisingly breaking the reading expec-
tations built up till then” (172)
5. The exploitation of Gricean cooperation between narrator and reader
(despite apparent noncooperation)
Strangely, Ermida seems to apply Giora’s ideas about discourse organiza-
tion of jokes (echoed in Ermida’s condition 4) to some broad sort of men-
tal, nondiscoursal “script oppositions” that are present in narrative under-
standing (her condition 1). Moreover, the definition uses terms that Ermida
has not clearly explained yet: the characteristics described under condi-
tions 2 and 3 are still somewhat vague. What does it mean that there is a
“hierarchy” among scripts and that hierarchically “higher” scripts show
“recurrent instantiation”? On page 173, however, immediately following
this still partly opaque definition, the book’s first detailed analysis of a
comic narrative clarifies a number of defining terms. In line with the sub-
title of the book, Humor Construction in Short Stories, Ermida has selected for
her main case study Woody Allen’s (1980c [1975]) short verbal narrative
“The Lunatic’s Tale.”
Allen’s text is a tale—a fabula—of a doctor who never finds the perfect
woman, then manages to transfer the mind of an interesting woman (his
wife) into the stunning body of another woman (his mistress), but finally
grows dissatisfied with this perfect blend and instead develops “a crush on
Billie Jean Zapruder, an airline stewardess whose boyish, flat figure and
Alabama twang caused my heart to do flip-flops” (Allen’s narrator, quoted
in Allen 1980c: 75). Unhappy with his restlessness, he abandons his life as a
“highly successful doctor living on the upper East Side” to become a crazy
man “skating unshaven down Broadway wearing a knapsack and a pin-
wheel hat.”
On the sjuzhet level, the narrator opens by stating, “Madness is a rela-
tive state. Who can say which of us is truly insane?” (quoted in Ermida
2008: 175). Ermida finds this “thematic antithesis” to be “translatable into
a script opposition (madness vs. mental sanity) which is to recur in the
text, together with other oppositions” (176). This in turn seems to confirm
that Ermida does not restrict “script” to a “chunk of information surround-
ing a word” (Raskin) but apparently also sees it as a theme extractable
from the action: global themes are the “higher” scripts “presiding over
long stretches of the textual line”; local units of action are the “lower”
scripts “represent[ing] information that is sequentially limited” (172) (con-
ditions 2 and 3 of the five-part definition). Like Raskin, Ermida thus blurs
again the distinction between mental structures (i.e., scripts as defined by
Schank and Abelson 1977)22 and their activation by discourse that narrates
an action world. The discourse indeed invites the reader to understand
the action and, possibly, to infer a theme, yet the specific action and the
extracted theme are not scripts—internalized schemas—in Schank and
Abelson’s or even Raskin’s canonized sense.
Two diagrams illustrate Ermida’s claim that “The Lunatic’s Tale” can
be methodologically subjected either to a sequential and action-logical
analysis (figure 1) or to a hierarchical “script”-based analysis (figure 2).
While figure 1 clearly exposes the single-track nature of Ermida’s sequen-
tial analysis, figure 2 is more difficult to interpret. It represents one cru-
cial (hierarchically “high”) script, the successful doctor, which “is”
opposed to the (also “high”) vagrant script—the main opposition that
constantly “recurs” in the text. Yet to what degree are these scripts, in
all their detail, stored in the mind or specified by discourse? “Are” the
successful doctor and the vagrant script structures opposed in the
mind (and do they as such amount—as Ermida and Raskin strangely sug-
gest—to linguistic antonyms like death/life, drunk/sober, and so forth)? Or
do they become opposed by discourse (which activates them as mental struc-
tures to raise and frustrate expectations)? Are patterns of communication
(discourse) and mental structures both scripts? Also, do scripts drive action
22. Schank and Abelson (1977) define scripts as action routines stored in memory and guid-
ing the behavior appropriate for a particular situation.
Figure 1 A sequential diagram of Woody Allen’s “The Lunatic’s Tale” (Isabel
Ermida, The Language of Comic Narratives: Humor Construction in Short Stories [Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter, 2008], 175; reprinted by permission of the publisher)
logic, as when “[the] happiness [script]” is called “a driving force of action

progression” in Allen’s tale (194)? Is this force not, rather, the specific story
agent’s desire to be happy (as communicated by the narrator)?
To be honest, I do not see how figure 2’s “script” and figure 1’s single-
track view of action bear upon the reader’s specific emotive engagement
with narrative participants, at which the term comic narrative (featuring in
Ermida’s title) essentially points. Most certainly, as understood by Schank
and Abelson (1977), scripts can play a part in comedy, because they may
cobuild expectations and surprises (“What does a doctor usually do?”) and
even help to resolve incongruities (as when the “mind transfer” is resolv-
able by appeal to such a possibility as “Allen’s narrator was a Frankenstein-
like doctor”). This illustrates that scripts are an important instrument for
humor. Yet they are not the mechanism of (narrative) humor itself, which
lies in the discourse-mediated, situation-specific incongruity and superi-
ority relations between (narrative) participants. Indeed, consider that nar-
rative discourse can turn one and the same script to comic or noncomic
use, as Ermida herself admits (173). Her successful doctor script, for
example, can operate both in hospital soaps and in tragic narratives.
Nor do Ermida’s script oppositions (e.g., successful doctor/vagrant)
explain narrative humor. If Ermida believes them to be linguistic antonyms
(like death/life or day/night), or (somehow) mentally stored oppositions
between “chunks of information evoked by a word,” or both, then they are
unduly projected from binary, nonintentional, nondynamic semantics of
language onto narrative’s doubly intentional structure, which is infinitely
open in principle and relatively closed, because specific, in discourse.
Neither will it help to understand opposed scripts as opposed themes (“the
successful doctor” vs. “the vagrant”) or opposed actions (“gadding about
town in a brown Mercedes” vs. “skating down Broadway”). Such con-
Figure 2 Hierarchical script representation of Woody Allen’s “The Lunatic’s Tale”

(Ermida 2008: 194; reprinted by permission of the publisher)
ceptual extensions turn script into a confused (vacuous, catchall) concept,

while the extended script oppositions still fail to separate comedy (comic
narrative) from tragedy (serious narrative).23 For the analysis of narrative
humor, Ermida needs to shift more radically—or operationally—toward
the discourse that manipulates our cognitive-emotive relation to perspec-
tives in/on a specific action world: for example, by creating oppositions,
not between scripts, but between discourse-guided predictions and actual
developments.
Thus, as opposed to the single-track narrative analysis of figure 1, a two-
level narrative analysis will consider the discourse level as well. Regarding
Allen’s tale, it will note that the discourse of the narrator starts by explicitly
pointing out the contrast between the I’s current life in rags and his previ-
ous success as a doctor. Due to the discourse organization, therefore, the
character is from the outset expected to become a vagrant: this development
causes no surprise, the discourse never having allowed us to form a view
of the character as a successful doctor only. (Ermida admits as much when
she writes, “[E]very action, episode or thought that Ossip [the protago-
nist] attributes to his highly successful doctor persona are shadowed by his
23. Incidentally, it would be interesting to investigate how many different senses the terms
script and opposition assume in linguistic Humor Studies. This constant extension of senses is
an attempt to avert a threat to the GTVH’s and Raskin’s SSTH’s adequateness. Since both
frameworks aspire to be general theories of (verbal) humor, and script oppositions are their
main concept, both are obliged to show that (verbal) humor always involves such opposi-
tions. When the involvement of scripts is not obvious in one sense, the analysis has to move
to another—at the cost of erasing important conceptual distinctions.
initial reference to a catastrophic fall from grace” [184]. This is right and
contradicts her main analysis, as explained in my following paragraph.)
The narrative interests actually created here mix comic curiosity24 regard-
ing the narrative past (How did he turn into a vagrant?) with comic sus-
pense about the narrative future (as the narrator takes us back to his life as
a doctor in trouble), and some surprises midway.
Regarding narrative, Allen’s readers are curious to know why the doc-
tor is in rags now. When the narrator begins to tell how this radical change
happened, they may be in suspense and wonder, “How will his life go on?”;
and when informed, they may think, “Is this how it happened? Amazing!”
Any action-logical surprises that may arise are situated in the gap-filling
between then and now, not in the fabula’s end point. Regarding the comic,
it is certainly not situated in the contrasting “life-styles experienced by
one and the same character,” supposedly “per se comical, because radi-
cal and extreme” (177). Such abstract “script oppositions” (doctor versus
vagrant) do not account for the humor, since every discourse activates
and interrelates scripts (doctor, vagrant) differently. Even a one-level
“sequential” analysis of these “opposed scripts” (a change from doctor
to vagrant) does not explain the humor, since an extreme riches-to-rags
story ( fabula) can work for tragedy too. (Many one-level analyses will even
say that it is specific to tragedy—which is also wrong, as Woody Allen illus-
trates here.)
In other words, if Ermida’s “thematic” analysis erroneously suggests that
a “script opposition” (between doctor and vagrant) is a humor mecha-
nism “per se,” her “sequential” analysis (figure 1) wrongly implies that a
twist (from doctor to vagrant) in the fabula’s tail is comic. Supposedly, this
is so because “at a final stage in the story,” the “most improbable . . . supra-
script of each opposition [here, the vagrant script] suddenly gains the
upper hand, thus surprisingly breaking the reading expectations built up
till then” (her fourth condition). As I have pointed out, however, we know
from the discourse’s very start that the doctor will become a vagrant. In
narrative humor, expectations are created not by changes per se but by
discourse that anticipates changes (or does not). Hence, the one-level dia-
24. “Both suspense and curiosity are emotions or states of mind characterized by expectant
restlessness and tentative hypotheses that derive from a lack of information; 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 suspense derives from a lack of desired information concern-
ing 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” (Sternberg 1978: 65).
gram is useless for measuring expectations and (narrative and/or comic)

surprises. Although Ermida’s sequential diagram has more explanatory
value in earlier parts of the fabula of “The Lunatic’s Tale”—where the
sjuzhet “mimetically” follows the action order and logic—a full explana-
tion of the narrative humor will have to consider the discourse presenta-
tion too.
On the one hand, much of the comedy resides in the action-logically
farfetched way in which the narrative gap between one event and the next
is bridged. The doctor is not attracted to his wife because, when seen from
a certain angle, she looks like his Aunt Rifka (who looked like a golem);
while watching a Béla Lugosi film, he devises a solution to his wife’s lack of
appeal—transferring her delightful mind into the more voluptuous body
of his mistress; now, after the successful transfer, having got a voluptuous
intellectual woman, he surprisingly falls in love with a boyish Alabama
hostess; unable to come to terms with his strange nature, the protagonist
gives up his position as a doctor. One-level analysis can partly account for
the small comic narrative surprises of this action world: the character does
surprising things for surprising reasons.
On the other hand, by manipulating this action, the discourse contrib-
utes to the humor in at least two important ways. First, by condensing the
story, the discourse speeds up to the changes in the action and thus helps
to make the character seem whimsical and incongruous. Second, the nar-
rator’s discourse presents these farfetched courses of action as relatively
normal (though painful) events, which confirms the feeling that the narra-
tor turns everything on its head: “Madness is a relative state. Who can say
which of us is truly insane?” As Ermida (145, 173, 177) notes, this narrator
is funny in many ways, but he is most continuously—least “sporadically,”
to use her term (172)—incongruous and inferior because he presents weird
action logic as relatively normal, that is, without taking any distance from
it. While not blind to this fact, Ermida’s semantic script approach prevents
her from highlighting such structural relations between participants. Par-
ticipant relations appear in passing comments (as when some “passages”
are said to be “humorous because they are narrated by a specific charac-
ter” [195]), while they actually constitute basic principles of analysis, which
enable us to distinguish among types of narrative humor.
Regarding the narrator’s discourse in Allen’s text, compare it with that
in Oscar Wilde’s “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” (at least in the text frag-
ment discussed above). There too, the narrator presents weird action as
normal, yet his tone of normality is felt to be ironic, distancing, disso-
nant. I would suggest that this different effect finds its explanation in two
mechanisms. First, he is an authorial (or authorlike), heterodiegetic nar-

rator, outside the narrated action world, as against Woody Allen’s homo-
diegetic one, entirely implicated in his world. Second, the ironic tone of
Wilde’s narrator arises from the start, where free indirect discourse suggests
that the narrator is an elusive (but reasonable) participant who implicitly
(but critically) echoes less reasonable characters (e.g., Lady Windermere’s
thoughts and evaluations). Woody Allen’s narrator, by contrast, is not
introduced as ironic from the implicit vantage point of reason. When he
asserts that “[m]adness is a relative state,” since “[w]ho can say which of us
is truly insane?” (1980c [1975]: 75), he immediately shows himself to be of
an incongruous type.
However, a shared feature cuts across the line between irony about incon-
gruous action (Wilde) and the crazy acceptance of its incongruity (Allen).
In both cases, the weirdness or (in)congruity or inferiority/superiority mix
with—and make a difference from—the usual forces of narrative: curi-
osity, suspense, and surprise. Thus, on the one hand, “The Lunatic’s Tale”
illustrates my hypothesis (argued in part I) that comic suspense is a state
of mind in which the reader/audience’s suspense (“How will things pro-
ceed or end?” i.e., uncertainty about the story-world development) mixes
or competes with a normative sense of superiority and distance vis-à-vis
that developing world. And the example extends my hypothesis to (comic)
curiosity. Curiosity, Sternberg’s (1978) third universal of narrative, created
by a sjuzhet (or narrator) drawing attention to an information gap about
the fabulaic past, has been far less conspicuous in this review essay than
surprise and suspense. It now emerges, however, that humor can relate
to curiosity in a similar manner as it does to suspense. In Woody Allen’s
story, our curiosity (“Why is he in rags now?”) interacts with comedy in
the following way: the weirdness of the action gradually undermines any
explanatory, gap-filling hypothesis formed by our curiosity, though some
minimal curiosity remains active.
On the other hand, “The Lunatic’s Tale” qualifies the second part of
my hypothesis about comic suspense—that the reader/audience learns
from an “authoritative (communicative, congruous, and superior)” nar-
rator about incongruous (inferior) acts and thoughts in the story world.
Obviously, this formulation does not fully apply to Woody Allen’s narra-
tive—which illustrates that even a weird, incongruous narrator can pro-
mote a reader’s normative distance vis-à-vis a weird action world. In “The
Lunatic’s Tale,” the homodiegetic (and autodiegetic) narrator is still quite
consonant with his previous self as a character: since he presents the mad
actions as quite congruous, the narrator is as mad as when he did what he
tells us. Yet although both the narrator and the character are incongruous,
the incongruity does not gnaw at the credibility of the narrator qua narra-
tor: comedy mixes with continued narrative interest.
This successful mixture shows that we are able to isolate and judge inde-
pendently different activities of the same participant: we find the narrating
sufficiently congruous qua narrator, even if otherwise as incongruous as the
character-I. So there must be elements in his discourse that make him a
good, relatively authoritative narrator, after all. To name the first of such
elements, his effective in medias res announcement of personal misery was
not a bad start at all for arousing curiosity:
Madness is a relative state. Who can say which of us is truly insane? And while
I roam through Central Park wearing moth-eaten clothes and a surgical mask,
screaming revolutionary slogans and laughing hysterically, I wonder even now
if what I did was really so irrational. For, dear reader, I was not always what
is popularly referred to as “a New York street crazy,” pausing at trash cans
to fill my shopping bags with bits of string and bottle caps. No, I was once a
highly successful doctor living on the upper East Side, gadding about town in
a brown Mercedes, and bedecked dashingly in a varied array of Ralph Lauren
tweeds. (Allen 1980c [1975]: 75)
Close, continuous, and systematic attention to comic narrative’s discourse/

story interactions—to the poetic impact on readers of narrational begin-
nings, for instance—is what I most miss in Ermida. Though this book is
a courageous attempt to introduce narratology into the Humor Studies
paradigm, its narrative ideas are in need of further clarification, sophisti-
cation, applications, and nonsubordination to other theories—to seman-
tic script theory, above all. Not everything in a narrative text is a script.
Rather than “high,” static, and abstract script oppositions, it is a text’s
discourse/story interaction that governs (creates, determines, establishes)
incongruity and superiority between narrative participants.
5. Conclusion
Raskin’s Semantic Mechanisms of Humor was a pioneering book, an inspir-

ing complex of ideas, but it proposed and promoted the wrong approach
to discourse as featurelike scripts, as langue. Its intuitions about discourse
and its more intentionalist analyses were subordinated to a semantic core
theory. This core theory then became, via Attardo and Raskin (1991), the
most important parameter of Attardo’s (2001) General Theory of Verbal
Humor and, partly as a result, the part of Raskin that is canonized in
Humor Studies. However, keeping an open mind to narratology, Ermida
(2008) understood that “scripts” defined as “large chunks of information

surrounding a word” would not explain “humor construction in short
stories” (as her book’s subtitle goes). While Raskin could still turn a blind
eye to the intentional perspectives of narrative jokes, Ermida was forced
to recognize that longer comic narrative is fundamentally intentional.
Thus, she sees the need for a “sequential” (i.e., action-logical) analysis,
and even mentions the discourse/story distinction. Unfortunately, she does
not really take into account the fact that comic narrative is discourse about
(comic) action worlds. Hence, she did not look for such mechanisms as
comic narrative surprise, suspense, or curiosity. (She does analyze comic
action logic on its own—as did Attardo [2001] and also Palmer [1987]—
which partly accounts for comic surprise, with its ties to incongruity and
superiority.) The comic action of Woody Allen’s “The Lunatic’s Tale” is
one factor of comedy, but it interacts with the narrator’s comically incon-
gruous (yet narratively effective) discourse frame, and so gives rise to nar-
rative humor. In Ermida’s approach, a narrative seems a constellation of
scripts, and a comic narrative a constellation of abstract opposed scripts,
which look like themes.
Indeed, next to her “sequential” analysis, and as an attempt to save Ras-
kin’s scripts in the face of longer comic narrative, Ermida engages in what
she calls “hierarchical” script analysis. There, she broadens the meaning of
scripts by defining them as themes—but where do these themes come from?
Are they extractable from the action and its logic? (She says that they are
“recurrently instantiated” along the text, but does instantiation mean the-
matic extraction?) When redefined, do they remain mental constructs stored
in long-term memory? Probably not. If not, though, why does Ermida stick
to concepts denoting mental structures (scripts) to represent discourse that
invites the reader’s dynamic, cognitive-emotive engagement with structures?
Her concepts are meant to analyze tools of verbal narrative humor, not the
narrative humor mechanism, which is discursive-interpretive. Accordingly,
narrative humor happens when a discourse participant (author, narrator)
invites other discourse participants (audience, reader) to activate general
(action-oriented) scripts for specific narrative situations and actions (involv-
ing agents), thus referring intentional participants to intentional (cognitive-
emotive) perspectives on/in specific narrative situations and actions, with a
view toward creating (or promoting) incongruity and superiority relations
among the different intentional participants.
These ideas are even less present in Humorous Texts by Attardo, who
is clearly uninterested in the knowledge that comes from poetics. I have
tried to illustrate what unfavorable effects this exclusionary strategy has
on his analysis of an Oscar Wilde story. This goes to show that Humor
Studies would do well to integrate insights from poetics and narratology
with their views on comic narrative—if only because these neighboring
fields often address the emotive, attitudinal, participant-focused aspects of
narrative texts (comic as well as serious). Attardo and his colleagues may
take Zupančič’s The Odd One In as merely confirming their suspicion that
nothing good comes from interpretive and literary analysis. But then, in
the fields of poetics and narratology, quite a few practitioners will not wel-
come Zupančič, either. Let us hope that Humor Studies will reconsider
its exclusionary stance and turn, instead, toward real interdisciplinarity in
regard to comic narrative. From the opposite side, consider Raskin’s (1985:
53) remark: “it would not really help poetics if the powerful apparatus of
phonological theory were imposed on it and a detailed analysis of the pho-
nemes making up a poem were made available, unless such an analysis
addressed a valid issue in poetics itself.” One such major issue in poetics is
emotive intentionality—as relating to narrative humor, for instance—and
Humor Studies could not begin to address it too soon.
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Narrative Humor (II):

Abstract This is part II of a two-­part essay on narrative humor. Part I appeared

fying such development as a feature of narrative in general; by the standards of seri-

1. Narrative Humor: A Complex of Emotions and Its Participant Structure

What is narrative humor? With this question in mind, part I of my pro-

I have attempted to describe some types of narrative humor, that is,

2. Does Psychoanalysis Rule Out Poetics?

Zupančič’s book creates certain initial expectations. Its subtitle is On Com-

Such examples clarify certain theoretical points but also undermine

rative participants, Booth’s explanation of Molière’s comedy makes better

screwball heroines” seem to express “a more equal relationship with men

Yet Zupančič highlights repetition and variation for special reasons.

lation (111)—says that “vital, living beings” wrongly behave in comedy

humor, Zupančič conflates (telic, narrated, invented) story and (possibly

mildly or radically nonempathic with the incongruous object, the experi-

institutionalized academic paradigm (for an overview, see Attardo 1994;

For Raskin, the humor in this text is created by an interpretive overlap

tic branch of Humor Studies—fails to resolve this basic ambiguity. It does

memory (“scripts”) and specific discursive (“local”) understandings of con-

munication involving motivated intentional participants—with concepts

ing. Nonetheless, my part I (especially Vandaele 2010: 748–60) attempts

example of “aesthetic” (that is, “aesthetically motivated”) comic narrative

So Raskin does not entirely evade emotive/motivational discourse

these dichotomies, Raskin suggests that there is an abstract semantic sys-

In short, an explanation of narrative humor needs to identify, on the one

focalization to the guy, showing in full detail how he is anticipating this

Raskin’s single category of sexual/nonsexual humor; and some he

and/or narrative surprise [see Vandaele 2010: 748–60 and references

potentially important in comic narrative—and in humor outside narrative

not about an action—these words reach us through the narrator’s quota-

Attardo’s discussion is puzzling. About the italicized sentence, for instance,

This analysis is so wrong, or incomprehensible, that the only words that

Dimitris Asimakoulas and I (2002) previously wrote that Attardo’s

predetermines one’s response to a potentially humorous message is at least

Yet it is unclear to me how an approach that determines these “necessary

Raskin, who attempted to treat discourse (pragmatics) as langue (semantics),

Since a message’s informativeness corresponds to the number of conceiv-

This idea of minimal yet manifest relevance corresponds to what Ziv

between participants. The suddenly open reference to assumedly shared

they can be unpredictable—and like a narrator’s extradiegetic uncoopera-

logic, as when “[the] happiness [script]” is called “a driving force of action

Figure 2 Hierarchical script representation of Woody Allen’s “The Lunatic’s Tale”

ceptual extensions turn script into a confused (vacuous, catchall) concept,

gram is useless for measuring expectations and (narrative and/or comic)

mechanisms. First, he is an authorial (or authorlike), heterodiegetic nar-

Close, continuous, and systematic attention to comic narrative’s discourse/

Raskin’s Semantic Mechanisms of Humor was a pioneering book, an inspir-

(2008) understood that “scripts” defined as “large chunks of information

Pratt, Mary Louise

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Abstract This is part II of a two-part essay on narrative humor. Part I appeared