Page 12 - The Language of Humour

introduction

Humour has a high profile in our society. A glance through the
television guides will show this: sitcoms and comedy shows are on prime-
time television every evening. In January 1997 the final episode of the
sitcom, Only Fools and Horses was watched by a record number of 24.5
million viewers. Humorous books are usually in the bestseller lists: in
January 1997 the best-selling paperback was Notes from a Small Island
by Bill Bryson, and another five humorous books were in the top
twenty. Comedians like Eddie Izzard, Victoria Wood, Jo Brand, Lennie
Henry can fill venues as well as top bands. These are all examples of
mass media, but humour has a fashionable status even at a personal level:
most advertisements in the lonely hearts columns refer to a GSOH (they
don’t even have to spell out a Good Sense Of Humour). Few people
today would own up to a lack of humour.
Humour is influential—from political satire to joking as a way of
establishing friendships and excluding others. The examples included in
this book all made someone laugh at some time, but the context for
humour is a crucial element. This means that a book about humour is
unlikely to be funny. What it offers is an examination of the ways that
humour is created in language. While this may spoil the immediate gut
reaction of laughter, it is important to understand how the response of
laughter is triggered.
Unit 1 moves towards a definition of what counts as ‘humour’ and
asks you to consider the factors which combine to make you laugh.
Then three theories of humour are examined in turn. One theory states
that we laugh at the unexpected or incongruous. Unit 2 looks at types of
ambiguity, from individual words to the structure of English sentences.
These types of double meanings are what many people think of as
humour, but there are more subtle ways in which the humorist jolts us
into laughter, by breaking the normal expectations of language in use.
These language conventions are examined in Unit 3. The next two units