Page 44 - The Language of Humour

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW 31
meaning, with the contradiction between ‘sleep’ and ‘awake’. The third
contradicts what we know about the world—it is not physically possible
to sleep on one toe.

Apparent contradictions
The strange thing is that, rather than rejecting such odd examples of
language, the human mind often reacts by trying to make sense of them,
as in Chomsky’s example: ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’. In
creative uses of language, such as poetry, the new combinations are
exciting precisely because they extend the range of possible meanings
and cause a sudden shift in perception. The apparent contradiction ‘bitter-
sweet’ invites a fresh look at the concepts of sweetness and bitterness;
the meaning of the words is widened to include metaphorical senses.
Perhaps the opposite is true of clichés—once a phrase is familiar, it is
used without thought and bypasses the mind; certainly the metaphorical
force loses its initial impact. For the sake of economy in language and to
reduce human experience into orderly chunks, it is useful to have many
such pre-packaged phrases. The poet is a person who ‘unties the string’.
The same may be true of the apparent contradictions of some humour,
which force the mind into a ‘cognitive shift’. Alexander Pope defined wit
as ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’. The stand-up
comedian Eddie Izzard leaves his audience startled by observations
which are strangely familiar (see Unit 8). In the following he points out
a type of non-sense:

Prince Philip shoots things. He’s the President of the World Wild
Life Fund and he shoots things. ‘Oh look, there’s a panda. I’ll
protect them and then shoot them dead.’

There is an apparent contradiction in the meanings of ‘protect’ and
‘shoot’, and an actual contradiction in having a president of such an
organisation who kills wildlife.
Three terms—contradiction, paradox and oxymoron—are used to
describe this type of semantic incongruity. Their use overlaps, so it is
difficult to distinguish between them. Contradiction is in everyday use
for statements that are necessarily false. These can occur in slips of the
tongue, which have been collected as unintentional humour in
‘Colemanballs’ (Private Eye):