Page 57 - The Language of Humour

44 THE SHOCK OF THE NEW
formal—no participation from audience, can stand alone: detachment,
cohesion
frozen—ritualised forms, e.g. in ceremonies and legal language.
To be socially competent you have to have access to all of them and
select the one appropriate for the situation. A lot of humour uses
register to reveal some problem a person is having with a situation,
because they select the wrong register or clumsily mix registers.
Sometimes there is the attitude that the features of written language
are intrinsically superior and that any sort of abbreviation is sloppy.
This causes people to ‘talk like a book’ when they feel out of their
depth. ‘Malapropism’ (see p. 11) refers to the mis-use of familiar
expressions, which suggests an attempt to use a higher register than the
speaker is comfortable with. Most people would admit that mistakes
occur when experimenting with language and using expressions for the
first time. This sort of unintentional humour is as likely to happen with
highly educated people (as you saw in a previous example), but it tends
to be used as a stereotyped language feature of less educated characters
in scripted humour, as in the following extract from the radio series The
Glums.
MR GLUM: Cor lummy, Ted—you ask more questions than the
Spanish Imposition. As perchance would have had it, that
whole get-up of Ron’s did not cost us a penny.
LANDLORD: You got that entire outfit for free?
MR GLUM: Absolutely au gratin. (‘The Job Interview’)
As Joos (1961) says, people can switch between styles, but we do not
normally expect a jump of more than one move. Bathos is a sudden
switch in style, from one which has grand overtones to one which is
commonplace:

She can make you laugh, she can make you cry, she can bring
tears to me eyes, she can bring blood to me shoulders, she can
bring the kettle to the boil. (Peter Cook as Alan Latchley)

There is a shift in the other direction in the following:

Why did Napoleon behave in the way he did? First of all, by all
accounts, he was a bit of a short-arse and you know what they say
about small men. They only come up to your Adam’s apple and
don’t like it so they have to compensate by becoming Emperor of
France. (Jo Brand)