Page 59 - The Language of Humour

46 THE SHOCK OF THE NEW
Ashley, but I think it does give some idea of what life must have been
like in a blustery old Yorkshire community of long ago.
(Victoria Wood, Brontëburgers)

Commentary

It is recognised as a lack to have access only to casual registers. Tarzan
is rehearsing more formal ways of greeting someone and introducing
oneself. In the heat of the moment, all he’s left with is the casual.
It’s not often recognised as a lack to only have access to the formal —
thought of as the good language. But the joke about a lawyer, stuck in a
frozen register, shows that it is just as inept. Some people are
protectively aware of their own ‘superior’ status and try to maintain a
rigidly formal register of language, as well as dress and manners, in any
situation. The effect may often be to impress their audience into nervous
silence or agreement. The humorist, like the child in ‘The Emperor’s
New Clothes’, sees such language as covering up their nakedness of
ideas, sense, sincerity etc. and reveals this by exaggerating the tendency
to ‘gobbledygook’—pompous or pretentious jargon. Jeff McNally
follows the familiar morphological rules for word formation, but the
politician’s tendency is to prefer the long and complicated, even where
a perfectly good version exists. The suffixes -al and -atious are both
possible for adjectives; -ity and -itude are both used for abstract nouns,
for example. This means that ‘original’ becomes ‘originatious’;
‘consensus—consensitivity’; ‘steadfastness—steadfastnitude’. Rather
than a ‘punchline’ the text leads up to a ‘punchword’; after all the
gobbledygook the final word ‘clarity’ is the only clear word used!
It can seem like a social gaffe to use an casual register in a formal
situation. (It can, of course, be done deliberately to make a point about
the speaker’s attitude to the situation.) In scripted humour the device of
mixing an informal language style with a formal situation creates
incongruity. In the tour guide’s speech there are colloquial lexical items
— ‘nut’, ‘lounge-type’, ‘blustery’—which would be more appropriate
for informal talk between friends. There is also the strangely
unneccesary explanation of the term ‘details’ and the personal reference
to her ‘vaccination’. The extract not only uses an incongruously
informal register in parts but switches awkwardly between a formal,
lecture-giving style—‘This is what was known in those days as…in
modern terminology’—and a casual, conversational style. The phrase
‘now, alas, no longer with us’ comes from a frozen register, that of a