METAPHOR vs . JOKE? Figurativeness vs . funniness?

1. METAPHOR vs. JOKE? Figurativeness vs. funniness? Arvo Krikmann The 3rd AIP-IAP Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Proverbs (Tavira, Portugal, November 8–15, 2009)

2. The presentation is based on the article"On the similarity and distinguishability of humour and figurative speech"(Trames 2009, vol. 13, no. 63/58, pp. 14–40), available at the address: http://www.kirj.ee/public/trames_pdf/2009/issue_1/trames-2009-1-14-40.pdf or see the link at the address: http://www.folklore.ee/~kriku/HUUMOR/

3. It is easy to recognize that the metaphor and punchlined joke have much in common. Both of them are embodied in texts with two planes of meaning. When a recipient encounters such a text for the first time, he/she encounters a semantic contradiction (inconsistency, incompatibility, ambiguity) and feels a need for it to be disambiguated (conceptualized, interpreted, construed) via certain semantic alterations using his/her linguistic competence and encyclopaedic knowledge. To succeed in this, a certain intersection (similarity, analogy, ambiguous element, causal link, inferential chain, etc.) must be found between the two planes of meaning.

4. A famous example fromAristotle's "Poetics" (Chapter XXI)– the so-called fourth type of metaphor: as old age is to life, so is evening to day. Evening may therefore be called, 'the old age of the day,' and old age, 'the evening of life'

5. Arthur Koestler"The Act of Creation"(1964):There are three fundamental forms of creativity – humour, discovery, and art.All of these are founded on bisociation: in the case of humour –a comic collision or oscillation between two frames of reference~ worlds of discourse ~ codes ~ associative contexts; in the case of scientific discovery – objective analogy, and in the case of art – the image. Koestler Algirdas Julien Greimas"Structural Semantics" (1966).Greimas uses the common term isotopy to denote different readings ofambiguous expressions, including metaphors and jokes.NB! the joke example punning with toilettes meant as 'evening dresses of ladies', but understood as 'toilets'. Greimas

6. Terms used to denote the colliding and incompatible parts of metaphors and jokes: Ivor Armstrong Richards: tenor and vehicle George Lakoff&Mark Johnsonetc.:target and source Gilles Fauconnier&Mark Turner:(input)mental spaces Victor Raskin:the first script and the second script

7. Terms used for the phenomenon of incompatibility itself and the way to handle with it: Jerry M. Suls,Thomas R. Shultz:incongruity and resolution Suls Shultz Victor Raskin: script opposition Seana Coulson:semantic leaps, frame-shifting Coulson

8. All these and others are different names for one and the same couple of twins and their relationships. But only quite recently, researchers have begun to ask further questions, like: in what exactly do they differ? do they differ only in degree, or in something deeper and more fundamental? is there something special and specific in humour that distinguishes it from all the rest of communication types, including figurative speech?

9. Intuitively, humorous items seem to have a more complicated semantic (or conceptual, or cognitive) structure than the average figurative speech. It is a quite commonly known fact that children in their language acquisition firstly learn to understand metonymies, later metaphors, and still later, only in their early teens, they begin to adequately understand and use jokes and other, more complicated forms of humour.

10. Salvatore Attardo’shopes based on violatingPaul Grice’s Cooperative Principle and conversation maxims in jokes: Initially problem of maximsis presented as a paradox: jokes seem to violate Gricean maxims very abundantly, but, on the other, they may be understood with an amazing ease and speed, and can convey information. Attardo discusses also the problem of who is "guilty" in maxim violations. His final conclusion:Aradical dichotomy between serious and humorous uses of language cannot be maintained in reality. Grice’s hypothesized speaker, totally commited to the truth and relevance of his/her utterances, is merely a useful abstraction. In reality, speakers use humorous remarks,andhearers decodeand interpret them, as such, along with other information to build their vision of the communicative context. Attardo Grice

11. Kurt Feyaerts and Geert Brône:hopes based on metonymy.Ronald Langacker claims that metonymy is the best entering point into the topic of discussion.F&B assert:In humorous units the defaultprocess of understanding is interfered. The processing difficulties cannot be too great either. Therefore they speak of the balanced processing difficulty that is measurable via the length of the causal chain, that is, the number of causal "steps", or "moves" that are necessary to reach the metonymical target concept.For example, in theGerman phraseologismBei deiner Geburt ist wohl etwas Dreck ins Hirn geraten the alleged length of the causal chain is only one step.The phrase Als dein Vater dich gesehen hat, hat er doch den Storch erschossen, on the contrary, requires the building up of two causal chains embedded in each other. Feyaerts Brône

12. Intuitively, it seems appropriate to think that metonymic utterances of different semantic complexity also need a different amount of 'mental work'to decode them. However, it is hard to believe that this amount could be measured solely via discretely numerable causal steps. Further, the idea of balanced processing difficulty hardly aims to include a tacit implication that the longer the journey from the 'lexical surface' of a metonymy to its actual sense, the funnier the 'mental output'.

13. Seana Coulson’s analysis of the cartoon by Jeff MacNelly"William Washington Clinton" – hopes based on blending. Already the capture primes the blended character of the cartoon: it is composed from first, middle and familiy names of different presidents of the United States.

14. Further, inputs of the cartoon are life episodes of two American presidents, Washington and Clinton: 1) the apocryphal story about how the young Washingtonchopped down his father’s cherry tree; 2) the reference to Clinton’s sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky.

15. So, the blended text in the cartoon reads:"When I denied chopping down the cherry tree I was legally accurate". The other elements of the cartoon are also blended: the man is holding a modern chain saw in his hand, not an axe; his face looks like Clinton’s, but he is dressed like Washington.

16. Many blends, quite obviously, appear to have a strong natural capacity to feed fantasy and produce humour. Yet the analyses do not detect more exactly, which blends do result in humour and which ones do not. As a whole, the conceptual integration theory is conceived to be a universal "theory of everything" with an immense area of applicability.

17. So here again we have to do with different names for one and the same baby. We can call it also "processing difficulties", "highly complicated semantic structure", or otherwise. That is, the many-level violations of pragmatic maxims, long multilevel chains of pragmatic inferences (metonymical or other), blends and other complicated relationships of mental spaces– all they are actually the different names for one and the same baby.

18. It is very obvious again that a lot of things exist which are humorous and figurative simultaneously. So it is natural to suppose that the share of humour in various specimens of human verbal or non-verbal creation is not 1/0 distinct, but gradual, somehow multidimensionally gradual. Nevertheless the question remains: What, after all, does make some some textual or non-textual items funny?

19. The other set of examples concerns the problem of technical distinguishability of humour and figurative speech, or prototypically again, jokes and metaphors. Mark Turner’s maxim in "Reading Minds": "The target comes first and the source comes second". Thence, somebody could ask: But as they are incompatible, which of them wins? This, in turn, arises another question: Which of the incongruous components of the joke is the target and which one is the source? If we use some more symmetrical terms like scripts or isotopies, the answer becomes evident: IN THE METAPHOR, IT IS THE FIRST SCRIPT WHO WINS, BUT IN JOKE THE SECOND SCRIPT.

20. In the existing literature, one can find some variants of the same answer in a more sophisticated form, given e.g. by Howard Pollioand especially by Rachel Giorain the context of her discussion on the requirements for the "well-formedness of texts", like Relevance Requirement, Graded Informativeness Requirement and Marked Informativeness Requirement– see p. 32 in my handout. Pollio Giora

21. A(fresh) metaphorcrosses the border,reaches the obstacle, backtracks to the left, looks around, returns to the right, takes something along,returns to the left and remains. Jokecrosses the border, reaches the obstacle, backtracks to the left, looks around, takes something along, returns to the right and remains.

22. But there are some residual complications that Giora’s theory leaves unresolved. Metaphors can be embedded in jokes, that is, jokes can be based on the literalizing, extending, twisting or mixing of metaphors, the "awakening"of dead metaphors, parodying of proverbs, etc.Pollio’s example of afunny mixture of metaphors: A virgin forest is one where the hand of man has never set foot Proverbs can sometimes be funny enough, too.Some Estonian examples: Vaese inimese uhkus on nagu kampsuniga magamine: tõmbad pee peale – pea paljas, tõmbad pea peale – pee paljas(Poor man's pride is like sleeping in a sweater – you pull it over your bum and your head is bare; you pull it over your head and your bum is bare)

23. Examples ofX is the Y of Z (or briefly: XYZ) structures. Some of them are (or include) conventional unfunny metaphors, or fresh unfunny metaphors, or funny non-metaphors, or otherwise.  Death is the mother of beauty< Wallace Stevens: non-humorous  Vanity is the quicksand of reason< George Sand?associative and witty, but, to my mind, not funny.  Cheese – milk's leap toward immortality< Clifton Fadiman: witty, ironic and obviously funny  Sex is the poor man’s opera< George Bernhard Shaw? –sadly humorous, parodying perhaps another aphorism  Music is the poor man's Parnassus<Ralph Waldo Emerson? or exploiting a productive proverbial pattern.

24. Some counterparts of X is the Y of Z structures in proverbswhere Z = 'poor man' from Wolfgang Mieder’s "Dictionary of American proverbs":  Ability is the poor man's wealth  Cleanliness is the poor man's luxury  Gratefulness is the poor man's payment  Hope is the poor man's bread  Snow is the poor man's fertilizer

25. So-calledcounterfactuals are very often designed to be funny:  If Clinton were the Titanic, the iceberg would sink The same pattern largely appearsin proverbs, some of them being serious, some somewhat funny, some extremely funny: If there were no failures, there would be no successes If things were to be done twice, all would be wise If there were no listeners there would be no liars If our foresight were as good as our hindsight, we would never make mistakes If wishes were horses, beggars might ride If "ifs" and "ands" were pots and pans, there would be no need for tinkers If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers If idiocy were pain, there would be groaning in every house If a beard were a sign of smartness, the goat would be Socrates If the aunt had balls, she would be called a uncle If the dog had not stopped for a shit, it would have caught the rabbit

26. Some examples of hyperbolic X is so Y that Z structures whose folkloric-phraseologic representatives the Finnish folklorist Anna-Leena Kuusi (Siikala) has termed consecutive phrases.Their degree of funniness can also vary from zero to infinity. Benjamin Bergen & Kim Binsted juxtapose the following two sentences :  It was so cold where I live, we found dogs huddling for warmth– an example of an "ordinary" non-humorous utterance  It was so cold in New York that flashers in Central Park were just describing themselves– a representative of the so-called scalar humour

27. The same holds for folkloric similes. On the lowest end of their funniness scale stand trivialities likecold as ice;hot as fire; white as snow; black as coal,which have completely worn out any figurativeness of their vehicles, functioning just as hyperboles meaning 'very'. On the highest end, there are similes whose vehicles represent not single words or syntagms, but various bizarre, fantastic, grotesquely funny scenes and situations, like the following Estonian items:  hädas nagu koer kolmanda julga peal(troubled like a dog on its third turd)  nagu lammas situb kobrulehe peale(like a sheep shitting on a burdock leaf'about fuzzy, mumbling pronunciation')  edeneb nagu koeral sibulasöömine(successful as a dog eating onions) õpeta nagu oma last leede sitale(like teaching one's own child to shit in the fireplace)

28. If figurative and funny textual units are located on some continuous or gradual "cognitive scale", the question remains as to what the increasing complexity of conceptual structure of the "well-formed" texts could, finally, achieve. One (intermediate?) stage is obviously humour. But even the shortest casually generated and preselected nonsensical word strings can be divided into simply nonsense and funny nonsense.Yuri Lotman claims that the best poetical metaphors are precisely those which outside of their concrete context qualify as nonsense.Samuel Levin, in turn, finds that there is no reason at all to speak of poetical metaphors, because poems build up their own individual possible worlds, inside of which metaphors do not need any special construal.Jaan Undusk, the well-known Estonian theorist of literature, culture and rhetoric, is convinced that oxymoron, the condensed unity of sense and nonsense, is the deepest basis and origin of all poetical and rhetorical creation.

29. THANK YOU!