Excerpts from Daniela Sorea on Griceian Humour

From her online:

"Jokes and the instantiation of conflicting scripts"

at

http://www.scribd.com/doc/18157894/Jokes-and-the-ion-of-Scripts

Consider the one- liner:

“The first thing which strikes a stranger in New York is a big car”.

"This text supports two different (opposing) scripts: that of a tourist being impressed by something in New York and that of a tourist being hit by something in New York."

---

“I’m telling you, you can’t make me tell a lie. Truth must be served.”
“Oh, please, can’t you serve it later?”
“No, it’s getting cold.”

(‘Perfect strangers’)

"The example displays ‘scriptal ambiguity’ as to which of the two scripts the header ‘serves’ is meant to be activated. One script is related to serving food or beverage. The other is activated by a second meaning of the verb ‘serve’ – ‘to render active service, homage, or obedience to (God, a sovereign, commander etc.)’ and is not predicted as likely to succeed the first in the light of the receiver’s initial assumptions."




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"Mr. Banks’ son is worried about his admission in college, especially that he knows that he is not as good as his father or his cousin. His father tries to encourage him:

“You don’t have to prove anything, to impress anyone. You don’t have to do what I do, or be like your cousin. Just be yourself!”

His son answers:

“Oh, please, there’s no need to be cruel!”

(‘The Prince of Bel-Air’)

"The father’s advice, ‘Just be yourself’, prompts the joke receiver to instantiate what Raskin calls a ‘normal’ script, i.e. a predictable and predictably assessable pattern of behaviour: acting natural is acknowledged, in most (western) cultures, to be a valuable, positive, rewarding attitude, which has been verbalized in the form of a cliché. The joke exploits the simultaneous possible activation of two contradictory scripts: the ‘naturalness’ schema, on the one hand, and the ‘low self-esteem’ schema on the other."



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Carlton:

"Listen, I don’t like this idea: driving like nuts on the highway, listening to loud music and all this stuff.”

Will:

““Relax, brother, nothing will happen to you. After all, let’s live a little; look at us: we’re young, we’re single, one of us is really attractive, the other one is you”. (


‘The Prince of Bel-Air’)

"The first part of Will’s last sentence (“…one of us is really attractive”) is likely to activate an ‘advantage’ script, in which attractiveness is an asset. The second part of Will’s repartee (‘the other one is you’) prompts a ‘disadvantage’ script, clashing with the first one."

Daniela uses 'implicature':

"The implicature of this last sentence

is not only that, presumably,

‘the other one’, i.e. his geeky cousin

Carlton does not fit into an ‘attractiveness’

subscript, but neither in

some ‘compensatory’, reasonably

expectable script, of the type ‘I/Will am

attractive, you/Carlton are clever’. Since

the compensatory element is missing, the joke

may trigger an expectation-challenging

effect on the joke receiver, brought about

by the sudden instantiation of a least

expected script, that of Will candidly

imparting to his cousin Carlton his

belief in Carlton ‘s constant cutting

a poor figure."


----


"Two women are talking about their husbands.

One of them says:

“Oh, I know what you mean. My husband has only two moods: angry and angrier”."

(‘Perfect Strangers’)

"At first, the joke exploits expectations likely to be triggered by the sentence: “my husband has only two moods”, Background knowledge prompts the expectations that the two moods are different, if not opposite. This script of two opposite moods, expected to be verbalized by two antonyms, clashes with the script most likely to be activated by the punch, yet unlikely to have been initially anticipated."


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"Mr. Banks asks his son, Carlton, to help him fix the cradle. Since both of them are clumsy, it takes longer than they thought and Carlton is really annoyed. Mr. Banks asks him:

“Am I keeping you from something more important?”

“As a matter of fact, I have to study for my mid-term,

to go to a party with the boys, and then I’d like to have

a wife and kids and go on with my life.”

(‘Prince of Bel-Air’)

"This joke is based on a possible/impossible opposition between short-term and long-term goals."


---

A: You know, my husband gave up working as a stunt man,

and, although he is unemployed, he wouldn’t change his mind.

He says that going back to stunts would

be a step back.


B: I understand what he’s afraid of. You see,

if he takes a step back, he’ll get back to the caves again.


(‘Cybill’)

"This example is based on a high/low status script opposition. The first script, that of a high status person unwilling to give up this position is opposed to a second script, in which the same person is described as very close to the ‘cave man’, a widespread cultural epitome of atavism and brutish ignorance."


----


Retired actor:

“Listen, baby, do you know who I am?”

Cybill:

“No, but I’m sure after a little nap you’ll remember”.

(Cybill)

---

"In this joke, the ‘age’ script is the least probable to be instantiated, since the retired actor’s repartee is not an honest question uttered in confusion and distress by an amnesic or senile person. It is a pick-up line, meant to reinforce his being both famous and irresistible. Cybil’s answer, while feigning taking the actor’s utterance for an honest question, expands on the ‘age’ script, with peculiar emphasis on the dottiness and forgetfulness as cruel yet unavoidable side-effects of aging. the ‘fame and charisma’ script is usually incompatible with the senility script, yet the latter is likely to be accommodated by the joke receiver, especially after Cybill has uttered the final, allegedly recomforting and morale boosting utterance on the benefits of a nap for the elderly."

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"The night before an important exam, Balki and Larry decide to stay up all night and study. Naturally, they fall asleep and wake up at ten o’clock in the morning.


Larry:

Balki, wake up, it’s ten o’clock,
your history exam started an hour ago.

Balky:

Really? How am I doing?

----


(‘Perfect Strangers’)

"Unexpectedness of script sequencing exploits Raskin’s opposition between ‘possible versus impossible’ scripts. There are two mutually exclusive subscripts likely to be activated with an ‘exam’ script: taking it or not taking it, out of various reasons, one of which could be oversleeping."



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A: Isn’t it too long a trip for a woman who is 106?

B: Are you kidding? My grandmother wakes up
every day before sunrise, goes ten miles up the hill with
the goats and grazes them, then goes down the hill ten miles,
cooks breakfast for 26 men and, after they go to work,
she does 45’ of aerobics.

(‘Perfect Strangers’)

"Processing the joke may lead to activation of two opposite scripts - ‘actual versus non-actual’ is Raskin’s classification - based on a cultural incongruity: the image of an overworked woman, subordinated to men, toiling in a rural environment in Mypos, suggested by the first sentences, and the image of the American, emancipated urban woman of the 80’s and her interest in body-building, (“she does 45’ of aerobics”). The unpredictable juxtaposition emerging is that between the commonly entertained image of a 106 year old and the activities she is said to engage in, mentioned in a least expected succession, yields a combination of unlikely-to-co-occur scripts which is inevitably humorous."


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“Well, nice to meet you guys, but I must be going now.”

“Won’t you stay for dinner? We have “ambush stew”. It attacks you when you least expect it.”

(”M.A.S.H. 4077”)

"The unusual collocation ‘ambush stew’ and the explanation given are based on the alleged incompatibility between two scripts likely to be activated by hearers: the ‘dinner’ script, embedding the ‘bad food’ subscript, and the ‘war’ script."


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A: Hey, man, what are you doing? Are you crazy?

B: I prefer the term “emotionally challenged”.

(‘The Prince of Bel-Air’)

"The utterance ‘are you crazy’, which is an indirect way of reprimanding somebody for being unreasonable, is likely to activate an ‘irrational behavior’ script. reprimanding somebody by questioning their sanity expectedly entails backlash, protest, denial."

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Mr. Banks: “Oh, hello, Vivian, how are you? You look great, did you lose some weight?”

Vivian:

“Yes, and it seems to me that you have found it.”

(‘The Prince of Bel-Air’)

"Punning the verb (‘to lose’) is a device meant to generate successive activation of unlikely-to- co-occur scripts). In Mr. Banks’s repartee, the verb is used as part of an idiomatic structure (‘to lose weight’). In his wife’s repartee, the verb preserves its lexical meaning and its semantic relations with the other words, in this case, the antonym ‘to find’, likely to trigger what Ruskin calls ‘an impossible’ script, that of somebody literally finding the weight some other person must have ‘lost’."



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A: “My job is shooting naked celebrities, you know.”

B: Oh, is it difficult?

A: Yes, it is. For instance, today we’ve been shooting La Toya Jackson, and we had to turn off the lights, because she was melting.”

(‘Prince of Bel-Air’)

Daniela writes: "Some background knowledge on La Toya Jackson is indispensable: she is an extremely appealing Afro-American pop star, whose skin color and her renowned sex-appeal allow the mapping of attractiveness into “sweetness” , hence La Toya’s being associated with chocolate in the ‘blend’ of the joke. The first script likely to be activated by the joke receiver is that of shooting/filming, which implies light and heat as indispensable elements and which implicitly exclude darkness. With the blending of sex-appeal into ‘chocolate’ a second instance of co-occurrence of incompatibles emerges in the ‘blend’, that between hot and cold.
It is common knowledge that chocolate has to be kept in cold, dark places in order not to melt. Consequently, joke receivers are confronted with more than one incompatibility: the filming script is not incompatible to the chocolate script, but with two ‘impossible’ subscripts: turning off the lights makes filming impossible, keeping the lights on will melt the ‘chocolate’."

Sorea's references include:

Norrick, Neal (2003). Issues in Conversational Joking. Journal of Pragmatics, pp. 1333-1359.