PRAGMATICS OF HUMOUR Let us start with

PRAGMATICS OF HUMOUR

Let us start with some comment on the key words ‘humour’ and ‘pragmatics’. ‘Help – call the Police. Murder has been done. This is NOT a joke. ’ This was the message an elderly man taped to his front door after killing his wife with a hammer. He then went into his garden shed and hanged himself.

Why this is of interest here is his reference to humour at a time of murder and suicide. The fact that in such a situation he felt the need to underline (literally, four times) that this communication was not a joke indicates at least two important things about humour in our culture. One, humour is something that can reach, directly or indirectly, into all areas of our experience, the malignant as well as the benign. Secondly, following on from this (potential) ubiquity, it is not always easy to discern what is and what is not humorous.

Humour humor is the tendency of particular cognitive or experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which taught that the balance of fluids in the human body, known as humors (Latin: humor, "body fluid"), control human health and emotion. People of all ages and cultures respond to humour. The majority of people are able to experience humour, i. e. , to be amused, to laugh or smile at something funny, and thus they are considered to have a sense of humour. The hypothetical person lacking a sense of humour would likely find the behaviour induced by humour to be inexplicable, strange, or even irrational. Though ultimately decided by personal taste, the extent to which a person will find something humorous depends upon a host of variables, including geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education, intelligence and context. For example, young children may favour s lapstick, such as Punch and Judy puppet shows or cartoons such as Tom and Jerry. Satire may rely more on understanding the target of the humour and thus tends to appeal to more mature audiences. Nonsatirical humour can be specifically termed "recreational drollery «

Pragmatics is a field of language study concerned with meaning. Pragmatics is concerned with the meaning of words used by people in concrete social situations, that is, with words in context. Given the wide variety of users and the wide variety of contexts in which we use language, the task of pragmatics is far from easy. Fortunately, in situations where there may be some doubt about meaning we usually work together to clarify matters, just as the additional comment in the note shows – ‘This is not humour’.

? ? ? However, what about when we do use humour, which, as we have noted, is not always easy to interpret? Can pragmatics deal with this? This study believes that it can. More specifically, can it deal with cases where humour is offered (even with metacomment) but is rebuffed, that is, where the meanings surrounding humour are disputed? Again, this study believes it can, and, indeed, in order to rigorously test its methods, sets itself the task in its main analysis of tackling precisely such a situation.

humorous utterances… humorous utterances are assigned different meanings by different recipients and this moves us into the area of pragmatics, where problems of meaning assignment, particularly the assignment of meaning to indirect utterances, are discussed.

Now we analyse an extract from a television chat show in which an utterance – ‘Margaret Thatcher was a man’ - is interpreted both as a joke and an insult. It was a simple utterance which caused an amiable free-flowing stream of conversation to suddenly boil up into a confrontation. The bone of contention was the sexism of the comment, but it could just as well have been a dispute about ethnicity, religion, football or food. Its immediate appeal was that it was a disagreement about the meaning of spoken words ( A man as a human being and a man as not a woman).