Stylistics

Special Web Strand: Style and Humour

In various places in the book, connections have been drawn between patterns of style and verbal humour (see for example units B.9, C.1, C.5 and C.9). This special web strand offers the opportunity to review some of the principles which inform the stylistic analysis of humorous discourse. In the first edition of Stylistics, much of the material below found its way into the last strand of the book. However, frank and honest feedback from many readers suggested that this inclusion was largely prompted by my own research interests in linguistic ‘humorology’ than by a need for comprehensive coverage of the methods and techniques of contemporary stylistics. Still, it seemed a shame to lose completely material that intersected, and still intersects, with various parts of the book.

Puns and verbal play

Two key theoretical principles underpin the language of humour, the first of which is that humour requires an incongruity. The principle of incongruity was mooted in B.9 and C.9 in respect of absurdism in drama dialogue, but the concept applies more generally to (i) any kind of stylistic twist in a pattern of language or (ii) any situation where there is a mismatch between what someone says and what they mean. The second principle is that incongruity can be in situated in any layer of linguistic structure. Just as style is a multilevelled concept (A.2), the humour mechanism can operate at any level of language and discourse, and it can even play off one level off against another. The stylistic analysis of humour therefore involves identifying an incongruity in a text and pinpointing whereabouts in the language system it occurs. Of course, not all incongruities are funny but the complex reasons as to why this is so will have to be left aside for now (see further Attardo 2001).

One of the most commonly used stylistic devices for creating humour is the pun. In its broadest sense, a pun is a form of word-play in which some feature of linguistic structure simultaneously combines two unrelated meanings. Whereas the unrelated meanings in a pun are often situated in individual words, many puns cut across different levels of linguistic organisation and so their formal properties are quite variable. Clearly, the pun is an important part of the stylistic arsenal of writers because it allows a controlled ‘double meaning’ to be located in what is in effect a chance connection between two elements of language. It is however a resource of language that we all share, and it is important, as emphasised throughout this book, not to sequester away literary uses of language from everyday language practices. Let me provide a simple illustration of the commonality of punning as a language resource, which comes, of all things, from the names of various hairdressing salons in the south of the city of Belfast. Such emporia are now but a distant memory for your follically challenged author, and so the examples and commentary that follow are offered strictly from the vantage point of the dispassionate outsider:

(1) Shylocks

Curl up n Dye

Shear Luck

Streaks Ahead

Hair Affair

Although a variety of individual punning strategies are used here, all of the names play on a chance similarity between two or more unrelated aspects of language. My own favourite, ‘Shylocks’, plays on an intertextual connection with Shakespeare’s famous character by exploiting the phonological similarity between ‘locks’ (of hair) and the morphology of the personal name. Other names make use of homophones which are words with the same sound but different spellings: thus, ‘dye’ versus ‘die’, ‘Shear’ versus ‘sheer’ and so on. Interestingly, these puns are framed in the context of familiar idioms and fixed expressions in the language (‘curl up and die’, ‘sheer luck’) and they provide good illustrations how foregrounding takes its source material from the commonplace in language. Especially clever is the multiple punning in ‘Streaks Ahead’. Projected into the discourse domain of hairdressing, this fixed expression not only gives a new resonance to the word ‘streaks’ but the morphology of ‘ahead’ facilitates an allusion to the relevant feature of anatomy. The last name on the list, if not strictly a pun, contours a sequence of sounds to create an internal rhyme scheme. It thus works by projecting the Jakobsonian axis of selection onto the axis of combination – a good example of the poetic principle in operation if ever there was one!

Moving onto puns in literature, the technique is illustrated by the following lines from the fourth book of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (1743):

(2) Where Bentley late tempestuous wont to sport

In troubled waters, but now sleeps in port.

Although this is just an isolated example from what is undoubtedly an enormous pool of possibilities in literature, it does illustrate well the basic principle of punning. The form port embraces two lexical items: both obvious, one refers to a harbour and the other an alcoholic beverage. In the context of Pope’s couplet, Bentley (a boisterous Cambridge critic) is described through a nautical metaphor, as someone who has crossed turbulent seas to reach a tranquil safe-haven. Yet the second sense of ‘port’ makes for a disjunctive reading, which, suggesting a perhaps drunken sleep, tends to undercut comically the travails of Bentley. This is the essence of punning, where an ambiguity is projected by balancing two otherwise unrelated elements of linguistic structure.

Parody and satire

Parody and satire are forms of verbal humour which draw on a particular kind of irony for the design of their stylistic incongruity. Irony is situated in the space between what you say and what you mean, as embodied in an utterance like ‘You’re a fine friend!’ when said to someone who has just let you down. A particularly important way of producing irony is to echo other utterances and forms of discourse. This is apparent in an exchange like the following:

(3) A: I'm really fed up with this washing up.

B: You’re fed up! Who do you think’s been doing it all week?

In this exchange, the proposition about being fed up is used in a ‘straight’ way by the first speaker, but in an ironic way by the second. This is because the proposition is explicitly echoed by the second speaker during their expression of their immediate reaction to it. The status of the proposition when echoed is therefore not the same as when it is used first time out.

We have already seen in this book an example of the echoic form of irony at work. In unit C.1, it was observed how the greater part of Dorothy Parker’s poem ‘One Perfect Rose’ echoed ironically the lyric love poem of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. This principle of ironic echo is absolutely central to the concept of parody. Once echoed, a text becomes part of a new discourse context so it no longer has the illocutionary force (A.9) it once had in its original context. Parody can take any particular anterior text as its model, although more general characteristics of other genres of discourse, as we saw in the case of ‘One Perfect Rose’, can also be brought into play. This underscores the broad capacity of parody to function as a ‘discourse of allusion’ (Nash 1985: 74-99; and see the Reading that follows).

The distinction between parody and satire is not an easy one to draw, but it is commonly assumed that satire has an aggressive element which is not necessarily present in parody. How this translates into stylistic terms is that satirical discourse, as well as having an echoic element, requires a further kind of ironic twist or distortion in its textual make-up. This additional distortion means that while parodies can remain affectionate to their source, satire can never be so. Consider, for example, Jonathan Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ (1729) which lays good claim to being the most famous piece of satire ever written. Swift’s text echoes the genre of the early eighteenth century pamphlet, and more narrowly the proliferation of pamphlets offering economic solutions to what was then perceived as the ‘Irish problem’. The opening of the Proposal reviews various schemes and recommendations to alleviate poverty and starvation, but it is only after about nine hundred words of text that its mild-mannered speaker eventually details his ‘proposal’:

(4) I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection. I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

(Swift 1986 [1729]: 2175-6).

While Swift’s text echoes the conventions of a particular genre of discourse, it contains the requisite distortion that marks it out as satire. This distortion comes through the startling sequence where the persona proposes to alleviate the burden of overpopulation in Ireland by eating that country’s children. This twist is both brutal and stark, and marks an abrupt shift from a seemingly moral framework to a framework of abnormality and obscenity. Just how ‘humorous’ this particular brand of satire is, where the sense of opposition between what is morally acceptable and what is not is very wide, is difficult to assess (see further Simpson 2003 passim). What it does show is how satire is created through both an echo of another discourse and an opposition or distortion within its own stylistic fabric.

Summary

This short unit has introduced some of the basic principles of punning and other forms of verbal humour. Although no more than a snapshot of an enormous area of inquiry, it should have demonstrated both how techniques in stylistics are well suited to the exploration of verbal humour and why stylisticians have shown a continued interested over the years in this area of study. One such stylistician is Walter Nash whose book The Language of Humour (1985) is a richly comprehensive study of style and humour, complete with some entertaining self-penned parodies, poems and sketches by the author himself. It is appropriate then that the reading that follows should be from Nash’s book.

Walter Nash Reading PDF

Further reading

Accessible introductory books on the language of humour include Chiaro (1992), Ross (1998) and Crystal(1998). Both Redfern (2000) and Culler (1998) are book-length treatments of puns, the latter with a specifically literary orientation. Leech (1969: 209-14) contains a useful section on punning in poetry. Simpson (2003) is a comprehensive study of the discourse of satire which contains a short overview of different forms of verbal humour. It also includes an account of the complex relationship between parody and satire. A collection of essays on the pragmatics of verbal humour is Dynel (2011).

References

Attardo, S. (2001) Humorous Texts: a Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis [Humor Research Monographs 6] Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Chiaro, D. (1992) The Language of Jokes London: Routledge.

Crystal, D. (1998) Language Play Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Culler, J. (1988) On Puns: The Foundation of Letters Oxford: Blackwell.

Dynel, M. (ed.) (2011) The Pragmatics of Humour Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Nash, W. (1985) The Language of Humour Harlow: Longman.

Redfern, W. (2000) Puns: More Senses than One Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Ross, A. (1998) The Language of Humour London: Routledge.

Simpson, P. (2003) On the Discourse of Satire Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.