PICHA CATALOGRAFICA

/ Edited and
and Misundemanding
The PRAGMATICS of Understanding
rsidad de Zaragoza, 1998
prefaced by Beatriz Penas. - Zar ago za : Unive
262 p.; 24 cm
LANGUAGE AND EXPERIENCE IN COGNITION
ISBN 84-89513-82-1
as Ibanez, Beatriz , ed. lit.
II. Uni- AND UNDERSTAND/NG:
1. Linguistica-Congresos y asambleas. I. Pen
versidad de Z aragoza.
A PREFACE TO THE PRAGMATICS
81'42(063)=1 l l OF UNDERSTANDING AND MISUNDERSTANDING
BEATRIZ PENAS IBANEZ
Universidad de Zaragoza

Absorption in language sometimes leads to a neglect of the connection

of language with non-linguistic facts, although it is this connection that
gives meaning to words and significance to sentences. No one can
understand the word 'cheese' unless he has a non-linguistic
Be atriz Penas Ibanez acquaintance with cheese.
lst edition 1998 (Bertrand Russell -Logic and Knowledge- 1956: 381)

Publisher: Universidad de Z ar agoza

Cl Pedro Cerbuna, 12 The present volume is the result of the joint effort of a group of young
50009 Zaragoza, Espana researchers and mature linguists who, from the beginning of their careers, have been
y Alemana bent on the study of language as it is used in context. The majority of them subscribe
Collaborato rs: Departamento de Filol ogi Inesa to a cognitive .. functionalist view of language as a system of communicative social
y Vicerreccorado de lnvesngacton .
action (Van Valin, 1991: 1) in which [s]yntax is not autonomous from semantics or
Universidad de Z arago za pragmatics" (Tomlin, 1990: 7) and in which there are ,no innate principles of pure
syntactic form, but only innate conceptual and processing restrictions (G. Lakoff,
1991: 61).
Primed in Spain
Jn other words the present publication makes the cognitive commitment leading
by: UTOClAN, S.L. to the study of cases where general cognition, semantics, pragmatics, and
DL: Z-2.936-98 communicative function play major roles in grammar and language. From this
vantage point we tackle different cases centered around the is;ue of understanding
 The Pragmatics of Understanding and Misunderstanding
72

University of Chicago Press.

RICCEUR, P. (1984) Time and Narratiue, uol. 1. 1983. Chkago:
VEYNE, P. (1971) Commen t on ecril l'histoire . Paris: Seutl.
.
Clio 1: 5-19-
WHITE, H. (1972) ,The Structure of Historical Narrative,. _ _
Plays, Prose Writings and Poems. London:
WILDE, o. (1990) The Critic as Artist. In 0. Wilde,
Dent; Rutland (VT): Tuttle. 1-60.

HUMOUR IN AMERICAN SITCOMS

CARMEN GREGORI SIGNES; BARRY PENNOCK; PATRICIA Bou FRANCH
Universitat de Valencia

Humour and wit are complex cognitive, social, and linguistic phenomena that are
relevant to research in text comprehension, pragmatics, and discourse processing. As
university teachers of English as a second language, we know that our students have
to take part in real interactions, i.e. cross-cultural communication, in which humour
can play a major part. So, in order to understand humorous communicative stretches
our students must become familiar with the socio-cultural background of the L2
community and must develop their inferencing abilities. Conversational implicatures
are often hard to comprehend and therefore should be taught. Failure to point out the
role of implicatures could lead our students to experience pragmatic failure (Thomas,
1983). In this paper we seek to analyze how humour is created in an American TV
series and find ways in which such material can be useful in the teaching of general
English, pragmatics, and media studies. The episode that we have taken the samples
from is Seinfeld, a very popular situation comedy which is currently being shown on
US television. The initial reasons for studying an episode belonging to this genre is
that it is rich in both linguistic and cultural data. Our point of view coincides with that
of Deming and Jenkins when they claim that:

a great deal can be learned from the close analysis of one episode of a television
series ... by analyzing the discourse of a TV episode, we can see the dominant
rules and structures in our culture operating in a television show (1992: 48-49).

Analysis of television programmes will certainly be of help to students studying

English Philology who wish to attain ideal viewer status, that is, near-native
competence both in linguistic and cultural terms. Programmes of this kind must, by
necessity, be studied from a multi-disciplinarian perspective and so contributions
74 The Pragmatics of Understanding and Misunderstanding
from several areas, such as media studies, pragmatics, and schema theory will be
used to attempt to shed light on what makes them funny.
One of our major aims is to offer an approach that will help our students to
decode wit and humour. To do this it is helpful to take into account Long and
Graesser's (1988) explanation of the two stages of the incongruity-resolution theory
introduced by Suls ( 1972-1977). This theory has two stages; first the recognition that
an incongruity exists and, second, the resolution of that incongruity. Long and
Graesser (1988: 36) conclude that essentially, very young children need only
recognize incongruity for the appreciation of humor, whereas older children must also
resolve the incongruity.
Students of EFL are adults and as such are similar to the second group
mentioned by Long and Graesser. When they are presented with an incongruity they
will be able to successfully decode wit and humour depending on their familiarity with
the genre, their understanding of the target culture, and their linguistic competence
in the target language. Long and Graesser's affirmation is hence relevant here since
the final purpose of this paper is to train and give examples of how to interpret and
decode humour in a foreign language and provide the students with the necessary
tools for understanding a complex feature of language such as wit.
1- Situation Comedy
To understand the humour and wit in the examples we provide, students need to
have some knowledge of the genre we have chosen, i.e., situation comedy. The
sitcom, as it has come to be known, became by the mid-sixties one of the most
popular television genres, and has maintained that status to this day. Programmes of
this kind take up a great deal of the prime-time television viewing in the USA. They
are therefore an example of a dominant genre form in American culture. For
advanced students of English sitcoms are a final test of their knowledge of English
and the culture of the United States as they not only presuppose knowledge of the
dominant culture but also deviations from it. Sitcoms depend on the familiarity,
identification, and redemption of popular beliefs. Marc claims that:
Experiments notwithstanding, the sitcom has generally upheld the sanctity of the
proscenium, and producers working in the genre have taken pains to respect the
age-old tradition of grafting humor to moral suasion (1992: 24).
Sitcoms never reach extremes, but sit on the fence of political and psychological
extremes. If we compare them to other genres such as stand-up comedy, we can
observe that the sitcom is ,committed to a cordial relationship with society that it
must simultaneously depict and solicit, sitcoms are full of barbs at day-to-day human
foibles (Marc, 1992: 27).
Seinfeld is not the most common type of sitcom in which all the characters are
fictitious. It is a throwback to shows that were already popular in the 1950s, when a
lot of shows exploited the purposeful confusion of 'real lives' of its stars and their
Humour in American Sitcoms 75
dramatic personae, 1 (Marc, 1991: 22). The main character, a well known stand-up
comedian whose real name is Jerry Seinfeld, plays a stand-up comedian in the
programme with the same name. One could say that he really is playing himself.
The main purpose of Seinfeld and other sitcoms is to entertain the audience to
make them laugh, so humour is always present and language becomes one of the
tools used to suspend potentially serious views on any topic. As a consequence, the
kind of interaction that takes place in sitcoms, which may happen in many everyday
situations, creates a 'play frame' in the sense of Bateson (1953), that is, ... a
perception of the interaction as friendly exchange for fun, rather than as deadly
serious business" (Norrick, 1994: 410). Our perception of the interaction that takes
place in the sitcom and the kind of relation that obtains between the characters
corresponds to the notion of a customary joking relationship, whereby the
participants in a conversation always joke when they are together, perhaps teasing
each other or punning competitively" (Norrick, 1994: 411). However, the difference
between a sitcom and everyday life is that the goal of the former is to make the
audience, not the participants laugh. In sitcoms the participants in the verbal play are
seemingly oblivious of the humour in their interaction.
2. Humour, Wit, Jokes
Humour is not a completely homogenous phenomenon and it is important to
understand the differences between diverse types of verbal comedy to fully
understand what makes sitcoms work. Long and Graesser (1988: 37-38) define
humor as anything that is done or said, purposely or inadvertently, that is found to be
comical or amusing. In contrast, jokes are defined as anything done or said to
deliberately provoke amusement. Wit is defined as a stretch of speech designed to
provoke amusement in a specific conversational context.
A key feature to take into account when differentiating between jokes and wit is
their relation to context, i.e. whether they are context-bound or context-free. Jokes are
context-free and self-contained in the sense that they can be told in many
conversational contexts. Wit, on the contrary, relies much more on preceding
conversational context.
Long and Graesser (1988) point out that an important distinction between jokes
and wit lies in the pragmatic goals of the exchange. The goals of the speaker are very
different when planning a witty statement and when he or she is telling a joke. The
authors claim that wit differs from jokes in that its capacity to amuse is often
secondary to social and communication goals" and that jokes have stylized forms of
expression, opening formulas that signal to the listener that a joke is about to begin,
while witty utterances are usually more subtle. In this respect, the verbal interaction
in sitcoms is much closer to wit than to joke telling.
I e.g. Burns and Allen Show, the Jack Benny Show, The Aduentures of Ozzie and Harriet.
76 The Pragmatics of Understanding and Misunderstanding
3. Analysis
In the sections that follow we shall attempt to analyze the different means used
in our data to create humour, from the point of view of the interactional structure, the
interpersonal relationships, and the cognitive processes involved in communication.
3. I. Interactional analysis of humour in our data
At the macrolevel, it is interesting to analyze the double interactional relationship
established in sitcoms. If we think of the participants in communicative events in
terms of senders and receivers, two different interactional levels can be identified:
Firstly, the interaction within-the-text/episode, in which the actors and actresses play
the roles of senders/receivers; and, secondly, the interaction outside-the-text/episode,
established between the sitcom personnae and the audience. In his analysis of
humorous written texts, Nash (1985: 19) explains this double interactional
relationship by means of the following diagram:
(E----->) E, <------>R (<-------R)
1
where E stands for executants (or senders) and R for respondents (or receivers).
At the microlevel, conversational joking serves many different functions: to get
talk started, to fill uncomfortable pauses and to negotiate topic changes and closings"
(Norrick, 1994: 415). We will focus our attention on the ways in which humour
contributes to topic progression and, more specifically, to topic shift, and on the way s
in which humour can disrupt the structure of adjacency pairs by momentarily
suspending the current topic.
Norrick (1994: 413) highlights the potential of joking to change a topic and to
influence the direction of [ordinary] conversation". In our data, we have found that the
following pattern recurs throughout the episode: there is normally a complete
humorous stretch with final joke followed by a blackout and a change of scene. The
functions of this pattern are twofold: to entertain the audience and to structure the
multiple scenes into which the episode is divided.
At a more local level, we can detect momentary topic shifts that disrupt for a
while the structure of an adjacency pair. In example [l] Seinfeld arrives to pick up
Sandy, his girlfriend. Laura, Sandy's roommate, opens the door:
[l]
Laura: Sandy's in the shower. Would you like to come in?
Seinfeld: I certainly would, but I forgot to bring my towel.
Laura: [laughs heartily]
Seinfeld: [goes in]
Humour in American Sitcoms 77
Upon opening the door, Laura utters an offer which is heard as the first part of an
adjacency pair. However, Seinfeld chooses to misinterpret the force of Laura's offer to
wait inside the flat and to consider it, instead, as an invitation for him to join Sandy in
the shower. Thus, he utters a humorous response as the second pair part of the
question-answer pair. Right after Laura's uptake in the form of laughter, Seinfeld
enters the flat, therefore producing an appropriate second pair part, that is, a serious
and relevant, non-verbal acceptance of Laura's intended offer. Thus, the initial offer
acceptance pair is restored.
According to Long & Graesser (1988: 43), this example may be classified as a
case of double entendre, where a statement or a word is deliberately misperceived or
misconstrued so as to entertain a dual meaning" which is often sexual in nature.
Therefore, by choosing to play with the ambiguous reference of the word 'in', and
deliberately flouting the maxim of relation, Seinfeld uses the joke first" strategy
(Norrick, 1994: 412) and momentarily disrupts the on-going sequence as regards
topic and adjacency pair. The intended sequence, however, is soon resumed and
neither Laura nor the audience hears this as an abrupt disruption. The audience
interprets this stretch according to their expectations of the sort of language found in
sitcoms. Within the episode, Laura answers with laughter and does not address the
disruption explicitly, that is, she accepts the interruption as a part of normal
interaction. However, in every day life disruptions of this sort are often perceived in
such a way that in order to go back to the original conversational topic, the subject
has to utter an apology addressed at the speaker who lost the floor, thus minimizing
the effect of the disruption. (Norrick, 1994: 416-417).
3.2. Interpersonal analysis of humour in our data
The customary joking relationship referred to above is one of the key aspects at
the interpersonal level. It should be noted that this relationship holds both among the
actors or participants (within-the-text/episode) and also between the actors and the
audience, which explains the complicity found between them ( outside-the
text/episode). However, in sitcoms the participants often seem to be unaware that
what they are saying is humorous. Keeping a straight face can be part of the game
and adds to the humorous message for the audience (Chiaro, 1992: 100-121).
Other interpersonal aspects of humorous communication deal with aggression
and, paradoxically, with its contribution to involvement and the enhancement of
rapport (Norrick, 1994). In our data, aggression can be found in the following
manners: (i) against the victim targeted in the joke; (ii) against the listeners who are
suddenly given an intelligence test; and (iii) against listeners whose attitudes and
tolerance toward potentially embarrassing and taboo areas are addressed. The
following is an example of aggression against Kramer, whose first name is revealed
after a long relationship: