Ermida Isabel. The Language of Comic Narratives: Humor Construction in Short Stories

Mouton de Gruyter, 2008. — xii, 261 pahes. — (Humor Research). — ISBN: 978-3-11-020514-5The book offers a comprehensive account of how humor works in short stories, by presenting a model of narrative comedy that is pragmatically as well as semantically, grammatically and stylistically informed. It is the first study to combine a sequential analysis of the comic short story with a hierarchical one, merging together horizontal and vertical narratological perspectives in a systematic way. The book covers the main areas of linguistic analysis and is deliberately interdisciplinary, using input from philosophy, sociology and psychology so as to touch upon the nature, motivations and functions of humor as a cognitive phenomenon in a social context. Crucially, The Language of Comic Narratives combines a scholarly approach with a careful explanation of key terms and concepts, making it accessible to researchers and students, as well as non-specialists. Moreover, it reviews a broad range of historical critical data by examining the source texts, and it provides many humorous examples, from jokes to extracts from comic narratives. Thus, it seeks to anchor theory in specific texts, and also to show that many linguistic mechanisms of humor are common to jokes and longer, literary comic narratives. The book tests the model of humorous narratives on a set of comic short stories by British and American writers, ranging from Evelyn Waugh and Dorothy Parker, through Graham Greene and Corey Ford, to David Lodge and Woody Allen. The validity of the model is confirmed through a subsequent discussion of apparent counter-examples.The concept of humor: history, scope and issues
Matter and manner
Taxonomic systems
Lexicological evolution
Conceptual satellites of humor
Humor theories
Ontogenetics and philogenetics of humor
Humor as a communicative act
Linguistic resources of humor Introduction
Sound
Written form: graphological games
Word: morphological play
Sentence: syntactic ambiguity
Meaning
Humor as a textual genre: from jokes to comic narratives
Semantic script theory of humor
General theory of verbal humor
Cognitive joke model
Linguistic approaches to comic narratives
Structural principles of narrative humor
Narrative dimensions
Structure, model and whole
Cohesion and coherence
Narrative units
Organization of narrative units
Limitations of narrative structure analysis
Pragmatics of the humorous narrative
Narration and other modes of discourse
Humorous text and context
The principle of humorous transgression
Breaking the communicative contract
The unsaid in narrative humor
Humorous intertextuality: allusion and parody
Narrative, literary and humorous cooperation
A model of humorous narratives
A hypothesis
A case study:The Lunatic’s Tale(1975), by Woody Allen
Extending the analysis
The Norris Plan(1927) by Corey Ford: parody
On Guard(1936) by Evelyn Waugh: black humor
You Were Perfectly Fine(1939) by Dorothy Parker: irony
A Shocking Accident(1972) by Graham Greene: sarcasm
Hotel des Boobs(1986) by David Lodge: meta-humor
Counter-examples