24.2304, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Chovanec & Ermida (2012)

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Subject: 24.2304, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Chovanec & Ermida (2012)

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Date: Wed, 05 Jun 2013 09:50:15
From: Ksenia Shilikhina [shilikhin at yandex.ru]
Subject: Language and Humour in the Media

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/23/23-5347.html

EDITOR: Jan  Chovanec
EDITOR: Isabel  Ermida
TITLE: Language and Humour in the Media
PUBLISHER: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
YEAR: 2012

REVIEWER: Ksenia Mikhailovna Shilikhina, Voronezh State University

SUMMARY

“Language and Humour in the Media” includes papers that were presented in a
thematic workshop that was part of the 10th conference of the European Society
for the Study of English (Torino, 2010). The collection of papers was edited
by Isabel Ermida & Jan Chovanec and published by Cambridge Scholars
Publishing. As a whole, the volume aims at covering theoretical and empirical
issues of humour in mass media as a specific discourse domain.

The introductory chapter, “Humour, Language and the Media”, written by Isabel
Ermida and Jan Chovanec, presents the reasons for compiling the volume and
gives a brief overview of the contributions. The main idea behind the volume
is to show that humour in mass media is not a purely rhetorical device.
Rather, it can be studied as an important and highly functional
sociolinguistic and discursive phenomenon. The authors allude to major
publications in the field of humour research and claim that pragmatic and
conversational approaches allow taking a broad stance on humour and its
functions in print and audiovisual media.

The papers included in the volume demonstrate a range of approaches to the
analysis of humour in media and analyse data that come from various genres of
mass media discourse. These differences allow for organizing the contributions
into three thematic sections.

Part One bears the title “Responses to Mass Media Humour across the
Disciplines”. It comprises three papers that address humour from an
interdisciplinary perspective. Patricia Andrew’s paper, “The Construction of
Old Age in Ageist Humor”, analyses jokes transmitted by pass-along email
messages. According to Andrew, pass-along emails combine the properties of
public and personal humour: they are public because they are usually sent to
multiple recipients, but at the same time, they are personal since it is up to
the sender to decide who will enjoy the humorous content of the message. When
age-related humour is transmitted via pass-along emails, it serves a number of
social functions, e.g., promoting in-group solidarity or eliciting sympathy
from the audience. Andrew also discusses the topics of age-related jokes (e.g.
loss of physical or mental abilities, loss of attractiveness or sexual
interest, etc.) and argues that this kind of humour is largely based on social
stereotypes. The jokes discuss the negative side of being old, and it would
seem only natural if they were considered unacceptable. However, because they
are amusing, they serve as a coping mechanism for elderly people.

Melody Geddert’s paper, “Towards a Cross-Linguistic Analysis of Humour in
Academic Reading”, addresses the practical issue of challenges that English as
a Foreign Language (EFL) students face in recognising humour in academic
texts. The research addresses two questions: how much differences in humour
perception affect recognition of humour in an academic text, and to what
degree cultural immersion influences one’s perception of humour. Geddert
adopts a sociolinguistic perspective in her study of how humorous passages are
recognised by EFL students. The results of the experimental research
demonstrate that the perception of humour, to a large degree, depends on the
amount of time spent in a particular culture.
 
The third paper included in the first part of the volume is Viktor Raskin’s
“The Hidden Media Humor and Hidden Theory”. Raskin insists on the need for a
“full-fledged, well-defined, formal, scientific -- and computable -- theory of
humor” [Raskin, this volume, p.45]. He shows how the Ontological Theory of
Verbal Humour (OTVH) -- the next step in the development of a formal theory of
verbal humour, after the Script-based Semantic Theory of Humor (SSTH, see
[Raskin 1985]) and the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH, see [Attardo &
Raskin 1991]) -- can be used in the analysis of compound jokes distributed
through internet mailing lists. He also addresses issues related to the
logical complexity of jokes and the number of mental steps needed to
understand a joke. Sections 6 and 7 of the paper are particularly important,
as they offer examples of formal joke analysis, model the process of logical
inference, and enumerate the necessary components of the OTVH.

Part Two, “The Mechanisms of Humour in the Mass Media”, comprises five papers
discussing topics such as audiovisual humour, jokes used in online sports
commentaries, and commercial advertisements. In his paper, “Dialects at the
Service of Humour within the American Sitcom: A Challenge for the Dubbing
Translator”, Christos Arampatzis focuses on the practical task of translating
the non-standard (dialectal) varieties of the characters from the sitcoms
“Friends” and “Will & Grace” into Spanish. Arampatzis reviews existing
translation strategies and analyses a corpus of examples with the aim of
revealing social stereotypes transmitted through humorous imitation of speech
varieties. The data suggests that three types of strategies are used in
Spanish dubbings: levelling (standardisation) of dialects to the standard form
of the target language; paralinguistic compensation for non-standard speech
(e.g. through a manipulation of pitch and/or tone of voice); and
generalization involving references to more general culture-related concepts
(e.g. stereotypes about British behaviour).

The paper “Humour on the House: Interactional Construction of Metaphor in Film
Discourse”, written by Marta Dynel, addresses the issue of humorous effects
produced by creative metaphors. Novel metaphors are diaphoric by nature: they
are likely to result in humour since they violate the requirement of
similarity between the tenor and the vehicle. Because of their cognitive
complexity, creative metaphors can pose a challenge for the listener. Dynel’s
qualitative analysis of creative metaphors produced by Gregory House, the
protagonist of “House. M.D.”, suggests that the main function of figurative
language use is entertainment of the viewers; novel metaphors can remain
unavailable to other characters of the film.

In Milena Kozić’s paper, “Framing Communication as Play in the Sitcom:
Patterning the Verbal and the Nonverbal in Humour”, a playful mode (or a play
frame, in Kozić’s terms) of communication is the main issue under discussion.
The study combines linguistic, psychological and media studies perspectives to
illustrate how verbal and non-verbal semiotic resources signal play in
sitcoms. Though the genre of a sitcom itself is usually perceived as humorous,
the play frame can be marked by a whole cluster of non-verbal signals, such as
laughter from the audience, facial expressions of characters or paralinguistic
resources (e.g. tone of voice or an accent). Kozić also discusses the three
types of relations between verbal and non-verbal channels: complementation,
contradiction, and substitution.

In his paper, “Conversational Humour and Joint Fantasizing in Online
Journalism”, Jan Chovanec analyses online newspaper texts of live sports
commentaries with the aim of documenting ways of interactively constructing
humour. Both journalists and readers participate in the joint creation of
humorous unreal situations, or shared fantasies: journalists introduce the
play frame and conduct the interaction; and readers comment on the situation
and mock and tease each other. Chovanec concludes that in general, humour
makes live commentary entertaining and helps establish virtual in-group bonds.

Moeko Okada’s paper, “Wordplay as a Selling Strategy in Advertisements and
Sales Promotion”, is concerned with the issue of humorous plays on words as
linguistic tools that allow for promoting products and services. Okada
analyses British and Japanese advertisements containing wordplay on various
linguistic levels. The Japanese examples are especially interesting because
the texts relate advertised products to university entrance examinations and
the tradition of reading signs that exists in Japanese culture. Through
wordplay, the ads present goods (e.g. chocolate bars) as signs of good luck
that can support students during exams. Okada suggests that humorous wordplay
is an effective marketing strategy: the reference to a culturally important
situation helps increase sales and establish the status of products.

Part Three, “Mass Media Humour as Political and Social Critique”, includes
papers that adopt a social perspective on humour. The data used by the
contributors include spoof newspaper texts, billboard messages and gossip
magazines. Isabel Ermida’s paper, “News Satire in the Press: Linguistic
Construction of Humour in Spoof News Articles”, draws on data from the
Portuguese spoof newspaper “The Public Enemy” to analyse a specific type of
spoof journalism -- parodic news satire. In particular, the research focuses
on the linguistic aspects of the genre, as well as its intertextual and
comical components. While keeping the formal properties of news coverage
intact, parodic news satire mimics and mocks reality through exaggeration and
nonsense. Using Raskin’s Semantic Script Theory of Humour as a theoretical
basis, Ermida offers a linguistic model of parodic news satire. The model
includes three components: intertextual, critical and comical. This kind of
structure allows for an integrative description of the genre, which is applied
to spoof newspaper texts in the latter portions of the paper.

Maria Jesús Pinar Sanz addresses the issue of multimodal (verbal and visual)
messages conveyed by British political billboards in her paper “Ethnic Humour
and Political Advertizing”. The possibility of a humorous interpretation of
visual and textual metaphors used in political discourse is analysed from the
perspective of Relevance Theory. Jesús Pinar Sanz suggests that in political
discourse, humorous messages function as signs of superiority and highlight
stereotypes traditionally associated with particular groups of people. The
identification of ethnic stereotypes largely depends on background knowledge
about the targeted group. Jesús Pinar Sanz claims that multimodal metaphoric
messages invite a number of equally possible interpretations, and as such,
overall, it is apparent that the viewer’s ideology and background knowledge
play main roles in ethnic humour appreciation.

The final paper, “Humour as a Means of Popular Empowerment: The Discourse of
the French Gossip Magazines”, written by Jamil Dakhlia, is a study of texts
published in the French celebrity press, the consumers of which are primarily
teenagers and young adults. To analyze this kind of data, Dakhlia combines
socio-discursive and cultural approaches. The focal point of his study is the
paradox between the canons of beauty and glamour and the desire to make fun of
those who conform to these canons (e.g. pop stars or film stars). According to
Dakhila, there are two strategies of transmitting humour: one can laugh with
the stars or, alternatively, one can laugh at the stars. While the former
strategy normally takes the form of friendly teasing, the latter is usually
expressed through irony, mockery and sarcasm. Both strategies are aimed at
producing readers’ satisfaction and transmitting a message of equality.

EVALUATION

As a whole, the volume brings together very different papers, showing that
humour has its special functions in mass media discourse. These functions
range from being a mechanism of coping with difficulties to being a marketing
tool or a strategy for activating ethnic stereotypes.

The analysis of various genres of mass media communication is the strong point
of the volume. It shows how widespread and universal humour is. Also, the
issues of age-related or ethnic humour are very subtle, so in this respect,
analyses of public joking about age or ethnicity presented by Andrew and Jesús
Pinar Sanz are very important contributions to the field of humour research.

There are, however, a couple of shortcomings that I would like to mention.
Firstly, most papers focus on qualitative approaches and do not pay attention
to quantitative aspects of humour (which I think are important as well). As a
result, it is not quite clear how often people use a particular kind of humour
and how culturally significant it is (for instance, how frequently people use
age-related jokes in pass-along emails). Also, though Andrew claims that
ageist jokes are culture-specific (and I fully agree with the claim), she
never clearly specifies the culture in which the jokes analysed in the paper
circulate. The American origin of the jokes could be stated more explicitly.

Secondly, it is fair enough to say that mass media is a vast field of
discourse comprising a wide range of genres. However, it is not quite clear
why the editors included Geddert’s paper, which analyses the comprehension of
humour in academic reading materials in the EFL classroom and how academic
discourse relates to the domain of mass media discourse. This somehow takes
away from the coherence of the volume and questions the general intention of
the editors to concentrate on the interface between humour research and mass
media discourse analysis.

Overall, the volume is an important contribution to the field of humour
research. It will be of interest not only to those involved in verbal and
non-verbal humour research, but also to those interested in cultural studies.

REFERENCES

Attardo, Salvatore and Viktor Raskin (1991), Script Theory Revis(it)ed: Joke
Similarity and Joke Representation Model. In Humor 4 (3-4), 293-347.

Raskin, Viktor (1985), Semantic Mechanisms of Humor, Dordrecht: D. Reidel.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Ksenia Shilikhina is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Voronezh State
University, Russia. Her main research interests include semantics and
pragmatics of verbal humour with a special focus on verbal irony. Corpus
linguistics is another area of her interests. She teaches courses in
Linguistic Typology,
Applied and Computational Linguistics and Formal Models
in
 Linguistics.








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