Why write this book?

Anyone interested in semantics and pragmatics, the way meanings are coded in language and produced or interpreted in context, notices that jokes exemplify various kinds of ambiguity or risk to meaning. Of particular interest, as an object of study, is the question of what knowledge is necessary in order to understand a joke. This might be knowledge of the language code (a matter mostly of semantics) or background knowledge for making the inferences necessary for getting the joke (a matter of pragmatics). Teaching semantics and pragmatics over the years, I realised that jokes can be analysed by using semantic and pragmatic theory, an attempt which prompts one to question and develop theory when the joke is difficult to explain. But the converse is also true: jokes might be a useful way into teaching semantics and pragmatics.

At the most banal level the present book uses jokes as a peg on which to hang theoretical concepts, but it aims to achieve more than that. At least jokes might function as a mnemonic – helping students remember the theoretical concepts through remembering and enjoying the joke. Moreover, for students for whom English is not a first language, humour might be a useful pedagogic tool in developing competence (O’Mara, Waller and Todman 2002). “The use of humour in the classroom has been shown (e.g. Ziv 1979) to increase ease of learning and to be a good pedagogical resource overall (Gentilhomme 1992)” (Attardo 1994: 211). But most crucially, distinct from other books in the series Key Topics in Semantics and Pragmatics, it explores the interface between humour theory and linguistic theories of various kinds, especially the pragmatic Relevance Theory, and the psychologically tinged corpus/text-linguistic theory known as priming theory. It does, however, exploit other linguistic approaches quite eclectically, touching on systemic functional linguistics, speech act theory, conversational analysis and genre theory. I hope that, above all in Chapter 11, it might contribute to linguistic theory in its own right.