Abstract
In this paper we treat humorous situations as a series of events underpinned by topoi, principles of reasoning recognised within a socio-cultural community. We claim that humorous effect in jokes and other discourse is often created by the juxtaposition of topoi evoked. A prerequisite for this is that there is a shift where the interpreter of the discourse updates their information state with regard to a second topos being evoked. This view of humour is consistent with an incremental analysis of dialogue, and we therefore argue that interaction is central both for humour creation and interpretation. We point out some different ways in which topoi are juxtaposed in humorous dialogues as well as in jokes published in social media or in joke books, and take jokes from the coronavirus pandemic as an example because this makes lots of new topoi available and therefore offers the opportunity of creating novel jokes based on the juxtaposition of the new and existing topoi. We explore how the mechanisms of inference in dialogue can be applied to humour through the four elements from our title: old (existing), new (not previously existing), borrowed (associated with a different situation) and taboo (inappropriate in the context).
Highlights
The title of this paper is, we think, mildly humorous
Thinking of events generating humorous effects in terms of topoi rather than scripts makes possible a more fine grained analysis suitable for humorous interactions occurring in spontaneous situations not strongly associated with particular scripts. We argue that such situations, where interlocutors involved in dialogue create humorous effects by juxtaposing contrasting topoi or evoking topoi which relate in an unexpected way with the situation at hand, are the origin of the scripted situation types often drawn on in jokes
We have shown that to understand the humour you need to have access to the old topos—which you may not if you come from Europe, where feet are not used to describe either height or distance
Summary
We claim that the humour involves taking something known (the advice to brides to wear or carry something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue) and transposing it from one type of situation to another. In this case, that is from the type of situation where a wedding is taking place to the type of situation where humour is being analysed. The creation of new humour often reuses something pre-existing in this way and something about the mapping from one situation type to another creates the humorous effect. We argue that much or all of human creativity, ranging from creativity in the arts to the creation of novel sentences in everyday speech, makes use of well-known components that others will recognise and adapts them to a new situation
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