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 JOKES
- A joke is a short story or ironic depiction of a situation
communicated with the intent of being humorous.
These
jokes will normally have a punch line
that will end the sentence to make it humorous. A joke can also be a single
phrase or statement, such as with sarcasm. Joke can also be used as a slang
term for a person or thing which is not taken seriously by others in general
or is known as being a failure.
A practical joke or
prank differs from a spoken one in that the major component of the humour is
physical rather than verbal (for example placing salt in the sugar bowl).
Jokes are typically for the
entertainment of friends and onlookers. The desired response is generally
laughter; when this does not happen the joke is said to have "fallen flat".
The joke's content (meaning) is not what provokes the laugh, it just makes
the salience of the joke and provokes a smile. What makes us laugh is the
joke mechanism. Milton Berle demonstrated this with a classic theater
experiment in the 1950s: if during a series of jokes you insert phrases that
are not jokes, but with the same rhythm, the audience laughs anyway. A
classic is the ternary rhythm, with three beats: introduction, premise,
antithesis (with the antithesis being the punch line).
In regards to the Milton Berle experiment, they can be taken to demonstrate
the concept of "breaking context" or "breaking the pattern". It is not
necessarily the rhythm that caused the audience to laugh, but the disparity
between the expectation of a "joke" and being instead given a non-sequitur
"normal phrase." This normal phrase is, itself, unexpected, and a type of
punchline.
Conclusions
When a technically good joke is
referred changing it with paraphrasing, it is not laughable any more; this
is because the paraphrase, changing some term or moving it within the
sentence, breaks the joke mechanism (its vividness, brevity and rhythm), and
its power and effectiveness are lost. Douglas Adams described sentences
where the joke word is the final word as "comically weighted." This saves
the "payoff" until the last possible moment, allowing the expectation for
surprise to reach its highest point, while the mind is more firmly rooted in
the pattern established by the rest of the sentence.
In the comic field plays the 'economy of ideative expenditure'; in other
words excessive energy is wasted or action-essential energy is saved. The
profound meaning of a comic gag or a comic joke is "I'm a child"; the comic
deals with the clumsy body of the child.
Laurel and Hardy are a classic example. An individual laughs because he
recognizes the child that is in himself. In clowns stumbling is a childish
tempo. In the comic, the visual gags may be translated into a joke. For
example in Side Effects (By Destiny Denied story) by Woody Allen:
“ "My father used to wear loafers," she confessed. "Both on the same foot".
”
The typical comic technique is the disproportion.
Wit
In the wit field plays the "economy of censorship expenditure" (Freud
literally calls it "the economy of psychic expenditure".); usually
censorship prevents some 'dangerous ideas' from reaching the conscious mind,
or helps us avoid saying everything that comes to mind; adversely, the wit
circumvents the censorship and brings up those ideas. Different wit
techniques allow one to express them in a funny way. The profound meaning
behind a wit joke is "I have dangerous ideas". An example from Woody Allen:
“ I contemplated suicide again - this time by inhaling next to an insurance
salesman. ”
Or, when a bagpipe player was asked "how do you play that thing," his answer
was:
“ Well. ”
Wit is a branch of rhetoric, and there are about 200 techniques (technically
they are called tropes, a particular kind of figure of speech) that can be
used to make jokes.
Irony can be seen as belonging to this field.
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