It's a Funny Thing, Humour ed. by Anthony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (review)

Book Reviews Anthony J. Chapman, and Hugh C. Foot, eds., It's a Funny Thing, Humour. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1977. 518 p. The "Preface" lists a dozen disciplines in which participants work; however , no linguists were represented, and nearly half of the contributors represented here are psychologists or psychiatrists. From a literary/humanistic perspective, the book is disappointing. It begins well, with an essay by Harvey Mindess, "If Hamlet Had Had A Sense of Humour," which contends that "a humourous view ofourselves. . .may. . .transform the very texture of our lives, rescuing them both from horror and banality by its refusal to buy into either a tragic or a flatly objective outlook." Mindess then uses the example of Hamlet to make a good case for his theory. One recalls, in reading it, such functional views of humor as that of R. P. McMurphy. One wishes the Mindess essay were longer; much more could have been done with the topic. Many essays later, one wishes it had been much longer. Even when the titles would seem to promise relevant, provocative essays (an entire section of eight essays, for instance, is devoted to "Ethnic Humour "), they nearly all, over and again, choose statistical quantitative, (literally ) graphic, formulaic methods of perceiving and analyzing the material. Thus we are provided with a means of analyzing just how it is that a cartoon with its caption is funnier than the same cartoon without its caption. The phenomenon is known, I believe, as "Incongruity and Partial Resolution" and is represented, I think, by "R (I,) + I1 + R(I2) + I2" . . or something like that. Likewise, this is a profile of a joke's having achieved success: "Fulfillment : When all the above rules are observed, where relevant, the utterance of JU is the clue to M and hence is the token of A's intention to achieve X. The intention is fulfilled if B's laughter is triggered by JU and not adventitiously." (Come to think of it, perhaps this is a funny subject.) In short, this book explains right out of existence that which it was attempting to explain. One departs from it, recalling E. B. White's famous one-liner on the subject: "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." KEN PELLOW, University of Colorado in Colorado Springs Walter A. Cook, Case Grammar: Development of the Matrix Model (19701978 ). Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1979. 223 p. Implicitly, Cook's collection of essays on case grammar is a challenge to the dismissai of Fillmore's proposals by Janet Dean Fodor in her 1977 Semantics: Theories of Meaning in Generative Grammar. Fodor feels that the generative semantics position that there is no abstract level of syntax that is not identical to the semantic lever has overtaken and incorporated case grammar. Cook presents the general outlines of this correspondence in paper 10, his 1973 "Case Grammar and Generative Semantics," where he outlines ways in which case grammar frames may be explanatorily 272VOL. 34, NO 4 (FALL 1980) ...