Joking Asides: The Theory, Analysis, and Aesthetics of Humor by Elliott Oring (review)

Folklorists and humor scholars live in separate theoretical worlds, for the most part. Folklorists have remained largely unaware of recent theoretical and experimental research results in humor studies—as if humor theory ended with Freud—while humor scholars, most of whom have disciplinary homes in linguistics, psychology, or literary studies, have neglected folk humor and rarely consider jokes as performances or as historical and aesthetic objects. With Joking Asides, Elliott Oring continues his almost one-man project of bridging this disciplinary gap, a project begun with his earlier volumes Engaging Humor (University of Illinois Press, 2003) and Jokes and Their Relations (University Press of Kentucky, 1992). Five of the essays in this volume were previously published, but the remaining seven are entirely new.

The first half of the book is devoted to the exposition and critique of five theories of humor, some familiar but others not, beginning with the chapter "What Freud Actually Said about Jokes." Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; Norton, 1960) is a true classic in the sense that everyone has heard of it, but few have actually read it. Whether or not he is cited directly, Freud's theories underlie the explanation, used almost universally in folkloristics and in any number of other fields, that jokes express unconscious fears and aggressions. Oring applies a close reading to Freud's theory of jokes to show, quite convincingly, that it has been largely misunderstood and misapplied. The usual argument is that, like dreams, jokes express unconscious thoughts that are aggressive or obscene but inaccessible to the conscious mind. Freud theorized that dream-work hides unconscious wishes from conscious awareness, whereas, in Oring's words, "when people produce a hostile joke, they usually know quite well what they are doing" (p. 11). In other words, joke-work provides only the thinnest of disguises, really just distractions and excuses that permit the underlying joke thoughts to be expressed in polite society. This chapter alone is worth the price of the book; anyone who would apply a Freudian (or Dundesian) analysis of jokes should first read and engage with this cogent argument.

For humor scholars, the runner-up to Freud in popularity is the semantic script theory of humor and its longer incarnation, the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), both of which describe the mechanism of verbal jokes as lying in the conjunction of opposed semantic scripts. In chapter 2, Oring offers a careful critique of the failures of the GTVH, arguing instead for his own formulation that the basis of humor is a structure of ideas that he calls "appropriate incongruity," where the joke presents an apparent incongruity that is nevertheless appropriate, if only spuriously so. Blending Theory, which stems from cognitive linguistics and argues that humor arises from the blending of two metaphorical domains, is subjected to the Oring treatment in chapter 3, and False-Belief Theory gets its turn in chapter 5. The latter proposes that humor arises from the recognition of false beliefs that are thereby eliminated to evolutionary advantage. Neither Blending Theory nor False-Belief Theory has won general acceptance in humor studies, and if Oring's critique gets a wide reading, these theories are even more unlikely ever to be accepted.

A fifth approach, the Benign Violation Theory (BVT), may put up more of a fight, if only because it considers the emotional rather than the cognitive aspect of jokes. Benign Violation Theory holds that humor arises from an emotional incongruity rather than a cognitive one: something is funny if it is perceived as a violation of some kind but is nevertheless able to be viewed as normal or benign. Oring's critiques of the theory are persuasive, especially the observation that it attributes feelings to joke tellers and audiences that cannot be verified independently. Although he does allow that emotional responses can amplify or reduce humor, Oring stands with those who find that...