Engaging Humor

1. Appropriate Incongruity Redux

1. Appropriate Incongruity Redux Humor, I have argued, depends upon the perception of an appropriate incongruity; that is, the perception of an appropriate relationship between categories that would ordinarily be regarded as incongruous.1 A brief example should suffice to illustrate the notion: “A man goes to see a psychiatrist. The doctor asks him, ‘What seems to be the problem?’ The patient says, ‘Doc, no one believes anything I say.’ The doctor replies, ‘You’re kidding!’” To understand this joke, one must apprehend both the appropriateness and the incongruity of the doctor’s response. The phrase “you’re kidding” is an expression of surprise and appropriately registers the doctor’s skepticism that the situation could be as severe as the patient describes.In some sense,it may even be regarded as a reflexive expression of reassurance. At the same time, “you’re kidding” registers the physician’s disbelief in the patient’s report and seems to affirm the very proposition that the physician seems to be denying— that no one believes anything the patient says. In other words, the doctor’s denial is incongruous in that it confirms the very problem about which the patient complains. Even the physician to whom the patient turns for help seems to doubt his veracity from the first moment of their encounter. It is worthwhile to note that while the linguistic formulation of the doctor ’s response in this joke is critical, the joke is a conceptual and not a linguistic one.2 It does not depend upon a precise and unalterable linguistic formula. Had the doctor responded, “That’s impossible,” or “Aren’t you exaggerating?” or “No way!” a joke would still be discernible that traded on the very same idea. Granted, the phrase “you’re kidding” is particularly felicitous in that it is familiar, colloquial, and has a certain semantic density that requires some work to unpack. It is not, however, essential to the cre- 2 engaging humor ation of the joke. Had the psychiatrist responded, “Well, we’d best get to the root of this problem,” there would have been no joke,and if he had responded , “Well, in that case you’d best pay me in advance,” the joke would have been different in that the reported untrustworthiness of the man would have been extended to the implied promise to pay for his treatment.3 While the phrase appropriate incongruity4 is recent and my own, the concept is not.In the late eighteenth century James Beattie proposed that “Laughter arises from the view of two or more inconsistent, unsuitable, or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as united in one complex object or assemblage.”5 This notion, that humor depends upon the perception of an incongruity that is resolved or made sense of, has come to be known as the incongruity-resolution theory of humor.6 While the notion of appropriate incongruity certainly resembles incongruity-resolution theory, there are two points on which they may be distinguished. The first is that the term appropriate incongruity does not suggest that an incongruity is resolved. The incongruity remains, even though points of connection between the incongruous categories are discovered.A measure of appropriateness is recognized between the juxtaposed domains,but incongruity and appropriateness characterize a psychologically valid rather than a logically valid relation. In the joke about the psychiatrist and his patient, nothing is resolved; the doctor’s expression of reassurance at the same time exacerbates the patient’s problem .Both effects of the phrase remain in force.While one sense of the phrase may be secondary to the other in a temporal sense, it is not secondary in a psychological sense. The incongruity and the appropriateness are parallel constructions. The second distinction between appropriate incongruity and incongruityresolution theory is that incongruity-resolution theory implies a temporal order such that an incongruity is first recognized and its resolution (or the appropriateness of that incongruity) follows.7 Appropriate incongruity does not presume the order of recognition.An incongruity may first be registered and then followed by the sense of its appropriateness, or a seemingly appropriate relationship may be supplanted by a sense of its incongruity. I would argue that in the joke about the psychiatrist and his patient that the appropriate sense of “you’re kidding” is registered before the incongruous sense. That is, the audience of the joke first perceives the phrase as an appropriate expression of the doctor’s surprise and concern before recognizing that the phrase identi...