ABSTRACT
Given the analogy between linguistic description and joke description put forward in Section 2.3, it is interesting to consider what would count as a structural description of a joke. A grammarian working within a particular linguistic framework can annotate a sentence to indicate what structural constituents or abstract properties that sentence has, thereby making explicit all the linguistically interesting aspects of the sentence. It would be interesting to devise a comparable tabulation of descriptive statements available to a joke-theorist for stating the humour-relevant components of a joke. The GTVH (Chapter 6) offers exactly such a scheme – a joke is a six-tuple of parameters – but we will consider possible alternatives.
