ABSTRACT
The authors focus on the linguistic and persuasive dimensions of humor, drawing on relevant research from humor studies. They outline the three currently leading theories of humor (superiority, psychic release, and incongruity) as well as the rhetorical models of humor each of these theories presents or implies, attending particularly to humor’s rhetorical functions at various levels of the language (phonology, lexis, grammar, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse). They examine the effects of engaging in different types of wordplay and punning (e.g., phonological, morphological, graphological), using various tropes and figures of speech for humorous ends (e.g., hyperbole, litotes, metaphor, parallelism, antithesis), leveraging other sentence-level features and genres (e.g., grammatical ambiguity, one-liners, advertising slogans) for comedic effect, and playing on areas of social ambiguity and contradiction by fusing incongruous semantic scripts. Considerations of the final two levels (pragmatics and discourse) includes broader issues, genres, and situations. Throughout their overview and analysis (and in alignment with more recent feminist contributions to humor studies), the authors are particularly attentive to gender because of gendered jokes in theories of humor and because of the social and rhetorical position humor has put women in – that is, in the role of either the passive audience or the object/butt of the joke.
