ABSTRACT
In his discussion of gags and jokes, Jerry Palmer points out that there are two principal sources of comic surprise: first, the sudden contradiction of expectations founded in the narrative itself; and secondly, ‘the contradiction of knowledge, or values, or expectations about the outside world that the audience may be assumed to derive from their ordinary everyday experience’.1 The examples he gives of the latter include the ‘indignities of farce’ (the pratfall, the pie in the face, and so on), which contradict our cultural beliefs and expectations concerning the body as the locus of human dignity and, more generally, the nature of events and the causal connections between them:
The issues of predictability and human dignity both refer us to the allied concepts of decorum and verisimilitude. Decorum means what is proper or fitting, verisimilitude what is probable or likely. Both concepts therefore centrally concern the relationship between representations, cultural knowledge, opinion, and beliefs, and, hence, audience expectations. The field of knowledge, opinion, and belief as a whole can, however, be divided into the broadly socio-cultural, the specifically aesthetic and the even more specifically generic, thus giving rise to at least two kinds of verisimilitude, as Tzvetan Todorov has pointed out:
These two kinds of verisimilitude thus give rise to two kinds of decorum: one which consists in respecting the norms
embodied in ‘public opinion’, and another which consists in respecting the rules of a genre or form. Thus it was both decorous and verisimilitudinous, proper and believable, to endow aristocrats, courtiers, and kings with dignified actions and weighty thoughts in a Renaissance play, just as in postwar European Art Cinema these attributes were more appropriate to Angst-ridden bourgeois intellectuals. It was at one time proper, and likely, that epics would be written in a high style, and that operas would consist of ‘extraordinary and supernatural adventures’,4 just as now it is proper for pornography and slapstick to be filmed in a ‘low’ style, and likely that characters in musicals will suddenly burst into song.
