ABSTRACT
This unit continues to examine humour which is caused by incongruity in language. Whereas Unit 2 looked at examples of double meaning in language, suggesting an image of language having a surface with something underneath, the work in this unit relies on the image of a net for the complex web of conventions that construct meaning. Some people even talk about language as a linguistic straitjacket. The German nonsense poet, Christian Morgenstern, used this sort of image to claim that we are imprisoned by language and that this causes our unsatis-factory relationship with other people, the society and the world in general. What we need to do, he said, is ‘smash language’ before we can learn to think properly. Some contemporary humour, like that of Monty Python, moves from wordplay towards nonsense and the absurd. But it is not a modern phenomenon. John O. Thompson points out that the French writer, Rabelais, used a comic form of speech called coq-a-l'âne (meaning ‘from rooster to ass’): ‘It is a genre of intentionally absurd verbal combinations, a form of completely liberated speech that ignores all norms, even those of elementary logic’ (Thompson, 1982). But it is extreme to claim that such humour is ‘completely liberated’ and ‘ignores all norms’. If language is ‘smashed’, is there any firm basis from which it can be examined? It should be possible to discuss how the existing conventions of language have been stretched to reveal wider possibilities for language and thought.
