ABSTRACT
Semiotics, the science of signs, has some interesting insights to offer about humor. This chapter discusses some of the more important semiotic concepts and uses them to analyze humorous texts. It considers such things as the structure of jokes, the relation of humor to code violations, and the various kinds of parody that exist. A sign, the semioticians tell us, is anything that can be used to stand for or substitute for something else. What semiotics concerns itself with, in essence, is how meaning is produced. The term semiotics is the one most commonly used now for the study of signs. From a semiotic point of view, humor can be thought of as involving some kind of a code violation. This notion can be thought of as a semiotic variation on the concept of incongruity.
