Humour's Everywhere — Salvatore Attardo

A scholar and a teacher: Tell us briefly about yourself and your work.

I am a researcher and teacher at a small, by American standards, public university in East Texas. I have been studying the linguistics of humor since the early 1980s and I have published a few books on the topic. Google Scholar will provide a list in no time. Don’t trust the Wikipedia page about me: it’s not very good.

What is your understanding of "humour" proper; or, at least, of those features thereof to which you have paid the keenest attention? And how does your work merge with, or is influenced by, your quotidian encounters with a potentially ubiquitous and ambiguous phenomenon such as humour? 

I have been using “humor” as a technical term since my earliest work in English (1988), following Raskin’s definition as an umbrella term, encompassing programmatically anything related to the laughable, ridicule, the comic, etc. Of course, in my native languages the “comic” is the unmarked term, but that has made the technical use actually easier, as I am always reminded of the technical nature of the term and so I am not tempted to “drift’’ from it. I have tried to stay away as much as possible from the kind of discussion about the differences between wit and humor or irony and sarcasm. I find them pointless. Ultimately, we have to recognize that these terms are emic terms, created by the speakers, and so they are not precise, watertight distinctions.

The ubiquity of humor never ceases to amaze me, and I find it quite stimulating: I remember many years ago listening to the talk between the pilot and the control tower of the airport we were departing from and to my amazement, the pilot slipped in a joke. So, even when there are literally hundreds of lives at stake, people find the time to say something funny. That’s just amazing.

About the ambiguity of humor, I have held for a long time a quite unpopular view: in a 2002 paper about irony, but the argument applies across the board, I presented a real-life example of irony and commented: “all indirect, non-literal discourse is based largely or in part, on abductive, hence, non-monotonic and open-ended, inferential processes. Therefore, all these modes derive their indeterminacy from the indeterminacy of abduction (i.e., we can never be sure that a given meaning is exactly what was implicated, ours is a best guess). Furthermore, we can make another significant step, and note that since the meaning of [the irony] is undetermined, significant leeway is given to its interpretation and eventual classification by [the hearer]. (…) Any attempt at disentangling this cluster of implicatures would be quixotic.” (Attardo, 2002, p. 165)

The scholarly literature gives the opposite impression, because scholars pick examples that are clear, obviously enough. Nobody gets tenure by saying “This joke must mean something, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is…” So, we pick examples that are clear, uncomplicated, univocous, as much as possible. For example, the infamous “doctor’s wife” joke in Raskin already allows a few different interpretations, but at least it is clear what is going on (i.e., there’s one reading that involves sex while the other does not). Humor that occurs in real conversations is a lot less clear and open to many interpretations.

Thinkers as different as Nietzsche, Judith Shklar, and Derrida have argued that cruelty is baffling because, even if we want to eliminate it from human life, it always finds a way to re-emerge therein, almost as if it were part and parcel of the same human life. Has cruelty ever played a significant role in your work's purview, and/or your understanding of social and cultural phenomena? 

Cruelty played no part in my research, until I started writing my 2023 book. I consider it a sign of the immense privilege that I lucked into by being born in a time where education, Phd-level education to be clear, was affordable enough that a lower-middle class household like my parents’, could afford to send their children to get degrees and not go bankrupt. If you add all the other privileges that the lottery of birth endowed me with (parents who loved us, no history of mental health issues in the family, male, sort-of-white, etc.), I was able to have a blessed life in which I did not have to worry about someone trying to kill me or my child, conquer my country manu militari, etc. So, because of this, I could afford to consider cruelty as a topic outside the domain of my interests.

Then I started writing my book on how the internet changed humor and the duty of accuracy in reporting forced me to address the darker corners of the internet, where Nazi propaganda passes for humor, and antisemitism, misogyny, and white suprematism are everywhere. It was not a fun experience. I can say it darkened my view of humanity. To be fair, ten years in administration in academe had already caused me to consider that homo homini lupus was far too optimistic of a position. But I digress.

There is an essay, by Adam Serwer, by the title of The Cruelty is the Point, which describes well the 180-degree turn that American culture took roughly at the time it went online. In the Blues Brothers and Indiana Jones, the bad guys are Nazis, a pop-culture echo of the Allied war of liberation. Not anymore. Now cruelty is a signal of affiliation; it lets the right people know that you are willing to kill a puppy, so you will have no qualms separating children from their parents or putting them into a cage. If you don’t get the reference above, count your blessings and do not look it up. Trust me on this one.

On a side note, I am grateful to you for drawing my attention to this theme. it is true that humor studies have a “positive” skew: we tend to focus on the fun, life-affirming stuff, and forget the darker side of it.

Are there two or three works that, when it comes to addressing any of the themes fuelling my own philosophical and literary production, you would describe as true "classics" and, therefore, advise the reader of this blog to familiarise themselves with — the way, say, Plato's Republic or Machiavelli's Prince can be said to be "classics" in politics? And are there any works from the past ten years that you would equally recommend? 

Humor studies have a set of canonical classics: from Plato, Aristotle, and Quintilian, to Freud and Bergson. I am ambivalent on the subject. Of course they are important and one should read them, but the real cutting-edge research has moved beyond their work decades ago. Freud is a good example: his analysis of the mechanisms of humor was groundbreaking, at the time, but has been shown to reduce to linguistic mechanisms that exist outside of humor. Metaphorically, you could say that modern linguistics “folded” those descriptions into its conceptual apparatus. The Freud example is only just that: an example. But the point stands more broadly: in short, the classics have now historical interest only. I would not rule out that one may come up with some sort of brilliant re-reading of some aspects here and there, and I am sure that there’s still much to be said about their ideas, but the field has moved on, at least as far as linguistics goes.

Of course there is a set of major works in the 1980s and early 1990s, by Apte, Raskin, Oring, Davies, Morreall and others who have defined the field. They remain central to our thinking. They are such classics, that I will not bother providing references. Now, of late there is a tendency to critique their stances on various issues, such as for example whether humor causes harm or is a sign of malice. On the one hand, I find that natural: historically, new movements within the history of ideas define themselves in opposition to their predecessors. So, I’m not surprised. On the other hand, I find the lack of historical perspective annoying: of course people fifty or sixty years ago behaved and said things that are embarrassing to us today. Shakespeare represents Jews and women very negatively. Was he a misogynistic anti-semite? He was a man of his time. I am sure in a couple of generations scholars will be tut-tutting about us.

Then there is a set of hidden classics. Here a good example is the work of Tajfel. He was a social psychologist and, in a nutshell, he theorized prejudice and he is responsible for the in-group/out-group distinction. He has had a massive influence on the field of humor studies, even though he probably would have been surprised by this fact.

Finally, there are classics we’d do well to forget: a case in point is Koestler’s Act of Creation. It’s a clever essay, mind you, but all it provides humor scholars with is a metaphor, and not a very enlightening one at that. The field has grown past that. It’s time to let it go.

Within the past ten years we’ve seen what I have labeled the “discursive turn” in linguistics. I would recommend two books, Tsakona (2020) and my own Attardo (2020) on the subject. Another area where there has been an upsurge of work is the ethics of humor, here I would recommend Wilk and Gimbel (2024), which is an eminently reasonable model.

References

Attardo, S. (2020). The linguistics of humor: An introduction. Oxford university press.

Attardo, S. (2023). Humor 2.0. How the internet changed humor. Anthem press.

Tsakona, V. (2020). Recontextualizing humor: Rethinking the analysis and teaching of humor (Vol. 4). Walter de Gruyter.

Wilk, T., & Gimbel, S. (2024). In on the Joke: The ethics of humor and comedy. Walter de Gruyter.

N.B. You can read more about and by Salvatore Attardo here: https://salvatoreattardo.substack.com