Abstract

Incongruity and discrepancy have been perceived by a great many scholars to be at the heart of the generation of humor in narrative jokes. Against this view, I argue that defamiliarization and vagueness explain narrative jokes in a more comprehensive way. Vagueness involves the applicability of semantic units to given contexts. In jokes, we find that the applicability of motifs pertaining to the interpretation of a story is unclear. It is by separating the two levels of expression, narrative and discursive, and by examining these two levels of communication, both separately and as they interact, that I show how narrative jokes exploit vagueness. We find that jokes use Gricean implicature to shift the interpretation of the narrative from one level of expression to the other, often several times during a single joke. The audience has to separate the independent meanings existing at the narrative and discursive levels to perceive the implicature, since the implicature often exists at one level only. Until the audience accomplishes this separation, they do not perceive independent meanings: thus, vagueness. The applicability of the motifs is revealed at the punch line and always involves a stereotype. This qualifies the narrative joke as a defamiliarized narrative since vagueness is only used to hide the stereotype. Thus, the interpretation of the joke will depend on the audience's ability to infer meaning at one level or the other and to reorganize the new architecture of the motifs