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Next: Elephant jokes. Up: Phenomena Previous: Phenomena

Examples of jokes

Set jokes are actually among the best understood of humor phenomena (Raskin 1985, inter alia). Many think of jokes alone when they think of humor, and a paper on the theory of humor might therefore be expected to spend most of its ink on analysing a sequence of jokes. I will not conduct yet another exercise in joke analysis, which has been raised to a science, largely compatible with the present theory (Raskin 1985, Attardo & Raskin 1992, inter alia), as discussed in the previous section. But both in order to provide a demonstration that this theory can be used to explore why particular jokes are funny, and in order to show how jokes' not being funny also fits in to the theory, a brief discussion of both inoffensive (in this case, elephant-) jokes and offensive jokes, is not out of order.



 

Tom Veatch
1999-07-15