Leticia Neria PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

serve as the basic vehicle for the humour of an event’. 17 William Hazlitt points out that
laughter ‘consiste en aquello que es el grado supremo de lo contrario, no sólo a la
costumbre, sino al sentido y a la razón’. 18 Critchley, following Kant, adds that
incongruity is when we expect one thing and something different emerges. 19
During a joke or a comic performance involving incongruity, we participate as
spectators, contrasting the situation with our own experience, enabling us to perceive
the incongruity of the scene, and recognise the comedy. ‘Humour is produced by a
disjunction between the way things are and the way they are represented in a joke’. 20 A
familiar image of incongruity is a clown. Clown’s features do not match what we
consider to be a normal person. Also, clown’s movements and behaviour are out of
proportion. Once we recognise that the character is illogical, then we perceive the
comedy and are ready to laugh.
In the joke about the fish that opens this section there are different incongruities.
We know that fish do not play tennis. But if we take the question seriously, our answers
might be that fish do not have arms, there is no tennis underwater, and so forth. The
‘obvious’ answers – the real ones – are not the right ones for the purposes of the joke.
Kant explains that ‘laughter is the result of an expectation which ends in nothing’, 21 that
is, if the world as we know it is disrupted, we are witnessing humour. Eco calls this a
broken frame. In either terminology, they refer to an incongruity as something which
distorts our regular thought while bringing us pleasure. I explain this next.
17
Paul E. McGhee, Humor, Its Origin and Development (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company.
1979), p. 10.
18
William Hazlitt, ‘Sobre el ingenio y el humor (Conferencias sobre los escritores cómicos ingleses,
1818)’, trans. by Javier Alcoriza y Antonio Lastra, Cuadernos de Información y Comunicación, 7 (2002),
69-94 (p. 74).
[accessed 18 December 2007]
19
Critchley, On Humour, p. 1-3.
20
Ibid., p. 1.
21
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. by James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1952; repr. 1980), p. 199.
17