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98-457: The work is generally considered to be the easiest to understand of Dōgen's due to its concrete examples and the infrequent use of allusion , metaphor , and word play characteristic of his other writings. According to Shōhaku Okumura , a modern Zen priest, the fundamental message in Dōgen's talks is the importance of seeing impermanence . Dōgen also stresses the importance of monastic practice with

196-456: A 20th-century American artist most famous for his pop-art images of Campbell soup cans and of Marilyn Monroe , commented on the explosion of media coverage by saying, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Today, when someone receives a great deal of media attention for something fairly trivial, they are said to be experiencing their " 15 minutes of fame "; that is an allusion to Andy Warhol's famous remark. According to

294-643: A bar ), absurd characters ( wind-up dolls ), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour ( knock-knock jokes ). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow , Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle . These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within

392-539: A bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab . It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from

490-447: A certain character. Some people are naturally better performers than others; however, anyone can tell a joke because the comic trigger is contained in the narrative text and punchline. A joke poorly told is still funny, unless errors or omissions make the intended relationship between the narrative and the punchline unintelligible. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response

588-543: A collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos ", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda , "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on

686-491: A compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny. Following its linguistic framing

784-466: A critic might not find illuminating. Addressing such issues is an aspect of hermeneutics . William Irwin remarks that allusion moves in only one direction: "If A alludes to B, then B does not allude to A. The Bible does not allude to Shakespeare, though Shakespeare may allude to the Bible." Irwin appends a note: "Only a divine author, outside of time, would seem capable of alluding to a later text." This

882-494: A decorative device. Allusion is an economical device, a figure of speech that uses a relatively short space to draw upon the ready stock of ideas, cultural memes or emotion already associated with a topic. Thus, an allusion is understandable only to those with prior knowledge of the covert reference in question, a mark of their cultural literacy . The origin of allusion is from the Latin noun allusionem "a playing with,

980-476: A dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such

1078-399: A folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form. The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by

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1176-510: A functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour. Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp

1274-541: A group of practitioners, practicing for the sake of the Buddhadharma alone, gainless zazen , intentional poverty , and taking steps to benefit others. Several different versions of the Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki exist. The most widely read was first published in 1770 by Menzan Zuihō , a highly influential Zen scholar monk. This text is known as the rufu-bon , which means "popular version". A second, older version

1372-400: A how-to guide on creating your own index. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems

1470-425: A joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be

1568-404: A local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in

1666-467: A pillar of salt is usually a reference to someone who unwisely chooses to look back once they have begun on a course of action or to someone who disobeys an explicit rule or command. In Greek mythology , Cassandra , the daughter of Trojan king Priam , was loved by Apollo , who gave her the gift of prophecy . When Cassandra later angered Apollo, he altered the gift so that her prophecies, while true, would not be believed. Thus, her accurate warnings to

1764-471: A priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line ), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature. Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns , which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at

1862-462: A punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes , slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles , jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings;

1960-417: A re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in

2058-417: A reference to", from alludere "to play, jest, make fun of", a compound of ad "to" + ludere "to play". Recognizing the point of allusion's condensed riddle also reinforces cultural solidarity between the maker of the allusion and the hearer: their shared familiarity with allusion bonds them. Ted Cohen finds such a "cultivation of intimacy" to be an essential element of many jokes . Some aspect of

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2156-476: A search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes". However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for

2254-418: A single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices . Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as

2352-465: A single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet . Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in

2450-522: A social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking

2548-490: A surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia , who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that " conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out." The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover ),

2646-744: A time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation. A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes , which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions ( viola jokes ), catastrophes, settings ( …walks into

2744-466: Is a figure of speech , in which an object or circumstance from an unrelated context is referred to covertly or indirectly. It is left to the audience to make a direct connection. Where the connection is directly and explicitly stated (as opposed to indirectly implied) by the author, it is instead usually termed a reference . In the arts, a literary allusion puts the alluded text in a new context under which it assumes new meanings and denotations . It

2842-705: Is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of

2940-441: Is a device for the simultaneous activation of two texts. The activation is achieved through the manipulation of a special signal: a sign (simple or complex) in a given text characterized by an additional larger "referent." This referent is always an independent text. The simultaneous activation of the two texts thus connected results in the formation of intertextual patterns whose nature cannot be predetermined. ... The "free" nature of

3038-601: Is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare , the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of

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3136-437: Is also called an homage . It may even be sensed that real events have allusive overtones, when a previous event is inescapably recalled by a current one. "Allusion is bound up with a vital and perennial topic in literary theory, the place of authorial intention in interpretation", William Irwin observed, in asking "What is an allusion?" Without the hearer or reader comprehending the author's intention, an allusion becomes merely

3234-422: Is an allusion. By metonymy one aspect of a person or other referent is selected to identify it, and it is this shared aspect that makes a sobriquet evocative: for example, "the city that never sleeps" is a sobriquet of (and therefore an allusion to) New York. An allusion may become trite and stale through unthinking overuse, devolving into a mere cliché , as is seen in some of the sections below. Andy Warhol ,

3332-582: Is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour : "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu , was from Ancient Egypt c.  1600 BC : "How do you entertain

3430-932: Is called the Chōenji-bon , or "Chōen-ji version" after the temple in Aichi Prefecture where it was discovered in 1942 by Dōshū Ōkubo. This version was not available to the public until it was published by Chikuma Shobō with a modern Japanese translation in 1963. Reiho Masunaga produced an English translation in 1975. Uchiyama, Kosho (2018), Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom: Three Fascicles from Shobogenzo with Commentary , translated by Okumura, Shōhaku ; Wright, Daitsu Tom, Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, ISBN   978-1614293026 Eihei Dogen, Shohaku Okumura trans. (2022), Dōgen's Shōbōgenzo Zuimonki: The New Annotated Translation―Also Including Dogen's Waka Poetry with Commentary, Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, ISBN 978-1614295730 Allusion Allusion

3528-427: Is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded. There are many types of joke books in print today;

3626-450: Is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour . Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret]

3724-588: Is judged to be insane. However, anyone who does not want to fly dangerous missions is obviously sane; thus, there is no way to avoid flying the missions. Later in the book the old woman in Rome explains that Catch-22 means "They can do whatever they want to do." This refers to the theme of the novel in which the authority figures consistently abuse their powers, leaving the consequences to those under their command. In common speech, "catch-22" has come to describe any absurd or no-win situation . The poetry of T. S. Eliot

3822-456: Is just simple entertainment for a group of friends. The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour

3920-436: Is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces

4018-508: Is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke ; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver

Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki - Misplaced Pages Continue

4116-449: Is not possible to predetermine the nature of all the new meanings and inter-textual patterns that an allusion will generate. Literary allusion is closely related to parody and pastiche , which are also "text-linking" literary devices . In a wider, more informal context, an allusion is a passing or casually short statement indicating broader meaning. It is an incidental mention of something, either directly or by implication, such as "In

4214-542: Is often described as "allusive", because of his habit of referring to names, places or images that may only make sense in the light of prior knowledge. This technique can add to the experience, but for the uninitiated can make Eliot's work seem dense and hard to decipher. The most densely allusive work in modern English may be Finnegans Wake by James Joyce . Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson wrote A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944) that unlocked some of Joyce's most obscure allusions. The literary allusion

4312-487: Is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect. Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around

4410-406: Is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in

4508-583: Is the Thompson Motif Index , which separates tales into their individual story elements . This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on

4606-524: Is the basis for Christian readings of Old Testament prophecy , which asserts that passages are to be read as allusions to future events due to Jesus's revelation in Luke 24:25–27 . Allusion differs from the similar term intertextuality in that it is an intentional effort on the author's part. The success of an allusion depends in part on at least some of its audience "getting" it. Allusions may be made increasingly obscure, until at last they are understood by

4704-463: The Book of Genesis , chapter 19, God destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, but Lot , the nephew of Abraham , was given time to escape with his family before the destruction. God commanded Lot and his family not to look back as they fled. Lot's wife disobeyed and looked back, and she was immediately turned into a pillar of salt as punishment for her disobedience. An allusion to Lot's wife or to

4802-574: The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use

4900-591: The printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press . This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini , first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on

4998-498: The 19th century ( Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne , and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes , listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of

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5096-468: The 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library

5194-528: The Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it

5292-498: The Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists. As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in

5390-487: The English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it." A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as

5488-540: The Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists

5586-524: The Lock or T. S. Eliot 's The Waste Land . In Homer , brief allusions could be made to mythic themes of generations previous to the main narrative because they were already familiar to the epic's hearers: one example is the theme of the Calydonian boarhunt . In Hellenistic Alexandria, literary culture and a fixed literary canon known to readers and hearers made a densely allusive poetry effective;

5684-557: The Trojans were disregarded, and disaster befell them. Today, a "Cassandra" is someone who accurately predicts disasters or negative outcomes, especially if those predictions are disregarded. This phrase comes from a novel by Joseph Heller . Catch-22 is set on a U.S. Army Air Force base in World War II . "Catch-22" refers to a regulation that states an airman's request to be relieved from flight duty can only be granted if he

5782-469: The Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under

5880-428: The author alone, who thereby retreats into a private language (e.g. " Ulalume ", by Edgar Allan Poe ). In discussing the richly allusive poetry of Virgil 's Georgics , R. F. Thomas distinguished six categories of allusive reference, which are applicable to a wider cultural sphere. These types are: A type of literature has grown round explorations of the allusions in such works as Alexander Pope 's The Rape of

5978-462: The beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight. Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to

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6076-462: The butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes , began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s. Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during

6174-407: The context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships , a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking. Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect

6272-555: The core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased. A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile ;

6370-509: The culture. Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include: As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales , the death of Michael Jackson , and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster . These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of

6468-501: The family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions. The psychologist Willibald Ruch  [ de ] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal

6566-457: The final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry. It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than

6664-414: The fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor , the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python 's " Dead Parrot Sketch ". During the 15th century ,

6762-517: The folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates

6860-402: The form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line , whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play , irony or sarcasm , logical incompatibility, hyperbole , or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in

6958-419: The intertextual patterns is the feature by which it would be possible to distinguish between the literary allusion and other closely related text-linking devices, such as parody and pastiche. Jokes A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes

7056-591: The joke structure include: As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of

7154-409: The joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for

7252-405: The joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of

7350-423: The linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo , attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of

7448-462: The listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on

7546-431: The longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience , it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here

7644-548: The middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices. The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of

7742-410: The multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke. Expected response to a joke is laughter . The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If

7840-402: The narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis , the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include

7938-433: The playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at

8036-666: The poems of Callimachus offer the best-known examples. Martin Luther King Jr. , alluded to the Gettysburg Address in starting his " I Have a Dream " speech by saying "Five score years ago..."; his hearers were immediately reminded of Abraham Lincoln 's "Four score and seven years ago", which opened the Gettysburg Address. King's allusion effectively called up parallels in two historic moments without overwhelming his speech with details. A sobriquet

8134-571: The popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny". Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera , i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved. Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre- classical texts. The oldest identified joke

8232-416: The potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at

8330-408: The printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons . Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand

8428-450: The punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in

8526-417: The punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline. The narrative always contains a protagonist who becomes the "butt" or target of the joke. This labelling serves to develop and solidify stereotypes within the culture. It also enables researchers to group and analyse the creation, persistence and interpretation of joke cycles around

8624-408: The referent must be invoked and identified for the tacit association to be made; the allusion is indirect in part because "it depends on something more than mere substitution of a referent". The allusion depends as well on the author's intent; a reader may search out parallels to a figure of speech or a passage, of which the author was unaware, and offer them as unconscious allusions—coincidences that

8722-409: The same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in

8820-497: The same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all

8918-424: The similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides

9016-452: The spread of topical jokes , "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences. A study by

9114-467: The stock market, he met his Waterloo." In the most traditional sense, allusion is a literary term, though the word has also come to encompass indirect references to any source, including allusions in film or the visual arts . In literature, allusions are used to link concepts that the reader already has knowledge of, with concepts discussed in the story. In the field of film criticism, a filmmaker's intentionally unspoken visual reference to another film

9212-410: The structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter. This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at

9310-619: The twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel . Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There

9408-417: The umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion. Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What

9506-418: The world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board ; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL , or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction

9604-489: Was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns". The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and

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