Session of March, 28: narrative eventfulness and semantic incongruity in graphic humor
Our examination of the question of style in the
art of humorous drawing in the last session of this course did not go beyond a
merely indicative condition of the aspectual disjunctions (fixed/animated) that
constitute caricatures and cartoons. Even so, some good suggestions have remained to allow us to
advance this question of the discursiveness of these drawing styles, in its
properly dramatic manner (i.e., related to the production of the sense of
animation of the visual motifs and their constitutive consequential
presentation, proper to narrative forms).
This results in a more precise direction we impose on our empirical universes, thus focusing on those episodic situations that are defined as the most elementary for the illustration of a poetics of visual humor, namely: the sensorimotor accidents (represented in the iconological plane of the visual sequences and the actions of the characters) and the paradigmatic disjunctions (in the impertinent games with the definitional horizon of textual semantics, expressed in the speech level of the balloons or in the narrative dimensions of the comics’ recitatives)
These two dimensions of the manifestation of humorous gags (physical and semantic disjunctions) provide the basis for our effort to interpret narrativity of graphic humor, through the sequential organization of the drawing – something that is particularly illustrated by the parenthood of comic strips with other manifestations of 19th century visual culture, like Muybridge’s chronophotographs: focused upon such cases, we value the production of laughter specific to each of these disjunctive dimensions - as a result of the ability to mobilize the impertinent games promoted by visual gags, and structured upon the presumed physical order of causality or in the conceptual determinability of meanings.
A first aspect to be therefore highlighted is that the reality to which we manifestation of humor is directed, while guided by the character of a constitutive “incongruity”, is forcibly incarnated in realities necessarily “textualized” – i.e., in the way its poiesis is embodied as expressed or assumed “construction”. Not by chance, it is in the context of some of the most important strands of semiotic and linguistic theories (especially those associated with semantic and pragmatic approaches to textual formats) that we will find some of the most suggestive formulations of this textual value proper to a poetics of humor.
In line with the argument about the
style of caricature in the previous session of the course, this point concerning
the proper textuality of graphic humor implies the particular way in which visual
sequences are arranged, to convey a sense of eventful evolutions or abrupt changes
in states of affairs: the art of comics, in its beginnings in the course of the
19th century, fairly codified these modalities, not casually in a way almost
entirely proper to humor – as this passage from art historian David Kunzle
illustrates , based on the concept of “montage”, in pioneers
like Töppfer and Busch:
“Töppfer´s characteristic wavering frame lines enhance the fluidity of movement from scene to scene, and the occasional sudden or unsightly abutting of scenes with no intervening spaces makes for a sense of contiguity, and for jostly, abrupt transitions (jump cuts)” (KUNZLE, 1990: p. 349)
This aspect of the sequential composition of comic episodes, through the treatment of countless aspects of humorous drawing (in matrices coming from caricature and cartoon styles) is also explored by another of the geniuses of the origin of this art, German artist Wilhelm Busch, also highlighted by Kunzle – especially in the treatment of the mechanical structures of the bodily movements and the potential for comedic effects it can generate
“Montage in Busch flows in a sober, regular and controlled manner derived initially from the simplicities of the child´s Bilderbogen (…). The summarily indicated viewpoint and locales tend to a uniformity that renders the occasional close-up all the more climactic. But within this relative uniformity, the developing actions of the figures could be pinpointed with maximum precision, clarity, and legitibility. How things happen is now as important as what and why, which in Busch is governed by a certain didactic predictability. The intensification of movement, the crescendo of violence that draws surrounding objects in its wake, is tracked with that sense of interval that Busch perfected.” (KUNZLE, 1990: p. 349)
In this sense, many authors identify this conceptual model of theories of humor as envisioning aspects of the internal textual organization of situations of proper comedy – beyond its characterization as a literary or dramatic genre. Conceived by the matrix of “incongruity”, what stands out as a structuring characteristic of visual humor derives from its coherent structuring as a “textual form” – evidently in the narrative matrix that manifests the internal principles of coherence in comic formats: therefore, the semantic approaches of theories of humor focus on the structures and dynamics of meaning which guide the discursive and narrative production, with a priority of promoting laughter as its most important response.
In a more detailed perspective of this situation that models humor as “incongruity”, the textual structure of comic situations (the “humorous texts”) is defined by a certain coherence of its constituent segments – that is, the incongruity does not constitute a deviation from the functions that internally cohere textual humor, on the contrary: what the guiding “functions” of the episodic succession of comic stories materializes, in turn – at least in Salvatore Attardo ’s view – is a succession of lines or statements, somehow all dependent on each other, but set up towards the different degrees of a disjunction (either in terms of the polysemy of its terms or in the ways of constructing references to the world through these segments).
On the basis of this characterization of the fundamentals of textual organization of humor, Attardo proceeds to an extensive descriptive discrimination of the constituent elements of this semantic structure, thus centering on the semiotic notion of "text" as a linear and interdependent structure of utterances - from which the profile of humorous texts would be defined by a specific type of correlation of passage between the different moments of this linear configuration – or the different sentences of a discourse: for the moment we are interested in recognizing that semantic approaches to humor identify in the textual structure the propoerty of “incongruity” – something associated with the effect of comedy, an aspect that illuminates the function established by each of the segments of the joke´s global linear structure.
“The function of joke preparation is quite significant: in order for there to be incongruity, there needs to be a background of expectations to be violated. Preparation fulfills this requirement. Narrative development can, in fact, be achieved through numerous means, so that we are not dealing with just a necessary and sufficient condition.” (ATTARDO, 2001: 89)
Let us consider, then, some instances of an elementary episodic structure of humor, trying not only to focus on the cases of its verbal manifestation, but still structuring other matrices (such as the graphic and the visual formats) under the same principles of its semantic organization: therefore, let us take the case of the narrative formats of daily newspaper strips, in order to vindicate this textual formalization of comic disjunction, as the main characteristic of the semantics of humor; on one hand, such cases preserve a strongly solidarity structuring each of the segments of the series of statements that compose it, but also configuring this succession from principles of incongruity – which can be of a semantic or referential nature.
In the empirical universe of our choice for the exam, we highlight those episodic situations that are defined as the most elementary for a “poetics of visual humor” - which are, to a certain extent, the same ones characterizing the formalization of “impertinence” - namely, the sensorimotor accidents (represented in the iconological plane of the visual sequences and actions of the characters) and the paradigmatic order (in the disjunctive games made with the definitional horizons of textual semantics, expressed in the speech of the balloons or in the narrations of the recitatives).
These two dimensions of the manifestation of the humorous gag (physical and semantic disjunctions) provide the basis of our effort to interpret the narrativity updated by the graphic humor of the daily strips, through the organization of the drawing in a sequential order (that is, in the textual matrix of functional interdependence, which Attardo tells us about ): focusing on these two most frequent aspects of a poetics of visual humor, we value in them the effect of the production of laughter specific to each of these dimensions (or, fundamentally, to the possible and various combinations of both), as a result of the ability to mobilize the impertinence games that gag promotes for the order of physical causality or in the prior determinability of meanings of words and verbal expressions.
Just by way of illustration (but which may suggest a field of evidence to be confirmed in a wider range of products from this same cultural series), let us examine the following strip by a famous Brazilian artist in the field of visual humor:
At the outset we apprehend the global meaning of this episode, in its abbreviated and self-conclusive dimension of a narrative event, as a characteristic of the spatio-temporal schemes of the textuality proper to the gag: there is an almost telegraphic aspect of its sequential construction, granted by the almost insignificant interval that subsists between its presentation and its conclusion (we would say hypothetically that, in terms of “story” represented, it is something that consumes no more than a few seconds in “real” time).
The episodic modification that characterizes it (since a narrative is structured upon the assumption of such a “change of states”) goes almost unnoticed, due to the way in which several of its elements are presented in the sequence (the permanently invariable unity of the scenario and of scene objects); in the sense that the temporal passage instructs the effects proper to the humor of the narration, we can see the bartender's arm serving the drink to the pirate in the first frame, the discreet mobility of the latter when asking for something in the second frame, and the unexpected reaction of a scene object, which closes the story – or concludes it in a “comedic”, impertinent sign of resolution.
This short narrative also illustrates a specific aspect of the genre of graphic humor, which is defined as a topical structure of comic stories, conceived beyond the visual materiality of the daily strip: it is thematically defined as an ordinary action within which emerge elements that will invest it with a comedic grace: its “dramaturgy”, if we can define it that way, is characterized by the exhibition of a universe of live actions, while guided by a sensorimotor mechanics (or here, by the equally mechanical character of the normality of the situation).
In the sequential economy of history, this normality is reinforced precisely in the sense that accidents are prepared to the extent of effecting a disjunction from the inaugural stability of his proposition – especially when we consider the specific function of the second frame, in which the pirate orders a “drop” (“chorinho”), after receiving a shot of drink: given such relevance in which the succession of the first two frames introduces this normality, the laughable character of this sequence emerges as an eventfulness built up from the previous normality of the ordinary situation. It is therefore the interaction between “normality” and “disjunction” that defines the textual economy (on the graphic and written level) of a poetics of humor in the daily strip.
Let us examine, in practice, the disjunctive operation that this comic strip expresses: firstly, it is assumed as doubly oriented by operators proper to drawing and written texts, since the effect of laughter is always less powerful when we consider these two in separation; in fact, it can be assumed that the humor of this episode is not even understood properly, if we consider images and writing outside the perfect articulation. Therefore, it is precisely because we associate the “chorinho” (“drop”), as it is requested by the chief of pirates in the second frame, with the tear that flows from his mug/skull at the end, that we finally experience the specific grace of this episode: it is evident that this effect implies a game, in which visual operators of the sequence (guided by the mechanical normality of the situation at the bar counter) and the “reaction” of a scene object, which literalizes the pirate’s request, pouring its own “teardrop”.
Other cases illustrate this same organizing principle of the semantic or referential “incongruity” of the textual structure of humor, now characteristic of its actualization or verbal performance - as the case of this classic routine of the burlesque humor tradition of the middle of the last century:
In the context of this case, we encounter the same disjunction characterizing the dynamics of incongruity that structure the textual grace of humorous genres, perhaps with a more expressed aspect of the functions most necessary for the “theatricalized” format of Burlesque (although not absolutely expendable from the purely verbal context of writing or the purely sequential context of graphic humor): but we still focus, at this point, on the specific dynamics with the functional and semantic horizon of word uses, for which the indirect pronouns (usually associated with interrogative statements) form the basis of a confusion among agents of the scene, concerning the names of players on a baseball team.
In a recent homage to this routine, made in a program of such an American television show, the almost “virtuous” aspect of the speed and rhythm of the characters’ interactions is here replaced by a more restrained and almost “explanatory” style of the dynamics that take place. builds into the verbal script of that episode:
From the perspective of the semantics of humor brought by the linguist Victor Raskin, the definition of the joke, in terms of its semantic structure, involves the admission of a situation in which two opposing semantic “scripts” are confronted, their overlapping quality articulated in the very syntax of his presentation: exemplified in the case of the joke of the patient who visits his doctor's apartment and is welcomed by his young wife, who invites him in (since the doctor is not there), what we have in view is precisely this apparent disjunction between two programs, one characterizing the perspective of the patient who wants to be seen by his doctor, and that of the bored young wife who admits the possibility of relationships with strangers.
Such a structure constitutes the main hypothesis of Raskin 's semantic theory of humor, stated as follows: the definition of a text as a joke necessarily implies a compatibility between two scripts articulated in superposition, but expressing opposite meanings. If we don't just stick to the textual structure of the simple joke (which is the case with Raskin), we can find a good illustration of this structure in this small segment:
In the interaction between the two characters, we see established the confrontation between two semantic scripts of the action, perfectly integrated with each other, in the exact measure of their perfect contradiction: in this case, it is the assumption of an interaction governed by the pragmatic principles of good faith between partners, through which the female character establishes the content and pertinence of linguistic cooperation with her ex-boyfriend, through a gift that she intends to give him; in the evolution the interaction takes place, we discover - with the help of the questions that the male character asks his interlocutor - that the memory she wants to give him is, in fact, a gift she received from another suitor.
In the conjunction between these two scripts, the kind of impertinent disjunction typical of comic texts is established: it consists of a kind of vagueness or ambiguity sufficient to integrate two semantic scripts that are momentarily opposed, but without making them, for that very reason, inadmissible in their successive conjugation – which is why they would stop being comic to reach the level of the absurd.
It is above all important to consider the role that the instance of reception must play, insofar as it employs its own encyclopedia (the set of mundane and textual knowledge that it is capable of employing in the situation), when activating the internal coherence that the text puts in motion. match. Unlike other types of textual organization of narrative forms, however, humor texts imply an intentional breaking of the parameters of an ordinary linguistic interaction, thus resulting in a distinct set of parameters for the communication between the text and the reader.
“According to this new principle of cooperation, the reader does not expect the speaker to tell the truth or convey to him any relevant information. Instead, he perceives the speaker's intention as an attempt to make him, the reader, laugh. As a result, the reader will look for the necessary ingredients of the joke in the speaker's utterance and, according to the main hypothesis, such ingredients include two overlapping and opposing scripts”. (RASKIN, 1984: 103)
An important aspect of the semantic mechanisms of humor is that characterizing the textual operators of the basic scripts of action in the episodic structure of a joke : by designating these operators as “triggers”, Raskin identifies them with the principles through which a presumably normal scenario is superimposed by another, necessarily incongruous with the first one; In this context, the most frequent textual operations of the narrative discourse of humor depend on a textual economy in which the original predisposition of coexistence between two semantic scripts is eventually shaken by the way in which certain elements of the text work as triggers to favor a particular script of actions.
“The usual effect of the trigger is exactly this: when introducing the second script, it casts a shadow of doubt over the first, as well as the part of the text that introduced it, imposing a different interpretation of the same (...). The different interpretation (...) may involve an unreal, abnormal or even impossible state of affairs. The role of the trigger is, however, by its mere presence, to make this different interpretation something more plausible and less unreal, abnormal or impossible.” (RASKIN, 1984: 114,115)
In the case of the humorous episodes that we have evaluated so far (especially that of the series Studio 60, by Aaron Sorkin ), it is possible to identify the type of trigger that characterizes it, designated as “ambiguity” by Raskin: they guide the interactions between characters, in the superposition and eventual surpassing of these two semantic scripts (the “end of a romantic relationship” and the “seduction of an ex-partner through jealousy”). The trigger here is manifested in the double semantic load attributed to the gift (the baseball bat) that Harriet offers to her ex-boyfriend (and current boss) Matthew: the aforementioned object embodies such duplicity of the intention to end a relationship in a friendly atmosphere (Harriet´s script), but with a provocation of her ex-partner's romantic feelings, as it is a "second-hand gift", given to her by a new suitor (Matthew’s script).
On the other spectrum of Raskin 's typology , there are the triggers that operate on the basis of the “contradiction” between the semantic scripts of a joke: in this case, the effect of humor derives less from the maintenance of the semantic vagueness articulating two scripts (as in the case of “ ambiguity ”), but of the more express resolution of the situation, in favor of one of them – but without such a resolution ending up the comically catastrophic sense of incongruity. In the narrative universes that we have explored so far, this sequence of the pilot of the first season of The West Wing is the most adequate exemplification of the textual structuring of this second model for triggering an incongruity.
In the case of this segment, the difference that characterizes the structure that absorbs the incongruity between two semantic scripts is something explained by the momentary interruption of the exchanges between the characters: without knowing that his boss's daughter (Mallory) was the 4th grade teacher and not a student of the same period, Sam Seaborn tries to fulfill the role of cicerone for the school class visiting the White House - without paying attention to the fact that it was an excursion that aimed to illustrate the students about the history of the presidential building.
At the culmination of the sequence, when being admonished by the children's teacher about his inappropriate behavior, he asks her to introduce him to his boss's daughter, talking about the series of misadventures he was going through that day, and culminating in an episode in which he would have accidentally slept with a call girl: at this point, his script is confronted with that of the situation, as Leo McGarry 's daughter was the teacher herself, to whom he had revealed several compromising facts about him; unlike the ambiguity that governs the previous sequence, here incongruity, once introduced and revealed, concludes the situation, preventing it from structuring the continuation of the interaction in the terms it was initially proposed.
In the context of a concrete analysis experiment, extracted from a more frank empirical approach, certain modalities of interpretation of the semantic mechanisms of humor could be hereby explored: when we move to the case of the episodic structures of graphic humor, we open a horizon of interesting considerations about the textual functioning of visual regimes in comics, somehow directed to an episodic structure that produces effects of a “narrative tension” (such as suspense, curiosity or surprise), something that could orient us towards a junction between “incongruity ” and the “poetics” of humor.
To that end, we return here, with the
help of the text by Alain Boillat and Françoise Revaz, to a domain of the
necessarily serialized modalities of the effect of humor, in formats such as
the periodical strips (daily or weekly) of daily newspapers. With Boillat and
Revaz, however, we explore the question of evaluating the historically given
conditions in which the poetics of visual humor – especially embodied in the
serialized structure of the episodes self-conclusive and periodically
reiterated - allows us to excavate narrative structures that (like other
dramatic genres, more directed to comic effects) could be discriminated with
the same analytical care as that of other dramatic modalities.
“We will consider the narrative sequences found in our corpus of comics not only in their textual structure, but also in the dynamic dimension that results from the seriality of their production. We will also observe the position of the reader who discovers a new adventure every week, from the point of view of content, but which is constant in its conclusion and formatting. The question that comes to us is, therefore, this: what can intrigue the reader, even when he knows the story's resolution in advance? (BOILLAT and REVAZ, 2016: 107)
Although the analysis of these authors seems to place the specificity of the phenomenon around certain historical contexts of simultaneity of expressive formats (in the case of Winsor McKay's comics, the coincidence of his procedures and those of a particular burlesque cinema from the beginning of the last century, centered on episodic structures of physical accidents of “attraction”), there is a possible correlation between the definition of accidents that conclude Little Sammy Sneeze’s plots (the child’s sudden sneezes, which produce an ever-repeated catastrophe as the conclusion of episodes that represent the normal course of situations of different kinds) and the poetically determined character of the incongruity effect of the conclusions of comic episodes.
A careful reading of these authors
bids us such a bet on the thesis of a “poetic mediation” of the semantic
structures of humor, despite their recourse to a history of their media
environments: the fact that these two authors work in different domains of
understanding about textual dynamics (the media and the semantics, respectively)
perhaps allow us to understand this sudden oscillation that they exercise, by
combining this first media constituted dimension of the appearance of humor
(Boillat), without neglecting the textual mechanisms in which the effectiveness
of their programming is enshrined as part of another communicational dynamic
(Revaz) - namely, the one that enshrines a junction between “poetics” and
“pragmatics” of humor; recourses to the media characteristics of the intervals
between frames in comics (and their correlation with the interstices between
shots, in cinema grammar) are not sufficient to delineate the functions of
humor as an implication between semantic mechanisms of action (updated by the
visual form) and its effectiveness in the scope of understanding.
“In fact, if it is possible to fill in the ellipses corresponding to the gutters between panels, this is because the background action is structured in scripts that the reader easily identifies and whose different stages are predictable for him (...): here the surrounding actions are in fact governed by one or more types of stereotypical organization, which can be easily introduced by the reader, as he gradually becomes familiar with the universe represented. (BOILLAT and REVAZ, 2016: 116,117)
At this point, we conclude this first stage of the journey that originated from an effort to vindicate a “poetics” of humor - in its twofold aspect allowing for the assimilation of the “comic” to the “dramatic modes” - and to situate the purpose of the episodic structure of the humor (guided by “incongruity”) to the horizon of its “effects”.
Bibliographic references:
ATTARDO, Salvatore. “The theory of humorous texts”. In: Humorous Texts: a semantic and pragmatic analysis . Berlin: de Gruyter (2001): pp. 79.102;
BOILLAT, Alain; REVAZ, Françoise. “Intrigue, Suspense and Sequentiality in Comic Strips: reading Little Sammy Sneeze ”. In: Narrative Sequence in Contemporary Narratology ( R.Baroni and F. Revaz , eds.). Columbus: Ohio University Press (2016): pp.
RASKIN, Victor. “Semantic theory of humour”. In: Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Dordrecht: D. Reidl (1984): pp. 99, 147.
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