Agnes Marszalek

This book builds on cognitive stylistics, humour studies and psychological approaches to literature and film to explore the emotional aspects of humorous narrative comprehension. It investigates how the linguistic features of comic novels and short stories (by, for example, Douglas Adams, Joseph Heller and Nick Hornby) can shape readers' experience of comedy, considering the ways in which moods, characters and the plot is used to trigger blends of positive and negative emotion. The book offers an approach to such features of comedy as dark humour, cringe humour and comic suspense, emphasising the relationship between humorous language and mental states which are typically considered serious.

This thesis builds on cognitive stylistics, humour studies and psychological approaches to literature, film and television to explore how the stylistic features of comic novels and short stories may shape readers’ experience of comedy. I suggest that our responses to written humorous narratives are triggered by two types of stylistic cue: those which lead to amusement and stabilise our experience of comedy, and those which destabilise it by evoking non-humorous emotions associated with experiencing narrative worlds generally. When presented simultaneously, those cues can trigger complex humorous responses in which amusement is experienced alongside other, often negative, emotions.

In order to investigate how textual elements can influence our emotional experience of humorous narratives, this thesis examines the ways in which stylistic cues affect some of the main experiential features of the narrative worlds of comedy: the moods evoked by the world, our relationships with characters, and our reactions to plot events. Following on from the Introduction and the Literature Review (Chapters 1 and 2), Chapter 3 explores the ways in which stylistic cues may evoke various moods by establishing, reinforcing and disrupting our expectations. Chapter 4 focuses on the role of characterisation in humorous narratives, concentrating on those cues which encourage us to laugh at narrative characters, and those which evoke other, non-humorous responses to them. In Chapter 5, I consider how the presentation of story events affects our experience of humorous plots. I discuss the cues which add humour to the presentation of otherwise problematic events, as well as those which combine humour with more uncomfortable emotions that stem from our reactions to story structures. Chapter 6, finally, provides a summary of the argument and of the contribution to knowledge made by this thesis.

My exploration of the non-humorous side of experiencing narrative comedy offers a key contribution to the study of humorous narratives. By investigating humour as part of a wider narrative world, this thesis moves beyond the analysis of amusing language and towards addressing the complexity of the creation and experience of humour in a narrative world. The interdisciplinary, stylistic-psychological approach adopted here allows for hypotheses to be made not only about the emotional experience of humour in comic novels and short stories, but also about the affective side of narrative comprehension more generally.

In this thesis, I examine some of the ways in which humour is created in comic novels. I combine concepts from cognitive stylistics and psychology to address the question: ‘How does the construction of narrative worlds contribute to the creation of humour in narratives?’ I suggest that the narrative world can be designed to enhance the humour of particular elements which appear in it by encouraging a playful interpretation of those elements. I call the narrative worlds which are constructed to elicit an overall experience of humour humorous worlds and outline some of the techniques which writers use to build them, focusing on three aspects:

Disrupted Schemata. In the first chapter, I discuss the elements which are used to build humorous worlds. I outline the ways in which representations of settings, objects, characters and situations which make up humorous worlds can be manipulated to achieve an amusing effect. I demonstrate some of the applications of schema theory in the stylistics of humorous texts, including Cook’s schema disruption and schema refreshment (1994), Gibbs’ soft-assembling of schemata (2003) and Schank and Abelson’s notion of scripts thrown off normal course (1977). I link those to McGhee’s concept of fantasy-assimilation (1972).

Repetition and Variation. I then outline some of the ways in which the disrupted elements are combined. I write about repetition and variation, which in humorous narratives operates in two ways (conceptual/stylistic) and on two levels (local/extended). I discuss the cognitive mechanisms involved in them (by drawing on, for example, Emmott’s 1997 contextual frame theory) and hypothesise about their amusing effect by basing my work on classic research in psychology (Berlyne 1972, Suls 1972).

Humorous Mode. Finally, I discuss the devices which mark humorous worlds as humorous. I point out that comic narratives need to be labelled as humorous discourse and that the humorous cueing/keying in novels is less explicit than that in jokes. I apply Triezenberg’s model of humour enhancers (2004) to humorous extracts, analyse narrative strategies in the opening paragraphs of a number of humorous novels and suggest some ways in which a manipulation of distance (e.g. Leech and Short 2007) between the writer and the reader can be seen as a humorous cueing strategy. 

I argue that while creating humour in narratives requires a skilful stylistic manipulation on the part of the writer, making sense of it demands a considerable cognitive effort from the reader. Through a range of examples from nine humorous novels (by authors including Heller, Fielding, Pratchett, Amis, Roth and Vonnegut) and relevant secondary literature, I illustrate how a cognitive stylistic analysis of humour in narratives has the potential to offer some hypotheses not only about reading comprehension, but also about the pleasure of reading.