At Least Somebody Gets It

Foremost, I must give credit to the excerpt from Murray Davis’s What’s So Funny, for it is a complicated, yet insightful breakdown of how incongruity and ambiguity work in humor. The explanations it puts forth are certainly well researched and proposed. Now, with that matter settled, the next is less pleasant. As well done as it is, I still find some of the concepts impossible to follow, and as a result, extremely difficult to grasp. Often, it is the summations made entirely in generalities, which are responsible for my frustrated condition. Consider the following:

Since every congruous element can be incongruous somewhere else, humorists also ply their trade by interpolating an element congruous with the other elements of one system into another system where it is less congruous or even incongruous. (18)

What does all that even mean?! With all the “congruities” and “incongruities” packed in that single statement, how can one begin to decode it? Only after the tenth reading of this single sentence, can I offer a simpler version, guessing he means to say humorists create humor by transferring something which is appropriate in one system to another where it will undoubtedly be contrary to that particular system’s guidelines. Still, that is strictly my interpretation, and so, it may not be exactly what he suggesting. The phrasing is just so general, and filled with so much repeated terminology, that I fear I lose the meaning in the abundance of words. That is why what follows is simply my best attempt to make sense of Davis’s ideas, and hopefully with some success, connect his theories of incongruity back to “The Seven Words” of George Carlin.

Those forbidden seven words, never to be spoken on television, George Carlin rambles off with ease, saying them all at once, and quite quickly. He even goes so far as to point out the nice rhythmic quality his list has. The whole act sends his audience into hysterical laughter. It seems Mr. Carlin has just proved that, “A real incongruity that deviates from prediction will collapse an orderly expectation system, causing those who had viewed the objective world through this particular subjective frame to laugh” (Davis 16). In other words, the audience still viewing the world through the set scheme of “those words” not being permissible speech, is amused by Carlin’s deviation from that prediction.

Building on this is one of Davis’s shorter revelations, the premise that, “The more incongruities that explode a given expectation system, the funnier” (16). Carlin proves the truth of this statement as well. He points out the glaring irregularity that these supposedly horribly foul words are also sometimes acceptable in everyday conversation. He calls them “my part time filth. They’re only fifty percent dirty” (Carlin). To think the same word is both acceptable and unacceptable is another incongruity Carlin piles onto the system of propriety, and when the audience realizes this, they laugh all the harder for it. I may not always understand what Davis is talking about, but undoubtedly, Carlin does, and that is good enough for me.

Carlin, George. “The Seven Words You Can Never Say on T.V.” www.youtube.com. 28 June 2008. YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. 30 January 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmZfYyctiuo.

Davis, Murray. “Wit’s Weapons: Incongruity and Ambiguity.” Laughing Matters. Ed. Marvin Diogenes. New York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2009. 13-36.