“Shamuz, Shamuz, Everything Is with Shamuz”—Making Sense of Humour Theory and Stylistic Enquiry: An Overview

Abstract

One of the famous examples of humour causation by Henri Bergson, a nineteenth-century French philosopher of humour, is that of a man running in the streets, tripping and falling, and people laughing. Such a reaction is one of the enduring puzzles of humour philosophy—that is, why would a scenario otherwise so pathetic activate sensations of the comic, and how should humour be classified in this and other regards. Other scenarios that are actually or potentially humorous have also engaged philosophers as to whether humour causation lies in apparent incongruity, a feeling of superiority on the part of watchers, or a sudden relief from pent-up emotions. However, stylisticians tend towards a different line of enquiry, which is: what has language got to do with it? The nature of the involvement of language in the activation of humour sensations has often been a source of disagreement among theorists of humour and the comic. It has also been doubly tasking for the stylisticians, who examine humour from the perspective of language, and who need to surmount the evidentiary bar in stylistics by exhibiting the linguistic mechanism involved in humour and laughter. This volume offers a variety of perspectives on the scholarly debates regarding linguistic input to humour. It is in pursuit of this objective that this introductory chapter examines the philosophical and linguistic trajectories of these debates, and analyses some vignettes, such as the literary vignette of Shamuz, as a way of making sense of humour theory and stylistic enquiry. In acknowledging various linguistic approaches to the analysis of humour, the chapter seeks to demonstrate why language is such an important element in humour communication at a general level, and is perhaps the most critical element in the analysis of humour. The chapter pursues a “unified levels of language analysis” (ULLA) approach. The chapter also summarizes how different other chapters in the volume grapple with the question of humour and language from different perspectives, and with data from different parts of the world.