Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/33.2741

AUTHOR: Lena Strasßburger
TITLE: Humor and Horror
SUBTITLE: Different Emotions, Similar Linguistic Processing Strategies
SERIES TITLE: Humor Research
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Villy Tsakona

SUMMARY
The most common theory used by linguists to account for humor and related phenomena (e.g. comedy, irony) is incongruity theory: humor is based on an incongruity, namely on a violation of expectations in a given context. Those who manage to resolve the incongruity, namely to make sense of it and grasp its playful logic, manage to interpret humor (on the incongruity-resolution model of humor, see Attardo 2020: 78-94 and references therein).

On the other hand, it is well-known among humor scholars that incongruity (and its resolution) may not always lead to humor or be perceived as humorous. Morreall (1983: 19) observes that “[n]ot all incongruity that a person notices will trigger laughter […]. Fear, pity, moral disapprobation, indignation, or disgust, Beattie [1779] says, can override our tendency to laugh at incongruity”. He elaborates on the idea by giving an illustrative example: the claim that “the mere perception of incongruity is sufficient for humor […] is clearly false, since negative emotions like fear, disgust, and anger are also reactions to what violates our mental patterns and expectations. Coming home to find your family murdered, for example, is incongruous but not funny. Experiencing something incongruous can also evoke puzzlement and incredulity” (Morreall 2009: 12-13). The same scholar has also delved into the relationship between comedy/humor and tragedy: they are both based on incongruity, but this incongruity is framed differently in each of these modes/genres and generates different emotions (Morreall 1998, 1999; see also Hamilton 2013: 202-251). In a similar vein, Marszalek (2020) has convincingly demonstrated that comic narratives including incongruities intended to be interpreted as humorous may not only amuse but also provoke emotions such as anxiety, suspense, embarrassment, and distress.

In this context, a monograph on the similarities and differences between humor and horror seems most welcome. Lena Straßburger sets out to investigate why and how detecting and resolving an incongruity can sometimes be hilarious and sometimes horrifying. Adopting a psycholinguistic perspective, she attempts to explore potential differences in processing costs and in the emotions generated by humorous and scary incongruities.

In the Introduction of the book, the author frames incongruity and its resolution as the common denominator between the two phenomena and describes the research gap she intends to fill in with her research. She also presents her research questions and provides a brief overview of the chapters to follow.

In chapter 1, titled “Horror: How to scream because of incongruity”, Straßburger provides a fascinating overview of art-horror, namely horror as produced in works of fiction from 18th century Gothic novels until contemporary horror movies and series. Art-horror seems to be premised on incongruities between the real and the unreal, the normal and the abnormal, the healthy and the sick, and safety and danger. Moreover, the author explores the emotions caused by art-horror, mainly fear, disgust, and surprise, and offers working definitions for all such concepts. Then, she takes us through psychoanalytic and cognitive approaches to horror. At the end of the chapter, the author summarizes the main concepts and theories shaping her analytical approach to art-horror and states that she “pursue[s] a cognitive definition of art-horror and interpret[s] it as the union of incongruous, cognitive concepts like life/death, normality/abnormality, reality/unreality, or safety/danger which break cultural categories and, thereby, cause cognitive processing costs and the negative emotions of, in particular, fear and disgust, as well as surprise and pleasure” (p. 36).

Chapter 2, titled “Humor: How to smile about incongruity”, contains a detailed and critical overview of humor theories, paying particular attention to incongruity theory. Straßburger begins with the classics, namely with how ancient Greeks and Romans viewed humor and how they set the foundations for later approaches to humor and related phenomena. Her next stop is Renaissance and Early Modern times, when the English term ‘humor’ acquires a sense similar to the one it has today (at least among English-speaking people), and when Kant and Schopenhauer provided us with the early modern version of incongruity theory. Then, the author elaborates on contemporary versions of incongruity theory as well as on their theoretical presuppositions. Most of these theories are premised on concepts such as schemas, frames, and scripts, or even relevance and informativeness. The author extensively refers to the Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH; Raskin 1985) and the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH; Attardo 1994, 2001, 2020), as well as to attempts at expanding the scope of these theories and at further specifying the central concept of incongruity. Investigating different types and degrees of incongruity may be the key to a contrastive analysis of humor and art-horror.

Drawing on observations of Bain (1876: 256) to the effect that “[t]here are many incongruities that may produce anything but a laugh […] but they cause feelings of pain, anger, sadness, loathing, rather than mirth” (p. 72; see also Morreall 1983, 2009 above), Straßburger argues that “final criteria for a clear definition of humor are still missing and […] humor theories are also suitable to explain fiction in general and genres with threatening characteristics” (p. 72). To illustrate her claim, she uses the GTVH to analyze horror micronarratives (pp. 74-75) and concludes that incongruity represents “the common denominator and tertium comparationis between humorous and scary texts” (p. 76). At the same time, she suggests that the difference between humor and art-horror may lie in the effects and reactions caused by incongruity (e.g. fear or exhilaration) as well as on the contexts of its occurrence, in particular, recipients’ value systems and their evaluations of incongruity as dangerous/threatening or not. Based on such an extensive but compelling discussion, the author formulates the goal of her study at the end of Chapter 2 as follows: “[t]his book searches for a cognitive incongruity model that explains humor and art-horror, and that predicts processing stages, verified by empirical data. It aims at determining peculiarities that are related to only one of the phenomena and underlying, higher-level mechanisms of incongruity processing” (p. 83).

Chapter 3, titled “Humor and horror: Processing incongruity”, further contributes to the author’s argument for the necessity of an empirical psycholinguistic investigation of the differences between humor and art-horror. Straßburger reviews a significant number of experimental studies mostly on the psycholinguistics of humor detection and processing and less on art-horror detection and processing (the latter being more limited in number anyway). The subject areas of this overview include: (a) studies on the processing costs of humor and art-horror: given that these phenomena involve unpredictable input for the recipients, the latter are forced to update their mental representations (see schemata, frames, or scripts above), to reanalyze the respective texts, and eventually to come up with a ‘new’ interpretation that would resolve the humorous or horrifying incongruity; (b) studies measuring recipients’ neuroelectric activity during humor processing and revealing differences in such activity depending on the processing stage (i.e. detection, resolution, and emotional reaction); (c) studies on the emotional reactions to incongruity: even though it is confirmed by relevant research that emotions are triggered by the detection and/or resolution of incongruity and hence follow them temporally, a number of studies reveal that emotions may also influence the detection and resolution of incongruity; and (d) studies in the individual differences in incongruity processing, which show that various factors such as age, gender, intelligence, language skills, world and expert knowledge, attitudes, and cognitive disorders play a more or less significant role in how individuals process incongruity. After such an extensive literature review, Straßburger underlines that “[e]ven though humor research often mentions similarities between humor and art-horror, a detailed experimental comparison investigating a shared understanding mechanism is missing. So far, art-horror has been analyzed from a literary science perspective so that experimental results are rare” (p. 111).

Chapter 4, titled “Humor and horror: An experimental comparison”, includes the data description, the methodology of their collection and analysis, the findings of the study, as well as their discussion in view of previous research. The author reports on three experiments conducted after two pilot studies, the latter aiming at producing a questionnaire that would fit the purposes of the experiments. More specifically, the first experiment measured the processing times of humorous, scary, and coherent texts (the humorous and scary texts were perceived as incoherent due to their incongruities). The findings show that humor and art-horror texts elicit longer reading times and hence incur increased processing costs compared to those of the coherent texts. In addition, the processing costs of the first two categories of texts are comparable, which may be an indication of “the same underlying cognitive mechanism” (p. 138).

The second experiment investigated the emotions caused by the different texts through the analysis of facial expressions using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). In particular, facial movements showing exhilaration were expected from reading the humorous texts, while facial movements of fear and/or disgust were expected from reading the art-horror texts. Even though the results obtained were quantitatively poor (thus pointing to non-significant trends rather than strong claims; see p. 183), they show that exhilaration indeed correlates with humor, while disgust and fear correlate with art-horror. Interestingly, non-negligible variation is also documented among participants, since some showed exhilaration for art-horror and some showed horror-related reactions to humor. The limited number of facial expressions documented puts into question the usefulness of FACS methodology for experimental studies conducted in laboratory settings. Thus, it would rather be used in social/interactional contexts where emotions are more visibly expressed, as the author notes (p. 157).

The final experiment was based on the method of electroencephalography used to explore “whether art-horror evokes additional neuroelectric processing costs, how far these costs reflect cognitive processing functions and phases, and to what extent they differ from other incongruity phenomena, like humor or irresolvable incongruities” (p. 173). The complex findings resulting from this experiment appear to suggest that recipients resort to the same cognitive resources to process both humor and art-horror incongruities, even though humor may be perceived as “less surprising than art-horror” probably “due to humor’s higher cultural acceptance and frequency” (pp. 173-174). However, the three stages of incongruity processing (i.e. detection, resolution, and emotional reaction) seem to be confirmed for the processing of art-horror but not for that of humor.

The final chapter, titled “Discussion and conclusion”, summarizes the content of the whole book, points out the limitations of the experimental contrastive investigation of humor and art-horror, and proposes some thought-provoking and worth-exploring ideas for future endeavors. Most importantly, the author puts forward what she calls an “Incongruity Processing Model of Humor and Horror” (pp. 187-191), which is based on her own findings as well as on a few other studies (mostly Rothbart 2017/1996 and Canestrari & Bianchi 2013).

EVALUATION

Lena Straßburger’s monograph has “conceptually and experimentally” (p. 176) addressed the intricate relationship between humor and art-horror. It is indeed an original and most interesting monograph on an under-researched topic. Its argumentation is supported by an extensive and critical review of the relevant literature as well as on meticulously designed and executed experiments. Chapters 1-2 are must-read for anyone interested in working in any of the contemporary versions of incongruity theory, as it offers extensive and critical accounts of them. The author also makes sure that detailed descriptions of the experimental procedures and compelling discussions of their findings are provided. She also offers helpful and reader-friendly summaries of the content not only at the end of each chapter but also when a thematic unit is complete (in the middle of a chapter) before moving on to the next one.

The book incites us to revisit methodological and analytical tools that presuppose that incongruity alone might be enough to characterize something as humorous. Given that art-horror is also based on incongruity, other conditions or circumstances should apply in order to have a humorous (and not scary) perception of incongruity. Generic particularities, interactional settings, speakers’ identities and sociocultural practices, among other things, may be equally important to identify and resolve an incongruity in humorous terms (see Tsakona 2020). The book also prompts us to reconsider the linear three-stage model for the processing of humor (i.e. detection, resolution, and emotional reaction): it seems that these three stages do not follow one another but may occur simultaneously, as emotions are generated during the detection and resolution of humor and may influence both (whether positively or negatively).

The proposed “Incongruity Processing Model of Humor and Horror” is obviously comprehensive and meticulously constructed, but still constitutes an idealization of how speakers’ cognition and emotions work when faced with incongruities. Perhaps its most thought-provoking and appealing dimension pertains to finding pragmatic or sociolinguistic ways to empirically confirm (parts of) it by analyzing authentic data coming from speakers processing humor and art-horror in actual interactional settings outside the walls (and restrictions) of laboratories. The distinction between humorous discourse and art-horror may be culturally specific (e.g. what seems humorous to somebody may seem horrifying to somebody else), while at the same time speakers may employ diverse semiotic resources to signify a humorous or horrifying uptake of incongruity. Consequently, further research could concentrate on how speakers discursively frame social events as scary or horrifying and how they metapragmatically comment on, or react to, such framings. The questions of how and why some speakers react to art-horror with laughter and exhilaration could also be worth-exploring not only for humor scholars but also for conversation analysts investigating the use and functions of laughter in social interaction. Eventually, if humor/comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same incongruous coin (Morreall 1998, 1999, Hamilton 2013, Marszalek 2020) and, at the same time, “humor and art-horror are […] two sides of the same coin” (p. 193), then another possible research question pertains to what is the relationship between tragedy and horror.

Until then, and perhaps even after that time, the book remains a must-read and an inspiration for all those working on incongruity theories not only from a psycholinguistic and cognitive perspective, but also from a pragmatic and sociolinguistic one.

REFERENCES

Attardo, Salvatore. 1994. Linguistic theories of humor (Humor Research 1). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Attardo, Salvatore. 2001. Humorous texts: A semantic and pragmatic analysis (Humor Research 6). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Attardo, Salvatore. 2020. The linguistics of humor: An introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bain, Alexander. 1876. The emotions and the will, 3rd edn. New York: D. Appleton & Company.

Beattie, James. 1779. An essay on laughter and ludicrous composition. In James Beattie, Essays: On poetry and music, as they affect the mind; on laughter, and ludicrous composition; on the usefulness of classical learning, 3rd edn., 297-450. London.

Canestrari, Carla & Ivana Bianchi. 2013. From perception of contraries to humorous incongruities. In Marta Dynel (ed.), Developments in linguistic humor theory (Topics in Humor Research 1), 3-24. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hamilton, Theresa. 2013. Humorous structures of English narratives, 1200-1600. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Marszalek, Agnes. 2020. Style and emotion in comic novels and short stories. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Morreall. John. 1983. Taking laughter seriously. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Morreall, John. 1998. The comic and the tragic visions of life. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 11(4). 333-355.

Morreall, John. 1999. Comedy, tragedy, and religion. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Morreall, John. 2009. Comic relief: A comprehensive philosophy of humor (New Directions in Aesthetics 9). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Raskin, Victor. 1985. Semantic mechanisms of humor (Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy 24). Dordrecht: D. Reidel.

Rothbart, Mary K. 2017/1996. Incongruity, problem-solving and laughter. In Antony J. Chapman & Hugh C. Foot (eds.), Humor and laughter: Theory, research, and applications, 2nd edn., 37-54. New York: Routledge.

Tsakona, Villy. 2020. Recontextualizing humor: Rethinking the analysis and teaching of humor (Language Play and Creativity 4). Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Villy Tsakona is Associate Professor of Social and Educational Approaches to Language at the Department of Early Childhood Education, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. She has published articles on humor research, political and media discourse analysis, as well as on critical literacy theory and applications. She has recently co-edited ‘The dynamics of interactional humor: Creating and negotiating humor in everyday encounters’ (with Jan Chovanec 2018) and authored ‘Recontextualizing humor: Rethinking the analysis and teaching of humor’ (De Gruyter Mouton 2020). Personal webpage: http://www.concept-pl.us/villy.tsakona