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Self-referential humor

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Self-referential humor, also known as self-reflexive humor or meta humor, is a type of comedic expression[1] that—either directed toward some other subject, or openly directed toward itself—intentionally alludes to the very person who is expressing the humor in a comedic fashion, or to some specific aspect of that same comedic expression. Self-referential humor expressed discreetly and surrealistically is a form of bathos. In general, self-referential humor often uses hypocrisy, oxymoron, or paradox to create a contradictory or otherwise absurd situation that is humorous to the audience.

History

Old Comedy of Classical Athens is held to be the first—in the extant sources—form of self-referential comedy. Aristophanes, whose plays form the only remaining fragments of Old Comedy, used fantastical plots, grotesque and inhuman masks and status reversals of characters to slander prominent politicians and court his audience's approval.[2]

Meta has come to be used, particularly in art, to refer to something that is self-referential. Popularized by Douglas Hofstadter who wrote several books on himself and the subject of self-reference.

Classification

Meta-jokes are a popular form of humor. They contain several somewhat different, but related categories: joke templates, self-referential jokes, and jokes about jokes (meta-humour).[citation needed]

Joke template

This form of meta-joke is a sarcastic jab at the endless refitting of joke forms (often by professional comedians) to different circumstances or characters without a significant innovation in the humor.[3] For example:

  • "Three people of different nationalities walk into a bar. Two of them say something smart, and the third one makes a mockery of his fellow countrymen by acting stupid."
  • "Three blokes walk into a pub. One of them is a little bit stupid, and the whole scene unfolds with a tedious inevitability." —Bill Bailey[4]
  • "How many members of a certain demographic group does it take to perform a specified task?"
    "A finite number: one to perform the task and the remainder to act in a manner stereotypical of the group in question."
  • There once was an X from place B,
    Who satisfied predicate P,
    Then X did thing A,
    In a specified way,
    Resulting in circumstance C.

Self-referential jokes

Truly self-referential jokes are quite rare, as they must refer to themselves rather than to larger classes of previous jokes. Examples:

  • "This joke is not funny when delivered in a deadpan accent."
  • "What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?"
  • An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a bar. The barman turns to them, takes one look, and says, "What is this—some kind of joke?"
  • A priest, a rabbi and a leprechaun walk into a bar. The leprechaun looks around and says, "Saints preserve us! I'm in the wrong joke!"
  • Three blind mice walk into a bar, but they are unaware of their surroundings so to derive humour from it would be exploitative. — Bill Bailey[4]
  • "When I said I was going to become a comedian, they all laughed. Well, they're not laughing now, are they?" – Bob Monkhouse

Jokes about jokes ("meta-humor")

Meta-humour is humour about humour. Here meta is used to describe that the joke explicitly talks about other jokes, a usage similar to the words metadata (data about data), metatheatrics (a play within a play, as in Hamlet), and metafiction.

Other examples

Alternate punchlines

Another kind of meta-humour makes fun of poor jokes by replacing a familiar punchline with a serious or nonsensical alternative. Such jokes expose the fundamental criterion for joke definition, "funniness", via its deletion. Comedians such as George Carlin and Mitch Hedberg used metahumour of this sort extensively in their routines.

Anti-humor

Anti-humor is a type of indirect and alternative comedy that involves the joke-teller delivering something that is intentionally not funny, or lacking in intrinsic meaning. The humor of such jokes is based on the surprise factor of absence of an expected joke or of a punch line in a narration that is set up as a joke.[5][6] It depends upon reference to the audience's expectations on what a joke is.

Breaking the fourth wall

Self-referential humor is sometimes combined with breaking the fourth wall to explicitly make the reference directly to the audience, or make self-reference to an element of the medium that the characters should not be aware of.

Class-referential jokes

This form of meta-joke contains a familiar class of jokes as part of the joke. Examples:

  • Bar Jokes:
    • Three men walk into a bar... Ouch! (And variants:)
    • A dyslexic man walks into a bra.
    • Two men walk into a bar... you'd think one of them would have seen it.
    • Two men walk into a bar... the third one ducks.
    • A baby seal walks into a club.
    • Two men walk into a bar... but the third one is too short and walks right under it.
    • An Irishman walks past a bar.
    • The bar was walked into by a passive sentence... "active members only" was heard said.
  • What and Why Jokes:
    • "What has four legs and barks?" "A dog." "You heard it."
    • Why did the elephant cross the road? Because the chicken retired.
    • What's an onomatopoeia? Just what it sounds like!
    • Why did the chicken cross the road? To have its motives questioned.
  • "There are 10 kinds of computer scientists: those who know nothing, those who know binary, those who know ternary, those who know quaternary, those who know quinary, ... "

Comedian jokes

The process of being a humorist is also the subject of meta-jokes; for example, on an episode of QI, Jimmy Carr made the comment "People laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now!"— a joke previously associated with Bob Monkhouse.[7]

Limericks

A limerick referring to the anti-humor of limericks:

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I've seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.[8]

W.S. Gilbert wrote one of the definitive "anti-limericks":

There was an old man of St. Bees,
Who was stung in the arm by a wasp;
When they asked, "Does it hurt?"
He replied, "No, it doesn't,
But I thought all the while 'twas a Hornet."[9][10]

Tom Stoppard's anti-limerick from Travesties:

A performative poet of Hibernia
Rhymed himself into a hernia
He became quite adept
At this practice, except
For the occasional non-sequitur.

Metaparody

Metaparody is a form of humor or literary technique consisting "parodying the parody of the original", sometimes to the degree that the viewer is unclear as to which subtext is genuine and which subtext parodic.[11][12][13]

RAS Syndrome

RAS syndrome refers to the redundant use of one or more of the words that make up an acronym or initialism with the abbreviation itself, thus in effect repeating one or more words. However, "RAS" stands for Redundant Acronym Syndrome; therefore, the full phrase yields "Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome" and is self-referencing in a comical manner. It also reflects an excessive use of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms).[14][15][16]

Exemplars

Carson

Johnny Carson in his Tonight Show career used to get laughs when reacting to a failed joke with, for example, a pained expression. Immediately following a failed joke about Lincoln's death Carson remarked, "A hundred years later, and you still can't do Abraham Lincoln jokes." The latter remark got a better laugh than the initial joke.

Galanter

Marc Galanter in the introduction to his book Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture cites a meta-joke in a speech of Chief Justice William Rehnquist:[17]

I've often started off with a lawyer joke, a complete caricature of a lawyer who's been nasty, greedy, and unethical. But I've stopped that practice. I gradually realized that the lawyers in the audience didn't think the jokes were funny and the non-lawyers didn't know they were jokes.

Hedberg

Stand-up comedian Mitch Hedberg would often follow up a joke with an admission that it was poorly told, or insist to the audience that "that joke was funnier than you acted."[18]

Izzard

Eddie Izzard often reacts to a failed joke by miming writing on a paper pad and murmuring into the microphone "must make joke funnier" or "don't use again."

Marx

In one memorable scene, Groucho Marx said into a telephone, "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?" He then turned to face the camera and said to the audience, "Well, all the jokes can't be good, you have to expect that once in a while."

The Office

In the U.S. version of the British mockumentary The Office, many jokes are founded on making fun of poor jokes. Examples include Dwight Schrute butchering the Aristocrats joke, or Michael Scott awkwardly writing in a fellow employee's card an offensive joke, and then attempting to cover it with more unbearably bad jokes.

Stewart

Jon Stewart, when hosting The Daily Show, used to wring his tie and grimace following an uncomfortable clip or jab.

White

E. B. White has joked about humour, saying that "[h]umour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."[19]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Sentences about Self-Reference and Recurrence". .vo.lu. Retrieved 2012-08-21.
  2. ^ Alan Hughes; Performing Greek Comedy (Cambridge, 2012)
  3. ^ "Stars turn to jokers for hire"[dead link]
  4. ^ a b Bill Bailey, "Bill Bailey Live - Part Troll", DVD Universal Pictures UK (2004) ASIN B0002SDY1M
  5. ^ Warren A. Shibles, Humor Reference Guide: A Comprehensive Classification and Analysis Archived September 28, 2007, at the Wayback Machine (Hardcover) 1998 ISBN 0-8093-2097-5
  6. ^ John Henderson, "Writing Down Rome: Satire, Comedy, and Other Offences in Latin Poetry" (1999) ISBN 0-19-815077-6, p. 218
  7. ^ Deacon, Michael (3 June 2015). "Modern comedy's unlikely hero: Bob Monkhouse". telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 18 February 2018.
  8. ^ Feinberg, Leonard. The Secret of Humor. Rodopi, 1978. ISBN 9789062033706. p102
  9. ^ Wells 1903, pp. xix-xxxiii.
  10. ^ Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia Of Literature - Google Boeken
  11. ^ Morson, Gary Saul; Emerson, Caryl (1989). Rethinking Bakhtin: extensions and challenges. Northwestern University Press. pp. 63–. ISBN 978-0-8101-0810-3. Retrieved 20 April 2013.
  12. ^ Marina Terkourafi (23 September 2010). The Languages of Global Hip Hop. Continuum International Publishing Group. pp. 234–. ISBN 978-0-8264-3160-8. Retrieved 20 April 2013.
  13. ^ Peter I. Barta (2001). Carnivalizing Difference: Bakhtin and the Other. Routledge. pp. 110–. ISBN 978-0-415-26991-9. Retrieved 20 April 2013.
  14. ^ Clothier, Gary (8 November 2006). "Ask Mr. Know-It-All". The York Dispatch.
  15. ^ Newman, Stanley (December 20, 2008). "Sushi by any other name". Windsor Star. p. G4. Archived from the original on May 3, 2012.
  16. ^ "Feedback" (fee required). New Scientist. No. 2285. 2001-04-07. p. 108. Retrieved 2006-12-08.
  17. ^ Marc Galanter, "Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture", University of Wisconsin Press (September 1, 2005) ISBN 0-299-21350-1, p. 3.
  18. ^ "Mitch Hedberg - Mitch All Together", CD Comedy Central (2003) ASIN B000X71NKQ
  19. ^ "Some Remarks on Humor", preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor (1941)
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