Jokes and Unintended Meanings

Another benefit of considering hermeneutical issues through reflection on humor: People can say and do things that are unintentionally funny. On a strict construal of authorial intention as the source and foundation of meaning, this would have to be explained with some kind of Hirschian distinction between "meaning" and "significance," or perhaps with a distinction between the meaning of a speech act (analyzed as locution + illocution) from the perlocutionary effect of the act.

But that is unsatisfactory. Surely, there is a disjunction in such cases between intention and effect; someone might intend something to be profound and grave and set off his audience into giggles. But the distinctions offered above don't work. To the suggestion of siphoning off perlocution from meaning: While this might work in the narrow confines of analyzing discrete speech acts, it doesn't work in the actual phenomenological setting where speech acts (and other acts) take place. We want to say that the effects of an act (whether speech act or no) are part of its meaning. At least this is the way that we use the word "meaning" in ordinary discourse: The Terror is part of the meaning of the French Revolution, and the fall of the Soviet Bloc is part of the meaning of John Paul II's visits to Poland and his support of Solidarity. To the suggestion that meaning and significance can be distinguished, again I would appeal to ordinary usage. When I read a book a second time, I say it "means" so much more than it did the first time.

Using jokes as a paradigm for hermeneutical reflection seems to help resolve this. A direct joke is rooted in the author's intention to make a joke, but that intention pushes the hearer toward other texts. A joke operates intertexually, even when it is governed wholly be authorial intention. An accidental joke also operates intertextually, but it is seen in the light of outside "texts" of which the speaker is unaware. "God cannot sink the Titanic" is funny, even though when it was originally uttered it was not intentionally funny. It's funny now because the audience who hears it in 2005 is aware that God in fact did sink the Titanic. Anyone who does not catch the humor of the statement is missing the meaning of the statement. Humor is part of the meaning of an unintended joke.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, April 04, 2005 at 05:38 PM

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