Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas, Brazil

‘Language lends itself to humor’ (x) says Barry Blake in his introduction to this book. It does so because of the pervasiveness of vagueness and the existence of ambiguities of all sorts. Humor often results from ambiguities, whether used deliberately or occurring inadvertently, as when someone says I am a baker because I knead the dough, or a newspaper headline says Killer sentenced to die twice, or in an eye witness report such as I saw a man eating a pizza and a dog.

But, says B, ‘language play is part of normal language use’ (viii) and ‘exploiting the humorous possibilities in language obviously provides entertainment’ (viii). However, joking is not just a light-hearted pastime, insofar as it is a way of dealing with the vicissitudes of life, there is also a serious, indeed a therapeutic, aspect to it.

The book is presented in twelve chapters, of varying lengths generally ranging from ten to twenty pages each. The shortest chapter, Ch. 12, is barely three pages long. Ch. 1 is introductory and is titled ‘The nature of humor’. It addresses such phenomena as grammatical ambiguities, transpositions, style mixtures, dashing of expectations, clever connections, and ‘logic or lack thereof’ (9). Ch. 2 is about the kinds of topics that people joke about, and Ch. 3 distinguishes between professional and amateur humor.

Chs. 4, 5, and 6 deal with different places in an utterance in which humor may be located. Ch. 4 focuses on the lexicon, while Ch. 5 discusses how puns work and how they serve as ‘the most common basis for humor’ (68). Ch. 6 concentrates on grammatical ambiguities, and how these ambiguities are frequently exploited in different parts of speech as well as for the purpose of occasioning humor.

Ch. 7 takes a closer look at different types of humor, distinguished on the basis of common and recurring themes—for instance, blonde jokes, cannibal jokes, dumb jokes, graffiti, oxymora, stickers, Tom Swifties, Wellerisms, and so forth. Ch. 8 is on wit, and an attempt is made to distinguish wit from humor, although B admits that ‘the difference is certainly not clear-cut’ (119). Ch. 9 looks at humor from an essentially Gricean perspective (without mentioning the name of the philosopher even in passing!) and analyzes some jokes by invoking the principle of cooperation (or deliberate flouting of it).

Ch. 10 is devoted to an analysis of some jokes arising out of ‘faulty knowledge of language’ (121), a broad category that subsumes such varied phenomena as slips of tongue, mispronunciation, accents and lisps, malapropisms, misspellings, mispunctuations, and even ‘logic or lack thereof’ (9). Ch. 11 looks at how rhymes are used for humorous ends in children’s and adult verses, limericks, nursery rhymes, and clerihews. This book is rounded off with a brief chapter titled ‘Beyond a joke’, in which B returns to the theme of how pervasive humor is in language and how humor is a sure sign that there is more to language than communication and the exchange of information.