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CHAPTER II REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
In this chapter, there are two sections, which are theoretical description and theoretical framework. Theoretical description presents the theories that are
employed to support the research. This study applies the theory of verbal humor, types of verbal humor, and translation. Theoretical framework discusses how the
theories are applied to the study.
A. Theoretical Description
The theoretical description presents the theory of verbal humor, types of verbal humor, and verbal humor translation.
1. Verbal Humor
To define verbal humor, it will be better to know what humor is in general. Humor is whatever evokes laughter or felt to be funny Spanakaki, 2007.
Spanakaki adds that the definition ultimately depends on the purpose for which it is used and the effect of the humor. It is quite difficult to define humor since there
will always be different interpretations of humor in different heads. A joke might be funny for one person, community, culture, or even country, but might come to
be boring to others. Raskin 1985 proposes that
“humor came from incongruity, unsuitable, or disharmonies among things because of something knocked out of its original
shape and purpose.” According to the humor theory of Incongruity, jokes might come from something that is irrelevant to the real nature.
Raskin’s perception is
9 more or less similar to Lynch 2002. He states that “something can be funny if it
is irrational, paradoxical, illog ical, incoherent, fallacious, or inappropriate”. In this
humor theory of Incongruity, humor comes from the intellectual activity. Humor is based on the psychological activity of the audience to produce the funny effect.
Lynch augments that “humor is cognitively based because it is dependent on the individual’s perception of an event, individual, or symbol in comparison to what
is considered typical”. Shade 1996 provides a categorization of humor by classifying it into four
major groups, namely figural humor, verbal humor, visual humor, and auditory humor. This categorization relies on the source and the media of the humorous
effect. Shade 1996 defines verbal humor, as the focus of this study, as a humor that employs language-based jokes, meaning to say, this kind of humor is mainly
expressed in the form of words, spoken or written, to produce the comical sense. Raskin 1985 explains that verbal humor comes from the concurrence of
two different and opposing concepts that creates contradiction in between. This contradiction actually generates the humorous effect out of an utterance. Raskin
1985 calls this contradiction as the Script Opposition and Incongruity. Raskin 1985 exemplifies this incongruity in this joke
, “An English bishop received the follo
wing note from the vicar of a village in his diocese: “Milord, I regret to inform you of my wife’s death. Can you possibly send me a substitute for the
weekend?” p. 101 In the joke above, there are two scripts or concepts arising incompatibly,
they are “loss” and “gain”. The vicar lost his wife and he supposed to be
10 burdened by deep sadness of loss, but instead of being concerned of the current
situation, he sends a lunatic request to the bishop asking a new woman to replace his wife for the weekend. One can resolve that the humorous sense lies in the
incongruity of two opposing scripts of “loss” and “gain”. Script Opposition can be experienced in many other scripts, such as “good” and “bad”, “young” and
“old”, “small” and “big”, or other countless combinations. As mentioned earlier, the effect of verbal humor generated from involving
the intellectual activity of the readers. The appreciation of verbal humor can only take place
when the readers discover and resolve the incongruity. “Once the hearer of the joke senses the incongruity, he or she will be motivated to resolve
the incongruity” Wu Chen, 2010. It may lead the readers to confusion if they fail to resolve the incongruity within a joke and they will not laugh at all.
2. Types of Verbal Humor
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