Danish Humour E-Book

Helen Dyrbye

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 265

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

What makes hygge-happy Danes, their humour, society and language so 'special'? Explore useful insights and toe-curling incidents with professor emeritus Lita Lundquist, language and humour researcher at Copenhagen Business School, and British-born, Danish-based Helen Dyrbye, freelance proofreader/translator and principal author of The Xenophobe's Guide to the Danes - while learning to navigate humour better in international waters. "Enjoyable and amusing reading. Backed by meaningful qualitative research, it reaches a broad audience. Anyone dealing with people from other nationalities in formal and working settings may benefit from the reflections expressed in this book." The European Journal of Humour Research.

Leseprobe

Contents

PART I The ‘charms’ of Danish humour

Introduction

Career suicide?

Career suicide checklist

Humour events: Sinking or swimming?

Does your humour fit in?

A question of humour socialisation

Your humour voyage

The authors, their ambitions and empirical data

Our goals and reasonsfor revisiting humorous ‘crime scenes’

Chapter 1 Happiness, alcohol and sex

A heady Danish humour cocktail

Danish conversational humour has no limits

So what is humour?

Defining humour

Surprise and incongruity

Irony

Self-irony

More Danish wisdom with lashings of irony

Charting progress

Humour in an academic context

Chapter 2 Authority, formality and privacy

Police, passports and personal comments

Humour events: From failure to success

Humour and the private life/work life divide

Professional roles and private personas

Is it hot in here?

Cancelling a humour event

Work culture incongruity

Charting progress

Chapter 3 Rocking the boat with laughter

Virtual hilarity

What a circus!

Laughter

The relief theory of laughter

Feeling superior?

The superiority theory of laughter

Relief or superiority?

Laughing in Parliaments

Charting progress

Anchor points from Part I

PART II The strengths of Danish society

Chapter 4 The Danes and their “Great Humour”

A new act in the Danish political circus

Travelling light with Danish politicians

Humour in international politics

The triple-A model

“Shamelessly rude” Danish humour – straight from the horse’s mouth

Stereotypes

Humour socialisation

Humour breeding and Great Humour as an attitude to life

How Danes are bred into their Great Humour

What makes you smile?

Who is in charge of our humour breeding?

Fear and fun in humour breeding

Charting progress

Chapter 5 Humour civilisation

The towel, the turban and a twist of Danish humour

Danes’ dumb-smart comments

From Great Humour to national styles of humour

The civilising process

A quick glance at Danish history

Danes and their campfire mentality

Trust and the French court society

British society in broad brushstrokes

From humour breeding

and socialisation to humour civilisation

The campfire, court and clowns

More shaking up the mix with royal Danish humour

Charting progress

Chapter 6 Humour, irony and self-irony in Danish management

Campfire football

A Danish dress-code

faux pas

Self-irony as a Danish antidote to self-importance

Self-irony as a “reflexive management practice”

Roles and personas

In humour and irony, we trust

A business merger comes unstuck

A good leader

Other norms in workplace culture

Humour as a leadership tool in other hands

Win-win or lose out

Performance versus the common good

Charting progress

Anchor points from Part II

PART III Humour and language

Chapter 7 Language and spontaneous verbal humour

Language and verbal humour – in general

Easy rider

Humour in a foreign language

Using humour – a case for linguistic pragmatics

Logic and conversation

The Cooperative Principle

Conversational implicatures – or ‘gangplanks’

The rules of conversation

Conversational humour implicatures

How to interpret Danish irony

Danish humour – gangway!

Charting progress

Chapter 8 Meeting the Danish language

The difficulties of understanding and learning Danish

The obscurities of spoken Danish

Focus on the positive

Danes speaking foreign languages

A sticky situation

Danes speaking English

Saving face

Compliments and honesty

The soft Danish ‘no’

Charting progress

Chapter 9 Fathoming the Danish language and humour

Misfired Danish humour events – in a lingua franca

Humour warning signals

‘Triggers’ that make Danes fit for wit

Danish humour – in Danish

Lars von Trier’s missing links

Saving the French scientist from trauma

Another round of alcohol and sex – in Danish

More intricate meanings

Impossibly intricate meanings?

Language and national mentality

Charting progress

Anchor points from Part III

Chapter 10 Conclusion

Reaching port in one piece

Gelotophobia

Are Danes as tough as they think they are?

Laughter and unlaughter

Be brave but responsible

Land Ho! A happy ending

Acknowledgements

References

This book is dedicated to our lovely sons: Rasmus Lundquist and Zac, Alex and Jake Dyrbye

PART I The ‘charms’ of Danish humour

Introduction

Inappropriate”, “in-your-face” and “rude”. Such phrases peppered the questionnaires completed by non-Danes describing their encounters with Danish conversational humour. But when browsing through examples of Danes’ spontaneous use of humour in professional settings, one particular outburst of utterly jaw-dropping proportions is hard to beat. It occurred at the Cannes Film Festival on 18 May 2011. What happened? There was certainly no warning that anyone was about to press ‘self-destruct’, in full view, on the silver screen. In fact, to an outside observer, the stage was set for triumphant success…

Career suicide?

The Dane in question was film director Lars von Trier, and his cinematic creations had been bathed in the glow of international success ever since he co-pioneered the concept of Dogme 95, with its stripped-back camera techniques, six years earlier. Praised for his “playful experimentation” and “darkly haunting atmosphere” in films such as Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Dogville (2004), he had also been widely credited with revolutionising modern Danish cinema.

As he took his seat on the podium in Cannes on this auspicious occasion, he was no doubt hoping to focus the global spotlight on his dramatic new film Melancholia starring Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland and Alexander Skarsgård.

Alongside his ‘family’ of actors, facing media representatives from all over the world, though usually somewhat shy, today he was smiling and clearly happy. Until, that is, the moment when a journalist from The Times asked him to expand on the German Romantic theme in the film and reveal more about his own roots – at which point he promptly began digging himself into a hole and undermining his international stature with these inadvertently wrecking-ball words:

“I really wanted to be a Jew, and then I found out that I was really a Nazi, because, you know, my family was German,” von Trier said. “Which also gave me some pleasure. …

Unfortunately, he did not stop there but continued to muse aloud as the cameras rolled, apparently unwilling to relinquish the spotlight: “What can I say?” he asked.

Take the Fifth Amendment, would be our advice. But there was no stopping him now: “I understand Hitler, but I think he did some wrong things, yes, absolutely. But I can see him sitting in his bunker in the end. He’s not what you would call a good guy, but I understand much about him, and I sympathise with him a little bit,” he declared. Eyebrows raised. He forged on regardless: “But come on, I’m not for the Second World War, and I’m not against Jews. … I am very much for Jews,” he announced, before backtracking again. “No, not too much, because Israel is a pain in the ass,” he exclaimed. Now thoroughly lost in a dark maze of his own smoke and mirrors, he appealed to the shocked audience for help, pleading: “How can I get out of this sentence?”

That is a very good question, and though this book might have provided him with a welcome lifeline, we cannot turn back the clock. We can, however, use the incident in Cannes to examine how he put himself in such a dreadful quagmire in the first place. And then perhaps “there will come a point at the end of this” as Von Trier promised but failed to deliver during his painful monologue, abandoned as he seemed to be, without mercy, by the conference moderator.

Now, we would not go so far as to claim that we understand Lars von Trier. He has a ‘complex’ personality. His knuckles are tattooed with a swear word in English. As this, if nothing else, indelibly proves, he in no way represents an average Dane, though Danes do swear in English quite profusely. Still, von Trier’s misfortune in trying to bond with his audience shows, we believe, some characteristics of how Danes like using humorous remarks to skate dangerously close to taboo topics. Some would say they steam blithely out onto thin ice. But these remarks are meant to be said with a quick twist of the blade, rotation of gravity and a twinkle in the eye intended to create a friendly atmosphere. How can Hitler and the holocaust possibly equate with friendliness – or hygge as the Danes call it? What could he possibly have been thinking? Let us dissect the unfortunate incident in detail.

Career suicide checklist

During the episode in Cannes, Lars von Trier failed to negotiate a range of important obstacles listed below. These obstacles will serve us here as a springboard for explaining why Danes using humour often dive head-first into provocative, confrontational and offensive waters, and meet an instantly icy, if not brittle reception. Not all Danes are conversational winter bathers, of course. However, we would suggest the list below explains some basic characteristics of Danish humour that international counterparts will find interesting and that Danes, too, would do well to bear in mind. This book is written for precisely these two target groups: Danes and non-Danes in professional and other environments.

1. Lars von Trier is a Dane. He appeared to forget that he was talking to an international audience, whose feelings might be hurt. Initially, at least, he appeared to direct his reply towards another apparently quite unperturbed Scandinavian participant sitting two seats to his left.

2. Lars von Trier felt safe and confident among his ‘family’ of close friends and colleagues. But he probably felt estranged and insecure facing an international audience.

3. His mother tongue is Danish. In Cannes he spoke English, the subtle nuances of which he had not perfectly mastered. As witnessed by his urgent plea: “How do I get out of this sentence?”

4. He said something dreadful and offensive. But he didn’t really mean it. Maybe he was describing himself ironically – at least in his early remarks.

5. He is ‘great’, in his profession. Yet he pretended to be ‘small’. He was – in Danish terms – being ‘self-ironic’, which is not quite the same as the English term ‘self-deprecating’ (more on this later).

6. He was in a work situation. But could not help referring to his private life, which may be familiar among Danes but not among non-Danes. In fact, with the sentence: “I really wanted to be a Jew, and then I found out that I was really a Nazi, because, you know, my family was German,” Lars von Trier was alluding to the very private but in Denmark more public knowledge that his mother made a dramatic deathbed confession: Her husband, from whom Lars had his Jewish-sounding family name ‘Trier’, was actually his stepfather. His biological father had a name with German resonances and was reportedly not actually a Nazi but a member of the resistance.

Evidently, the famous film director was attempting to flirt provocatively with taboos for the camera, but quickly lost the plot. His train of thought, and consequently his communication, derailed in spectacular fashion – also professionally. Despite his high status, he was expelled from the film festival as a persona non grata. And although he subsequently apologised, it was some time before his film company once again received an invitation to the event – and for a while, his illustrious career was at risk.

Looking back, from a position of implicit and presupposed connivance with his audience, the Danish film director was probably speaking in what we could call ‘tongue in cheek’ (ironic) fashion. But foreign accents have a way of concealing precisely where a tongue is – or should be. Consequently, he seemed almost oblivious of the moral hot potato he was attempting to juggle. Instead, he missed his mark, lost his footing and landed in an ungainly mishmash of offensive Hitler-Nazi references. To the trained ear, he probably intended to expand upon the complicity he felt he had cleverly created by heaping on more irony and self-irony. He may even have been attempting to sound inclusive by allying himself with both ends of the World War II spectrum. Yet he simply ended up offending everyone imaginable. So, what went wrong?

Humour events: Sinking or swimming?

Trier’s performance in Cannes illustrates to perfection a (failed) humour episode in a professional setting. It took place during a press conference where he was supposedly hoping to create a positive atmosphere. Schematically, episodes of humour in such ongoing interactions between partners A and B can be seen as a humour event with two possible outcomes: Either the humour event can be understood and taken as intended for fun. In which case, it creates an enjoyable and friendly atmosphere that breaks the ice and positively enhances further professional cooperation. Or it may not be taken as intended for fun. Then it causes misunderstandings, frustration, rifts and chasms that jeopardise the professional cooperation and steer it off a cliff . And that is exactly what the humour event in Cannes achieved.

Figure 1: The humour event

In most professional situations, A and B are presumably working towards a common goal, such as maintaining a fruitful relationship or sealing a business contract or political agreement. Everyone presumes that no one would wish to say anything that risks steering the interaction in a negative direction. What would be the purpose of that? The participants are expecting humour to be used in a positive sense to underline that everyone is in the same boat, pulling in generally the same direction. It is therefore all the more counterproductive and tragic when efforts run aground.

Does your humour fit in? A question of humour socialisation

Understandably, humour events are more likely to take a negative turn when A and B come from different countries, speak different languages and have different cultural backgrounds. In fact, everyone’s use of humour and preferred forms of humour in specific situations is moulded by the country and culture where they grow up and by the language they learn during childhood. This hypothesis, which we defend and substantiate in this book, describes how we gradually build up our attitudes to humour during our lifetimes.

This process of being socialised into specific forms and norms of humour starts with humour breeding during childhood. We are literally bred, via small episodes of fun and laughter in our close family unit and later through humour socialisation, as we call it. We have coined this term to illustrate how people are gradually ‘socialised’, nudged and kneaded, into certain forms of humour by the society that surrounds them, along with its prevailing norms, and by the specific language that infuses and unites it (Lundquist 2020, 2021).

The first instances of humour breeding and socialisation take place in your own culture among your own countryfolk, naturally. However, the positive side of the story is that, despite your breeding, you can still learn and evolve. That can be achieved by living, working and generally being around people from other countries who have been shaped and socialised in other societies with other languages. Another tactic is to read about their specific experiences, such as those we describe here in some detail. We can then understand more profound differences in humour attitudes, and hopefully learn to wrangle, tame and develop our own humour to fit specific occasions.

That is precisely why we have written this book. With a few concepts, such as the humour event model above, and the triangle model of humour socialisation below, we aim to equip readers with a useful range of tools. These can be used for spotting, understanding and deftly tackling the differences in various approaches to humour, while relaxing and revelling in the diversity of humour and life. We have no intention of putting a lid on the fun. Quite the contrary.

And with that established, we would like to open with a tour of the universal elements of humour socialisation, as shown below:

Figure 2: The process of humour socialisation

This general model applies to how humour can be approached and used – in professional relations and everyday life. But in Figure 4, we reveal some of the particular features of Danish humour exposed by the unfortunate Cannes of worms von Trier event we opened with. As the book progresses, we will plot more details into the model for future reference.

Figure 3: The Danish process of humour socialisation

Your humour voyage

Sink or Swim will guide you through the socialising process by describing how Danes develop preferences for using conversational humour. Often, these ‘humour to go’ preferences clash to some degree with other people’s expectations of how humour should be served up in work situations. The first leg of the voyage therefore covers theories of humour and detailed sketches of business relations shipwrecked by Danes’ often confusing remarks made to their foreign colleagues and counterparts. Next, we explore the peculiar characteristics of Danish society that have together moulded the Danes’ sense and use of humour. And, on the last leg of the journey and final side of the triangle, we examine certain quirks of the Danish language, almost inaudible to foreigners but ingrained in Danes, that defuse or trigger more or less innate reactions worldwide.

By charting these three stages

I: Preferred Danish humour forms

II: Characteristics of Danish society

III: Features of the Danish language

we hope to prompt personal reflections and insight as readers of all nationalities reflect on their own reactions to the excruciating humour events described. Fortunately, examining where Danes’ humour events sink or swim, though a slightly guilty pleasure, can reveal how we are all bred to respect the humour prevalent in our own countries. And by raking over the ashes of burnt business bridges, we can have fun identifying or sympathising with both the ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ if those labels apply, while considering how to adapt our own personal humour, if necessary, to suit our unsuspecting surroundings. We can also begin to learn how to enjoy each other’s humour, like a breath of fresh air blowing through otherwise stale, stiff and often stressful intercultural work situations.

And that is the happy note on which our journey ends – with the conclusion: Reaching port in one piece.

But before reaching our happy ending, what qualifications do we have for being your tour guides on this journey through the foggy territory of Danish humour?

The authors, their ambitions and empirical data

We come from different countries, Denmark and England, with different mother tongues, and have witnessed some interesting episodes where Danes attempting harmless witty jibes have overbalanced in a clash of cultures with their international colleagues and washed up on the rocks.

Our professional backgrounds are also very different. One of us, a Danish researcher in the field of linguistics, text, discourse and humour research, is the author of a book on humour socialisation and why the Danes are not as funny as they think they are. Her research explores observations and data that came from two main sources: Firstly, interviews with Danish and French employees working for French and Danish companies, respectively, and other interviews with Danish, French and German Members of the European Parliament. Secondly, questionnaires filled in by students at the International Studies programme at Copenhagen Business School representing 14 different countries. Some of this data and analyses appear in other works as well as in this book (Lundquist 2020).

The other author is a British language consultant who translates from Danish into English. She is also a teacher of business English and the principal author of The Xenophobes Guide to the Danes (Dyrbye 2020). Her career spent rubbing elbows with Danes in their natural habitat, while attempting to fit in, largely provides our third source of ‘fun’ for the slice-of-life incidents in Danish Humour – Sink or Swim.

As soon as we met, we realised that we share a keen desire to explain why such misunderstandings arise. To get to the bottom of the matter, we therefore decided to combine our expertise and dive deeper by examining all kinds of disconcerting real-life encounters that left those involved struggling, completely at sea. We accompany our own ‘beneath-the-surface’ observations with inspiration from the academic fields of social and linguistic studies.

Our goals and reasons for revisiting humorous ‘crime scenes’

By describing the incidents recalled in research interviews and questionnaires and many other encounters experienced by foreigners living in Denmark, we hope our book can fulfil its double goal: Firstly, to provide insight and warnings to a wide range of Danes, and, secondly, to help all other nationalities to open up and accept the friendly intention underlying what can come across as ‘sledgehammer icebreakers’.

Ultimately, we believe our descriptions and explanations of Danes’ humour in various international settings can form a useful life raft for avoiding collisions between A’s and B’s use of humour, regardless of country and language. Yes, that is a seriously ambitious claim. But read on, as we believe the insight, home truths – and entertaining glimpses of hygge gone wrong in Sink or Swim will ultimately improve cross-cultural appreciation and acceptance of other peoples’ humour across the world.

Chapter 1 Happiness, alcohol and sex

A heady Danish humour cocktail

Foreigners who have heard anything about Denmark approach Danes and their Danish business contacts with a smile. They are expecting to meet happy, friendly people living cosy, conflict-free lives. After all, there are shelves of books and reports describing this consensus-seeking society with among the highest happiness ratings in the world.

And on this particular day, the Chinese student arriving at Copenhagen Business School for a period of study was confident that he had done his homework. He was, we imagine, excited at the prospect of having his own adventure in this fairy-tale land of Hans Christian Andersen stories and beechwood forests.

As the Chinese student explained in a questionnaire he completed later, he was also looking forward to his first encounter with his Danish classmates, especially his Danish buddy – as the university pairs up students to encourage friendships. Little did he know that it was at the hands of this very buddy that he was destined to learn what he later described as his first “cruel lesson”.

The pair in question met in a classroom at the International Studies programme, to be precise. In an effort to kick the proceedings off to a genial start, the Chinese student made the first move. With no idea of the consequences it would have, he offered up to his Danish buddy this initial sympathetic and contact-seeking remark. “I have heard that Danes are the happiest people in the world,” he said. The response was prompt: “That’s because of their excessive use of alcohol and sex.”

It left him stunned. He later described his own reaction in these terms: “I was very surprised. I would have preferred a more discreet and restrained form of humour. (…) Maybe because I am from a country with a tradition for censorship and reserve.”

Clearly, many parameters are at play in this social interaction, which capsized and ended up in the drink, so to speak. The two “discourse participants”, to call them by their technical titles, A and B, have a conversational exchange in English as a lingua franca. We suppose both the Chinese student and the Dane mastered this common language well enough to avoid misunderstandings. However, the two participants bring different social expectations to the exchange – expectations anchored in their different cultural backgrounds. And on what we might refer to as the badminton court of light conversation, the Chinese student served up a gentle opener, politely aiming to initiate contact. The Dane responded in his manner, instantly knocking a stinging retort back across the net by referring to an aspect of ‘national wisdom’ common among Danes, at least among young Danes. It implies ‘the more you drink, the more sex you get, and the happier you are’. Ouch! That hit a nerve.

Now every country has such pearls of national wisdom, some associated with less flattering self-observations than others. But often, as here, they escape the notice of outsiders. And sure enough, caught on the hop, the Chinese student explained that he was not only “very surprised” but also felt “slightly offended and excluded”.

So why does engaging in polite conversation with a witty Dane sometimes feel like courting disaster?

Danish conversational humour has no limits

As we warned in the introduction, non-Danish respondents described their encounters with Danish conversational humour as everything from “inappropriate”, and “rude” to “having no limits”. Not only does this cover the subject matter itself, but also the Danes’ fondness for what might be termed ‘speeding’. Speed is considered a virtue in its own right. For instance, the Danes have a saying: ‘Han er altid god for en kvik bemærkning’, which is totally positive though it means ‘He is always good for a quick/witty comment’. As ‘kvik’ means both ‘witty’ and ‘fast’, it is easy to see that in the race to a punch line, the distinction may get somewhat blurred, and unsuspecting casualties, such as the non-Danes in this book, may feel they have suddenly been thrown under the passing juggernaut of a swift Danish jest.

Take, for example, the reflections of the Chinese student. After flagging the contents of the Danish buddy’s reply, the Chinese student pointed out the “very quick reaction (of Danes) – as if it is an innate component in them”. Compared with the Danish whiplash approach, he judged his own sense of humour as being a “very withdrawn type of humour. I have to know a person pretty well before I can use my humour”. And he explained the Chinese national style of humour in these words:

I would say Chinese people prefer those hidden-meaning jokes very much – it takes time and brain cells to figure out where the funny part is. I feel it has something to do with the highly controlled censorship in China and also its ancient culture of being reserved.

This discrepancy between the Dane who is prone to a speedy, impulsive response and his Chinese counterpart, who would prefer a restrained, pondered reaction, reveals a first tantalising glimpse of what humour socialisation is all about: Danish and Chinese individuals have, like everyone else, been bred by their surrounding community and language to follow certain rules for using humour – not least in formal professional situations. These rules are probably not only unspoken but end up becoming innate features of their default humour settings.

Our advice is to apply the brakes and don’t judge too harshly. From the Dane’s perspective, his response can be viewed as restrained. He could easily have referred not only to alcohol and sex but also to the Danes’ high consumption of antidepressant drugs – another potentially direct cause of their sky-high happiness ratings. Fortunately, he held back on that score, but clearly a lesson can be learned.

So what is humour?

Was this an example of humour? In some ways, it apparently overshot its mark. Yet, on another level it was on target since the Chinese student reported the event when asked to describe his first encounter with Danish humour. Still, he was uncertain whether he was facing humour or not, admitting that his own approach to humour differed and was shaped by his Chinese background. So, what we have here is a situation where the two parties’ views of humour clearly diverge.

Who is right? Is there all-prevailing agreement on what actually constitutes humour? Let’s take a stroll through the field of humour studies.

Defining humour

After reviewing a mountain of research, we see that many scholars have seized this task by the horns and attempted to ‘brand’ a universal definition. One that captures the very essence of humour. Their mission has been – and still is – to define what humour has in common to all people, at all times, in all contexts.

Being personally somewhat sceptical that such a one-size-fits-all definition exists, we have adopted a more tailored approach. Instead, we focus on the feeling evoked by a successful humour event – the glow, if you like – and the new relationship it sparks between the parties. This prompts the following question: How does this feeling arise and what is its source?

Surprise and incongruity

Humour researchers generally agree that the prevailing feeling resulting from a positive humour event is a feeling of mirth and well-being. They also generally accept that this emotion is caused by the surprise of being confronted with different ‘mental worlds’ that are suddenly and unexpectedly juxtaposed.

Jokes provide an excellent example of just such kaleidoscope moments. The instant when different mental worlds collide in the mind of the receiver, the elements click into place and an amusing new pattern is produced. Understandably, therefore, jokes have been put under the microscope both intensely and extensively. Most explanations ultimately focus on incongruity or incompatibility as the releasing factor. These specific states arise when the person reading or listening to the joke has relaxed with a comfortable mind map of expectations created by the initial story line. Then suddenly – at a certain trigger point – these expectations are reset and steered in a new direction. Like a satnav losing its GPS signal and requiring a new fix on its location, this causes a momentary flash of mental confusion in fast traffic. The reader or listener must instantly switch mental lanes, abruptly blending one story line with another, and change direction in one manoeuvre to reach the desired conclusion. Since, in jokes, this happens in a split second, we sometimes simply miss the turn, and the moment is lost. But sometimes a joke in a business setting adds a dash of colour, a triumphant diversion and welcome relief in an otherwise bleak office landscape.

Box 1 Incongruity and reconciliation in jokes (Raskin 1985, 99).

The following ‘doctor joke’, called ‘the most hated joke in humour research’ because it has been repeated ad nauseam, illustrates the fundamental mechanism of the joke, seen as the prototype of humour: “Is the doctor at home?” the patient asked in his bronchial whisper. “No,” the doctor’s pretty young wife whispered in reply. “Come right in.” We expect the story to be about a patient with lung disease but are surprised by the sudden change of the “doctor script” into a “lover script”. The surprise is what causes the smile and, with luck, a chuckle. In fact, the essence of the joke – and the essence of humour in general – has been defined as “a funny reconciliation” of “different semantic scripts”.

Although jokes are not the main subject of this book on spontaneous conversational humour, the doctor example opens the door to a useful explanation of incongruity – of elements that do not fit together. This principle of incongruity is also found in ongoing conversation, where it is often condensed into more succinct linguistic expressions, such as (ambiguous) sentences, (twisted) sayings and even (novel) single words. In fact, as far back as in 1905, the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis psychologist Sigmund Freud, defined humour as a radical abbreviation with a concentrating force of two different domains. He skilfully illustrated how, instantaneously, two domains could be distilled into one single word with the following ‘witz’ (wit or witticism): “I sat next to Salomon Rothschild and he treated me just like his equal, quite familionairely.”

Box 2 The Technique of Wit

In his book “Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten