A Spectrum of Linguistic Humor: Humor as Linguistic Design Space Construction Based on Meta-Linguistic Constraints

Nearly all humor derives from some element of surprise, discrepancy, unexpectedness, pattern-breaking, or anomalous inference. This speculative paper will briefly discuss aspects of linguistic humor, from simple wordplay including shm-reduplication, punning, simple language games, simple humorous linguistic and textual genres (limericks, Pig Latin, “Name Game”), to more complex genres that go beyond humor into linguistic and textual artistic innovation such as modernism (Joyce’s Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake), post-modernism (Theater of the Absurd, Beckett, John Barth’s Giles Goat Boy, Chimera), OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, “workshop for potential literature”) (constraint-based postmodernism), and science fiction (world creation). In many cases, both humor and linguistic and textual innovation can be considered to have notions of friction or pressure within a constrained communicative channel, and more generally as breaking a common linguistic pattern based on implicit or explicit meta-linguistic constraints. My speculative approach includes developing a linguistic spectrum (from phono-morphological to discourse components and beyond) to describe the range of techniques used for humor, but also a very early foray into a theoretical account of humor and creativity that focuses on creating an object-level design space (structure and model) that is guided by meta-linguistic constraints.