2.2 Humour theories

In her paper on humor theories, the author discussed jokes in the light of D. Sperber and D. Wilson's relevance theory and investigated the following questions: Can the verbal joke be considered as a form of communication and hence be subsumed under the relevance-based communication theory developed by D. Sperber and D. Wilson? If so, can relevance theory account for the degree of appreciation of jokes (a question that has to be considered in the light of Z. Freud's relief theory stating that laughter is the result of a saving in expenditure of psychic energy). Her answer was: "While relevance theory can very well account for jokes as a special type of communication, no relationship could be established between relevance as the result of contextual effects gained and processing efforts spent, on the one hand, and the appreciation of jokes as the result of high contextual effects at low processing costs giving rise to laughter, on the other hand" [10. P. 21].

The reasons are at hand: neither processing efforts nor contextual effects are measurable quantities; hence, the appreciation of jokes is always context-dependent and subjective. Relevance theory is too limited as an approach to account for the multifaceted nature of jokes. It was suggested that the creation and the comprehension of jokes involve human capacities that go far beyond linguistic issues so that an interdisciplinary investigation involving, in addition to linguistics, neuro-linguistics and social-psychology and possibly philosophy seems advisable.