Introduction
Prosody and humor
Salvatore Attardo
1
, Manuela Wagner
2
,
and
Eduardo Urios-Aparisi
2
Texas A&M University - Commerce
1
/ University of Connecticut
2
1.
Introduction
The purpose of this book is to gather several studies on the intersection of prosody
and humor — a promising area of investigation, which has recently undergone a blos-
soming. The chapters in this book address more or less directly the issue of whether
and how prosodic and multimodal features are used to “mark” humor (in a broad
sense). As we will see the very idea of “marking” humor is under scrutiny, although
this is a central theme of this issue. Furthermore, all the papers share a methodologi-
cal commitment to empirical instrumental analysis (supplemented, to be sure, by
human analysis and interpretation). Before we proceed to summarizing the chapters
and discussing some broad implications of their findings, we need to pause to ad-
dress an issue of terminology and to take stock of the literature on these topics.
1.1
A terminological caveat
Anyone interested in the study of humor is faced with a terminological problem,
which may appear trivial at first, but that eventually becomes serious enough to
require clarification. Humor research has standardized on the use of the umbrella
term ‘humor’ to indicate any form of communicative behavior intended or inter-
preted as having the intention to elicit amusement, mirth, laughter, or associated
feelings of exhilaration, the perception of the comical and similar states of mind.
By definition, ‘humor’ is meant to encompass any form of such behavior, without
any attempt at further differentiation. Under this term, humor encompasses most
uses of irony. This is not to say that one cannot establish internal operational sub-
divisions, and study wit in 18th century England, for example. The same goes for
irony and sarcasm: there are those who claim that the two are distinct phenomena,
2
Salvatore Attardo, Manuela Wagner,
and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi
but the general consensus is that sarcasm is an aggressive form of irony.
1
We
generally do not differentiate between the two, as it is usually impossible to do so
reliably in the intermediate cases. However, the difference may be reintroduced in
a methodologically controlled way: for example, Cheang and Pell (this book) and
Caucci and Kreuz (2012) examine specifically critical irony (sarcasm) as distin-
guished from “positive/humorous” (i.e., non critical) irony.
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