Incongruity, Vagueness, and Pertinence: A Defence of Noël Carroll’s Incongruity Theory of Humour

I. The Notion of Incongruity and the Criticism of Vagueness

The key claim of incongruity theory is that the perception of an incongruity is necessary for comic amusement. Philosophers have offered different types of definitions of incongruity. Some have offered a narrow definition of incongruity, where the incongruity relevant for comic amusement is very specific. Schopenhauer, for example, describes incongruity as a conceptual mistake.¹ Others have offered an extended definition of incongruity, consisting of a list of paradigmatic incongruities.² Contemporary incongruity theorists prefer to endorse formal definitions, which provide an outline of the formal object of comic amusement, as for example the violations of norms or expectations. Formal definitions are considered more flexible and able to account for a wider range of comic instances.³

Incongruity theories endorsing formal definitions are nevertheless charged with three standard criticisms. The first criticism challenges the necessity claim. Counterexamples, including caricatures, imitations, and repetitions of jokes, are offered to show that the perception of an incongruity is not necessary for comic amusement.⁴ The second criticism is that incongruity is not sufficient for comic amusement. We perceive incongruities when faced with riddles or when watching horror movies, but we respond with puzzlement and fear rather than comic amusement.⁵ Finally, the third criticism is that the notion of incongruity is vague: it is not informative and precise enough to be a viable notion.⁶ The third criticism presents a more serious threat than the first two to incongruity accounts of humour. While the first two criticisms target the ability of incongruity theory to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for comic amusement, the third criticism objects to the very idea that there is a viable theory to be discussed. This article defends Noël Carroll’s formal notion of incongruity from this third type of criticism.

Carroll’s influential account⁷ of incongruity theory consists of a necessary condition and additional jointly sufficient conditions that are meant to eschew these three criticisms. Carroll provides a formal notion of incongruity, describing it as ‘a comparative notion. It presupposes that something is discordant with something else. With respect to the comic amusement, that something else is how the world is or should be.’⁸ On Carroll’s account, an incongruity is a violation of general norms and expectations. Further to the necessary condition, Carroll provides additional conditions to account for the fact that we often perceive incongruities without being amused. To exclude incongruities found in horror movies or those that lead to fear, anxiety, or disturbance, Carroll claims that comic amusement requires the perception of an incongruity ‘as non-threatening or otherwise anxiety producing’. In addition, Carroll claims that an incongruity should not be perceived as ‘annoying’.⁹ For example, a person who minds that they are impeccably dressed would be disturbed and not amused by finding out that they are wearing two different socks.¹⁰ Finally, he adds that incongruities should not ‘enlist genuine problem-solving attitudes’ and should ‘give rise to the enjoyment of precisely the pertinent incongruity’ and ‘to an experience of levity’.¹¹ These conditions exclude puzzles or riddles where the attitude required is one of looking for a solution and where the enjoyment derives from finding one that dispels the incongruity.¹² According to Carroll, all these conditions, together with the necessary condition, are jointly sufficient for comic amusement.

Carroll’s theory has been met with criticism. While it could be argued that Carroll’s definition of incongruity is flexible enough to respond to counterexamples to previous definitions of incongruity,¹³ the objections to his sufficiency conditions and to the vagueness of his definition are still live.¹⁴ The latter criticism is the most pressing for Carroll’s theory. The vagueness of Carroll’s definition lies in its extreme generality but that is also what allows for its flexibility. Thus, what appears to be a strength (flexibility) might turn out to be a severe weakness (vagueness). If the criticism of vagueness is correct, Carroll’s account of incongruity theory should be rejected as its key notion would provide little, if any, insight into comic instances. Given the serious threat that the criticism of vagueness poses to the viability of Carroll’s theory, this article provides a response to it. Although I do not address the criticism of Carroll’s sufficiency conditions, some suggestions on how to approach that criticism will be provided.

Carroll anticipated that his account could be open to the criticism of vagueness that targeted previous versions of incongruity theory. Far from replying to the criticism,¹⁵ he acknowledged that there might be ‘some justice to the claim that the notion of incongruity is “too vague of a concept to be much of a use”’. Consequently, he deflated the strength of his notion, and made the modest recommendation to ‘embrace the incongruity theory provisionally as the best way to advance the discussion’, as a ‘heuristic which, though slippery, is not vacuous’. His invitation is to ‘apply it to a wide number of cases in the hope of isolating, as exactly as possible, the pertinent recurring variables in the leading structure of humour’.¹⁶ In response to Carroll’s invitation, I put the notion of incongruity to use to respond to the criticism of vagueness and, simultaneously, refine it.

To defend Carroll’s notion of incongruity, it is crucial to understand the exact charge that has been moved against it. I maintain that there are different versions of this criticism, which are yet to be distinguished. Carroll’s notion of incongruity has been targeted with two versions of the criticism of vagueness. The first version criticizes the notion of incongruity for being (1) vacuous and not informative about the object of comic amusement. The second version criticizes the notion of incongruity for allowing for (2) shoehorning, that is, that the notion of incongruity allows for tailoring an incongruity around any given element. There is a third version of the criticism of vagueness that criticizes extended notions of incongruity as open-ended.¹⁷ However, Carroll’s notion, being a formal notion of incongruity, is not liable to the third version of the criticism.

In Section II, I reject version (1) of the criticism of vagueness, and I claim that Carroll’s notion should not be abandoned on the ground that it is uninformative. To support this, I demonstrate that it is informative by analysing examples of humour taken from texts by Samuel Beckett and Laurence Sterne. Carroll’s notion allows for capturing crucial differences between these texts, which account for their different comedy styles. Starting from Section II, the philosophical discussion alternates with, and it is supported by, a piecemeal literary analysis. In Section III, I spell out version (2) of the criticism of vagueness, and I claim that Carroll’s notion should be amended to address it. I then assess and reject Tom Cochrane’s amendment to the notion of incongruity. In Section IV, I provide my own amendment to Carroll’s notion of incongruity by adding a pertinence condition to it. This condition requires that the norms, or the expectations violated, are pertinent to or part of the same context of the element that violates them. Finally, in Section V, I deal with objections and counterexamples, and in Section VI I show that the pertinence condition helps Carroll in replying some of the criticisms to his sufficiency conditions.

II. The Criticism of Vagueness as Vacuous

The first version of the criticism of vagueness targets Carroll’s notion of incongruity for being (1) vacuous. According to this criticism, the notion of incongruity is uninformative: one would not know much about a comic instance if one had only this analytical tool. This point is voiced by Alan Roberts, who criticizes Carroll’s articulation of incongruity for being redundant: Carroll presents incongruity as an infringement of what we take to be normal, which equates to saying that there is something incongruous. Although the perception of an incongruity is necessary for comic amusement, Roberts argues, Carroll’s articulation of the notion of incongruity does not provide a description of what counts as an incongruity,¹⁸ and consequently the theory is in need for a more precise articulation.¹⁹

There are reasons, however, to be sceptical of the criticism of vacuity moved to Carroll’s articulation of incongruity. Although Carroll’s articulation is quite broad, it is not redundant or uninformative. Carroll’s articulation describes what constitutes an incongruity: it is a ‘discordant relation’ between two terms. One of the two terms is our expectations on ‘how the world is or should be’, and the other term violates these norms or expectations.²⁰ This is perhaps a minimal definition of incongruity but it is one that amounts to something. When used in an analysis of comic instances, this notion helps to identify the elements responsible for comic amusement insofar it requires indicating a pattern of norms or expectations and an element that infringes them.²¹

Consider, for example, passages (a)–(b) below. A piecemeal analysis of these passages demonstrates that Carroll’s notion of incongruity is informative. By looking at which patterns of norms or expectations are breached in each passage, it is possible to individuate similarities and differences in their comedy. In (a) and (b), taken from two of Samuel Beckett’s works, the comedy is dependent on the narrator’s interruptions of their own narration. In (a), from ‘The End’, the narrator interrupts his story to rectify what he just said, creating the comic effect of a clumsy narrator. In (b), from Molloy, the narrator interrupts his story to express his distaste for what is being narrated, creating the comic effect of an annoyed narrator.

• (a) So I got a tin and hung it from a button of my greatcoat, what’s the matter with me, of my coat, at pubis level.²²

• (b) I will not tell what followed, for I am weary of this place, I want to go. It was late afternoon when they told me I could go.²³

The similarity between the comedy of (a) and (b) can be identified by looking at expectations or norms that are breached in both passages: the narrator’s intervention establishes a same comic incongruity. The explicit rectifying and deploring of one’s narrative is incongruous with what one expects from a well-formed written narration. While one expects the process of narration to follow that of careful planification and drafting, these stories appear to be drafted while narrated, giving their narrator, respectively, a clumsy and an annoyed look. The comedy of passages like (a) and (b) is, at least in part,²⁴ the result of the violation of these expectations.

Looking at expectations and norms breached also helps to identify the difference in the comedy of (a) and (b). Notice that only the intervention of the annoyed narrator in (b), and not that of the clumsy narrator in (a), leaves the reader doubting the meaningfulness and truthfulness of the story narrated. This is because (b), but not (a), breaches our expectations that each episode narrated in a story should be truthful and relevant. On the one hand, the narrator’s expression of weariness and the decision to not ‘tell what followed’ calls into question the relevance of the episode narrated. On the other hand, the truthfulness of the narration is doubted because of the sudden and suspicious change of setting, which appears as a stipulation of how the story developed. By contrast, the narrator’s intervention in (a) does not generate any incongruity related to relevance and faithfulness. If anything, it lends more credence to the narrator and more importance to his words: the correction appears as an attempt to report the story as accurately as possible, where each word matters.

The difference and similarity between comic effects in (a) and (b) can thus be captured by identifying the norms and expectations that are breached. This shows that Carroll’s notion of incongruity is informative, despite being broad. The analysis of (c) and (d) below – taken respectively from The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne and from Watt by Samuel Beckett – further illustrates this point. A key comic motif for both novels is the constant stalling of narration.

• (c) He was four years totally confined, – part of it to his bed, and all of it to his room; and in the course of his cure, which was all that time in hand, suffer’d unspeakable miseries, – owing to a succession of exfoliations from the oss pubis, and the outward edge of that part of the coxendix called the oss ileum, – both which bones were dismally crush’d, as much by the irregularity of the stone, which I told you was broke off the parapet, – as by its size, – (though it was pretty large) […]²⁵

• (d) Watt had no direct dealings with Mr Knott, at this period. Not that Watt was ever to have any direct dealings with Mr Knott, for he was not. But he thought, at this period, that the time would come when he would have direct dealings with Mr Knott, on the first floor. Yes, he thought that time would come for him, as he had thought it had ended for Arsene, and for Erskine just begun.²⁶

Looking at expectations and norms breached help to identify the similarity between (c) and (d). In both passages, the narrators supposedly aim to tell a story, but their continuous digressions and clarifications tease readers by frustrating their expectations of narrative progress. Passage (c) consists of a single sentence, where numerous dashes, commas, and semicolons keep opening asides and adding clauses. Although each clause appears to contribute to the overall description of Uncle Toby’s suffering, in effect they keep this description open, thereby deferring its completeness. A similar effect is achieved in (d), where each new sentence clarifies or corrects a previous one, deferring the completeness of the description of Watt’s dealing with Mr Knott. The incongruity at the heart of the comedy of (c) and (d) lies in this sense of deferment: where we would expect descriptions to progress with the addition of information, each new clause in (c) or new sentence in (d) defers their completion.

The difference in the comedy of (c) and (d) can be individuated by looking at expectations breached in (d) but not in (c). In addition to the stretching out of the narrative, the comedy in (d) is also generated by the hesitancy and faltering of the narrative. Whereas in (c) each clause adds a new piece of information, no matter how trivial or pedantic, in (d) each addition modifies and corrects previous claims. The first sentence of (d) begins with an absolute statement (‘Watt had no direct dealings with Mr Knott’), which is swiftly corrected into a time-relative statement by the addition of ‘at this period’, leaving open the possibility that Watt could eventually deal with Mr Knott. The second sentence (‘not that Watt was ever to have any dealing with Mr Knott’), however, undoes the correction and closes that possibility. The third sentence introduces yet another correction. If ‘at this period’ was a temporal modifier in the first sentence, its repetition sets the entire passage into Watt’s perspective at that time. The continuous corrections violate the expectation that each new sentence of a description provides additional information. In (d), each new sentence modifies and almost cancels what was said by previous ones.

Once again employing Carroll’s notion of incongruity has proved to be fruitful. It helped to identify the expectations or norms breached, enabling us to account for similarities and differences in the comedy of (c) and (d). Their similarity is due to a similar incongruous stalling of the description, and their difference is due to the faltering effect that the addition of information generates in (d) but not in (c). The analysis of the four passages demonstrates that, though it is broad, Carroll’s notion of incongruity is not vacuous, and therefore this version of the criticism of vagueness should be rejected.

III. The Criticism of Vagueness as Shoehorning

The second version of the criticism of vagueness – the (2) shoehorning criticism – claims that the vagueness of Carroll’s notion of incongruity allows for shoehorning incongruities into any putative example of humour. This criticism is expressed by Tom Cochrane, who says that the vagueness of the notion is such that ‘for any putative counter-example, we will always be able to find something incongruous about it from some point of view’.²⁷ A notion of incongruity that allows for this, Cochrane says, ‘could make the theory unfalsifiable’ and, therefore, ought to be discarded. Admittedly, Carroll’s notion of incongruity does not contain elements that could save it from criticism (2). It is true that, given any element (i), it is possible to find or construe norms and expectations (ii) violated by (i). To avoid this, some restrictions regarding (i) or (ii) should be added to Carroll’s notion.²⁸

Cochrane has provided his own amendment to the notion of incongruity in response to the criticism of shoehorning. His response consists of restricting the realm of norms apt for eliciting comic amusement. On his account, comic amusement requires the violation of rule-based norms – norms for ‘how something ought to be’ – as opposed to the violation of statistical norms – norms on ‘how something generally is’.²⁹ In addition, comic amusement requires the violation of norms related to intentional actions or attitudes, as opposed to norms that are non-intentional, such as ‘the laws of physics or teleological norms regarding the morphology of living creatures’.³⁰ Cochrane’s articulation of the norm violation as a violation of intentional, rule-based norms is narrower than Carroll’s articulation. The latter includes the violation of ‘how the world is’,³¹ that is, of the statistical, teleological, and physical norms excluded by the former. Cochrane’s narrower articulation eschews the criticism of shoehorning, as it restricts the possibility of fitting any incongruity onto an example of humour.

Carroll’s broader notion of incongruity should, however, be preferred over Cochrane’s narrower notion, which does not account for many comic instances. Let us start from his exclusion of non-intentional norms. Cochrane anticipates some counterexamples, discussing the cases of Wile E. Coyote’s recurring violation of the law of gravity or the laughter caused by ugliness, which can be described as a teleological-norm violation. He dismisses these counterexamples by saying that, in addition to the violation of non-intentional norms, they involve the violation of intentional norms, and it is this latter violation which is comic. Wile E. Coyote’s defiance of gravity, says Cochrane, would be perceived as miraculous, not as comic, if it were not for his mindless behaviour; ugliness is funny when is the result of intentional behaviour, as when one pulls ugly faces. Yet this response is not satisfying. Although it is true that many comic situations that involve the violation of non-intentional norms also involve the violation of intentional norms, one may nonetheless laugh at both types of violation. Wile E. Coyote’s mindless behaviour could well be the main reason we laugh, but this does not exclude the fact that we laugh at the violation of the law of gravity too. Consider as a case in point Nikolai Gogol’s short story The Nose, which starts with the main character waking up to discover that he has lost his nose and ends with him waking up few days later to find his nose back. It is certainly true that much of the comedy in this story depends on the character’s attempts to recuperate his nose, which could be described as violations of intentional norms regarding appropriate behaviour. And it is true that in a different context a nose-less face would lead to a different reaction, for example terror if in a horror movie. But it is hard to deny that a key comic element in the short story is the absurd situation of losing and finding one’s nose, which is a violation of non-intentional natural laws.

Cochrane’s exclusion of statistical norms from the realm of norms apt for eliciting comic amusement should be questioned too, as it leaves unaccounted for another large set of comic situations. Pace Cochrane, the violation of statistical norms – which include norms set up by repetition – is apt for comic amusement.³² In fact, it is a device exploited by comedy series, which often contain sketches where laughter is caused by the subversion of a running gag. The repetition of a running gag sets up a statistical norm, which is subverted when the running gag is subverted. For example, a running gag in the animated series The Simpsons is related to Homer’s imagination. Upon hearing something, Homer often uses his imagination to visualize a scene related to what he hears, and each time what he visualizes is comically far from reality. However, at least one time Homer’s imagination provides a correct visualization, when in the episode ‘E. Pluribus Wiggum’ he correctly visualizes a think tank. Homer correctly imagining a think tank is funny only as far as it breaks the statistical norm set up by the running gag. The comic breaking of the pattern is even emphasized by the other characters, who look at Homer surprised, to which Homer responds by asking whether he is not allowed to get one right.

Cochrane’s narrower notion of norms is too restrictive and open to counterexamples to be a convincing response to the shoehorning criticism. In the remainder of this article, I offer my own refinement of Carroll’s notion of incongruity, which aims to avoid the possibility of shoehorning, while maintaining the notion’s flexibility and ability to explain a wide range of examples.

IV. The Pertinence Condition

In this section, I answer the shoehorning criticism by providing my own amendment to Carroll’s version of incongruity theory. Specifically, I add a pertinence condition to Carroll’s notion of incongruity. This condition requires that the elements generating an incongruity are part of the same context; that is, they must be pertinent to the same context. This responds to the shoehorning worry that the notion of incongruity works in a wide range of contexts only because, given any element (i), an incongruity theorist can easily fabricate an incongruous element (ii) to prove the strength of their theory. According to the pertinence condition, not just any incongruity is apt for eliciting comic amusement, only those where the incongruous elements (i) and (ii) are part of the same context. An incongruity theorist, to explain an instance of humour, cannot appeal to any breaching of norms but must individuate an incongruity that is generated by breaching norms that are pertinent to the relevant context. Notice that this amendment to Carroll’s notion of incongruity does not restrict the range of norms apt for eliciting comic amusement; it regulates whether a norm, in a given case and context, is relevant to the analysis of the comedy.

To illustrate and support my own refinement, I analyse examples where the same norms and expectations appear to be breached and to generate the same incongruity but that lead to different reactions: where some generate comic amusement, others are estranging or fantastical. This difference, I shall show, is not captured by the sufficiency conditions outlined by Carroll to distinguish between humorous and non-humorous incongruities. I shall argue that this difference is explained by the pertinence condition. The nature of this demonstration requires, once again, piecemeal analysis.

Let us start by comparing passage (e) below, from Samuel Beckett’s ‘Ill Seen Ill Said’, with passages (a) and (b) of Section II. Recall our analysis: in (a) and (b) the comedy was generated by the narrators’ interventions, who by stipulating and correcting their stories violated the rules of well-formed narrations. ‘Ill Seen Ill Said’ is punctuated by interventions too: the narrator intervenes to guide and craft the entire text. Passage (e) below – the opening passage of ‘Ill Seen Ill Said’ – provides an illustration of the use of this device in the text.

• (e) From where she lies she sees Venus rise. On. From where she lies when the skies are clear she sees Venus rise followed by the sun. On. Then she rails at the source of all life. At evening when the skies are clear she savours its star’s revenge. At the other window. Rigid upright on her old chair she watches for the radiant one.³³

The narrator of (e) intervenes to urge the description to continue with the repeated ‘On’ and to order a change of setting by issuing the direction ‘At the other window’. The result is a text that appears to be devised before our eyes. As in (a) and (b), the narrator’s interventions generate an incongruity: a narration that is devised before our eyes violates the rules of a well-formed narration, which dictate to leave out from the final version of the story anything that has to do with the process of devising it. However, notice the difference. The violation in (a) and (b) is comically amusing: it leads us to picture a narrator who is clumsy or annoyed, not up to the task. These are passages where the narration appears to go wrong. By contrast, in (e), and in ‘Ill Seen Ill Said’ generally, the violation of the rules of well-formed narration is estranging: we are no longer sure to be reading a narration, or at least a mere narration.

This difference is not accounted for by Carroll’s conditions for comic amusement. Passage (e) ticks all the conditions set by Carroll and yet it is not amusing. The incongruity of (e) does not invite the reader to assume a genuine problem-solving attitude: it does not include elements to solve and dispel it. By contrast, it is devised to be aesthetically enjoyed and to be appreciated as an incongruity as far as it contributes to the aesthetic value of ‘Ill Seen Ill Said’. Finally, the incongruity does not elicit negative emotion or anxiety: none of the elements present in the passage is threatening or disquieting.

By contrast, the difference in reactions can be captured by the pertinence condition. In all three passages (a), (b), and (e) the incongruity is generated by (i) the simultaneity of devising and narrating, which violates (ii) the norms of a well-formed narration. However, only (a) and (b) belong to texts where the norms (ii) are pertinent; this is because they belong to texts that are narrations: in ‘The End’ and Molloy, the narrators tell stories from their past. By contrast, (e) belongs to a text where the norms of well-formed narrations are not pertinent since its very beginning. ‘Ill Seen Ill Said’ is a text that records the process of forming a narrative.³⁴ This is not to deny that (e) violates the norms of well-formed narration; it certainly does. But these norms are external and not pertinent to ‘Ill Seen Ill Said’ insofar this is not a narrative. Given that rules of narration do not straightforwardly apply, readers are asked to reassess the nature of the text that they are reading, hence the estrangement.

A second set of examples, taken from a different comedy genre, offers a further illustration of the pertinence condition. Let us start by considering gags by The Three Stooges where objects appear to be animated. This is the case for a gag in the episode ‘Oily to Bed Oily to Rise’, where Curly’s clumsy attempts to shut a waggon’s door result in him being repeatedly hit by it. In one of these attempts, after having shut the door, Curly sticks his tongue out at the door and challenges it to hit him in the face. Immediately, the door appears to take on the challenge and hits him in the face. There is a similar gag in the episode ‘Loco Boy Makes Good’. This time, Curly is trying to lay out a carpet roll, which keeps rolling up. Exasperated, Curly commands the carpet to roll back in place. The carpet initially appears to respond to the command. However, as soon as Curly turns his back to it, the carpet rolls up and hits him. One of the comic elements at the heart of these gags is that objects appear to be animated and to have agency, thus comically breaching the everyday expectation that objects are inanimate.

Now consider animated movies such as Beauty and the Beast, or the children’s cartoon series Bob the Builder. In such cases, objects are animated and have agency, thus breaching our everyday expectation about objects. However, this incongruity, rather than being comically amusing, is fantastical, that is, it sets the stories in a fantasy world. Carroll’s sufficiency conditions cannot capture this difference in reaction. In these animated works, the incongruity generated by animated objects is meant to be aesthetically enjoyed, and it is certainly not threatening or anxiety-producing. Moreover, it is not meant to be engaged with a problem-solving attitude, as the viewer is asked to play along with it. By contrast, the pertinence condition accounts for the difference in reaction. While in the case of The Three Stooges’ gags the everyday norms and expectations that objects are not animated and do not have agency apply, these norms and expectations do not apply in the worlds of Beauty and the Beast and Bob the Builder. These are fantasy worlds where some of the everyday norms of reality are external and not pertinent.

The pertinence condition dispels the shoehorning criticism by making Carroll’s account of incongruity theory more precise. Importantly, it does so without affecting the account’s flexibility and ability to explain a wide range of examples. Moreover, this condition makes incongruity theory falsifiable: it is possible to falsify and reject it by finding a counterexample where a comic instance depends on the violation of rules that are not pertinent.

V. Objections and Counterexamples

Let us deal now with objections and counterexamples to the pertinence condition. A first objection could point out that the pertinence condition is vague since it requires incongruous terms to be part of the same context but gives no indication of how to identify the relevant context. Therefore, one could object that the pertinence condition does not dispel the shoehorning objection but only moves it a step back. It is still possible to shoehorn an incongruity into any given comic element by adjusting the relevant context. For example, one could object to my analyses of The Three Stooges and of Beauty and the Beast that I arbitrarily decided that everyday norms and expectations on objects apply in the context of the former but not of the latter. One could argue that objects in The Three Stooges should be regarded as animated and that is an attempt to shoehorn an incongruity into the example: that of claiming that everyday norms apply in one case and not in the other.

However, this objection fails to show that the criticism of shoehorning applies to the pertinence condition. All it shows is that determining the relevant context might require discussing different interpretations and evaluating the most convincing. For example, the claim that everyday norms regarding objects apply in the case of The Three Stooges but not in Beauty and the Beast is not arbitrary. It is supported by the observation that, in the scenes by The Three Stooges discussed in Section IV, apart from the gags mentioned, objects are always inanimate. The same is not true for objects in Beauty and the Beast. If one wants to claim that everyday norms on objects apply in Beauty and the Beast, and to explain some of its comedy by claiming that these norms are breached, they need to provide a convincing interpretation. Simply adjusting the context to find an easy explanation for humour would not be persuasive.

Moving on to counterexamples, these consist in instances of humour that contain a comic incongruity where one of its terms is not pertinent. Particularly challenging for the pertinence condition can be caricatures, imitations, or parodies. To start with, consider the case of caricatures. The incongruity at the heart of caricatures lies between the true appearance of a person and their distorted image. For example, a caricaturized portrait of Barack Obama might exaggerate the size of his ears. The caricaturized portrait, obviously, would show the distorted image of Obama only. Given that the true appearance of Obama is not in the caricature, one might argue that it is external or not pertinent to it. So described, the case of caricatures would be like that of passage (e), or to the case of animated movies: as much as the norms of well-formed narrations or everyday expectations around objects were external to those examples, the true appearance of the person – Obama’s, in our case – does not appear in the caricature, and as such is external to it. The same could be said for imitations and parodies, which consist in distorted representations but need not contain an accurate representation of the subject of the parody or imitation.

Caricatures, imitations, and parodies, however, are only apparent counterexamples to the pertinence condition, which can account for these cases. Consider the caricature example above. Although the true appearance of Obama is not depicted, to appreciate that caricature as a caricature of Obama, the caricaturized image must be compared to its true appearance. Similarly, consider the Saturday Night Live sketches where Tina Fey imitates Sarah Palin. If one does not know who Sarah Palin is, they might appreciate those sketches for their jokes or for the exaggerated mannerisms. However, to enjoy these sketches as imitations of Sarah Palin, one needs to compare Fey’s distorted depiction with the real Palin. While the image of the real Palin is not in the sketches, it is still pertinent for the imitation to be appreciated as such. This is where the difference with fantasy movies lies. There, the audience is asked to leave aside the expectations that objects do not talk in real life, and fully immerse themselves in the fantasy. By contrast, imitations, caricatures, and parody require viewers to entertain in thought the true appearance of their targets and compare it to the distorted image they see. Thus, an appropriate context for appreciating these works is one where both the true appearance and the distorted image are pertinent, so that an incongruity can be established and appreciated.

VI. An Additional Upshot for Carroll

The pertinence condition, beyond responding to the criticism of shoehorning, offers an additional upshot. Carroll’s account of humour and, more generally, incongruity accounts of humour are often criticized for stipulating away counterexamples to the theory. Critics who would expect a theory of humour to explain why some incongruities are funny and some are not may think that the list of sufficiency conditions offered by Carroll do not say much more that the incongruities that are funny are the not-unfunny ones. While I do not wish to provide a full response to this criticism, I suggest that adopting the pertinence condition provides Carroll with a non-circular answer to some (but not all) counterexamples.³⁵

First, recall that in Section IV I offered novel counterexamples to Carroll’s sufficiency conditions. I showed that the incongruous interventions of the narrator in (e), from ‘Ill Seen Ill Said’, and the incongruity generated by animated objects in Beauty and the Beast and Bob the Builder are not comic, despite meeting all the conditions set out by Carroll. I argued that the pertinence condition can account for these cases: the norms supposedly breached in each case were not pertinent to the relevant context. The pertinence condition was used to show that what seemed like potential counterexamples to Carroll’s sufficiency conditions are not so insofar they are not candidates for being pertinent incongruities in the first place.

I think that the same response can be given to a counterexample that is standardly moved against the incongruity theory of humour. Incongruity accounts, including Carroll’s, are criticized for not being able to account for surrealist art, which seems to check all the sufficiency conditions set out, yet they are not funny.³⁶ Carroll has rejected the criticism by pointing out that surrealist paintings are excluded because ‘surrealist incongruities are intended to be unsettling […] They are designed to disturb – to elicit a haunting sense of enigma or mystery.’³⁷ As such, they are anxiety-producing and therefore excluded as good candidates for comic amusement in Carroll’s account.

Carroll’s answer strikes me as unsatisfying or at least too quick. While it may be a good reply to the specific case that he examines, I do not think it can be generalized to all surrealist artworks. Carroll discusses Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931) as a possible counterexample, and it might be fair to consider the depiction of melting watches and a melting face disquieting, as one might be prompted to imagine one’s reality or one’s own body melting away (metaphorically or not).³⁸

Better counterexamples to the theory are some of Joan Miró paintings, such as The Birth of Day (1968) or Figures and Dog in front of the Sun (1949). These paintings are populated by shapes and figures that are incongruous with shapes and figures populating our ordinary world. Nonetheless, these shapes and figures do not seem to be intended to annoy or threaten, so Carroll’s defence would not work here. They depict patches of colours that do not strike me as being particularly sombre or gloomy. The paintings do not invite the viewer to find solutions to dispel the incongruities either. By contrast, they are to be appreciated and enjoyed. While Carroll’s sufficiency conditions cannot capture the case of Miró’s paintings, the pertinence condition can. The incongruities individuated in these paintings would not be considered apt to elicit comic amusement by the pertinence condition. This is because the incongruities are between the figures and shapes in the paintings and the ordinary world. These shapes are incongruous as far as one compares them with our ordinary experience of reality. However, a full appreciation of these paintings requires a full immersion into their alternate dimension, where the rules that apply to ordinary reality are not pertinent.

One need not agree with my description of Miró’s paintings to concede the overall point that Carroll’s list of sufficiency conditions might not be apt to deal with all cases of incongruities. The pertinence condition provides Carroll’s account with an additional, non-circular tool to respond to some threatening counterexamples.

VII. Conclusion

This article has argued that Carroll’s notion of incongruity, although quite general, is promising. Carroll’s notion of incongruity can, and should, be made more precise. The criticisms made to this notion can help us to do so, if we understand the exact challenges that they pose to it and try to meet them. In this article I have done so by spelling out and distinguishing two versions of the criticism of vagueness. This article has rejected the first version of the criticism, which claims that Carroll’s notion is too general to be informative, by demonstrating that, although general, this notion can guide our understanding of comic instances. The second version of the criticism of vagueness, the shoehorning version, is a greater challenge for Carroll’s notion of incongruity. Carroll’s notion presents incongruity as a violation of norms or expectations but does not pose any constraint on what norms or expectations are relevant. Because of this, it is always possible to construe an incongruity that would explain an instance of humour, making the theory unfalsifiable. I have argued that, to meet this criticism, Carroll’s notion of incongruity should be amended adding a condition of pertinence. This condition requires that the norms or the expectations violated are pertinent or part of the same context of the element that violates them. Beyond disabling the possibility of shoehorning an incongruity into a comic instance, I have argued that the pertinence condition helps in replying to some counterexamples of the sufficiency conditions. Thus, the pertinence condition makes the notion of incongruity more precise, and the incongruity theory of humour stronger.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.