A further fruitful way to address the problem of translating humour is from the point of view of humour theory. The most influential theory of humour in recent years has no doubt been that of Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, whose General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) emerged out of work that both scholars published in the mid-1980s to 1990s. The GTVH is in origin a theory of jokes but has been applied with more or less success outside this immediate sphere. The theory is based on what Raskin and Attardo call ‘script opposition’ and is in essence a theoretically sophisticated incongruity model. As such it shares similarities with a long line of theories which see humour as being predicated on some sort of surprise which is painless to the listener (‘painlessness’ being a quality of humour suggested by Aristotle: aveu oShvnq, Poetics 1449a). The ‘scripts’ which are opposed are abstract entities made up of the conventional experiences and utterances connected with a given activity or situation - in a more casual moment, Attardo calls them ‘an organized complex of information about something’ (Attardo 2002: 181) - and so, for instance, the ‘script’ connected with ‘going shopping’ would include, say, all the sentences and assumptions behind a phrase book entry on that subject. Two or more scripts must overlap in a joke and then be shown to be ‘opposed’ - the normal model being that there is one ‘obvious’ reading of the humorous text or situation presented but that another less obvious reading is shown also to be possible at a key moment, i. e. the punch line, which tends to appear at or towards the end of the text. So, to take an example:
A pair of suburban couples who had known each other for quite some time talked it over and decided to do a little conjugal swapping. The trade was made the following evening, and the newly arranged couples retired to their respective houses. After about an hour of bedroom bliss, one of the wives propped herself up on her elbow, looked at her new partner and said, ‘Well, I wonder how the boys are getting along.’
Here the punch line leads the listener to re-evaluate his/her initial expectations. What was set up as an instance of heterosexual intercourse is shown to be an instance of homosexual intercourse: thus two scripts are ‘opposed’. Jokes can be referential or verbal in nature, just like other forms of humour. The ‘partner swapping’ joke is referential, the following joke, complete with its connector, ‘tank’, is verbal.
Two fish in a tank. One says to the other, ‘Where’s the gun?’
The GTVH gets more complex still: it posits that any given joke can be broken down into six components, known as Knowledge Resources (KRs). These are:
LA (Language: i. e. the precise wording of the text)
NS (Narrative Strategy: e. g. simple narrative, riddle, conversation, etc.)
TA (Target, or ‘butt’ of the joke: not all jokes have a target)
SI (Situation: what the joke is ‘about’)
LM (Logical Mechanism: the way that the incongruity is built in to the joke and thus resolved)
SO (Script Opposition: the way in which the key frames of reference present in a joke - the ‘scripts’ - are ‘opposed’ to one another).
Relevant to the translation of humour is that, according to Attardo, these six Knowledge Resources form a hierarchy: and so each Knowledge Resource in the list above is more deeply integral to the joke than the last. Experiments using paraphrased jokes suggest that listeners are most likely to rate two jokes as being ‘the same joke’ when the Knowledge Resource changed is most superficial: Language is thus the least important, Script Opposition the most essential (although a significant number of listeners rate Situation as more key than Logical Mechanism: see Ruch et al. 1993). We might see fit to scratch our heads at this point since puns might reasonably be said to rely on Language, which is the Knowledge Resource that Attardo reckons to be the least important. However, in his 2002 article, ‘Translation and Humour: An Approach. Based on the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH)’, Attardo defends the hierarchy by arguing that punning is actually reliant on a kind of Logical Mechanism: one called ‘cratylism’ (Attardo 2002: 188) which relies on the notion that if two words sound the same or similar they must therefore have the same or similar meanings. Thus, according to Attardo, punning lies at the deepest level of the joke bar one (only Script Opposition is deeper) and it is simply that ‘the Logical Mechanism “cratylism” preselects some features of Language (i. e. it limits the options of the Language Knowledge Resource to any of the options which fulfil the requirements of the Logical Mechanism)’ (Attardo 2002: 189).
Whether or not we accept Attardo’s reasoning on this point, the conclusions which he arrives at bear a strong resemblance to those we reached earlier with the help of the Ciceronian distinction. To oversimplify: verbal jokes do not translate (unless we are lucky) and referential ones do (unless we are unlucky). Attardo concludes that, with the notable exception of puns, the mere fact of translating a joke into a foreign language ought not to cause any particular difficulty - as long as the Narrative Strategy, Target, Situation, Logical Mechanism and Script Opposition are ‘available’ in the target culture. And it is here that we are faced with the realities of cultural exchange outlined earlier. With an Aristophanic text the Target may or may not be available in modern anglophone culture (politicians yes, ‘the Paphlagon’ no); likewise the Situation (voting with hands yes, feeding Herakles no), and so on. The logic of Attardo’s argument is that a translator should make a substitution at the most superficial level possible for the translated joke to be most like the original - the problem of puns notwithstanding.
World History
