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I beg to differ. A one-liner or funny story depends not on the context in which it is told, outside certain fairly obvious provisos (a shared language and often shared cultural assumptions, say), depends on the capacity of the comic to create an internally consistent universe within the course of that joke. Tannhauser
I'm looking at this, Tannhauser, and finding it difficult to see just what it is that you are begging to differ about.
First, you downplay the importance of the extra-textual context of any joke (the arguably vital access to a shared language and cultural assumptions/knowledge by speaker/writer and listener/reader), and then you foreground the importance of the creation, for the joke to work, of an accessible intra-textual context (in your words, 'an internally consistent universe') by the speaker/writer or comic.
The point is that both *are contexts* needed for the joke's reception. On any occasion, even the simplest communication depends on complex interpretative processes that in turn depend on various kinds of framing or recognitions of context.
But the contexts of a joke's/text's reception are also variable, given all the situational factors affecting interpretation: socio-cultural circumstances, institutional settings, proximity of the text to other texts, the class, gender and race of the interpreter and so on. The much feted 'iterability of the word' depends on this.
So, to sum up, specific contexts are as important to the communication of dry humour as to the communication of any text, but they don't in themselves define the text type. A joke/text doesn't have a single meaning determined by a single context; given the interplay of different framings of it, the text's contexts and hence meanings are multiple. |
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