Horation vs. Juvenalian Satire

One example of the MICH theory of humor is seen in the distinction between what is called Horatian satire as compared to Juvenalian satire. Horatian satire is named after Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) who lived in Rome from 65 to 8 BCE (Before the Christian Era). He wrote humorous satires that would gently ridicule or mock the dominant opinions and philosophical beliefs of ancient Rome and Greece. His humor was made up of witty exaggerations and clever mockery, which he used to tease his readers. When the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City put on a six-month exhibit, Stand-Up Comedians on Television, one major section was devoted to “Social Satire.” It was divided into three sections: the Instigator, the Politico, and the Sage. Exhibit notes explained that social satirists follow in the tradition of Mark Twain and Will Rogers. Their sole mission is to make you think before you laugh. They were talking about Horatian satire, which has the purpose of amusing people enough that they will take a new look at their society and work to move it closer to being a utopia. Modern examples include Lois Lowry's prize-winning children's book, The Giver (1993) and George Orwell's Animal Farm (1954). Both of these books have anti-totalitarian messages, along with gentle humor, as when in Jonathan Swift's 1726 Gulliver's Travels, the hero Gulliver travels to such places as Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the Country of the Houyhnhnms. It is humorous, when he is in Lilliput, to find an adult man of apparently average size, suddenly living amongst people who are extremely small. On one fateful morning, he wakes up to find himself pinned down by hundreds of threads placed over his body by the tiny people of Lilliput, who were frightened by the vision of such a “giant” bringing them harm. An equally funny incident is when he puts out the fire that is burning the Queen's palace by urinating on it.

Juvenalian Satire (not to be confused with the word juvenile) is named after the Roman poet Juvenal, who lived in the first century after Christ. Many of today's most popular comedians go back and forth between creating Horatian humor and the stronger Juvenalian satire. For example, in talking about the possibility of being angry about something unfair or ridiculous, Henry Rule confessed, “In truth I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with anything [that has gone wrong] to satirize it. No, I want to stand up before it and curse it, and foam at the mouth – or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp.”

Probably the best-known example of Juvenalian humor is Jonathan Swift's 1729 “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland, from Being a Burden to their Parents or to their Country.” In order to solve the problem, he suggested that at the age of one year, poor Irish children should be sold as food to be eaten by landlords and other members of the upper class. One of the lines that most of the readers who have read his “Modest Proposal” never forget was his statement that Irish mothers should be encouraged to let their children “suck plentifully in the last Month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table.”

Funny Scripts

Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo have said that a text is funny if and only if the text is compatible (fully or in part) with two distinct scripts, and the two distinct scripts are in some way opposite. In order to demonstrate this script opposition, Raskin tells the following joke: “Is the doctor at home?” the patient asks in his bronchial whisper. “No,” the doctor's young and pretty wife whispers in reply. “Come right in.”

The actors in this mini-drama are a “patient” and a “doctor,” and both of these words support the “health” interpretation. “The doctor's wife” and “bronchial whisper” also support the “health” script, but why is it mentioned that she is “young” and “pretty,” and why is she “whispering”? Then, when the doctor's wife says, “No. Come right in,” the “health” script is violated, because if the doctor is not in, the patient would ordinarily not be invited in, so we have to look for a new interpretation – an interpretation that supports “young,” “pretty” and “whispering.”

Then comes the “Ah ha!” “I get it!” We were given false clues with “patient,” “doctor” and “doctor's wife.” What's really happening here is a tryst – so the new words, representing the opposing script, take precedence. The set-up script is always relatively mundane, while the opposing punch-line script is dramatic and often sexual, scatological, or obscene.

One of the things that linguists like about jokes is that they are usually succinct. Jokes are like poetry in this respect. One of the great ways of packing a lot of semantic meaning into a word or expression is to use various rhetorical devices. For example, allusion is the noun form of the English verb “to allude.” “Allude” comes from Latin “ad-” plus “ludere” meaning “to play.” A good example of allusion is the name of the character “Jiminy Cricket” in Walt Disney's 1940 film, Pinocchio. Modern English is filled with allusions, thanks partly to modern media, where “instant” allusions can be puffed out in readers’ or listeners’ minds to full stories. The expression “By Jiminy” used to be a swearword. In fact, it was a double swearword, because it was swearing by the constellation “Gemini” which represented the twins (Castor and Pollux) from Greek mythology. Americans, who were not as familiar with Greek mythology as were European speakers, changed the expression to “Jiminy Christmas.” Walt Disney took it a step further by changing it to “Jiminy Cricket” when his company turned Carlo Collodi's 1882 book, The Adventures of Pinocchio, into a film. In Collodi's original Pinocchio there is a “talking cricket,” who offers advice to the naughty little puppet who has miraculously been changed into a boy. However, fairly early in the book, the boy doesn't like taking advice and throws a hammer, killing the cricket.

The cricket's ghost later appears as a minor character, but it was the genius of the Walt Disney makers of the 1940 Pinocchio film to name the cricket and give him a major role as the little boy's conscience. What better conscience could one have than someone with the same initials as Jesus Christ? However, in one of Alleen's Children's Literature classes, a student wrote on the final course evaluation, “I don't think it was nice of the teacher to compare Jesus Christ to a cricket.”

Sometimes allusions can be intentionally confused for comic effect. For example, comedian Michael Davis had a show in which he claimed that he was juggling with the ax that George Washington had used to chop down the cherry tree. “However,” he explained, “I did have to replace the handle,” and then, after some more silent juggling, “and the head.”

On the George Burns and Gracie Allen television show, Gracie often got her allusions wrong.

Antithesis is another rhetorical device that can be used for epiphany, and therefore for comic effect. Antithesis occurs when opposite concepts are connected so as to make a surprising kind of sense, as in a Mastercard advertisement showing a picture of a tall man looking at a shirt. The caption reads, “You found a 50 long. But you're $17 short.” The World Book Encyclopedia ran a summertime advertising campaign under the slogan, “Schools are closed … Minds are open.” The Hoover Company advertised its irons with “The iron with the bottom that makes it tops.” Shortly after Gerald Ford assumed the US Presidency, he amused an audience at Ohio State University by saying, “So much has happened in the few months since you were kind enough to invite me to speak here today. I was then America's first instant Vice-President, and then I became America's first instant President. The Marine Corps Band is so confused they don't know whether to play “Hail to the Chief,” or “You've Come a Long Way, Baby.”

Chiasmus is when words are repeated, but in inverted order. Consider the following humorous examples.

• Mae West said, “It's not the men in my life that count; it's the life in my men.”

• A bumper sticker reads, “Aging is a matter of mind over matter: If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.”

• Another bumper sticker reads, “Marijuana is not a question of ‘Hi, how are you’ but of ‘How high are you?’”

• A one-liner that is popular around tax time reads, “The IRS: We've got what it takes to take what you've got.”

Eponyms are created when the name of a real or mythical person is used in reference to something other than that individual. In 1992, the term “Frankenfood” started being used for genetically altered tomatoes or other foods. During the first Gulf War, American soldiers complained about Johnny Weissmuller field showers where the cold water made them scream like Tarzan. They named them after the Olympic swimming star, Johnny Weissmuller, who was the most famous of the different actors who played Tarzan in the Tarzan movies. When the wealthy Ross Perot was running for president, he was accused of holding the Daddy Warbucks theory of presidential qualifications. Daddy Warbucks was the wealthy-but-absent father of the lonely little girl in the Little Orphan Annie comic strip. In the seven-year period between 1987 and 1994, the Los Angeles police were involved in 700 shooting incidents. Of these, 500 were potentially life-threatening incidents, and the national news announced that the officers had succumbed to the John Wayne syndrome.

Sometimes an eponym is based on just first names, as in the noun Lazy Susan, the verb to peter out, or exclamations like Great Scott! and By George! Sometimes the words rhyme, as with even Steven, and ready for Freddie. And sometimes there is alliteration in addition to eponymy, as in gloomy Gus, dumb Dora, and nervous Nellie. Or there could be assonance, as in alibi Ike, fancy Dan, sneaky Pete, long johns, and screaming Meemie.

In English, Joe is a simple generic name, as in Joe Six-Pack, which is a refinement of the Good Old Joe concept, seen earlier in Joe Blow, Joe Schmo, and the more specific G. I. Joe for a soldier. The G. I. means “Government Issue,” and was imprinted on soldiers’ uniforms. Other examples of the Joe eponym include Joe (or J.) Random Hacker for a computer whiz, Holy Joe for an army chaplain, Joe College for a college student, and even Joe Camel for the controversial cartoon character that was used to sell Camel cigarettes.

Metaphor is another rhetorical device that can be used for humorous effect, especially when the metaphors are so common that they are called Dead Metaphors. Soldiers in the military used to be required to wear dog tags that hung on a chain around their necks. As with the dog tags that are attached to dog collars, the military tags helped to identify soldiers who might be unable to speak for themselves if they become casualties of combat. The expression raining cats and dogs originated when London had such poor sewer drainage that in city streets small animals could easily drown. After a heavy rainstorm, dead cats and dogs were lying in the gutters. Today it is just a humorous kind of exaggeration.

Bite the dust and kick the bucket are two more dead metaphors – in more ways than one. Bite the dust is a cowboy metaphor that originated with cowboys getting thrown off from a bucking bronco. It later became an expression for “to die.” To kick the bucket is a bit more subtle. It refers to a particular way of committing suicide, where a person stands on a bucket, ties one end of a rope around his neck, and the other end of the rope around a firm object overhead. When the person “kicks the bucket,” he or she is choked to death.

Metonymy occurs when something is named for a quality that is in some way associated with the item. In the days of CB radios, people often chose “handles” (self-given nicknames) that were descriptive of their physical characteristics or their hobbies. Today with email and the Internet, some people choose nicknames that are metonymous. For example, Jeff Gordon, a professor of geography at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, collects interesting names of antique shops. He has collected more than 300 names, including such creative examples as:

Sometimes the antique shops are metonymically associated with the names of the owners, as in:

The term Watergate is another example of metonymy. The Watergate Hotel is where the break-in of the National Democratic headquarters occurred during Richard Nixon's presidency. Today's dictionaries give more room to the metonymous meaning of Watergate than to the literal meaning of “a gate controlling the flow of water.” Gate has now become a suffix meaning “scandal” as in Irangate, Contragate, Iraqgate, Pearlygate (a scandal involving Televangelists), Murphygate (referring to Murphy Brown on television), Nannygate (referring to Arnold Schwarzenegger's having a baby with the family's Nanny), and Monicagate referring to President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewsinsky.

Diseases are sometimes given metonymous names. For example, the “Pickwickian Syndrome” gets its name from Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers (1837) in which Joe the Fat Boy constantly falls asleep. The disease is a condition in which blood veins going to the brain are squeezed so that people fall asleep in the midst of everyday activities. “Ondine's Curse” describes a condition in which sleeping people cease breathing and die without awakening. It is named for a mythological water nymph who cursed her mortal lover when he betrayed her. “Legionnaire's Disease” is named for the twenty-nine victims who died after attending a 1976 American Legion convention in a hotel with a contaminated air-conditioning system. The hotel managers probably breathed a sigh of relief when the disease happened to be named after the people who died, rather than after the hotel.

Synecdoche is a specific kind of metonymy in which a part of something is used to represent the whole thing. Movies are “the big screen,” television is “the tube.” Football kicker Lou Grossa was called “The Toe,” while the outspoken baseball player and coach Leo Durocher was called “The Lip.” Actress Betty Grable was called “The Million-Dollar Legs,” while Jimmy Durante was called “The Schnoz.” In a Brant Parker Wizard of Id cartoon a girl brings home a boy and introduces him with, “Father, he's asked for my hand.” The father replies, “Marv … It's the whole package or nothing.”

The literal meaning of Nonsense is that it doesn't make sense, but in truth, people do manage to make some kind of sense out of almost any set of words if they are placed in a conventional order, for example, a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase. Noam Chomsky's example of a nonsense sentence was “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” which has by now been repeated by thousands of linguistics professors and their students. The linguist Martin Joos has given “I never saw a horse smoke a dozen oranges.” Even if these are both “nonsense,” they have some meaning or else we wouldn't be able to say that Chomsky's nonsense sentence is false, while Joos's nonsense sentence is true.

In truth, nonsense verse and other nonsense is usually carefully constructed so that it has a strong rhythmic quality that serves to highlight logical infelicities and nonce words. “Nonce” means “only once.” As in the nonsense words found in Lewis Carroll's “Jabberwocky” poem where he created “frabjous” and “galumphing.”

Nonsense can also be found in the logic of some seemingly ordinary pieces, as in Charles Dickens’ story for children, “The Magic Fishbone,” in which he makes fun of large Victorian families by describing Princess Alicia's family as follows:

Oxymoron comes from two Greek words: oxys meaning “sharp” and moros, meaning “foolish or dull.” This kind of paradox or contradiction can be seen in such brand names as “Icy-Hot” (an arthritis medicine), “Cool Fire” (a line of shoes), and “Soft Brick” (a floor covering). Oxymorons also appear in such phrases as “All deliberate speed,” “Civil War,” “peace offensive,” “friendly fire,” and in the ironic slogan, “Anarchists Unite!”

Personification and Animation are two additional humorous rhetorical devices. Even babies respond to toys as if they were human. In nursery rhymes and stories, animals, dolls, “choo-choo” trains, and teapots come to life. We never outgrow this kind of personification. The Ents in J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (Reference Tolkien1955) not only can talk and communicate with other Ents and with humans; they are even able to leave their forests in order to storm a castle. One of the Ents is named Treebeard; Treebeard is the oldest creature in Tolkien's Middle Earth. Many of the animals in Walt Disney movies are also personified. Examples include Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy, the dog; however, the term that they use is “Animation” because in addition to animals becoming personified, inanimate objects, like mountains, rocks, and trees can come to life (i.e. become animated).

A favorite rhetorical device for linguists and word lovers is the pun. Richard Lederer in the introduction to his Get Thee to a Punnery (1988) said that puns are “a three-ring circus of words: words clowning, words teetering on tightropes, words swinging from tent-tops, words thrusting their heads into the mouths of lions.” Tony Tanner said that a pun is like an adulterous bed in which two meanings that should be separated are coupled together. Debra Fried defined puns as “the weird accidents, amazing flukes and lucky hits that the one-armed bandit of language dishes up.” This definition contains an instance of “once-removed personification,” because a “one-armed bandit” is itself a personified reference to a gambling machine.

We will end this section with the rhetorical device of Zeugma, intentional faulty parallelism. The idea is that this kind of a sentence structure points more attention toward the item that is either unexpected or is different from the other items in a list. For example, Chuckles the Clown on the Mary Tyler Moore show offered, “A little song…, A little dance…, A little Seltzer down your pants!” Naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch wrote that “the most serious charge that can be brought against New England is not Puritanism, but February.” Henry Clay declared that he “would rather be right than President.” A Wall Street Journal cartoon by D. Cresci pictured a bank robber informing the teller, “You won't get hurt if you hand over all the money, keep quiet, and validate this parking ticket.”

When William F. Buckley Jr. was campaigning to be Mayor of New York City in 1965, he railed against the restrictions being put on New York City police. He complained that they couldn't use clubs or gas or dogs. And then he concluded with, “I suppose they will have to use poison ivy.”

The term Malapropism comes from Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play, The Rivals (1775). She was always mis-hearing and mis-analyzing words and phrases. All three of these examples come from “old” language that is out of the ordinary and that is usually spoken rather than read from a printed script.

Sometimes these slips of the tongue, or slips of the ear, are written intentionally. One of the most successful novelty songs of all time has the following lyrics:

Then, the next verse provides clues to the meaning:

Both of us remember singing this song when we were kids, and it was a welcome relief from all the patriotic songs and serious news about World War II. Creators Milton Drake, Al Hoffman, and Jerry Livingston recorded it in 1943. The recording reached number one in record sales, not to mention how often it was played on the radio. One of the differences between then and now is that it was also sold as sheet music with over 450,000 buyers. Having the sheet music in front of them gave people an extra chance to appreciate the many puns.

While this “silly song” was purely for fun, in the 1970s Norman Lear produced a famous (some people thought it infamous) television show that was more serious in the way that it re-analyzed modern family life. It was entitled All in the Family and featured an American family of four. The father, Archie Bunker, was played by Carroll O'Connor, a xenophobic blue-collar worker from Queens, while his wife, Edith, was played by Jean Stapleton, who Archie often called “Dingbat.” The other two members of “the family” were their newly married daughter, Gloria (played by Sally Struthers) and her husband, Mike Stivik (played by Rob Reiner). The show revealed the inner workings of two generations living under the same roof but looking at the world from very different perspectives. Carroll O'Connor played his role so well that he was viewed as both lovable and ridiculous.

The writer and producer, Norman Lear, would often have Archie Bunker spout out “slips of the tongue.” Lear was setting out to shake up people's expectations and to prove to sponsors that they did not need to fear controversy. The show was described as an American version of the British Till Death Us Do Part. It proved to sponsors that serious issues, including racial prejudices, sexism, abortion, birth control, and sexuality could be treated in comic fashion. Critics worried that Lear was teaching a whole new generation the kinds of prejudices that liberal-leaning people had worked so hard to destroy. On the other hand, fans argued that he was making so much fun of the old prejudices that he was actually helping to enlighten people.

Here are some examples of the “slips of the tongue” that Norman Lear carefully crafted for Archie Bunker to say. We have listed them alphabetically, but as you read them, notice how they all show that Archie Bunker is uneducated. Then, see if you can decide which ones relate to prejudices against “foreigners,” minorities, or women. Archie referred to:

If you were an American named Archie during the time that this show was wildly popular, would you have been a little offended, or embarrassed? It would be interesting to look at naming records for the United States to see if during the 1970s, the name Archie (usually an abbreviated version of Archibald) went down in popularity as a name for newly born boys. But even if it did, we couldn't be sure that Norman Lear and his portrayal of Archie was to blame, because Norman Lear purposely chose the names of both Archie and his wife Edith because they already sounded “old-fashioned.”

Negative wordplay is more fun, because it is edgy. That's why we often run across examples of negative wordplay that is more or less hidden inside the original words. One technique is to make the words rhyme, either internally in a created name or with a playful name that rhymes with the original name. Here are two examples:

P. T. Loser: Alleen's hairdresser was discouraged when she told Alleen about how she and her husband had bought their grandson, who was a senior in high school, a new car. They bought him a Chrysler P. T. Cruiser, but he wasn't at all happy about it because the other kids at school called it a P. T. Loser, a term that was so common it made its way into the Urban dictionary.

Edison's Medicine: In a different sort of story, The Week magazine (May 18, 2012) devoted a full “Briefing” page to a story on “The Return of Electroshock Therapy.” The electroshock treatment for mental illness began in the 1930s when Italian psychiatrists discovered that the suffering of mentally ill people could sometimes be helped by giving electric shocks to their brains. However, the practice was overused and sometimes was catastrophic in that it left the patient as a “vacant-minded shell.” It was portrayed in the 1975 American film One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Besides calling it Edison's Medicine, critics began to refer to is as a Georgia power cocktail because of it being used at the Georgia State sanitarium in the 1940s. The news story was about how the treatment is being brought back, but with more supervision. Critics are pointing out that it should remain available only for “the most severe cases of depression,” and not as a way for the medical profession to make money off “elderly depressed women on Medicare.”

English Language Learners

In the world-at-large, more people speak English as a second language than as a first language. One of the contributing factors to the ease with which people learn English is that English has borrowed words from so many languages and has kept both the English and the borrowed word. This gives speakers a second chance at understanding and remembering the meanings of pairs of words, especially if one or the other is related to their native language.

For example, we use the English word heart, along with the Latin cor and the French coeur. A hearty greeting is a cordial greeting, and if someone comes over for a visit, we might offer them a cordial (drink). In contrast, a person who is disheartened is also discouraged. The original meaning of record was to learn something by heart, while to have a heart attack is to suffer cardiac arrest.

Another interesting pair is the English word hand and the Latin word manus. Handcuffs are also called manacles; a handbook is a manual, and something made by hand is manufactured instead of being grown by nature. At least in the “old days,” manuscripts were written by hand and manual labor involved working with one's hands. Even the word emancipate is related. The Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves from the hands of their owners

Ped and foot are another pair. A pedestrian lane is a kind of footpath. If something impedes your progress, it is like your feet are tied. Pedants were the servants who walked Greek children to school – tutoring them along the way. The most far-fetched example is pedigree from French pied de gris (foot of a crane), named because of how the lines on genealogy charts look like the legs and feet of cranes.

Dent is the French word for tooth, which relates to the fact that we get our teeth fixed by the dentist and that false teeth are called dental plates, or dentures. Hanging indentation and indented paragraphs look like someone has taken out a bite, and so does a dented fender.