Ambiguity

One of the most important contributing factors to humor is ambiguity. Ambiguity in its most fundamental characterization is the possibility of a given utterance, text, or even discourse situation to be interpreted in more than one way. The significance of ambiguity to humor is found in the prominent role that ambiguity occupies in different theories about the nature and composition of humor. Rather than consider how ambiguity figures into different theoretical approaches to humor, however, this entry instead briefly considers some types of ambiguity, showing how they can be manifested in some humorous texts.

All humor, indeed all communication, depends upon larger contextual factors for its meaning. So when we look at a humorous text and identify an ambiguity with a specific word, phrase, clause, or situation, we must remember that ambiguity, at whatever linguistic level it seems most directly evident, still relies on a significant interplay of contextual factors, including world knowledge and expectations, in order for us to see both meanings. Consider, for example, the following line from Roseanne Barr: “You get a lot of tension. You get a lot of headaches. I do what [Page 24]it says on the aspirin bottle: Take two and keep away from children” (That's Funny, 1996, p. 78).

In this example, we may note the crucial role of the ambiguous utterance “Take two and keep away from children.” But the humor of the joke still depends not only on our world knowledge about what causes headaches, how children can be especially noisy, and how they shouldn't be given unsupervised access to medication, but also on the common grammatical custom of product labels to omit the direct object of a verb. This last expectation we have about labels accounts for how in this setting we can interpret “keep away from children” as being ambiguous with “keep the aspirin away from children.”

Some ambiguities are highly dependent on specific language forms for their occurrence, while other ambiguities are much more independent of a specific form. We shall begin by looking at the former, which may be divided between lexical and structural ambiguities. Lexical ambiguity results from the possibility of a word (or word phrase) to carry more than one meaning in a particular context. An example of this would be a brief dialogue provided by Milton Berle:

“Did you hear my last speech in Congress?”

“Senator, I hope so!” (1989, p. 592)

This example depends on the meaning difference of last as “most recent” or, alternatively, “final.”

In contrast to lexical ambiguity, a structural ambiguity results from the possibility of more than one structural, not merely word, interpretation in a given context. Among the structural ambiguity types we might identify are those involving the “part of speech” (or as some linguists might say, the lexical category), the grammatical function (such as whether a word or phrase is a subject, direct object, modifier, etc.), and the scope of modification. The structural ambiguities involving a part of speech (or lexical category) ambiguity are distinct from simple lexical ambiguities because the differing part of speech meanings also correspond with varying interpretations about the grammatical structure involved. Some categories of structural ambiguity are represented in the following

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