Misdirection

Misdirection is a broad term that applies to techniques of information presentation that implicitly encourage the audience to adopt one interpretation of what is being presented, despite the fact that another interpretation is not only possible but will later become more obvious. This is relevant to humor (such as jokes) in which expectations are established only to be violated later. This entry discusses how misdirection can lead an audience away from an interpretation that subsequently is revealed to be central to the humorous effect.

The notion of misdirection fits within a particular account of humor, often discussed with reference to humor presented in language. Humor can occur in ordinary life when a person misperceives or misunderstands a situation, perhaps making unconscious predictions, then realizes what the true circumstances are, and that the initial predictions are not borne out. This pattern of events is adopted in many specially constructed cultural artifacts, such as jokes, in order to achieve humor. Some scholars even propose that this is the essential mechanism for all jokes, not merely for a large subset of jokes.

The initial portion of such a joke (usually known as the setup) establishes (in the mind of the audience) certain ideas about the situation being described. These initial ideas may trigger some expectations on the part of the audience. The joke then has a final short portion, usually known as the punch line (or sometimes simply punch), which causes the audience to revise the ideas established by the setup and perhaps discard some expectations. This means that the setup must be compatible with two different interpretations, either through vagueness (i.e., the information leaves certain details unspecified) or through ambiguity (i.e., the information has two or more clearly distinct meanings). Moreover, for the joke to work, one of these possible interpretations must be more “obvious,” in the sense that the audience is most likely to be aware of that interpretation and not to be conscious of the other interpretation. If the audience does become aware, during the presentation of the setup, of the interpretation evoked by the punch line, then the joke will probably fail to work, as there will be no corrected misunderstanding, no violated expectations, and no surprise.

Although this device (misinterpretation followed by sudden revision) can be used in any medium (visual, tactile, verbal, etc.), it crucially depends on information being released gradually to the audience over some period of time, for example, by the joke being delivered in language. Where a humorous artifact does not have this sequential presentation (e.g., a single-frame cartoon, where the reader’s eye is free to explore the areas of the picture in any order), it is harder to control the order of presentation of information.

[Page 513]Misdirection is part of the technique for crafting these misinterpretation-based jokes. The setup of a joke must be constructed in such a way that both possible interpretations are available in principle, but also so that the interpretation associated with the punch line is unlikely to be noticed during the setup. To this end, the joke creator must express the setup appropriately, so as to guide (misdirect) the audience toward the required interpretation. In language, this can involve careful choice of vocabulary and other discourse elements.

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