Salvatore Attardo

In this paper I will discuss three related concepts: the widely used idea of humorous frame (in the Goffmanian sense), the idea of context (broadly construed, see Tsakona 2020; Attardo 2020), and the mechanisms that allow us to determine which frame is currently active, i.e., “is this humor?”. I will start out by pointing out that most treatments of the idea of humorous frame are vague, at best. For example, laughter does not co-occur exclusively with humor and yet the presence of humor is assumed to “mark” or “signal” or “acknowledge” humor (e.g., Coates, 2007). The correct question should be, what is the difference between laughter that accompanies humor and laughter that does not? I will then differentiate between “framing,” “keying,” “footing,” and “bracketing” all concepts used by Goffman in relation to humor and used more or less interchangeably in the literature. Finally, I will argue that the metaphor of “negotiating” the humorous frame should be replaced, at least in some instances, with the concept of “soft assembly” which fits better the facts, because it does not assume that interactants deliberately communicate nor that they reach an agreement.