This review aims at describing the conference delivered by Sírio Possenti, by not only evaluating its content, but also by discussing about parts worthy to be highlighted. In his speech, Possenti analyses a set of texts made up by some genres that are part of the humoristic field (among others, jokes and cartoons) in order to show how the form, that is, the linguistic mechanisms are, in general, more important than the content itself in the production of a humorous effect. While he explains the functioning of such mechanisms in his analysis, Possenti shows the importance of humor to those interested in the studies of language, as the discourse analysts.
Esta resenha tem como objetivo fazer uma descrição da conferência apresentada por Sírio Possenti, não apenas avaliando seu conteúdo, como também discorrendo sobre pontos que merecem destaque. Em sua fala, Possenti analisa um conjunto de textos composto por alguns gêneros do campo humorístico (entre outros, piadas e charges) a fim de mostrar como a forma, isto é, os mecanismos linguísticos são, em geral, mais importantes do que o conteúdo em si na produção do efeito humorístico. Ao explicar o funcionamento de tais mecanismos em suas análises, Possenti explicita a importância do humor para os interessados nos estudos da língua/ linguagem, como os analistas do discurso.
The virtual event Abralin Ao Vivo (Abralin ao Vivo – Linguists Online), promoted by Abralin (Associação Brasileira de Linguística) in partnership with CIPL (Comité International Permanent des Linguistes), ALFAL (Asociación de Lingüística y Filología de América Latina), SAEL (Sociedad Argentina de Estudios Lingüísticos) and LSA (Linguistic Society of America), was an initiative to promote an environment for discussions and reflections about various aspects of the linguistic studies during the quarantine caused by the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. The event, with the contribution of important names of Linguistics, provided all those interested with an opportunity of free access to relevant content.
As a part of this virtual event, the conference “Why does humor interest linguists and discourse analysts”
In this presentation, directed not only to (under)graduates in Languages and/or Linguistics, but also to those interested in language studies in general, Possenti emphasizes the analysis of the corpus rather than its underlying theoretical principals, revisiting previously published content, especially those found in Os humores da língua (POSSENTI, 1998)
Regarding the theoretical concepts, and in order to support his analysis, Possenti briefly presents two theories. Firstly, he defends Freud’s proposition (FREUD, 2017)
Besides these theoretical aspects, Possenti also mentions during his presentation, though indirectly, the concept of scripts, another notion developed by Raskin (1984)
Such notions, though briefly presented, are enough to the analysis of the corpus selected for this virtual conference. However, even though Possenti affirmed not to be his goal to deepen into theoretical aspects, he could have given, either at this point, or by the end of his speech, suggestions of bibliographical references so that the viewers could research about the subject further on.
In the following moment, which takes up the longest part of the presentation, Possenti analyses a set of jokes to show how linguistic mechanisms (be they of any type: phonetical/phonological, prosodic, lexical, semantic, syntactic,…) are used as triggers, resulting in the characteristic surprise found in this genre. In some cases, it is necessary to access a memory about the subject and/or theme, for example when he analyses a joke about Ayrton Senna e Nelson Piquet, two former Brazilian F-1 pilots. Besides jokes, Possenti talks about sentences considered as humorous, according to his essay Humor e grandes frases (POSSENTI, 2018)
In the Q&A section, Possenti discusses about important issues related to humor, such as the analysis of multimodal genres, the translation of jokes, the dissociation between laughter (according to BERGSON, 1983)
As a whole, the conference is very productive to undergraduates in Languages/Linguistics and/or to those who would like to know the basics regarding how humor works based on linguistic aspects. On the other hand, to those who are researchers in that field, the presentation may be used to review some known concepts, without presenting new content, though.