Article

Name: The principle of play in black humor

Authors: G. I. Berestnev

Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, Institute of Humanitarian Investigations

Abstract: In the article the categorical frames of play are defined from the theoretical point of view. The play is being considered as the specific behavior of a person in the semiotic sphere, the behavior which suggests intentional applying to ambiguity provided by the common systemic properties of the sign systems. In this respect, the whole range of different phenomena besides language texts gets into the focus of some researchers attention. But in all the cases like these, the play is based on the relation “norm – another norm” or “objective reality – playful reality”. At the same time, interaction of such positions which discovers relevant similarities and dissimilarities between them is underlined. Such play is observed in the sphere of black humor as well. In black humor, the play may be lingual or imagery but it can be realized in the interaction of the two mentioned codes. In the latter case the verbal text and the image complement each other meaningfully, verbal component either giving the vector of the playful interpretation of the image, widening the field of its understanding or being itself defined by the content of the image. Language play in black humor is realized on all levels of language system – phonetics, lexical semantics, grammar, syntax and language pragmatics. Here, all known systemic properties of language which create the effect of semantic and functional ambiguity of words and texts play an important part. Such language play can be realized on the text level as well. In these cases, the playful ties appear among the given text itself – the situational semantics expressed by it – and the text semantics to which the addressing is directed. Language play in black humor can be realized in the field of worked out communicative prescriptions. In such cases, external view of the text corresponding with all conditions of successful communication and the text meaningful part discovering the real inadequacy or the erroneousness of the given communicational act are connected by the playful relations. This kind of play is inherent to the black humor creolized forms of which the verbal texts are necessary contents. Here, in some cases their verbal content turns out to be self-sufficient, in the others it needs the image context and tightly interacts with it. Finally, play is inherent to the visual forms of black humor but they are defined at the level of their meta-language description. Meaningfully the playful relations of such kind are placed in the area of the oppositions like “normal – divergent from norm”, “natural – unnatural”, “successful – unsuccessful”, “safe – dangerous”, “real – must” and so on.

Keywords: black humor, linguistic play, Russian, Creole texts, image, semantics, phonetics, lexis, morphology, syntax, text

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