What makes a good piece of irony?

The role of sense of humor in producing and comprehending irony

Abstract

The paper discusses the relationship between irony and sense of humor. The point of departure is the popular category of irony, that is, whatever people in general consider to be irony or ironical will be accepted here as irony and ironical, respectively. On the other hand, we emphatically rely on the theoretical and methodological background assumption of functional cognitive pragmatics with respect to the interpretation of irony: the assumption that irony capitalizes on reflexivity, one of the fundamental properties of linguistic cognition, and in particular, participants’ metapragmatic awareness, in an emergent manner. The initial hypothesis of the paper is that sense of humor is positively correlated with both irony production and irony comprehension. The empirical study consists of two steps: we conducted two cascaded online questionnaire studies on the production and comprehesion of irony, respectively, in relation to sense of humor. We used standardized tests to measure the participants’ aptitude for producing/comprehending humor. The study of recognizing and producing irony took place with reference to 15 pictorial stimuli. In our statistical analyses we found that ironical utterances produced with high-level sense of humor were judged significantly more ironical by addressees than those produced by speakers with average or below-average sense of humor. On the other hand, the analyses showed that, in most cases, their own below-average vs. above-average sense of humor did not significantly help participants in judging the level of irony of the utterances presented to them.