Archiwum
- Index
- Carroll_Jonathan_ _Vincent_Ettrich_TOM_02_ _Szklana_zupa
- Carroll Jenny (Cabot Meg) 1 800 Jeśli W
- Carroll Jonathan Całując ul
- Carol Lynne [Cattle Valley 05] Physical Therapy (pdf)
- Jay D. Blakeny The Sword, the Ring, and the Chalice 02 The Ring
- Willa Okati And Call Me In the Morning
- Jacqueline Lichtenberg [Sime_Gen_08]_ _RenSime
- Encyklika Jana PawaśÂ‚a II F
- Arthur Upfield 20 The Battling Prophet (pdf)
- 6798D TE
- zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- lafemka.pev.pl
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
ber, for the most part, relies upon mobilizing her default presuppositions about
how the real world operates.15 That is, given her standing sense of the way
in which the type of events portrayed in the narrative usually unfold or fail
to unfold in the world as she knows it, the audience member has a rough
intuition of the range of which narrative eventualities are practically pos-
sible and practically impossible. She has, in other words, an expectation set.
Therefore, since narratives, and especially erotetic narratives, are intim-
ately related to the promotion of expectations, it should come as no surprise
that narration has a latent comic potential. For inasmuch as narrative has
the power to elicit a default range of expectations, it equally possesses the
power to subvert those expectations in a way that can abet the kind of
incongruity favored by humor. This is the secret of the wildly improbable
comic plot.
That is, insofar as raising expectations is a typical function of narration,
especially of erotetic narration, and insofar as upsetting expectations is the
business of humor, erotetic narration and comedy are naturally suited for
each other, notably in terms of the capability of narrative to elaborate causal
chains that, with respect to our default assumptions about how things hap-
pen, result in practically impossible a.k.a. wildly improbable states of affairs.
That Friendless, a.k.a. Buster, in Keaton s film Go West could save the day
that his clueless leadership of the cattle herd could solve the problem is
Appendix 169
a lucky series of events, bordering on the ridiculous. That all s well by the
end of the film is a palpable absurdity. It is so unlikely that anything good
could come from the efforts of the likes of Friendless that it is, as we say in
ordinary language, a joke, that is, funny, absurd.
The capacity of narratives to function as comic vehicles, of course, should
be predictable, since, in all probability, the largest number of jokes are nar-
rative. And, in certain respects, what I am calling improbable plot structure re-
sembles certain narrative jokes. The joke, Did you hear that a taxi overturned
in Edinburgh? Thirty people were injured, rides, in part, on the improbability
of packing 30 people, even 30 penny-pinching Scotsmen, into a normal-sized
cab.16 The practical impossibility of it rattles our standing expectations.
Similarly, the comically improbable plot winds up in a place that our stand-
ing assumptions about the normal course of events would ordinarily rule out.
After witnessing Johnnie Gray s fumbling incompetence in the chase to
Chattanooga, a fair estimate of his successful return to Marietta is pretty close
to zero. That it happens against the odds is, in part, what makes us giddy.
The plot itself amounts to a stupendous violation of our realistic default expec-
tations about what is practicable in the fictional world of The General.17
In the wildly improbable plot, the relevant incongruity is the outlandish
improbability of the consequences in contrast to the causal conditions that
give rise to them. That a character like Elle Wood in Legally Blonde 2: Red,
White, and Blonde is able successfully to pass a bill in Congress, given her naive,
not to say skewed, understanding of the world, is so imponderable that its
probability gets as close to nil as conceivable without utterly dissolving into
it. As a logical possibility, it has a conceptual niche on our horizon of expec-
tations, but only barely so. And yet, in improbable scene after improbable
scene, Elle Wood advances her cause until the impossible achieves actuality
in the fiction; and, thereby, the tension between this happening and our pre-
sumption that this is all supposedly occurring in something like the world
as we understand it evokes mirth.18
Though in some ways like a narrative joke, the improbable plot also diverges
from it in certain respects. In the typical narrative joke, the incongruous punch-
line is puzzling, invoking an incongruous interpretation in the mind of
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]