forceville in humor

Addressing an audience: Time, place, andgenre in Peter van Straatens calendar

cartoons

CHARLES FORCEVILLE

Abstract

Cartoons, like other forms of mass media, are aimed not just at anybody,

but at a multitude of individuals. The extent to which these numerous indi-

viduals understand the cartoons in the same way depends not only on their

shared interpretations of the word and image texts themselves, but also on

interpretation strategies suggested by the (near)identical circumstances

under which the cartoons are accessed. As Gail Dines points out, locating

cartoons within the cultural realm of mass communication requires an

understanding of how these media forms come into existence and how they

are consumed by the intended audience (1995: 238). To understand better

how cartoons are processed, it is necessary to generalize about contextual

factors governing their perception. In this paper I examine cartoons by the

Dutchman Peter van Straaten that all appeared on a tear-o calendar in

the year 2001. The question addressed is how the temporal and spatial cir-

cumstances under which the cartoons are accessed, in combination with the

generic conventions of the calendar in which they appear, trigger the activa-

tion of specific cognitive schemata, and thus steer and constrain possible in-

terpretations. The general framework in which these matters are discussed

is Sperber and Wilsons (1995) Relevance Theory.

Keywords: Humor reception; Peter van Straaten; cartoons; relevance

theory; genre.

1. Introduction

A joke is usually directed at a more or less specific audience, and relies for

its success on the activation of various types of background knowledge,

Humor 183 (2005), 247278 09331719/05/001802476 Walter de Gruyter

or schemata, by that audience. This is true not only when it is a verbal

joke told orally and in real time, but also when it is a multimodal one

relayed to a mass audience and in non-live form. Mass-medial jokesters

and their audience are aware of at least some of the circumstances under

which the latter accesses the jokes, and jokesters may exploit this mutual

awareness. Attempts to generalize about reception circumstances are im-

portant because they provide insight into what extra-textual factors sys-

tematically influence the comprehension and appreciation of jokes and

cartoons.

Drawing on the relevance theory model developed by Sperber and

Wilson (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1987, 1995; Wilson and Sperber

2004), I will show how the appreciation of a dozen cartoons by the

Dutchman Peter Van Straaten depends partly on the audience awareness

of three interlocking extra-textual dimensions: time of access; place of ac-

cess; and genre. I thereby aim to contribute to a theory of humor that

takes into account pragmatic as well as textual factors.

2. A characterization of Peters Zeurkalender cartoons

Peter van Straaten is one of Hollands best known cartoon satirists

of bourgeois life. Among many other things, he contributes a daily

cartoon to the Dutch newspaper het Parool, called Dagelijks Leven

(Daily Life), and two cartoons to the Dutch weekly magazine Vrij

Nederlanda political one and a cartoon in the series Het Literaire

Leven (Literary Life). His cartoons also appear abroad. Since 1994

Van Straaten has moreover released a tear-o calendar. His calendar

is one among various such calendars published in the Netherlands.

Competitors include other humorous calendars as well as poetry, phi-

losophy, and recipe calendars (see e.g., Vanderstraeten 2001). Since one

tears o a sheet every day, such a calendar is called a scheurkalender

(scheuren means to tear [o ]). Van Straatens calendar is called

note the rhymea zeurkalender (zeuren means to whine, to

complain).

Each of the 368 representations of the 2001 edition of the calendar

(three extra for the first three days of the next year) consists of a black-

and-white drawing of one or more people situated in a recognizable set-

ting. Although the characters to some extent represent stereotypes (the

beautiful girl, the elderly artist, the dull oce manager, etc.), they

248 C. Forceville

are not caricatures. While the humor in Van Straatens work is not of the

absurd kind that requires a mental turnaround from one script to another

(as, for instance, in the Gary Larson cartoons serving as examples in

Smith 1996), there is an underlying tension that qualifies as a script

opposition (Attardo 2001: 22). This opposition can be formulated as

the tension between the ways in which things should be properly said or

done, or simply be, in an ideal world, and the sordid, imperfect and

disappointing ways in which they actually turn out in Van Straatens

universe. There is usually a clearly identifiable target (Attardo 2001:

23) in each cartoon, since almost always somebodys positive face

is harmedwhether the speakers own, the interlocutors, or a third

partys. The knowledge resource situation (Attardo 2001: 22 et passim)

is to be derived mainly from the pictorial part of the cartoons. Typical

locations in Van Straatens sordid scenarios include chic restaurants (bad

food, pompous behavior, lack of dining experience), bedrooms (boring

sex, quick sex, unsatisfactory sex), the home (marital and parent-child

conflicts), the oce (malingering, sexual harassment, tedium), the school-

yard (humiliation, power play), the psychotherapists treatment room (in-

security, miscommunication, erratic expectations), and the pub (drunken-

ness, desperate flirtations).

Van Straatens cartoons depict a moment in time, and this sensation of

frozen time is enhanced by the fact that he refrains from using picto-

rial runes (Kennedy 1982: 600; see also Forceville 2005) such as speed

and trajectory lines, which give at least a minimal visual impression of

passing time.1 Moreover, given that the verbal texts invariably consist of

single-speaker utterances, no narrative development and hence no narra-

tive strategy (Attardo 2001: ibid.) might seem to be at stake. However, a

Van Straaten cartoon often derives its humor from a strong suggestion of

what happened in the seconds, minutes or years before, or will or might

happen in the seconds, minutes or years ahead.

The text below each drawing is invariably a short utterance produced

by a character in the drawing; hence the text is never a comment by

some narrator outside of the story (Bals external narrator, 1997: 22).

There is a single speaker only. While the utterances produced by Van

Straatens characters are usually not verbally spectacular, and do not

easily fit Attardos punch and jab lines (funny lines that do not occur in

segment-final or text-final positions, see Attardo 2001: 29), the humor

of the cartoons depends partly upon the right word in the right place, as

well as upon such elusive concepts as rhythm and a good ear for oral

Addressing an audience in cartoons 249

languagemuch as in the purely verbal jokes and humorous narratives

that Attardo discusses.

To the extent that the text helps clarify, and determine the interpreta-

tions of, elements in the picture, such as who is talking and what the

relations between people are, the text, in Barthes sense, anchors the

picture (Barthes 1986: 28). But to the extent that the humorous nature of

the representation is a result of combining picture and text, and would be

lost if either of them were eliminated, Van Straatens texts relay the

pictures (ibid.). Although it seems that there is usually a preferred reading

of a cartoon, not all viewers necessarily process the cartoon in exactly the

same manner. In the next section I will explore this dimension of Van

Straatens work with reference to relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson

1995; Wilson and Sperber 2004).

3. A joke is relevant to an individual (or it isnt)

The presenter of a joke is no dierent from the communicator of a mes-

sage in aiming, in Sperber and Wilsons (henceforward: S&W) words, at

optimal relevance. This means that she (I will follow S&Ws practice to

make communicators female and addressees male) intends the addressee

of the joke to understand it without expending undue energy. That is,

the message must contain sucient information, conform to conventional

ways of address, etc. for the addressee to process it, but ideally no more

than that. In order to achieve this, the sender of the message makes an

assessment of what the addressee probably already knows, or can easily

access by being (made) perceptually aware of his environment, in order

not to overload the message itself with superfluous information.

Jokes, like messages, always come with the presumption of rele-

vance, that is, they are presented by the joker to her addressees with the

presupposition that it will be worth their while to pay attention and try to

understand. Note that what should count as undue energy in jokes,

however, may structurally dier from what counts as such in ordinary

communication inasmuch as a joke always deliberately leaves something

impliedthis something to be cognitively accessed by the addressee.

Indeed, the success of a joke crucially hinges upon the addressee autono-

mously grasping this piece of information; else the jokester has to explain

this part and thus spoil the joke. So, even without quantifying what is

undue energy, more eort is required for the uptake of a joke than for

250 C. Forceville

the processing of a piece of ordinary information. This leaves uninvali-

dated that humor is governed by the presumption of relevance, and that

the viewer will stop processing at the first interpretation of a joke he hits

upon that strikes him as relevant (a key element in S&Ws theory), in the

belief that the jokester will have provided him with the best possible stim-

ulus under the circumstances (see S&W 1995: 168169) compatible with

the communicators abilities and preferences (W&S 2004: 612). As Yus

puts it: Humorists may be willing to keep relevant information to

themselves, be obscure, be ambiguous, etc. for the sake of pursuing the

creation of humorous eects, but the principle of relevance invariably

applies to both humorous and non-humorous discourse (2003: 1298).

A message achieves relevance if the addressee, combining the message

with assumptions already present in his cognitive environment, decides

(i) to adopt one or more new assumptions; (ii) to abandon old assump-

tions in favor of assumptions just communicated; (iii) to strengthen old

assumptions; or (iv) to weaken old assumptions. The degree of relevance

depends partly on the nature of the cognitive eects (if you just heard you

won $1 million they are bigger than when you heard the coee is ready),

partly on the eort needed to derive the eects: the more eort needed for

a given eect, the less relevance.

S&W distinguish three subtasks in the comprehension process:

a. Constructing an appropriate hypothesis about explicit content (ex-

plicatures) via decoding, disambiguation, reference resolution, and

other pragmatic enrichment procedures.

b. Constructing an appropriate hypothesis about the intended contex-

tual assumptions (implicated premises).

c. Constructing an appropriate hypothesis about the intended contex-

tual implications (implicated conclusions) (W&S 2004: 615).

For present purposes, two concepts in S&Ws (1995) Relevance Theory

model are specifically pertinent: (1) the claim that relevance is always

relevance to an individual (S&W 1995: 142 ); and (2) the distinction be-

tween strong and weak communication (S&W 1995: 176 ). Both con-

cepts shed light on the issue of multiple readings of cartoons that Dines

exhorts humor scholars to address in their research (1995: 247). To illus-

trate (1), consider the following: if Mary wants her husband Peter to fetch

her the scissors, she is optimally relevant to him if she shouts to him:

Can you get me the scissors, please? since she knows he knows where

they are. To a first-time visitor Mary is more likely to shout something


like, Can you get me the scissors, please? They are in the leftmost

drawer. Since the visitor would not know where they are, she achieves

relevance by forcing him to expend slightly extra eort (he needs to pro-

cess not only can you get me the scissors, please? but also they are in

the leftmost drawer). The point here is that in order to be optimally rel-

evant a communicator varies the nature of her stimulus, depending on

what background knowledge she takes her addressee to possess.

A second important dimension of S&Ws theory is the distinction be-

tween strong and weak communication. A communicator can choose a

very explicit stimulus to achieve a cognitive eect in her audience (often

in turn leading to some sort of behavior following that cognitive eect),

such as (i) Shut that window! or a very indirect one, such as (ii) It is

getting a bit chilly in here. In the case of (i), communication, in S&Ws

terminology, is strong: the message has, given the circumstances, clearly a

single interpretation; in the case of (ii), communication is weak: it is a hint

rather than a command or a request, although the intended cognitive

eect and the desired behavior may be the same. Strong and weak com-

munication form no either/or pair but are extremes on a continuum. The

dierence between strong and weak communication has two important

consequences. First, the more strongly an assumption is communicated,

the more the responsibility for its actual derivation rests with the commu-

nicator; the more weakly it is communicated, the more the responsibility

for its actual derivation rests with the addressee (S&W 1995: 235). Some-

one shouting Close the window! can hardly deny she conveys her wish

to have the window closed, whereas someone saying Its getting a bit

chilly in here canupon you kindly closing the windoweasily disso-

ciate herself from what you did. She might have wanted you to turn o

the air conditioner instead, or bring her a blanketor simply to strike

up a conversation. Though you may feel somewhat oended if your

friendly action is not appreciated, the implicature (Any assumption

communicated, but not explicitly so, is implicitly communicated: it is an

implicature, S&W 1995: 182, italics in original) was derived by you

largely on your own responsibility.

Second, a communicator who chooses weak over strong commu-

nication may create a degree of accidental or deliberate ambiguity.

S&W discuss the following example: the mediocre composer Salieri asks

Mozart what he thinks of his, Salieris, music, upon which the genius

shrewdly replies, I didnt think such music was possible (S&W 1987:

751). Moreover, a communicator indulging in weak communication

252 C. Forceville

aims not necessarily at a single interpretation, but at a range of inter-

pretations that can coexist. S&W propose the name poetic eects for

such a situation (S&W 1995: 217; see also Pilkington 2000).

In applying relevance theory to pictorial metaphors in print adver-

tisements and billboards, I proposed four points of attention (Force-

ville 1996: 99104) which are no less pertinent to Van Straatens mass-

communicated cartoons.

Non-co-presence in time. Misunderstandings in mass-medial com-

munication, including cartoons, are not instantly reparable as this is

possible in on-line, live conversation between two interlocutors. Another

consequence of the time gap often inhering in mass-communication is

that the collective cognitive environment of the audience may have

changed due to intervening events (say, a war in the Middle East, the out-

break of a global epidemic disease, a political murder, or a lasting spate

of exceptionally hot or cold weather) in a way that potentially aects the

uptake of a cartoon. This is all the more pertinent here since the cartoons

in the Zeurkalender are conceived and printed long before they are seen

and enjoyed.

Number of communicators involved. The cartoons have a multitude of

individual addressees, with widely dierent cognitive environments.

Clearly, Van Straaten steers his audience into a certain direction by

making salient certain elements, but idiosyncrasies in the cognitive envi-

ronment of addressees knowledge and experiences could lead to interpre-

tations that dier between individuals.

Multimodal character of Van Straatens jokes. While the majority of

S&Ws examples exemplify verbal utterances, Van Straatens cartoons

feature a mixture of verbal and pictorial information. Since non-verbal

communication tends to be less explicit than verbal communication, the

pictorial component in the cartoons may to some extent lead to dierent

inference processes in dierent viewers.

Ambiguity of the textual part of the cartoon. In most cases, the textual

part of the Van Straaten cartoons does not appear to aim at ambiguity

and vagueness in the manner that many advertising texts do (see e.g.,

Leech 1966: 161; Tanaka 1994: 36; Hermeren 1999: 79 et passim), and

other cartoons as well. The texts are seldom characterized by puns or

other linguistic virtuosities. Indeed, the fact that most of them are not

funny or remarkable when divorced from the pictures (and vice versa) tes-

tifies to their ordinariness. While the texts in the cartoons thus do not as a

rule contain a disjunctor (a word or phrase that, in jokes, is used in two


senses, Attardo 2001: 18), forcing the interpreter to revise his earlier

understanding of the situation, they may be ambiguous in less spectacu-

lar ways. The viewer often has to infer the broader situation for which

the current cartoon is the cue, which leaves room for an idiosyncratic

interpretation.

From a relevance-oriented perspective what matters is that all four fea-

tures favor the triggering of weak implicatures which, as we saw shift the

responsibility for their derivation to the addressee. The use of implica-

tures also has another consequence: The more information [the commu-

nicator] leaves implicit, the greater the degree of mutual understanding

she makes it manifest that she takes to exist between her and her hearer

(S&W 1995: 218). That is, by the use of implicatures, the communicator

can aim for intimacy (cf. Cohen 1979: 7).

4. The cognitive environment of Van Straatens audience

I will now argue that Van Straatens calendar cartoons activate time,

place, and genre-related assumptions in the cognitive environment of the

audience that steer interpretations, these assumptions being mutually

manifest to sender and addressees. To demonstrate that reception con-

ditions sometimes do make a dierence, I will here focus on 12 calendar

cartoons whose success depends partly on (a) the spatiotemporal circum-

stances under which they are accessed by their audience; and (b) the

audience awareness of Peters Zeurkalenders generic conventions. Let

me first briefly discuss these factors.

4.1. Place

Where does a viewer access the Zeurkalender? Humorous tear-o calen-

dars typically hang in peoples homes rather than at work. Moreover,

within the home, the toilet is a pet location, as various sources acknowl-

edge. Thus one reviewer prefers the Zeurkalender over glossy calendars,

explaining sitting on the toilet and looking at a beautiful photo or

drawing is nice, but being oered a text or other type of message every

day is nicer (van Garderen 1999: s.n.), and another begins her review

of the Zeurkalender with the line Peter van Straatens Zeurkalender

isbesides paper and lavatory brusha steady attribute [gevestigde

254 C. Forceville

waarde] on many Flemish and Dutch toilets (Vanderstraeten 2001: 47).

Another review starts Its always a good Santa Claus present: a tear-o

calendar for the smallest room (Ruesink 2002: s.n.). Van Straaten him-

self alludes to the location by choosing as cover for the Zeurkalender 2001

a picture with a toilet (Figure 2). It is to be noted that the location within

the toilet may favor (often standing) men or (invariably sitting) women (I

owe this observation to Judith Tromp). Another aspect of place is that

the cartoons are typically directed at a Dutch-speaking audience, which

means that some specifically Dutch (sub)cultural models and schemata

are triggered.

4.2. Time

Three dimensions of time are potentially significant in the cartoons under

discussion: time of the day, day of the week, period in the year. If the cal-

endar indeed hangs on the toilet, each cartoon is typically seen when one

goes therehence typically alonebefore leaving for work or embark-

ing on other daytime activities. But even if the calendar hangs elsewhere a

sheet is torn o early rather than late in the day.

The day in the year and the day of the week can be objectively estab-

lished, since they are indicated on the calendar (see Figure 1). As to the

seasons, these evoke many assumptions, some culturally based, such as

that winter, in Holland, is prototypically cold and snowy, the days are

short and the nights are long, and if it freezes long enough the Elfsteden-

tocht, the legendary ice-skating contest, can be organized. In spring the

life cycle starts again and new plans are made. Summer is supposed to

be hot, the season of relaxation, men and women parade in bathing suits

on beaches or sweat under their sheets at home. In September the holi-

days are over, people must get back to work or school, autumnal leaves

begin to fall, winter is approaching, etc.

Anniversaries and other festive days have their own connotations:

at Christmas time one entertains family and friends, New Years Eve

has its traditional doughnut balls and apple turnovers as well as fire-

works, champagne toasts to the new year, and TV highlights of the one

just over. On April 30 the Queens birthday is celebrated across the

country . . . . All or most of these assumptions (and many more) are la-

tently present in the cognitive environment of Van Straatens audience,

ready to be activated by his cartoons.


To a lesser degree this holds for the days of the week. After a weekend

of relaxation and, often, abundant food and drink, people on Monday go

back to work or school. By contrast, Friday is the last day of work, and

the weekend is eagerly awaited. Saturday and Sunday are the days of lei-

sure, entertainment, sleeping in, sex and churchgoing. Indeed, the Mon-

days and Saturdays are particularly marked in Peters Zeurkalender.

Mondays have oce or back to school cartoons (41 out of 53 on a

conservative count in the 2001 edition), while Saturdays in 47 out of 53

cases show or allude to sexual activity (and 41 of these 47 pictures feature

a bed).

4.3. Genre

It is dicult to overestimate the role of genre in the interpretation of rep-

resentations of whatever kind. We tend to forget it, because we are almost

always aware of the genre to which a representation facing us belongs

and thus automatically activate the conventions that govern that

genres interpretations.

Siegfried Schmidt claims that literary texts typically create expectations

geared toward the maximization of aesthetic eects and polyvalent mean-

ings, whereas for instance front page newspaper articles, by contrast,

create expectations geared toward the representation of facts and mono-

valent meanings (Schmidt 1991). Zwaan (1993) en Steen (1994) found

in experiments that presenting a verbal text as literary or non-literary

led to systematically dierent uptake among subjects, while Forceville

(1999) showed that students confronted with a photograph presented as

part of an advertisement came up with dierent interpretations from

those who were told about the same photograph that it was an artistic

picture.

The very fact that we are so good at picking up genre clues also

entails risks. Altman (1999) emphasizes that institutional groups (in the

case of film for instance: Hollywood studios, critics, theatre owners,

fans) have dierent interests in the attribution of a genre to a speci-

fic text. Consequently groups may, for reasons that serve their specific

interest, impose a genre on a text. The importance of genre-attribu-

tion is underlined by Fokkema and Ibsch who, discussing the genre

of literature with reference to Schmidts work on conventions, state

that

256 C. Forceville

not the structure of literary texts, but the capability and willingness of hu-man beings to agree upon a rule of conduct (a convention) are the decisivefactor in reading a text as a literary textalthough, admittedly, this conventionis usually activated by textual and/or contextual signals (Fokkema and Ibsch2000: 22).

As to the genre of Van Straaten cartoons, the viewer is predisposed to be

on the lookout for jokes that are weary, wry, ironic, and mildly savage,

rather than good-natured, downright bitter, or truly sadistic.

5. Twelve cartoons in Peters Zeurkalender 2001

In this section 12 cartoons from Peters Zeurkalender 2001 will be dis-

cussed which have been selected on the basis of their suitability to

demonstrate the impact of spatiotemporal access and genre-awareness

on interpretation. The cartoons have been reproduced here in their

original form, except for one thing: I have deleted from the original

pictures the day of the week and the date that in the original calendar

sheets appear above the pictures (except in Figure 1, so as to give one

cartoon in its original form). The reason for this is that I want to

enable the readers of the present article to assess for themselves at

least the contribution of the day and date of access to interpretation

(place and genre conventions are not so easy to manipulate). My point

is not that without this awareness the cartoons are no longer com-

prehensible and/or funny, but that if the three reception factors under

scrutiny are allowed full play, this provides aspects of humor not ac-

cessible to those unaware of them.2 In order to emphasize this, I will

draw on S&Ws already discussed distinction between explicatures, im-

plicated premises, and implicated conclusions, whereby the focus will

be on those premises and conclusions that pertain to time, place, and

genre.

Since the analyses are all mine, I will undoubtedly postulate premises

and derive implicatures that other readers will not accesssimply be-

cause their cognitive environments are no copies of mineas well as

vice versa. Nonetheless I will claim that inasmuch as I share a consider-

able part of the cognitive environment with other (Dutch) viewers of Van

Straatens cartoons, while they may not always fully share my interpreta-

tions they at least will accept them as valid.


5.1. Figure 1

Word and image explicatures: An elderly woman watches an elderly

man, probably her husband, exercising with weights, saying, Ill miss it,

Jan. Via explicature enrichment, it is understood as referring to the

mans belly.

Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The date is 5

January. Traditionally in Holland, as in other countries, at the beginning

of a new year people fervently announce they are going to better their

lives, losing weight being among the more popular good intentions.

Implicated conclusions available by access to time/place/genre:

The man is not just exercising to lose weight; he has made the traditional

New Year resolve to lose weight. Since New Year intentions tend to be

abandoned fairly soon, the wifes professed nostalgia for her husbands

fat belly invites the viewer not only to savor the humorous notion that a

wife could miss her husbands sagging belly, but in addition to ponder the

naivety, or irony, of her comment.

5.2. Figure 2

Word and image explicatures: Visible through a half open toilet door is

a woman, wiping herself, saying Half-way through January and that

calendar is already finished!

Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The Zeurka-

lender often hangs in peoples toilets and is naturally supposed to last an

entire year. The date is 16 January.


This self-referential cartoon suggests that people, many of whom are on

the toilet when they see the cartoon, might use the calendar as toilet

paper. Van Straaten thus mocks his own calendar in line with the spirit

of deflating humor that permeates the calendar.

5.3. Figure 3

Word and image explicatures: A woman sits with her psychotherapist

(cues: the notebook plus pencil in the lap of the woman on the left and

258 C. Forceville

Figure 1. Ill miss it, Jan.


Figure 2. Halfway through January and that calendar is already finished!

260 C. Forceville

Figure 3. I think its about time I became simply happy.


the tissue box) and accusingly (?) says, I think its about time I became

simply happy.

Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The date,

Wednesday 17 January, is not relevant here, but the place of access favors

the activation of Dutch schemata in the processing of the text.


The phrase domweg gelukkig (literally: dumbly happy) makes extra

implicatures accessible to those viewers who happen to know and remem-

ber the often anthologized line Domweg gelukkig in de Dapperstraat

(Dumbly happy in the Dapper street,) by the Dutch poet J. C. Bloem,

first published in 1947. To those viewers, the patients choice of phrase

may suggest, for instance, that she consciously or unconsciously rehashes

a cultural cliche, or inadvertently cites a line written by a poet whose work

is not particularly well-known for his happy or positive attitude to life.

5.4. Figure 4

Word and image explicatures: an elderly woman in net stockings sit-

ting at a table in a pub, asks a man slumped at the bar, Nice, wasnt it,

last night . . . Did you really mean what you said to me?

Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The day is a

Sunday, so last night was, in Van Straatens universe, sex night.

Implicated conclusions available by access to time/place/genre: The

man, carried away in sexual playor in an attempt to seduce the

womansaid he loved her, or thought her beautiful, or wanted to

marry her.

5.5. Figure 5

Word and image explicatures: a man and a woman in fur coats walk

past a drunkard, sleeping in a doorway. He says, What about it? He is

having a nice lie-in.

Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The day is a

Sunday, and the couples fur coats suggest they may be going to, or have

come from, church.

262 C. Forceville

Figure 4. Nice, wasnt it, last night . . . Did you really mean what you said to me?


Figure 5. What about it? He is having a nice lie-in.

264 C. Forceville


Church-going is meant to make one more charitable toward ones fellow

mans suering, particularly in cold January, but instead the speaker ca-

sually waves away an observation that might cause him to feel guilt about

not doing anything for this particular man.

5.6. Figure 6

Word and image explicatures: A man in jacket and wearing a bow tie

has fallen apparently drunk on the marital bed, while his wife asks him,

Was Harry Mulisch there?

Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The date is 14

March. There refers to the annual Boekenbal, the most prestigious and

notorious party in the Dutch literary world; Harry Mulisch is Hollands

most famous living writer. Note that Van Straaten could rely on press

publicity about the party around this time (and for good measure he

Figure 6. Was Harry Mulisch there?


throws in a card with Boekenbal on it, partly visible in the left hand

bottom corner).


The wife naively wants to know whether her husband met the famous

Harry Mulisch, and seems unaware, unlike the viewer, of the Boekenbals

reputation as an occasion for excessive drinking and outrageous behavior.

5.7. Figure 7

Word and image explicatures: Flabbergasted, a man looks at his wife

who lies on the bed crying her heart out, saying, O dear, and I thought

youd like it enormously.

Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: It is April 1,

Fools day, which is traditionally a day on which people are allowed to

pull one anothers legs in good-natured ways.

Implicated conclusions available by access to time/place/genre: On

another day, it could refer to any action performed by the man, and

the cartoon would simply portray another typical Van Straaten situation

in which a husband and wife are not on the same wavelength. Today the

date suggests that it refers to a joke the husband honestly thought

would amuse his wife, making their misunderstanding even more wryly

funny.

5.8. Figure 8

Word and image explicatures: A man hugs an apparently younger

woman next to a tree and a river, saying, All right pussycat . . . . As

soon as Miriam is ready for it, Im going to divorce her. Thanks to

encyclopaedic knowledge we are aware that Miriam is the mans wife.

Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: It is Friday the

thirteenth, the proverbially unlucky day.


Generic knowledge of Van Straatens humor does not incline us to believe

that the man is ever going to leave his wife for his young lover, but the

day and date further substantiate this suspicion.

266 C. Forceville

Figure 7. O dear, and I thought youd like it enormously.


Figure 8. All right, pussycat . . . . As soon as Miriam is ready for it I am going to divorceher.

268 C. Forceville

5.9. Figure 9

Word and image explicatures: A man toasts an elderly woman who

probably just entered the pub and says, My treat, beauty.

Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The date is

Monday April 30, which is the birthday of the Dutch queen Beatrix

mother, Princess Juliana (who died in 2004). This is Koninginnedag, the

day on which the Queens birthday has for decades been celebrated

nation-wide in Holland, even during Beatrix reign.


Without the date, and its connotations, the woman might have been the

mans wife, come to fetch him. But given the date many viewers will be

alerted to the resemblance between the woman and princess Juliana. Con-

sequently, they may entertain weak implicatures such as that Juliana

would frequent ordinary pubs, or drink beer with an elderly, possibly

drunk man; or they may see the resemblance as a reinforcement of the

widely shared idea of Juliana as an everyday woman (an image which

she herself relished and promoted).

5.10. Figure 10

Word and image explicatures: A young man brings out a tray with

drinks to an outdoor terrace where a number of heartily laughing elderly

people are gathered around a table, saying, Are you still talking about

the war?

Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The date is May

4, which is the day the victims of WW II are ocially commemorated

nation-wide in Holland.


While laughter about the war seems unsuitable anyway, it is especially in-

appropriate on this day, and may suggest irreverence for the dead or hint

that the war was for many people not at all so bad a period as is generally

thought.


Figure 9. My treat, beauty.

270 C. Forceville

Figure 10. Are you still talking about the war?


5.11. Figure 11

Word and image explicatures: Several people are sitting at a restaurant

table. One woman looks at her plate in disgust, saying Bah, what a scary

animal! Did I order that?

Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The date is Oc-

tober 4, National pets day in Holland.

Implicated conclusions available by access to time/place/genre: A

joke about eating animals (a lobster?) is particularly daring on the one

day in the year people are supposed to be extra kind to them.

5.12. Figure 12

Word and image explicatures: A woman looks down on the street from

an upper story window, addressing a lonely man, standing in the dark,

who looks up at her, saying, Sorry Jan, tonight doesnt suit me very

well. Another time, OK?

Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: It is December

24, Christmas Eve.


Invitations for festivities on Christmas Eve are usually planned long in

advance. A man who casually drops by a woman on this evening for

what, considering the Zeurkalenders generic conventions, is no doubt

casual sex, must be a particularly desperate or sad case.

6. Conclusions

A number of Peter Van Straatens cartoons have been shown to owe part

of their meaning potential to three specific aspects of context: their time

and place of access, and their generic conventions. In this manner I have

made a case for the impact of generalizable extra-textual factors aecting

the interpretation of cartoons. These three interconnected aspects have

been formulated in terms of implicated premises; the potential extra

interpretations thus made available have been formulated in terms of

implicated conclusions (W&S 2004). Sperber and Wilsons key idea that

272 C. Forceville

Figure 11. Bah, what a scary animal! Did I order that?


Figure 12. Sorry Jan, tonight doesnt suit me very well. Another time, OK?

274 C. Forceville

relevance is always relevance to an individual is demonstrated to func-

tion in mass-medial communication no less than in face-to-face com-

munication and joke-telling. Any dierences in interpretation among

individual viewers that arise will not only depend on how text-internal

cues (i.e., the picture and the utterance underneath it) are understood,

but also on which implicated time, place, and genre-based premises are

activated. Somebody who does not recognize the line from the poet

Bloem (Figure 3) will miss part of the joke, just as somebody who does

not recognize Juliana (Figure 6) will. And a viewer aware of Van Straa-

tens monday work joke convention may derive additional humorfrom Figure 6, the Royal family traditionally being on heavy ceremonial

duty on this particular day.

Assuming that the cognitive eect Van Straaten wants to bring about

in his audience is a smile or a laugh, we have to conclude that the extra-

textual factors discussed here sometimes lead to the introduction of as-

sumptions in the cognitive environment of the audience, and sometimes

to their strengthening (S&W 1995: 108 ). The date in Figure 6 (Fools

day) is necessary for the explicature enrichment of it to joke, and in

Figure 12 (Pets day) the day adds an assumption (this is the one day of

the year one is extra kind to animals) not available textually. Hence in

these two examples relevant assumptions are introduced. In other car-

toons the extra-textual factors strengthen rather than introduce assump-

tions: Laughing about the war is inappropriate, laughing about the war

on May 4 is excessively inappropriate (Figure 10). Our suspicion that

the man in Figure 8 will never leave his wife Miriam is strengthened,

not introduced, by the date Friday the 13th (and possibly by generic

expectations).

Sperber and Wilsons concept of poetic eects is pertinent in how

Van Straatens cartoons achieve relevance. Once an assumption has

been triggered, viewers may, at their own responsibility, add further

assumptions building on it, and hence derive more weak implicatures.

The word dumbly (Figure 3) to some viewers perhaps suggests an

implicit contrast with the dicult, smart way of becoming happy at a

psychotherapist i.e., through psychoanalysis. As soon as a viewer has

recognized Juliana in Figure 6 he can entertain all sorts of assumptions

(ranging from: the former queen got lost in a pub; she prefers to

celebrate her birthday in an ordinary pub rather than with the rest of

the Royal family; Juliana is not recognized by one of her subjects;

the queen is not amused ) which in turn can give rise to further


cognitive eects. In this way cartoons interpretations can vary per

individual.

I see as one of the strengths of the findings presented here that they

are to some extent experimentally testable, and hence verifiable and falsi-

fiable. While the fact that experiments require strongly controlled con-

ditions (such as that subjects answer questions or perform tasks in a

laboratory situation) inevitably aects the interpretations when compared

with how they would have occurred under natural circumstances (such as

stumbling, barely awake, to the toilet and grimace at Peters cartoon-of-

the-day), certain variables can be controlled. Particularly the impact of

time can be empirically investigated, since it is easily manipulable. In

each case where, as I have proposed, a specific day of the week (Monday,

Saturday, Sunday) and/or a specific date (Friday the 13th; the fourth of

May; Christmas Eve) supplies extra premises, and hence potentially leads

to more implicatures, this information can in a control group either be

omitted, or changed to an irrelevant day or date. The impact of place is

conveniently testable inasmuch as the place of access is Holland: by

showing a number of complete cartoons, i.e., including days and dates

(e.g., 4 May and 30 April) both to a Dutch audience and (with apt trans-

lations) to a non-Dutch audience, this impact could be measured. The

role of generic conventions in the interpretation process could be tested

by showing a number of Van Straaten cartoons to one group of (Dutch)

subjects familiar with his work, and another group who has never seen it,

allowing for predictions such as that the first group would more quickly

recognize the two women in Figure 3 as a therapist and her client than

the second group; or that more people in the first than in the second

group will say that the man in Figure 8 will not divorce his wife. Such

researchwhich can be extended to other comedy genres (newspaper

cartoons, stand-up comedy, pornographic jokes on internet sites)also

brings the examination of jokes and cartoons into the broader realm of

cognition studies.

University of Amsterdam

Notes

Correspondence address: [email protected] am indebted to Harmonie publishers, especially Marielle Boukens and Elsbeth Louis, forproviding me with an intact copy of Peters Zeurkalender 2001 and to Peter van Straaten

276 C. Forceville

for permission to reprint his cartoons. I thank Etienne Forceville and Tom van Klingeren fortechnical help with the pictures. All translations from Dutch (in Van Straatens cartoons andDutch secondary sources) are mine. I have benefited from comments by Kurt Feyaerts,Geert Brone, two anonymous peer reviewers, and the editor-in-chief of Humor on earlierdrafts of this paper. A version of the paper was presented at the international Semiotics con-ference at Lumie`re II University, Lyon, France, July 2004.1. Smith (1996) refers to various subtypes of pictorial runes, such as waftaroms (smell

lines), hites, vites, and dites (lines indicating horizontal, vertical and diagonal direc-tion of movement respectively), and agitrons, lines around a body or body part sug-gesting motion.

2. Since Van Straaten regularly collects his best cartoons, readers could indeed comeacross the same cartoons in one of his books without the days and dates (for instance,at least seven cartoons from Peters Zeurkalender (2001) also occur in Van Straaten(2001).

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