Relevance of Cold Jokes (Pun Intended)

Abstract

In this paper we examine what is known as a cold joke from a relevance-theoretic perspective. A cold joke is a specific kind of humor-inducing piece of language with a communicative purpose of creating a relaxing atmosphere, without being actually funny. The cold jokes selected for the analysis conducted in this paper are about the cold weather, hence the specific underlying pun of this research. The jokes were selected according to the thematic criteria and then divided into categories according to the means of achieving the humorous effect. The results show that the most frequent occurrence within our corpus were those jokes that utilized puns and manipulation of polysemous words, both within the discourse-based and frame-based jokes. Implication-based jokes were not attested within the corpus of this study. Since the interpretation of these jokes requires additional cognitive effort while the jokes themselves are not usually uninformative, we conclude that the relevance of cold jokes is in the positive non-propositional effects as a special case of phatic communication.