Jokes and Hermeneutics

I’ve been wanting for some years to write an article developing the fairly simple point that all texts depend on things that are not in the text for their meaning. Jokes are among the best examples of this. What makes a joke funny is usually something that is not stated explicitly in the joke. If you don’t have the requisite outside knowledge, you don’t get some “partial meaning” of the joke; you don’t get the joke at all.

This occurred to me while watching Shrek , which I have since argued is a “goldmine of hermeneutical insight.” I also recognized a related phenomenon in drama, especially drama that depends on structural ironies, like Oedipus the King . The actual meaning of Oedipus’s statements depends on knowledge that no one in the play possesses, though the audience does possess it. In the larger context that the audience has, Oedipus’s statements are ironic, though he does not intend them to be so. Yet, they are objectively ironic, given his situation, and missing the irony means missing a large part of the meaning of his words. Obviously, meaning depends here on knowledge that neither the “author” (speaker) nor the text communicates directly.

Explaining this point to my 15-year-old son this evening, I had the idea of a Borgesian story about a quixotic (of course) writer who set out to write a text that depends on nothing outside the text. He commits suicide or something, in despair at the infinite task he set himself.