Incongruity (Essay Sample)

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 DATE \@ "d MMMM yyyy" 10 October 2016
Incongruity in Comedy: Twain vs. Sedaris
According to O'Shannon, adults form and live by a big rulebook in which they have a normative range of things and details of how the world should behave. Adult interactions with the world are a series of comparisons with this rulebook. Incongruity occurs when something appears beyond the normal range of the rulebook. The incongruity theory posits that one perceives humor at the instant of realization of incongruity between an idea involved in a given situation and the real objects thought to relate to the idea. Humor often holds an unexpected, often abrupt, change in perspective.  Shannon writes, “The mind can find the information so shocking or threatening that it rejects the truth of it, rendering the information nonsense. The brain then tries to make sense of the nonsense by filing it under comedy – just.” The rules that determine incongruity may be from the rulebook or may come up at the time the audience is trying to make sense of the joke (O'Shannon).
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County is a humor-laden narration about a famed gambler Jim Smiley. In the narrator’s description, “If he ever seen a straddle bug start to go anywhere, he would bet you how long it would take for him to go to wherever he going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road.” The writer, himself an audience, has to suffer through a Western man’s tale about a jumping frog. It is difficult to read the story aloud with a straight face due to the heavy accent. A paragraph in the story goes:
It was a good pup, was that Andrew Jackson, and would have made a name for hisself if he'd lived, for the stuff was in him, and he had genius I know it, because he hadn't had no opportunities to speak of, and it don't stand to reason that a dog could make such a fight as he could under them circumstances, if he hadn't no talent. It always makes me feel sorry when I think of that last fight of his'n, and the way it turned out. (Twain).
In his book Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris describes their migration to Raleigh and their parents’ attempts to stop them from acquiring the Raleigh accent, and the curious terms of endearment between his father and their last-born brother Paul, a clear misfit in the family. Sedaris portrays his father as seeking to micromanage everything in their life and feels that, as payback for that, life sent Paul, a half-literate misfit who punctuates his language with outrageous profanities. He is surprised at how the standards go drastically low to accommodate Paul. While for them, using the abbreviated form of ‘you all’, would have earned them punishment, Paul can say, “Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can't kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up sometimes, but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Rooster. You know what I'm saying?" and he even calls his father to say, "Motherfucker, I ain't seen pussy in so long I'd throw stones at it." Nothing prepares the writer for the phenomenon that Paul is. Sedaris describes it as a complex hybrid of the local deep country laborer accent and hard-core rap music. He says conversation with Paul is “like speaking to a foreigner and understanding only the terms motherfucker, bitch, and hoss and the phrase "You can't kill the Rooster." (Sedaris)”
Incongruity has been used to great effect in both of Sedaris and Twain’s stories. Twain uses objects in his story that would normally count as insignificant in most readers’ minds. He uses a dog that is inadvertently funny to bring the humor in Smiley’s compulsive gambling. There seems to be some understanding between Smiley and Andrew Jackson, the dog. Andrew would get into dogfights but weather the storm until all the bets against it were high enough, then it would predictably grab the other dog’s hind leg and not let go until the opponent conceded defeat. Just when it looks impossible for Andrew to lose a fight, it faces a dog that had no hind leg. Andrew Jackson lost the fight and paid for it with its life. Twain employs the same comic tool when describing Smiley’s newfound champion, Dan'l Webster. Webster is a frog that Smiley caught and ‘trained to jump.’ Wheeler describes it as being capable of responding to Smiley’s verbal cues, and even describes it as being modest, not bragging about its talent. In Me Talk Pretty One Day Sedar...