The Language of Jokes: Analysing Verbal Play

a play by Davison, and Urquhart’s novel, Clzarigirig Hcareri. In each, the rhetoric of the novel is dislocated and unhinged, even rewritten. Jerry Booth’s essay on weather forecasts gives an analysis of such things as titles, type, maps and camera movements in a crosscultural study of British, Spanish and French television broadcasts. While little of what he has to say relates directly to rhetoric, the account of the similarities across cultures shows what structural components are required for such a broadcast to be taken seriously; to attempt alternatives is to undermine the force of the predictions. hfuch the same could be said of academic journals, for example, in which the development of a particular format contributes to the authority of any one article. The final essay, by Prudence Black and Stephen Muecke, gives an account of a moment in fashion history: the appearance of the mini-skirt in Melbourne in 196.5. Up for analysis here is a photograph of the event, an image which managed to scandalise one section of the audience while seducing the other: i t was a moment of transgression. While it is a sociological question to ask about the way this came about, the image itself played an important role, one which is given an excellent analysis here. I have not discussed the essays by d’Auzac, Asher, Frowe, McGonigal, Seitz and Gibson, but I recommend them to the reader’s attention. Overall, as with many collections, the quality of work presented here is fairly mixed. However, there is plenty of very interesting material in this volume and, while this book is only part of the process, one could certainly agree that the field of rhetoric has been reborn.