The cognitive mechanisms of adversarial humor

Abstract In this paper, we provide an in-depth cognitive analysis of a specific humor strategy we coin “trumping”, a multi-agent language game that revolves around the subversion of the linguistic forms of exchange. In particular, we illustrate how, in a conversational setting, agents can “reflect” and “distort” the linguistic-conceptual construal of each others' utterances. Because this reflection or parallelism in the trumping game can be situated on different levels of linguistic organization, a multi-dimensional semantic-pragmatic account is proposed. Using insights from cognitive linguistics, we show that adversarial agents exploit the conceptual mechanisms underlying the opponent's utterances in order to turn the tables in the humor game. In doing so, an agent can trump an adversary by demonstrating a “hyper-understanding” of the lexico-conceptual meaning of an opponent's utterance. This subversion of construal operations like metaphor, metonymy and salience leads to a sudden manipulation of the discourse space that has been set up in the previous utterance(s) (Langacker 2001). In general, by providing an analysis in terms of basic principles of semantic construal, we argue that a cognitive linguistic treatment of humor has an ecological validity that is lacking in most linguistic humor research.