ABSTRACT
Dealing with narratives, especially narratives longer and more complex than jokes, and their interrelation with humor has been an issue of great interest to humor scholars, not only linguists of many persuasions (structural linguists, cognitive linguists, semanticians, pragmaticians, semioticians, stylisticians, discourse theorists, rhetoricians, and others) but also literary scholars, folklorists, and philosophers. Mainstream humor research, however, has centered on the study of jokes as a principally oral form (printed or online versions of jokes usually appeared later), which is clearly and solely aimed at amusing the target audience (see Raskin, 2017). Indeed, Raskin (1985) went even as far as to claim that his semantic theory of humor applied to simple jokes only and that he was pessimistic as to the likelihood of it being applied to anything more sophisticated than that. In contrast, the ambition of various humor scholars over the ages, philosophers, linguists, literary scholars, and many others has been to account for the presence and role of humor in any form of text or genre (see also Tsakona, 2017 on genres), thus to develop an all-encompassing, comprehensive theory of how humor works in any context.
