Unit three
The shock of the new
This unit continues to examine humour which is caused by incongruity in language. Whereas Unit 2 looked at examples of double meaning in language, suggesting an image of language having a surface with something underneath, the work in this unit relies on the image of a net for the complex web of conventions that construct meaning. Some people even talk about language as a linguistic straitjacket. The German nonsense poet, Christian Morgenstern, used this sort of image to claim that we are imprisoned by language and that this causes our unsatis-factory relationship with other people, the society and the world in general. What we need to do, he said, is ‘smash language’ before we can learn to think properly. ...
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