Literacy, Comedy, and Technology: Making Meaning in a Multi-Contextual World
Recently, I was watching a comedy special on Netflix called Oh, Hello on Broadway. Starring and created by two young comedians, Nick Kroll and John Mullaney, Oh, Hello was a spinoff from their sketch comedy show The Kroll Show, which aired on Comedy Central. It’s a meta-play comedy that ran on Broadway about two aging New Yorkers named Gil Faison and George St. Geegland. In character as George St. Geegland, John Mulaney is introducing the show and says that it will be a “real treat for anyone familiar with our oeuvre, which means ‘egg’” (Warren, 2017).
I laughed hysterically. My husband, on the other hand, was clueless about why I was laughing so hard. My husband never took French and didn’t possess the literacy skills needed to understand this joke. I began thinking about the types of literacy that went into me understanding the joke. I had to understand:
- digital literacy to find and stream the show;
- have some context of the show and what it was about;
- that this show was a comedy, and actors were in character;
- the faked New York dialect of the characters;
- understand malapropism (mistaken use of a word that sounds similar);
- the grammatical irregularity in making a French word plural¹;
- French linguistics and possibilities for misconception or mistranslation;
- that people would mix up those two words, and George St. Geegland was the type of character, pseudo-intellectual, who would use a French word and not know what it meant;
- And be literate in theater, deadpan comedy, satire.
Finally, I had to relate it to the human experience of confusing words and the empathetic embarrassment for someone who did that publicly. All of this went into understanding a simple joke. Cognitively, I knew the words, even the ones in a different language, and would, by the historical definition, be literate in understanding the sentence. However, I had to be literate in the full context, and employ multiple literacies, to truly make meaning of it.
Comedy, and the ability to understand it, is a great framework to explain and explore the different views of literacy ². Comedy and literacy are analogous: both rely on context (socio-cultural), semantics (cognitive), and discernment (critical) of one’s position and perspective relational to the position and perspective of the person transmitting the message (Gee, 2015).
The unflattening of literacy, like the unflattening of comedy, requires a give and take of relating and unrelating. One must suspend belief and entertain imagination while also relating and connecting. A good joke holds truth and untruth and, like unflattened literacy, is the multidimensional interplay and overlap of a sense of our situated perspective and an understanding of the perspective of another (Sousanis, 2015, p. 37–40).
Robots aren’t funny: Cognitive perspectives on comedy and literacy
Literacy is not just receiving (reading or understanding spoken words); it also requires creation, like writing or speaking. While artificial intelligence, or A.I., might be able to algorithmically find and recognize linguistic patterns that constitute a joke (Ferreira, 2016), they are incapable to master language in a generative way required to create comedy. They are missing the critical and socio-cultural context for meaning-making and to replicate it (Stone, 2013). Robots aren’t capable of higher-order thinking or understanding the subtle nuances of language where “a word does not hold implicit meaning on its own, because it can change in the context of the language, dialect, sentence, and so on” (Golumbeanu, 2017).
Literate in Humor — Socio-cultural perspective
Movie studios are producing fewer and fewer comedies, and the reason is economic: comedy doesn’t translate well (McDuling, 2014). Therefore, it’s risky because of the decline of domestic movie ticket sales after the great recession of 2008. Movie studios rely on global box office markets to make profits on movies (Ciepling, 2008). From a literacy perspective, global fans may possess the cognitive ability (even with the help of translation) to understand the words, and by the old definition, they would be considered literate. However, they lack the socio-cultural and critical literacies to make and derive the intended meaning of the words and find the humor. Even domestically, most comedy, such as Oh, Hello, is targeted to very niche markets where the discourse is shared and understood by a sub-culture or affinity group (Gee, 2015).
It also boils down to timing. Universal pop culture moves quickly; movie production and release is slow. By the time these comedies are released our reality sets have shifted, and any collective discourse is forgotten. (Gee, 2015, p.48–50). Like literacy, comedy relies on social and cultural contexts that give meaning. The Kroll Show, which parodies American reality television shows, wouldn’t make sense if you had no context of American reality television. American cultural themes, like the extended adolescence seen in movies like Knocked Up, don’t translate into different cultures or social contexts (Ciepling, 2013).
Luckily, technology and the diversification of formatting has allowed people to create and tailor comedy to reach niche markets, without the risks associated with or necessity of large budgets, through digital media. These comedic affinity spaces allow content to be shared with people who speak that comedic Discourse and integrated or altered to create meaning within that social group (Gee, 2015).
Water, Water, Everywhere³: A Critical Examination of Comedy and Literacy
We have access to vast amounts of content online, available on our cell phones and computers, in an instant. Most people can download a book within seconds. We live surrounded by words, but are we literate?
While cognitively, more people are gaining the ability to read, are they meeting the “unflattened” definition of literacy? Even in “developed” countries, we often can read and write; we can understand what was said, but are we literate in how and why it was said? For example, recently an article about Facebook shutting down A.I. after it developed its own language circulated social media. Turns out, that article was largely fabricated (Emery, 2017). Many lacked the critical literacy to discern “real news” from “fake news.”
Thinking critically and about the political implications of being literate in the big-D Discourse, we must ask ourselves a different question: who is literate and why? A.I. might be becoming more literate than humans (Schaffhauser, 2016), according to the historic definition, but which humans and why? Thinking about these questions will help us move toward emancipatory literacy (Gee, 2015).
Putting It All Together: “Reading” Pittsburgh Dad
Most of you are literate in English, so watch this video and try to make sense of the English used within it:
Did you have trouble? That’s because these people are speaking a regional dialect of American English called Pittsburghese, which is categorized by its distinct accent and contextual vocabulary (jag off, for example) (Bhasin, Johnstone, & Wittkofski, 2002). Even the most pretentious Pittsburgher who moved away or goes to great lengths to hide their accent, will slip into this dialect after a few Arn [Iron] City beers or when a jag off [rude person] warshes [washes] their Terrible Tow [towel used to cheer the Steelers] before a Stillers [Steelers] game.
This video will cognitively help you understand the phonetic inconsistencies and vocabulary:
Even if you have the cognitive ability to understand the words, are you literate in Pittsburghese now? Are you able to detect the contextually-dependent subtle nuances to find either of these clips funny:
Comedy is funny because we can holistically “read” a situation — cognitively, socio-culturally, and critically — and simultaneously employ multiple literacies to make meaning. According to O’Shannon’s model of humor, successful comedy operates in four frameworks: context, information (in terms of literacy, this is paralleled with “cognitive ability”), aspects of awareness (socio-cultural), and enhancers/inhibitors (person meaning-making) (O’Shannon, 2013).
Literacy works in the same way. To be literate means that you must understand the cognitive, foundational elements of language, know how to decode the socio-cultural context of what is said or in what context it’s appropriate to employ certain discourse, and why things are being communicated and the purpose of the way they are presented. Being literate goes beyond reading and writing and encompasses all the skills needed to make meaning of the world.
However, as argued throughout this post, new “unflattened” literacy requires the following skills in our “literacy kits” (Gee, 2015):
· Cognitive ability to decode and decipher letters and language;
· Contextual awareness, framed by an understanding of social and cultural signifiers, to understand appropriateness of discourse and flexibility to move within and through codes;
· Critical thinking to understand the perspective of the person transmitting a message and the purpose of the message and medium used;
· The inverse, generative ability to create language that meets the demands of context, makes cognitive sense, and transmits a message in the way and scope one wants it to be received;
· And, finally, the ability of meaning-making to situate language into a multi-dimensional framework in accordance with our perspectives developed over time.
For example, when hearing a joke, a fully-literate person must understand the words, decode the subtleties of figurative or metaphorical language (irony, double entendres, etc.), understand the background of the person telling the joke or the cultural/social references, derive meaning in relation to the person’s life and experiences, and generate thought-language to process it. This task, while it happens quickly for a literate person, is not programmable.
Ultimately, to be literate requires you to be human and rooted in the human experience.
Footnotes
¹ For example, the noun oeuf [egg] doesn’t become “oeuves” [it becomes oeufs] unlike the adjective neuf [new], which becomes neuves to agree with a plural noun that it’s modifying). It’s an example of a French malapropism.
² A point of clarity: literacy and comedy are not synonymous; illiterate people, by the historical definition, still possess the ability to find things funny.
³ Interestingly, this reference to Rime for an Ancient Mariner is criticized for being archaic and hard to read. The reference is also often misquoted (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 2017).
References
Bhasin, N., Johnstone, B., & Wittkofski, D. (2002). “Dahntahn” Pittsburgh: Monophthongal /aw/ and representations of localness in southwestern Pennslyvania. American Speech, 77 (2), 148–166. doi:10.1215/00031283–77–2–148
Brice’s Mice. (2014, November 2). Pittsburghese English as spoken in Pittsburgh [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/wO_tMLAUNhE.
Cieply, M. (2008). When the comedy is lost in translation. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/business/media/22steal.html?mcubz=0.
Comedy Central. (2014, March 3). Kroll show — welcome to Pawnsylvania [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/3qeY0mIn1K0.
Emery, D. (2017). Did Facebook shut down an AI experiment because chatbots developed their own language? Retrieved September 07, 2017, from http://www.snopes.com/facebook-ai-developed-own-language/.
Ferreira, B. (2016). Joke-telling robots are the final frontier of artificial intelligence. Retrieved from https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z43nke/joke-telling-robots-are-the-final-frontier-of-artificial-intelligence.
Gee, J. P. (2015). Literacy and education. New York: Routledge.
Golumbeanu, S. (2017). Why A.I. is just not funny. Retrieved from http://nautil.us/blog/why-ai-is-just-not-funny.
McDuling, J. (2014). Hollywood Is Giving Up on Comedy. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/07/the-completely-serious-decline-of-the-hollywood-comedy/373914/.
O’Shannon, D. (2013). What are you laughing at?: a comprehensive guide to the comedic event. London: Bloomsbury.
Pittsburgh Dad. (2014, November 14). Pittsburgh dad at Giant Eagle [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/MJfNI9DppP4.
Q9.29 Morning Show Pittsburgh. (2012, February 19). S**t Pittsburgher’s say: Pittsburghese [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/YcBiLDAfmVA.
Schaffhauser, D. (2017). Smartphones outpacing humans in literacy. Retrieved from https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/03/09/smartphones-outpacing-humans-in-literacy.aspx.
Sousanis, N. (2015). Unflattening. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Stone, A. (2013). A motherboard walks into a bar. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/opinion/sunday/can-computers-be-funny.html?mcubz=0.
The rime of the ancient mariner. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved September 07, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rime_of_the_Ancient_Mariner#cite_note-15
Warren, M. J. (Director). (2017). Oh, hello on broadway [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.netflix.com/search?q=oh%20hello&jbv=80168221&jbp=0&jbr=0
