Semiotic Thoughts: On Stand-up Comedy

As part of a process of simultaneous self improvement/effacement, over the past couple months I have been undertaking a course in stand-up comedy.

During the process of the course a number of interesting exercises and incidents occurred that seemed to have particular semiotic interest. The aim of this post is to briefly explore some of these, and comment on any relevant semiotic learnings gleaned from the course.

Seeing Yourself as the Audience Does:

The very first exercise on the course dealt with a common concern in the world of commercial semiotics, the gap between intended meaning and received meaning.

We were tasked in advance to spend some time stood in front of a mirror, and to each write a description of how we saw ourselves. Upon arrival at the course each student took a turn to stand in front of the group and read their description. The other course members and tutor would then comment on anything they felt they had missed. Once this was completed the other students were invited to speculate on a series of questions about the student along the following lines:

-Is this person heterosexual or homosexual?

-Are they single, in a relationship, or married?

-Are they ‘nice’ or ‘nasty’?

-When they go on holiday, do they go to look at castles and monuments, or to have a party?

-What is their job?

The aim of this exercise was not simply icebreaking, it was to ensure that as performers we understood that our personal self image and feelings are less important than the meanings that the audience understand when looking at us. It was made clear that if a performer who appeared to be ‘nice’ started their performance in a ‘nasty’ persona, this would be inauthentic to the audience, and would present a barrier to engagement for many audience members. In many cases the perceptions of the group did not match with the individuals view of themselves, this was sometimes initially troubling, but often provided interesting stimulus in terms of the development of the individuals comic persona.

Set up – Punch:

Next we moved on to look at joke structure. the first important learning here was an acknowledgement of the competition that a comedian faces in the live environment, both from hecklers, as well as other noises and distractions for the audience (such as mobile phones). Due to this, there is a ‘rule’ of stand-up that dictates a performer should be getting a minimum of a laugh every 15 seconds (something to bear in mind analogously for client presentations). Sticking too this rule prevents audience members becoming distracted/restless and is an important consideration for writing structure.

Bearing this in mind we were introduced to the fundamental structure of a joke, namely set up – punch. 

Set up punch refers to the two essential parts of a joke, the eponymous ‘set up’, and ‘punch’

-The set up contains essential contextual information necessary to understand the punchline. It should be short and to the point, brevity is the priority over correct punctuation or pronunciation, words can be and are run into each other in order to condense this section.

-The punch(line) contains new information, that somehow changes or recontextualises the information provided in the set up. Again the punch should be as economical as possible, BUT additions can be made as long as they promote further laugher and do not dilute the initial punch.

This structure underlines all* stand-up comedy, it was illustrated to us that the narrative structures that we associate with standup performance are actually constructed retrospectively by combining a series of ‘set up – punch’ jokes on the same subject. Additionally punch(lines) do not necessarily need to be spoken, but can be acted/mimed etc.

Making Associations:

There are a number of methods for generating material, from ‘ranting and raving’ to the more sedate ‘list method’. But in all cases the initial process of joke writing involves selecting a subject and expanding it out in order to explore it from all possible angles. This expansion by association utilises a number of semiotic phenomena such as connotation, metaphorical connectivity, and even material considerations such as rhythm, rhyme, homophony and contronyms.

Rather than plunging into unlimited semiosis however, this process had to be carefully managed. For the purposes of the course associations were divided into ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’, with primary associations deemed the strongest for constructing jokes.

While this process was very semiotically relevant, I personally found the process harder than most. I found that due to my semiotic bias, I typically moved straight to ‘secondary’ associations and overlooked some useful ‘primary’ ones.

A primary association would be along the lines of:

Policeman -> Helmet

Whereas I was typically thinking of secondary associations, such as;

Policeman -> Authority

As we know from the work of Barthes, connotation often appears “natural” and “immediate” (Cobley 2004, 50), while denotation is unpacked subsequently. It seems my problem was related to this, in that I was ‘jumping ahead’ into the diffuse world of connotation, while overlooking denotation and risking writing material that would not be understandable by the audience.

As an example, in one of our early exercises we were working from a set of idioms as inspiration and trying to expand them out. During this I came up with the following potential joke (presented here as an example of a work in progress, not as a demonstration of ability!):

They say an army marches on it’s stomach. That’s why I’m afraid of snakes.

The link here was apparent to me (that snakes crawl on their stomachs), but was opaque to the rest of the class, resulting (among other reasons) in the joke failing. A more successful joke based on this idiom would probably relate to the stomach in a more direct fashion (something about hunger, or involving a portly captain perhaps).

Use of Familiar Phrases and Subject Matter:

While my attempt was unsuccessful, the use of idioms and familiar phrases is very common in comedy. During the course these phrases ranged from expressions such as ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’ to more mundane notes like; ‘please leave this toilet as you expect to find it’. The cultural embeddedness of these phrases is a useful for comedy as humour, and therefore the punch of ‘set up – punch’, is built upon surprise. It is therefore necessary to have a culturally familiar subject which you can twist or subvert in some way in order to provide the surprise.

In a recent post I used the following quote from Groucho Marx as a demonstration of how a significant proportion of humour is based on such semiotic misdirection.

The humour in this joke results from the western culturally ingrained symbolic interpretation of back cats as signs of bad luck and witchcraft. Instead Marx subverts this habitual expectation, by offering an alternative interpretation of the cats movement as an indexical sign of its desire to go somewhere. The humour here is precisely located in the interpretation of something usually discussed in the context of symbolism, instead as an index.

As semioticians we are aware of the culturally specific nature of certain types of knowledge. This becomes increasingly diffuse as we enter into connotation and tangential links.

In order to ensure our adherence to the  pool of widely held cultural knowledge. We were advised on the course to pretend that we were writing jokes to appeal to someone radically different than ourselves, namely a fifty year old Swedish woman. This ensured that all of our jokes would be maximally understandable, as well as provide a sufficiently surprising punchline.

Performance:

Finally for those interested, the video below documents my debut performance (it was shot by a friend who saw fit to add ‘Lemon Live Exclusive’ in the Corner and make it black and white.) Feel free to have a watch and let me know if you have any questions or additional thoughts concerning semiotics and stand up!

 

Further Information:

http://www.londoncomedycourse.com

References:

Cobley, Paul 2004. Introducing Semiotics. Icon Books

Notes:

*Stewart Lee was highlighted on the course as a general exception to all of the ‘rules’ of comedy as he performs in his own idiosyncratic style (employing repetition, drawn out silences, direct attacks on other comedians, intellectual material, and moves to deliberately divide the audience). He is a personal favourite, but we were strongly advised not to copy him, as he has earned the right to perform in his style over years of touring. Additionally he often advertises his shows including negative reviews, to highlight the unusual nature of his act and ensure that audience members do not turn up unawares.

 

 

Stage 1 (5): Types of Sign Relations – Charles Sanders Peirce’s notions of Icon, Index, and Symbol

In the previous post (https://decodingsemiotics.wordpress.com/2015/07/11/stage-1-4-modeling-flexible-meaning-charles-sanders-peirces-model-of-the-sign/) we looked at Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic model of the sign, and how its constituent components of a ‘representamen’, an ‘interpretant, and an ‘object’ facilitate an understanding of meaning as a flexible phenomena.

Through the course of this blog thus far we have looked at how we construct our world through signs (Jakob von Uexkull (1)), the role of socially agreed signifier – signified conventions in helping to create our meaningful world (Saussure (2)), how meaning extends beyond these dyadic conventions, to include the fluid notion of ‘sense’ (Frege (3)), before looking at Peirce’s triadic model of the sign (4) as a means of combining the thinking of Saussure and Frege.

In very simple terms we can depict our journey over the last three posts as:

Saussure                                       Frege                                               Peirce

Working entirely independently these three thinkers each revealed important aspects of sign functioning, with Peirce’s thinking providing the most comprehensive model.

According to Peirce; ‘all forms of thought (ideas) are essentially communication (transmission of signs), organised by an underlying logic (or semiotic, as he called it) that is not fundamentally different for communication processes inside or outside of brains.’ (Deacon 1998, 70)

Thus far we have considered all signs as being of the same type, operating in the same ways. But for Peirce, while all sign processes share an ‘underlying logic’ there are different classes of sign that operate within this. Moving beyond his general 3-part model of the sign, Peirce describes a typology of subtly different signs and explores the ways in which they function as signifiers.

Sign typologies have existed throughout the history of semiotics and philosophy, where; ‘in order to be specific about differences in referential form, philosophers and semioticians have often distinguished between different forms of referential relationships’ (Deacon 1998, 70). But Peirce’s full typology is considered; ‘probably the most successful classification of representational relationships’ (Deacon 1998, 70), and was developed throughout his life to extend to some 66+ types. At its foundation Peirce’s typology concerns 3 core sign types; Icons, Indexes, and Symbols. Terrence Deacon summarises how these signs differ as follows;

In simple terms, the differences between iconic, indexical, and symbolic relationships derive from their regarding things either with respect to their form, their correlations with other things, or their involvement in systems of conventional relationships.’ (Deacon 1998, 71)

Unpacking this; ‘Icons are mediated by a similarity between a representamen* and an object’ (Deacon 1998, 70). This similarity can be conveyed through any sense, for instance onomatopoeic language signifies iconically with the word ‘cluck’ possessing a similar audible quality to the noise made by a chicken.

The sound that Steve Miller makes with his guitar  18 seconds into the song ‘The Joker’ is an example of an iconic sign for a “wolf whistle”

Visually toilet signage frequently makes use of iconicity with the figures depicted in forms visually similar to stereotypically female and male forms of dress.

As we can see; ‘when we say something is “iconic” (an icon) of something else we usually man that there is a resemblance that we notice.’ Realism in art is a movement that favours iconic representation within which; ‘landscapes, portraits, and pictures of all kinds are iconic of what they depict’ (Deacon 1998, 71).

Jules Breton ‘The End of The Working Day’

Moving beyond similarity, Indexical signs; ‘are mediated by some physical or temporal connection between sign and object’ (Deacon 1998, 70). When we say something is an “Index” we mean that it is somehow directly/causally linked, like walking on a beach is to footprints on the sand.

Indexes are established by the regular the co-occurence of some phenomena, a classic example of this is of smoke being understood as an indexical sign of fire, with one seemingly indivisible from the other.

The hand prints in the concrete outside of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard are another example of Indexical signs.

The fame of these markings exists in their direct physical and temporal connection to the stars that made them, which lends these indexical signs additional ‘authenticity’ in terms of their perceived relation to the stars that made them.

Due to this potential for ‘authenticity’, indexical signs are frequently requested as evidence of an individuals agreement with something, for example when ‘signing’ a document, or historically through use of an wax seal.

Due to the causal link between representamen and object, Indexical signification can have a particularly strong physical effect upon recipients. As as example Terrence Deacon talks about the indexical sign ‘laughter’, stating that; ‘laughter provides others with information about the laugher’s state of mind and recent history, but it also exerts amore direct effect, a sort of compulsion to laugh along.’ (Deacon 1998, 58)

In contrast to Icons and Indexes, there is no naturally occuring link between a symbol’s representamen, and its object; ‘Symbols are mediated by some formal or merely agreed-upon link irrespective of any physical characteristics of either sign or object.’ (Deacon 1998, 70)

An example of a Symbol is the common cultural practice of ringing a peal of church bells to celebrate a wedding, that occurs in many countries.

There is no link between the ringing of bells and marriage, prior to the construction of a human convention linking the two. The link here is arbitrary in the same way that we explored when looking at the work of Saussure in the second post.

More than simply an agreed, or arbitrary link between the representamen and object (arbitrary indexes can be established, think of ‘Pavlov’s Dog’ as an example of this), it is important to not that symbols are involved in ‘systems of conventional relationships’ (Deacon 1998, 71), and it is this that is their defining feature.

 

Think back to Saussure’s notion of linguistic value (discussed in post two), which he states is constituted of;

‘(1) of a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which the value is to be determined; and (2) of similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined.’ (Saussure 1978, 115)

Saussure gives the example of a coin, which can (1) be exchanged for some bread of the equivalent value, or (2) compared or exchanged with coins of a different value.

For symbols; ‘the relationship that a representamen* has to an object is a function of the relationship it has to other representamen’ (Deacon 1998, 86).

Essentially there is a similarity in the structure of relationships between objects, and in the structure of relationships between signs, and these structures must be understood first, before we can properly claim to be able to ‘use’ symbols.

‘many interdependent associations that will ultimately provide the nodes in a matrix of symbol-symbol relationships must be in place in order for any one of them to refer symbolically, so they must each be learned prior to recognising their symbolic associative functions.’ (Deacon 1998, 93)

As an example of this think back to the mutually structuring relationship between language and colour, again explored in the second post.

We have now explained the differences between these three classes of signs, however it is very important to note that they are not mutually exclusive categories, very few signs can be considered to be pure examples of either an Icon, Index, or Symbol, there is often a blend of simultaneous significations;

‘no particular objects are intrinsically icons, indexes, or symbols. They are interpreted to be so, depending on what is produced in response’ (Deacon 1998, 71)

Many representamen possess potential Iconic, Indexical, and Symbolic associations, it is merelycontext and habit that biases us into interpreting them a certain way. Playing with one such habitual interpretaion, Groucho Marx famously remarked;

An important point for all semioticians to remember!

*terminology amended for consistency within this post

Reccomended Reading:

Deacon, Terrence W. 1998. The Symbolic Species. New York: Norton and Company

Stage 1 (4): Modelling Flexible Meaning – Charles Sanders Peirce’s Model of the Sign

In the previous post ( https://decodingsemiotics.wordpress.com/2015/06/19/stage-1-3-beyond-one-to-one-correspondence-gottlob-frege-on-sense-and-reference/ ) we explored how Frege’s distinction between ‘Sense’ and ‘Reference’ undermines Saussure’s signifier-signified model of the sign. In this post we go on to explore an alternative model of the sign that allows for the consideration of meaning as a flexible phenomena.

Two posts ago we looked at Saussure’s classic model of the conventional sign. This model consists of two parts, the signifier and the signified combined through an arbitrary social convention:

Signifier-Signified

In the last post we eamined how Frege’s essay ‘On Sense and Reference’ implies a split within the signified into two parts:

Sense + Reference

By combining these two concepts we arrive implicitly at a combined model containing the elements:

Signifier – Sense – Reference

Moving beyond Saussure’s rigid dyad, this combined concept implies a three part model of the sign. Luckily there are a number of three part models of the sign littered throughout the history of semiotics, with many conceptions based on triangles:

Of these three part/triangular models of the sign, the one that closest embodies our hybrid ‘Signifier-Sense-Reference’ concept  is the influenetial model proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce. This model is visually represented below:

As we can see Peirce’s model of the sign is made up of a ‘representamen’, an ‘interpretant’ and a referent (more commonly known as the ‘object’). These parts relate to signifier, seanse and reference in the following ways:

-The representamen is; ‘similar in meaning to Saussure’s signifier’ (Chandler 31), in that it is the ‘material’ (image, sound, thought etc.) that carries the meaning.

-The interpretant is the; ‘sense made of a sign’ (Chandler 32). The interpretant is the most complex part of Peirce’s model, but bears important similarities to Frege’s notion of ‘sense’ in that the interpretant is drawn from the context of the communicative situation and from knowledge of other potential terms in the sign system. Considered on a social level the interpretant is a sort of vague/diffuse mental image, but we should be aware that for each individual sign user the interpretant is usually quite a fixed and narrow concept.

-Finally the ‘object’ is  something that exists outside of the statement in the the real world or within some other sign system, it is therefore equivalent to Frege’s notion of the reference.

Giving a concrete example of an instance of a sign these three parts can typically be illustrated arranged as follows:

As we can see the interpretant (the mental image of the tree) is given an active presence in this model, where previously in Saussure’s model this flexible mental element was only implicit (remember the dancing tree images from Stage 1 (2)?). This is not the only difference between the sign concepts proposed by Saussure and Peirce however.

Peirce’s model of the sign extends beyond Saussure’s focus on socially agreed linguistic conventions to embrace a wide range of signifying stimuli. An example of this can bee seen in the image below which reveals the semiotic process behind seeing smoke and determining its meaning. (in this image ‘sign vehicle’ is used as an alternative term for ‘representamen’).

Far from being about agreed linguistic entities, Peirce’s concept of the sign is all encompassing, as is revealed by his popular definition of a sign as; ‘something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity’ (Cobley 22). This rather obtuse description is important, as it makes clear the necessary components for semiosis (the occurance of meaning).

– ‘something which stands’ = a signifer – the material (written, spoken, acted, imprinted etc.) conponent of the sign

– ‘to somebody’ = a receiving mental presence (a human, or other animal)

– ‘for something’ = a concept or image that differs from the material signifier but which is envoked by it

Considering these essential components, consider the well known thought experiment; ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’

From the perspective of Peircian semiotics the answer can only be no. With no ‘somebody’ around to percieve the tree’s fall, there can be no interpretant and hence no semiosis and meaning (no sign is produced).

This is because, as Peirce states;

This point is an important link back to the first blog  post where we looked at the work of Jakob von Uexkull. Remember for instance the living room as percieved by a dog:

As we can see, the unreadable books and inaccessable desk draws etc. are not percieved as signs by the dog, and therfore do not exist as meaningful entities within its umwelt. The are not signs as they are not interpreted as signs.

As we can see Peirce’s model of the sign provides a neat summation of a numer of the theoretical perspectives dealt with so far. It has an added benefit however in terms of how it extends the concept of semiotics beyond Saussure and Frege’s narrow linguistic focus, to begin to embrace the diversity of signs that surround us. It is this that we will expole in more detail in the next blog.

Reccomended Reading:

Paul Cobley: Introducing Semiotics 2004. Icon Books

For more information on Peirce’s own definitions of the components of his sign model, see the Peirce Commens Dictionary (try searching for ‘interpretant’, ‘representamen’ etc.) available here: http://www.commens.org/

Stage 1 (2): Social Convention and Signification – Ferdinand de Saussure’s ‘Course in General Linguistics’

This post follows on from the previous one, and understanding my be aided by familiarity with that post, available here: https://decodingsemiotics.wordpress.com/2015/04/23/stage-1-1-semiotics-and-perception-jakob-von-uexkull-a-foray-into-the-worlds-of-animals-and-humans/

Our semiotic experience of the world is dependent on habit. The final Bongard problem at the end of the last post was an example of the way that habitual social conventions govern our filtering of a chaotic world into a meaningful space (umwelt). It is only through our learned reading experience of the letters ‘A’ and ‘B’ that we can readily determine the difference between the two groups.

Learned social conventions underpin a number of semiotic systems, and are the focus of Ferdinand de Saussure’s influential Course in General Linguistics. Analysing language Saussure considers words as ‘signs’, units of meaning created through the combination of a signifier, with a signified.

In English, for instance, the sound ‘tree’ is a signifier for the signified concepts or images:

Saussure’s work uses these notions of sign, signifier, and signified to look at language as a semiotic structure, a socially arranged system for communicating meaning that we all must buy into through a tacit social contract.

This unwritten contract is crucial to the functioning of the system because, as Saussure reiterates throughout; ‘The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary’ (Saussure 1978, 67) The arbitrary nature of the sign means that:

‘the idea of “sister” is not linked by any inner relationship to the succession of sounds s-ö-r which serves as its signifier in French; that it could be represented equally by just any sequence is proved by differences among languages and by the very existence of different languages’ (Saussure 1978, 67-8)

Because of this we are all bound by convention to use our language in the socially understood way, otherwise our statements will not be understandable.

Arbitrariness means that in language signifiers do not contain any direct connection to their signifieds, they operate only through convention. Consider again the variety of the ‘A’s and ‘B’s depicted in the Bongard problem above, it is very hard to determine any one consistent feature that defines each category of letters. This is because the value of letters is purely negative and differential. As Saussure observes the same person can write ‘t’, for instance, in different ways:

For Sassure when an individual is writing ‘t’; ‘the only requirement is that the sign for ‘t’ not be confused in their script with the signs used for ‘l’,’d’, etc.’  (Saussure 1978, 119-120)

Overly similar signifiers can be the source of confusing social situations and are often the basis for comedy.

The differences between signifiers is the most important part of a functioning sign system, as Saussure notes; ‘the important thing in the word is not the sound alone but the phonic differences that make it possible to distinguish this word from all others, for differences carry signification.’ (Saussure 1978, 118)

Difference is vital for the functioning of language as, ‘language is characterised as a system based entirely on the opposition of its concrete units.’ (Saussure 1978, 107)

This principle extends beyond language into other sign systems. Differences are emphasized in order to ensure meaning is as clear as possible. This is evident in the use of Emmental to represent cheese in cartoons, as the unique bubbles present in the famous swiss cheese, prevent it from being confused with yellow objects such as butter when depicted in the reduced detail of the cartoon medium.

Depending on differences to define its units any semiotic system must then imbue its units with value. As we have seen in language signs are arbitrary and must therefore be imbued with semiotic value, which for Saussure is created according to two principles.

Saussure states that value is composed: ‘(1) of a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which the value is to be determined; and (2) of similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined.’ (Saussure 1978, 115)

To illustrate this Saussure gives the example of a coin, which can (1) be exchanged for some bread of the equivalent value, or (2) compared or exchanged with coins of a different value.

Taking an example from language, the signifer ‘smile’ may be (1)  exchanged for a signified image of a smile or an emoji 🙂 etc, or (2) substituted for a signifier conveying a different emotion such as ‘frown’. Through these two axes of relationships the meaningful signs of language are constructed.

Saussure conceives as these two relationships existing on two separate planes shown in the diagram below:

These two planes represent (A) language, and (B) thought, and linking these through social convention creates meaningful units (these are indicated by the dotted lines). These units create the consistuent parts of our meaningful world, as Saussure states; ‘without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.’ (Saussure 1978, 112)

For a concrete example we can look at how the signifiers; Violet, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, and Red, in English divide up the ‘uncharted nebula’ of the colour spectrum.

The link between language and colour here (as the formation of a sign) creates the units of meaning for a language group, actively constraining how they concieve and communicate about, the world, but these units are arbitrary and differ between many languages.

Linguists identify a set of ‘grue’ langauges (such as Japanese in the example below) where no distiction is made between the shades that in English would be green and blue, similarly some langages (Russian below) may use further subdivisions in their standard colour set not present in English, and therefore not possessing a distinct conventional meaning for English speakers.

Due to the necessity of differences between signs in constructing linguistic value, the meaning of ‘green’ in English includes the assumption that the subject is not ‘blue’.

For this reason fully understanding a sign requires knowledge of other similar signs in the system. To enter into a the speaking community of a certain language an individual must learn a great number of socially agreed, signifier-signified conventions, and in doing so adopt the worldview of the speaking community.

Reccomended Reading:

PDF version of Course in General Linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/DeSaussure-Course-excerpts.pdf     *Page 65 Onwards*

Course in General Linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure. 1978. trans. Wade Baskin. London: Fontana/Collins

About this Blog

Hi Everyone!

Welcome to Decoding Semiotics. This blog aims to present some of the key concepts and texts of semiotics in a punchy and easily digestible format!

We will move from some of the key texts from the founders of modern semiotics to steadily explore more nuanced areas of semiotic study before looking at some of the theory behind contemporary applications of semiotics by commercial semioticians.

This blog is intended to be as accessible as possible, with material to interest those new to the field as well as established semioticians.

If you are new to this blog I recommend starting with the ‘What is Semiotics and Why is it Important?’ tab at the top of the page for some background before jumping in to the blogs themselves. The blogs will be ordered in stages 1… with each text numbered in brackets afterward so if you are looking for the start search for ‘Stage 1 (1)’, otherwise blogs can be browsed by interest tagged.

Happy reading and feel free to comment with any comments or questions!

Mark