Norrick’s work reminds me a great deal of the things that Becker discusses in his exploration of repetition. In his article, Becker explores the way in which humor can arise because of access to a shared prior text, for example, the prior text of the “how many x-es does it take to do y?” joke frame. Without access to that frame, the joke is largely lost, and a statement like, “How many Ph.D.’s does it take to find a wireless button” loses much of its punch.
At the same time, Norrick marries some of the concepts introduced by Bauman and Bauman & Briggs on Performativity with the work on repetition, in looking at the ways repetition is used to create frame breaks which allow for the punchline of the joke to emerge. However, Norrick makes an important distinction between jokes and parodic allusion. While both are performative speech events a la Bauman and Briggs, Norrick points to the idea that the joke is performative in an intrusive way—their use of intertextual reference is brief and used to challenge the audience to achieve the goal of the punchline, while the allusion that creates parody invites the audience to align with the speaker, drawing them together to joke at the expense of a third party.
It is this last element that I think may be useful to my own work—the work of WK and identifying WK is to align a number of speakers against the WK-participant, once the speech event has been entextualized as a WK event. Comparing the ways these alignments function will likely be a very useful tool to me as I go forward examining how WK functions within the discourse of the internet communities I’m studying.
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