Abstract

Victor Raskin's clear delineation of the differences between humorous and bone fide serious communication and his systematic formal account of how jokes work was not only a major contribution to linguistics but also made possible revolutionary advances in other areas of the social sciences of humor. It was Raskin's account of the fictional, conventional, and mythical scripts used in jokes that freed us from the earlier tendentious and misleading analyses of jokes in terms of “stereotypes.” The General Theory of Verbal Humor enables us more easily to explain, transform, unpack, and compare quite disparate kinds of jokes from elephant jokes to Polish jokes and to explain how and why jokes have evolved over time. Raskin's contribution to humor scholarship has been that of a master.