An Introduction to the Semantic Script Theory of Humor and the Study of its Weaknesses on the Basis of Persian Language Data

The Semantic Script Theory of Humor is the first complete linguistic theory on humor. This theory, that was in fact a radical departure from the traditionally taxonomic approach of puns and humor, was first introduced by Victor Raskin. He was the first linguist that analyzed the structures of humor from the semantic view point, and could identify the structure of joke. In Raskin’s view, a semantic theory must include two abstract concepts: a set of the whole scripts available to the speakers and a set of compositional rules. The purpose of this article is to introduce this theory and to answer this question that which objections on the basis of Persian data may be made to this theory. For this purpose, we studied a number of Persian jokes published in Iranian Humor Press, and by the analysis of these texts, we could show some weaknesses of the theory. The results of this study showed that the way of analysis in Raskin’s Semantic Scripts theory, which is based on listing all of the scripts involved in the words used in the humorous text, has some weaknesses in analyzing Persian Jokes; such as not being compatible with the linguistic processing realities and for having time-consuming redundant complexities, it is not applicable on long Persian jokes.