Form-versus-content humour is a type of
humour
Humour (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English) or humor (American English) is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humorism, humoral medicine of the ancient Gre ...
in an
incongruity between a statement's content and the way it is communicated makes it humorous. It is one of the basic techniques of
tragicomic
Tragicomedy is a literary genre that blends aspects of both tragic and comic forms. Most often seen in dramatic literature, the term can describe either a tragic play which contains enough comic elements to lighten the overall mood or a serious ...
humour.
Form-versus-content humour can be delivered, for example, by presenting a message in a form that inherently defeats the ostensible purpose of the message, or in a form that is fundamentally incapable of carrying the important part of the message. The ''
Jargon File
The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT AI Lab ...
'' gives an example of this type of humor: a red
index card
An index card (or record card in British English and system cards in Australian English) consists of card stock (heavy paper) cut to a standard size, used for recording and storing small amounts of discrete data. A collection of such cards ei ...
with GREEN written on it.
See also
*
Indirect self-reference
Indirect self-reference describes an object referring to itself indirectly. For example, the "this sentence is false." contains a direct self-reference, in which the phrase "this sentence" refers directly to the sentence as a whole. An indirectly ...
* ''
Ceci n'est pas une pipe''
References
Comedy
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