Humor in Linguistics: Forced Reinterpretation Theory

Abstract

Humor was a neglected area of studies in linguistics until the second half of the 20th century. Since it is a distinctive human feature, humor has also been studied within other sciences, oftentimes through an interdisciplinary approach. In this paper, we will present the Forced Reinterpretation Theory of humor using examples from the popular British TV series The Black Adder. Due to the fact that the corpus is in English, the humorous effect in Bosnian always depends on the translation and achieving it represents a tall order for any translator. We will reflect upon such instances in this paper as well.