Por que não tão sério? Dispositivos pragmáticos em piadas

The fundamental question in philosophy of humor is: what makes us laugh? In this paper, we will hold the so-called incongruity theory, according to which laughter is provoked by the presentation of inconsistent features in an utterance. For that, we will analyze how pragmatics of language provides ways of presenting incongruities in written and spoken jokes and, hence, provoking a sensation of comic amusement in an audience. Our focus will be on conversational implicatures, speech acts, and presuppositions, and how they are used in joking. This is not an exhaustive analysis of all the ways incongruities are rendered in comic utterances; of course, there are other ways of presenting disharmonies, such as by means of semantic features. Finally, we will discuss whether jokes should be considered as a distinct kind of speech act, instead of just a parasitic use of language.