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Library's collection Library's IT development CancelIn almost all daily activities, people are defiling with humors, either in the
form of readings or in the form of utterances. By making a joke or sensing
something runny, people are released from boredom and tension In the form of
readings, there is a type of humors which only consists of a single speech act
where all sentences contained are uttered by a single speaker, i.e., one-line joke
or one-liner. As it consists of a single speech act, it is certainly provided with
very limited information. That is why, one line joke is quite difficult to
understand. Moreover, humor has not been studied very much in linguistics
(Soedjatmiko, 1988. p. 2). The reasons above have encouraged the writer to do
the research on one line joke.
Meanwhile, as one-line joke is considered as text-as-product where the
writer can only make n study on the structure or the meaning of humors, the writer
decides to study on the meaning of one-line joke, Semantics. As mentioned above
that one-line joke has a unique characteristic like having limited information, there
must be a certain mechanism that creates the funniness on the joke Koesler states
that the mechanism of humor works because of the incongruity between two
different interpretations about the joke Then, Willmann adds that the two
different ideas occur as a matter of manipulation of ambiguity. Based on those
theories, the writer intends to analyze the semantic mechanism of one-line joke
that creates the funniness and also to find out the manipulation of semantic
ambiguity on one-line joke.
For the subject of the research, the writer takes 30 one line jokes from
Reader's Digest from January to December 1995 To conduct this study, the
writer uses tho combination between field and library research It means that some
of the interpretations of the subjects are found from the conditions in reality and
some arc from the references In this study, the writer uses qualitative analysis to
find Die semantic mechanisms that create the funniness, and the linguistic
elements I hat are violated so that the jokes are funny. IJI the limitation to written
verbal humor, one line jokes are analyzed under the scope of semantic ambiguity
and truth-conditional semantics.
Under the theory of mechanisms of humor; this study leads to the findings
thai truth conditional semantics is the most violated among the thirty one line
jokcH analyzed. These findings lead lo the conclusion that the condition of the
sentences or the jokes which are not sufficient to the truth-condition have created
the jokoK lo bo funny On one-lineis. Ihcso violations to Ihe uuth-condition happen
most frequently compared to the violation of lexical ambiguity, grammatical
ambiguity and causal fallacy. It shows that to understand one line jokes, readers
need to have logical thinking of truth-condition. Finally, this study also concludes
that to understand the semantic mechanism of one line jokes, it. is necessary for
the readers to have an expectation and an alternative idea about Ihe joke. Both
readers' expectation and alternative idea are compared, and later on it is
concluded that the alternative idea has surprised the readers. The surprising
solution creates the one-liners to be funny.