Addressing an audience: Time, place, and

genre in Peter van Straatens calendar

cartoons
CHARLES FORCEVILLE

Abstract
Cartoons, like other forms of mass media, are aimed not just at anybody,
but at a multitude of individuals. The extent to which these numerous individuals understand the cartoons in the same way depends not only on their
shared interpretations of the word and image texts themselves, but also on
interpretation strategies suggested by the (near)identical circumstances
under which the cartoons are accessed. As Gail Dines points out, locating
cartoons within the cultural realm of mass communication requires an
understanding of how these media forms come into existence and how they
are consumed by the intended audience (1995: 238). To understand better
how cartoons are processed, it is necessary to generalize about contextual
factors governing their perception. In this paper I examine cartoons by the
Dutchman Peter van Straaten that all appeared on a tear-o calendar in
the year 2001. The question addressed is how the temporal and spatial circumstances under which the cartoons are accessed, in combination with the
generic conventions of the calendar in which they appear, trigger the activation of specific cognitive schemata, and thus steer and constrain possible interpretations. The general framework in which these matters are discussed
is Sperber and Wilsons (1995) Relevance Theory.
Keywords: Humor reception; Peter van Straaten; cartoons; relevance
theory; genre.
1. Introduction
A joke is usually directed at a more or less specific audience, and relies for
its success on the activation of various types of background knowledge,
Humor 183 (2005), 247278

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6 Walter de Gruyter

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C. Forceville

or schemata, by that audience. This is true not only when it is a verbal

joke told orally and in real time, but also when it is a multimodal one
relayed to a mass audience and in non-live form. Mass-medial jokesters
and their audience are aware of at least some of the circumstances under
which the latter accesses the jokes, and jokesters may exploit this mutual
awareness. Attempts to generalize about reception circumstances are important because they provide insight into what extra-textual factors systematically influence the comprehension and appreciation of jokes and
cartoons.
Drawing on the relevance theory model developed by Sperber and
Wilson (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1987, 1995; Wilson and Sperber
2004), I will show how the appreciation of a dozen cartoons by the
Dutchman Peter Van Straaten depends partly on the audience awareness
of three interlocking extra-textual dimensions: time of access; place of access; and genre. I thereby aim to contribute to a theory of humor that
takes into account pragmatic as well as textual factors.

2.

A characterization of Peters Zeurkalender cartoons

Peter van Straaten is one of Hollands best known cartoon satirists

of bourgeois life. Among many other things, he contributes a daily
cartoon to the Dutch newspaper het Parool, called Dagelijks Leven
(Daily Life), and two cartoons to the Dutch weekly magazine Vrij
Nederland a political one and a cartoon in the series Het Literaire
Leven (Literary Life). His cartoons also appear abroad. Since 1994
Van Straaten has moreover released a tear-o calendar. His calendar
is one among various such calendars published in the Netherlands.
Competitors include other humorous calendars as well as poetry, philosophy, and recipe calendars (see e.g., Vanderstraeten 2001). Since one
tears o a sheet every day, such a calendar is called a scheurkalender
(scheuren means to tear [o ]). Van Straatens calendar is called
note the rhyme a zeurkalender (zeuren means to whine, to
complain).
Each of the 368 representations of the 2001 edition of the calendar
(three extra for the first three days of the next year) consists of a blackand-white drawing of one or more people situated in a recognizable setting. Although the characters to some extent represent stereotypes (the
beautiful girl, the elderly artist, the dull oce manager, etc.), they

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are not caricatures. While the humor in Van Straatens work is not of the
absurd kind that requires a mental turnaround from one script to another
(as, for instance, in the Gary Larson cartoons serving as examples in
Smith 1996), there is an underlying tension that qualifies as a script
opposition (Attardo 2001: 22). This opposition can be formulated as
the tension between the ways in which things should be properly said or
done, or simply be, in an ideal world, and the sordid, imperfect and
disappointing ways in which they actually turn out in Van Straatens
universe. There is usually a clearly identifiable target (Attardo 2001:
23) in each cartoon, since almost always somebodys positive face
is harmed whether the speakers own, the interlocutors, or a third
partys. The knowledge resource situation (Attardo 2001: 22 et passim)
is to be derived mainly from the pictorial part of the cartoons. Typical
locations in Van Straatens sordid scenarios include chic restaurants (bad
food, pompous behavior, lack of dining experience), bedrooms (boring
sex, quick sex, unsatisfactory sex), the home (marital and parent-child
conflicts), the oce (malingering, sexual harassment, tedium), the schoolyard (humiliation, power play), the psychotherapists treatment room (insecurity, miscommunication, erratic expectations), and the pub (drunkenness, desperate flirtations).
Van Straatens cartoons depict a moment in time, and this sensation of
frozen time is enhanced by the fact that he refrains from using pictorial runes (Kennedy 1982: 600; see also Forceville 2005) such as speed
and trajectory lines, which give at least a minimal visual impression of
passing time.1 Moreover, given that the verbal texts invariably consist of
single-speaker utterances, no narrative development and hence no narrative strategy (Attardo 2001: ibid.) might seem to be at stake. However, a
Van Straaten cartoon often derives its humor from a strong suggestion of
what happened in the seconds, minutes or years before, or will or might
happen in the seconds, minutes or years ahead.
The text below each drawing is invariably a short utterance produced
by a character in the drawing; hence the text is never a comment by
some narrator outside of the story (Bals external narrator, 1997: 22).
There is a single speaker only. While the utterances produced by Van
Straatens characters are usually not verbally spectacular, and do not
easily fit Attardos punch and jab lines (funny lines that do not occur in
segment-final or text-final positions, see Attardo 2001: 29), the humor
of the cartoons depends partly upon the right word in the right place, as
well as upon such elusive concepts as rhythm and a good ear for oral

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C. Forceville

language much as in the purely verbal jokes and humorous narratives

that Attardo discusses.
To the extent that the text helps clarify, and determine the interpretations of, elements in the picture, such as who is talking and what the
relations between people are, the text, in Barthes sense, anchors the
picture (Barthes 1986: 28). But to the extent that the humorous nature of
the representation is a result of combining picture and text, and would be
lost if either of them were eliminated, Van Straatens texts relay the
pictures (ibid.). Although it seems that there is usually a preferred reading
of a cartoon, not all viewers necessarily process the cartoon in exactly the
same manner. In the next section I will explore this dimension of Van
Straatens work with reference to relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson
1995; Wilson and Sperber 2004).

3.

A joke is relevant to an individual (or it isnt)

The presenter of a joke is no dierent from the communicator of a message in aiming, in Sperber and Wilsons (henceforward: S&W) words, at
optimal relevance. This means that she (I will follow S&Ws practice to
make communicators female and addressees male) intends the addressee
of the joke to understand it without expending undue energy. That is,
the message must contain sucient information, conform to conventional
ways of address, etc. for the addressee to process it, but ideally no more
than that. In order to achieve this, the sender of the message makes an
assessment of what the addressee probably already knows, or can easily
access by being (made) perceptually aware of his environment, in order
not to overload the message itself with superfluous information.
Jokes, like messages, always come with the presumption of relevance, that is, they are presented by the joker to her addressees with the
presupposition that it will be worth their while to pay attention and try to
understand. Note that what should count as undue energy in jokes,
however, may structurally dier from what counts as such in ordinary
communication inasmuch as a joke always deliberately leaves something
implied this something to be cognitively accessed by the addressee.
Indeed, the success of a joke crucially hinges upon the addressee autonomously grasping this piece of information; else the jokester has to explain
this part and thus spoil the joke. So, even without quantifying what is
undue energy, more eort is required for the uptake of a joke than for

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the processing of a piece of ordinary information. This leaves uninvalidated that humor is governed by the presumption of relevance, and that
the viewer will stop processing at the first interpretation of a joke he hits
upon that strikes him as relevant (a key element in S&Ws theory), in the
belief that the jokester will have provided him with the best possible stimulus under the circumstances (see S&W 1995: 168169) compatible with
the communicators abilities and preferences (W&S 2004: 612). As Yus
puts it: Humorists may be willing to keep relevant information to
themselves, be obscure, be ambiguous, etc. for the sake of pursuing the
creation of humorous eects, but the principle of relevance invariably
applies to both humorous and non-humorous discourse (2003: 1298).
A message achieves relevance if the addressee, combining the message
with assumptions already present in his cognitive environment, decides
(i) to adopt one or more new assumptions; (ii) to abandon old assumptions in favor of assumptions just communicated; (iii) to strengthen old
assumptions; or (iv) to weaken old assumptions. The degree of relevance
depends partly on the nature of the cognitive eects (if you just heard you
won $1 million they are bigger than when you heard the coee is ready),
partly on the eort needed to derive the eects: the more eort needed for
a given eect, the less relevance.
S&W distinguish three subtasks in the comprehension process:
a.

b.
c.

Constructing an appropriate hypothesis about explicit content (explicatures) via decoding, disambiguation, reference resolution, and
other pragmatic enrichment procedures.
Constructing an appropriate hypothesis about the intended contextual assumptions (implicated premises).
Constructing an appropriate hypothesis about the intended contextual implications (implicated conclusions) (W&S 2004: 615).

For present purposes, two concepts in S&Ws (1995) Relevance Theory

model are specifically pertinent: (1) the claim that relevance is always
relevance to an individual (S&W 1995: 142 ); and (2) the distinction between strong and weak communication (S&W 1995: 176 ). Both concepts shed light on the issue of multiple readings of cartoons that Dines
exhorts humor scholars to address in their research (1995: 247). To illustrate (1), consider the following: if Mary wants her husband Peter to fetch
her the scissors, she is optimally relevant to him if she shouts to him:
Can you get me the scissors, please? since she knows he knows where
they are. To a first-time visitor Mary is more likely to shout something

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C. Forceville

like, Can you get me the scissors, please? They are in the leftmost
drawer. Since the visitor would not know where they are, she achieves
relevance by forcing him to expend slightly extra eort (he needs to process not only can you get me the scissors, please? but also they are in
the leftmost drawer). The point here is that in order to be optimally relevant a communicator varies the nature of her stimulus, depending on
what background knowledge she takes her addressee to possess.
A second important dimension of S&Ws theory is the distinction between strong and weak communication. A communicator can choose a
very explicit stimulus to achieve a cognitive eect in her audience (often
in turn leading to some sort of behavior following that cognitive eect),
such as (i) Shut that window! or a very indirect one, such as (ii) It is
getting a bit chilly in here. In the case of (i), communication, in S&Ws
terminology, is strong: the message has, given the circumstances, clearly a
single interpretation; in the case of (ii), communication is weak: it is a hint
rather than a command or a request, although the intended cognitive
eect and the desired behavior may be the same. Strong and weak communication form no either/or pair but are extremes on a continuum. The
dierence between strong and weak communication has two important
consequences. First, the more strongly an assumption is communicated,
the more the responsibility for its actual derivation rests with the communicator; the more weakly it is communicated, the more the responsibility
for its actual derivation rests with the addressee (S&W 1995: 235). Someone shouting Close the window! can hardly deny she conveys her wish
to have the window closed, whereas someone saying Its getting a bit
chilly in here can upon you kindly closing the window easily dissociate herself from what you did. She might have wanted you to turn o
the air conditioner instead, or bring her a blanket or simply to strike
up a conversation. Though you may feel somewhat oended if your
friendly action is not appreciated, the implicature (Any assumption
communicated, but not explicitly so, is implicitly communicated: it is an
implicature, S&W 1995: 182, italics in original) was derived by you
largely on your own responsibility.
Second, a communicator who chooses weak over strong communication may create a degree of accidental or deliberate ambiguity.
S&W discuss the following example: the mediocre composer Salieri asks
Mozart what he thinks of his, Salieris, music, upon which the genius
shrewdly replies, I didnt think such music was possible (S&W 1987:
751). Moreover, a communicator indulging in weak communication

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aims not necessarily at a single interpretation, but at a range of interpretations that can coexist. S&W propose the name poetic eects for
such a situation (S&W 1995: 217; see also Pilkington 2000).
In applying relevance theory to pictorial metaphors in print advertisements and billboards, I proposed four points of attention (Forceville 1996: 99104) which are no less pertinent to Van Straatens masscommunicated cartoons.
Non-co-presence in time. Misunderstandings in mass-medial communication, including cartoons, are not instantly reparable as this is
possible in on-line, live conversation between two interlocutors. Another
consequence of the time gap often inhering in mass-communication is
that the collective cognitive environment of the audience may have
changed due to intervening events (say, a war in the Middle East, the outbreak of a global epidemic disease, a political murder, or a lasting spate
of exceptionally hot or cold weather) in a way that potentially aects the
uptake of a cartoon. This is all the more pertinent here since the cartoons
in the Zeurkalender are conceived and printed long before they are seen
and enjoyed.
Number of communicators involved. The cartoons have a multitude of
individual addressees, with widely dierent cognitive environments.
Clearly, Van Straaten steers his audience into a certain direction by
making salient certain elements, but idiosyncrasies in the cognitive environment of addressees knowledge and experiences could lead to interpretations that dier between individuals.
Multimodal character of Van Straatens jokes. While the majority of
S&Ws examples exemplify verbal utterances, Van Straatens cartoons
feature a mixture of verbal and pictorial information. Since non-verbal
communication tends to be less explicit than verbal communication, the
pictorial component in the cartoons may to some extent lead to dierent
inference processes in dierent viewers.
Ambiguity of the textual part of the cartoon. In most cases, the textual
part of the Van Straaten cartoons does not appear to aim at ambiguity
and vagueness in the manner that many advertising texts do (see e.g.,
Leech 1966: 161; Tanaka 1994: 36; Hermeren 1999: 79 et passim), and
other cartoons as well. The texts are seldom characterized by puns or
other linguistic virtuosities. Indeed, the fact that most of them are not
funny or remarkable when divorced from the pictures (and vice versa) testifies to their ordinariness. While the texts in the cartoons thus do not as a
rule contain a disjunctor (a word or phrase that, in jokes, is used in two

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senses, Attardo 2001: 18), forcing the interpreter to revise his earlier
understanding of the situation, they may be ambiguous in less spectacular ways. The viewer often has to infer the broader situation for which
the current cartoon is the cue, which leaves room for an idiosyncratic
interpretation.
From a relevance-oriented perspective what matters is that all four features favor the triggering of weak implicatures which, as we saw shift the
responsibility for their derivation to the addressee. The use of implicatures also has another consequence: The more information [the communicator] leaves implicit, the greater the degree of mutual understanding
she makes it manifest that she takes to exist between her and her hearer
(S&W 1995: 218). That is, by the use of implicatures, the communicator
can aim for intimacy (cf. Cohen 1979: 7).

4.

The cognitive environment of Van Straatens audience

I will now argue that Van Straatens calendar cartoons activate time,
place, and genre-related assumptions in the cognitive environment of the
audience that steer interpretations, these assumptions being mutually
manifest to sender and addressees. To demonstrate that reception conditions sometimes do make a dierence, I will here focus on 12 calendar
cartoons whose success depends partly on (a) the spatiotemporal circumstances under which they are accessed by their audience; and (b) the
audience awareness of Peters Zeurkalenders generic conventions. Let
me first briefly discuss these factors.

4.1.

Place

Where does a viewer access the Zeurkalender? Humorous tear-o calendars typically hang in peoples homes rather than at work. Moreover,
within the home, the toilet is a pet location, as various sources acknowledge. Thus one reviewer prefers the Zeurkalender over glossy calendars,
explaining sitting on the toilet and looking at a beautiful photo or
drawing is nice, but being oered a text or other type of message every
day is nicer (van Garderen 1999: s.n.), and another begins her review
of the Zeurkalender with the line Peter van Straatens Zeurkalender
is besides paper and lavatory brush a steady attribute [gevestigde

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255

waarde] on many Flemish and Dutch toilets (Vanderstraeten 2001: 47).

Another review starts Its always a good Santa Claus present: a tear-o
calendar for the smallest room (Ruesink 2002: s.n.). Van Straaten himself alludes to the location by choosing as cover for the Zeurkalender 2001
a picture with a toilet (Figure 2). It is to be noted that the location within
the toilet may favor (often standing) men or (invariably sitting) women (I
owe this observation to Judith Tromp). Another aspect of place is that
the cartoons are typically directed at a Dutch-speaking audience, which
means that some specifically Dutch (sub)cultural models and schemata
are triggered.

4.2.

Time

Three dimensions of time are potentially significant in the cartoons under

discussion: time of the day, day of the week, period in the year. If the calendar indeed hangs on the toilet, each cartoon is typically seen when one
goes there hence typically alone before leaving for work or embarking on other daytime activities. But even if the calendar hangs elsewhere a
sheet is torn o early rather than late in the day.
The day in the year and the day of the week can be objectively established, since they are indicated on the calendar (see Figure 1). As to the
seasons, these evoke many assumptions, some culturally based, such as
that winter, in Holland, is prototypically cold and snowy, the days are
short and the nights are long, and if it freezes long enough the Elfstedentocht, the legendary ice-skating contest, can be organized. In spring the
life cycle starts again and new plans are made. Summer is supposed to
be hot, the season of relaxation, men and women parade in bathing suits
on beaches or sweat under their sheets at home. In September the holidays are over, people must get back to work or school, autumnal leaves
begin to fall, winter is approaching, etc.
Anniversaries and other festive days have their own connotations:
at Christmas time one entertains family and friends, New Years Eve
has its traditional doughnut balls and apple turnovers as well as fireworks, champagne toasts to the new year, and TV highlights of the one
just over. On April 30 the Queens birthday is celebrated across the
country . . . . All or most of these assumptions (and many more) are latently present in the cognitive environment of Van Straatens audience,
ready to be activated by his cartoons.

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C. Forceville

To a lesser degree this holds for the days of the week. After a weekend
of relaxation and, often, abundant food and drink, people on Monday go
back to work or school. By contrast, Friday is the last day of work, and
the weekend is eagerly awaited. Saturday and Sunday are the days of leisure, entertainment, sleeping in, sex and churchgoing. Indeed, the Mondays and Saturdays are particularly marked in Peters Zeurkalender.
Mondays have oce or back to school cartoons (41 out of 53 on a
conservative count in the 2001 edition), while Saturdays in 47 out of 53
cases show or allude to sexual activity (and 41 of these 47 pictures feature
a bed).

4.3.

Genre

It is dicult to overestimate the role of genre in the interpretation of representations of whatever kind. We tend to forget it, because we are almost
always aware of the genre to which a representation facing us belongs
and thus automatically activate the conventions that govern that
genres interpretations.
Siegfried Schmidt claims that literary texts typically create expectations
geared toward the maximization of aesthetic eects and polyvalent meanings, whereas for instance front page newspaper articles, by contrast,
create expectations geared toward the representation of facts and monovalent meanings (Schmidt 1991). Zwaan (1993) en Steen (1994) found
in experiments that presenting a verbal text as literary or non-literary
led to systematically dierent uptake among subjects, while Forceville
(1999) showed that students confronted with a photograph presented as
part of an advertisement came up with dierent interpretations from
those who were told about the same photograph that it was an artistic
picture.
The very fact that we are so good at picking up genre clues also
entails risks. Altman (1999) emphasizes that institutional groups (in the
case of film for instance: Hollywood studios, critics, theatre owners,
fans) have dierent interests in the attribution of a genre to a specific text. Consequently groups may, for reasons that serve their specific
interest, impose a genre on a text. The importance of genre-attribution is underlined by Fokkema and Ibsch who, discussing the genre
of literature with reference to Schmidts work on conventions, state
that

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not the structure of literary texts, but the capability and willingness of human beings to agree upon a rule of conduct (a convention) are the decisive
factor in reading a text as a literary text although, admittedly, this convention
is usually activated by textual and/or contextual signals (Fokkema and Ibsch
2000: 22).

As to the genre of Van Straaten cartoons, the viewer is predisposed to be

on the lookout for jokes that are weary, wry, ironic, and mildly savage,
rather than good-natured, downright bitter, or truly sadistic.

5. Twelve cartoons in Peters Zeurkalender 2001

In this section 12 cartoons from Peters Zeurkalender 2001 will be discussed which have been selected on the basis of their suitability to
demonstrate the impact of spatiotemporal access and genre-awareness
on interpretation. The cartoons have been reproduced here in their
original form, except for one thing: I have deleted from the original
pictures the day of the week and the date that in the original calendar
sheets appear above the pictures (except in Figure 1, so as to give one
cartoon in its original form). The reason for this is that I want to
enable the readers of the present article to assess for themselves at
least the contribution of the day and date of access to interpretation
(place and genre conventions are not so easy to manipulate). My point
is not that without this awareness the cartoons are no longer comprehensible and/or funny, but that if the three reception factors under
scrutiny are allowed full play, this provides aspects of humor not accessible to those unaware of them.2 In order to emphasize this, I will
draw on S&Ws already discussed distinction between explicatures, implicated premises, and implicated conclusions, whereby the focus will
be on those premises and conclusions that pertain to time, place, and
genre.
Since the analyses are all mine, I will undoubtedly postulate premises
and derive implicatures that other readers will not access simply because their cognitive environments are no copies of mine as well as
vice versa. Nonetheless I will claim that inasmuch as I share a considerable part of the cognitive environment with other (Dutch) viewers of Van
Straatens cartoons, while they may not always fully share my interpretations they at least will accept them as valid.

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C. Forceville

5.1.

Figure 1

Word and image explicatures: An elderly woman watches an elderly

man, probably her husband, exercising with weights, saying, Ill miss it,
Jan. Via explicature enrichment, it is understood as referring to the
mans belly.
Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The date is 5
January. Traditionally in Holland, as in other countries, at the beginning
of a new year people fervently announce they are going to better their
lives, losing weight being among the more popular good intentions.
Implicated conclusions available by access to time/place/genre:
The man is not just exercising to lose weight; he has made the traditional
New Year resolve to lose weight. Since New Year intentions tend to be
abandoned fairly soon, the wifes professed nostalgia for her husbands
fat belly invites the viewer not only to savor the humorous notion that a
wife could miss her husbands sagging belly, but in addition to ponder the
naivety, or irony, of her comment.

5.2.

Figure 2

Word and image explicatures: Visible through a half open toilet door is
a woman, wiping herself, saying Half-way through January and that
calendar is already finished!
Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The Zeurkalender often hangs in peoples toilets and is naturally supposed to last an
entire year. The date is 16 January.
Implicated conclusions available by access to time/place/genre:
This self-referential cartoon suggests that people, many of whom are on
the toilet when they see the cartoon, might use the calendar as toilet
paper. Van Straaten thus mocks his own calendar in line with the spirit
of deflating humor that permeates the calendar.

5.3.

Figure 3

Word and image explicatures: A woman sits with her psychotherapist

(cues: the notebook plus pencil in the lap of the woman on the left and

Addressing an audience in cartoons

Figure 1. Ill miss it, Jan.

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C. Forceville

Figure 2. Halfway through January and that calendar is already finished!

Addressing an audience in cartoons

Figure 3. I think its about time I became simply happy.

261

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C. Forceville

the tissue box) and accusingly (?) says, I think its about time I became
simply happy.
Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The date,
Wednesday 17 January, is not relevant here, but the place of access favors
the activation of Dutch schemata in the processing of the text.
Implicated conclusions available by access to time/place/genre:
The phrase domweg gelukkig (literally: dumbly happy) makes extra
implicatures accessible to those viewers who happen to know and remember the often anthologized line Domweg gelukkig in de Dapperstraat
(Dumbly happy in the Dapper street,) by the Dutch poet J. C. Bloem,
first published in 1947. To those viewers, the patients choice of phrase
may suggest, for instance, that she consciously or unconsciously rehashes
a cultural cliche, or inadvertently cites a line written by a poet whose work
is not particularly well-known for his happy or positive attitude to life.

5.4.

Figure 4

Word and image explicatures: an elderly woman in net stockings sitting at a table in a pub, asks a man slumped at the bar, Nice, wasnt it,
last night . . . Did you really mean what you said to me?
Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The day is a
Sunday, so last night was, in Van Straatens universe, sex night.
Implicated conclusions available by access to time/place/genre: The
man, carried away in sexual play or in an attempt to seduce the
woman said he loved her, or thought her beautiful, or wanted to
marry her.

5.5.

Figure 5

Word and image explicatures: a man and a woman in fur coats walk
past a drunkard, sleeping in a doorway. He says, What about it? He is
having a nice lie-in.
Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The day is a
Sunday, and the couples fur coats suggest they may be going to, or have
come from, church.

Addressing an audience in cartoons

Figure 4. Nice, wasnt it, last night . . . Did you really mean what you said to me?

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C. Forceville

Figure 5. What about it? He is having a nice lie-in.

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265

Implicated conclusions available by access to time/place/genre:

Church-going is meant to make one more charitable toward ones fellow
mans suering, particularly in cold January, but instead the speaker casually waves away an observation that might cause him to feel guilt about
not doing anything for this particular man.

5.6.

Figure 6

Word and image explicatures: A man in jacket and wearing a bow tie
has fallen apparently drunk on the marital bed, while his wife asks him,
Was Harry Mulisch there?
Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The date is 14
March. There refers to the annual Boekenbal, the most prestigious and
notorious party in the Dutch literary world; Harry Mulisch is Hollands
most famous living writer. Note that Van Straaten could rely on press
publicity about the party around this time (and for good measure he

Figure 6. Was Harry Mulisch there?

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C. Forceville

throws in a card with Boekenbal on it, partly visible in the left hand
bottom corner).
Implicated conclusions available by access to time/place/genre:
The wife naively wants to know whether her husband met the famous
Harry Mulisch, and seems unaware, unlike the viewer, of the Boekenbals
reputation as an occasion for excessive drinking and outrageous behavior.

5.7.

Figure 7

Word and image explicatures: Flabbergasted, a man looks at his wife

who lies on the bed crying her heart out, saying, O dear, and I thought
youd like it enormously.
Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: It is April 1,
Fools day, which is traditionally a day on which people are allowed to
pull one anothers legs in good-natured ways.
Implicated conclusions available by access to time/place/genre: On
another day, it could refer to any action performed by the man, and
the cartoon would simply portray another typical Van Straaten situation
in which a husband and wife are not on the same wavelength. Today the
date suggests that it refers to a joke the husband honestly thought
would amuse his wife, making their misunderstanding even more wryly
funny.

5.8.

Figure 8

Word and image explicatures: A man hugs an apparently younger

woman next to a tree and a river, saying, All right pussycat . . . . As
soon as Miriam is ready for it, Im going to divorce her. Thanks to
encyclopaedic knowledge we are aware that Miriam is the mans wife.
Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: It is Friday the
thirteenth, the proverbially unlucky day.
Implicated conclusions available by access to time/place/genre:
Generic knowledge of Van Straatens humor does not incline us to believe
that the man is ever going to leave his wife for his young lover, but the
day and date further substantiate this suspicion.

Addressing an audience in cartoons

Figure 7. O dear, and I thought youd like it enormously.

267

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C. Forceville

Figure 8. All right, pussycat . . . . As soon as Miriam is ready for it I am going to divorce
her.

Addressing an audience in cartoons

5.9.

269

Figure 9

Word and image explicatures: A man toasts an elderly woman who

probably just entered the pub and says, My treat, beauty.
Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The date is
Monday April 30, which is the birthday of the Dutch queen Beatrix
mother, Princess Juliana (who died in 2004). This is Koninginnedag, the
day on which the Queens birthday has for decades been celebrated
nation-wide in Holland, even during Beatrix reign.
Implicated conclusions available by access to time/place/genre:
Without the date, and its connotations, the woman might have been the
mans wife, come to fetch him. But given the date many viewers will be
alerted to the resemblance between the woman and princess Juliana. Consequently, they may entertain weak implicatures such as that Juliana
would frequent ordinary pubs, or drink beer with an elderly, possibly
drunk man; or they may see the resemblance as a reinforcement of the
widely shared idea of Juliana as an everyday woman (an image which
she herself relished and promoted).

5.10.

Figure 10

Word and image explicatures: A young man brings out a tray with
drinks to an outdoor terrace where a number of heartily laughing elderly
people are gathered around a table, saying, Are you still talking about
the war?
Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The date is May
4, which is the day the victims of WW II are ocially commemorated
nation-wide in Holland.
Implicated conclusions available by access to time/place/genre:
While laughter about the war seems unsuitable anyway, it is especially inappropriate on this day, and may suggest irreverence for the dead or hint
that the war was for many people not at all so bad a period as is generally
thought.

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C. Forceville

Figure 9. My treat, beauty.

Addressing an audience in cartoons

Figure 10. Are you still talking about the war?

271

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C. Forceville

5.11.

Figure 11

Word and image explicatures: Several people are sitting at a restaurant

table. One woman looks at her plate in disgust, saying Bah, what a scary
animal! Did I order that?
Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: The date is October 4, National pets day in Holland.
Implicated conclusions available by access to time/place/genre: A
joke about eating animals (a lobster?) is particularly daring on the one
day in the year people are supposed to be extra kind to them.

5.12.

Figure 12

Word and image explicatures: A woman looks down on the street from
an upper story window, addressing a lonely man, standing in the dark,
who looks up at her, saying, Sorry Jan, tonight doesnt suit me very
well. Another time, OK?
Implicated premises pertaining to time/place/genre: It is December
24, Christmas Eve.
Implicated conclusions available by access to time/place/genre:
Invitations for festivities on Christmas Eve are usually planned long in
advance. A man who casually drops by a woman on this evening for
what, considering the Zeurkalenders generic conventions, is no doubt
casual sex, must be a particularly desperate or sad case.

6.

Conclusions

A number of Peter Van Straatens cartoons have been shown to owe part
of their meaning potential to three specific aspects of context: their time
and place of access, and their generic conventions. In this manner I have
made a case for the impact of generalizable extra-textual factors aecting
the interpretation of cartoons. These three interconnected aspects have
been formulated in terms of implicated premises; the potential extra
interpretations thus made available have been formulated in terms of
implicated conclusions (W&S 2004). Sperber and Wilsons key idea that

Addressing an audience in cartoons

Figure 11. Bah, what a scary animal! Did I order that?

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C. Forceville

Figure 12. Sorry Jan, tonight doesnt suit me very well. Another time, OK?

Addressing an audience in cartoons

275

relevance is always relevance to an individual is demonstrated to function in mass-medial communication no less than in face-to-face communication and joke-telling. Any dierences in interpretation among
individual viewers that arise will not only depend on how text-internal
cues (i.e., the picture and the utterance underneath it) are understood,
but also on which implicated time, place, and genre-based premises are
activated. Somebody who does not recognize the line from the poet
Bloem (Figure 3) will miss part of the joke, just as somebody who does
not recognize Juliana (Figure 6) will. And a viewer aware of Van Straatens monday work joke convention may derive additional humor
from Figure 6, the Royal family traditionally being on heavy ceremonial
duty on this particular day.
Assuming that the cognitive eect Van Straaten wants to bring about
in his audience is a smile or a laugh, we have to conclude that the extratextual factors discussed here sometimes lead to the introduction of assumptions in the cognitive environment of the audience, and sometimes
to their strengthening (S&W 1995: 108 ). The date in Figure 6 (Fools
day) is necessary for the explicature enrichment of it to joke, and in
Figure 12 (Pets day) the day adds an assumption (this is the one day of
the year one is extra kind to animals) not available textually. Hence in
these two examples relevant assumptions are introduced. In other cartoons the extra-textual factors strengthen rather than introduce assumptions: Laughing about the war is inappropriate, laughing about the war
on May 4 is excessively inappropriate (Figure 10). Our suspicion that
the man in Figure 8 will never leave his wife Miriam is strengthened,
not introduced, by the date Friday the 13 th (and possibly by generic
expectations).
Sperber and Wilsons concept of poetic eects is pertinent in how
Van Straatens cartoons achieve relevance. Once an assumption has
been triggered, viewers may, at their own responsibility, add further
assumptions building on it, and hence derive more weak implicatures.
The word dumbly (Figure 3) to some viewers perhaps suggests an
implicit contrast with the dicult, smart way of becoming happy at a
psychotherapist i.e., through psychoanalysis. As soon as a viewer has
recognized Juliana in Figure 6 he can entertain all sorts of assumptions
(ranging from: the former queen got lost in a pub; she prefers to
celebrate her birthday in an ordinary pub rather than with the rest of
the Royal family; Juliana is not recognized by one of her subjects;
the queen is not amused ) which in turn can give rise to further

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C. Forceville

cognitive eects. In this way cartoons interpretations can vary per

individual.
I see as one of the strengths of the findings presented here that they
are to some extent experimentally testable, and hence verifiable and falsifiable. While the fact that experiments require strongly controlled conditions (such as that subjects answer questions or perform tasks in a
laboratory situation) inevitably aects the interpretations when compared
with how they would have occurred under natural circumstances (such as
stumbling, barely awake, to the toilet and grimace at Peters cartoon-ofthe-day), certain variables can be controlled. Particularly the impact of
time can be empirically investigated, since it is easily manipulable. In
each case where, as I have proposed, a specific day of the week (Monday,
Saturday, Sunday) and/or a specific date (Friday the 13 th ; the fourth of
May; Christmas Eve) supplies extra premises, and hence potentially leads
to more implicatures, this information can in a control group either be
omitted, or changed to an irrelevant day or date. The impact of place is
conveniently testable inasmuch as the place of access is Holland: by
showing a number of complete cartoons, i.e., including days and dates
(e.g., 4 May and 30 April) both to a Dutch audience and (with apt translations) to a non-Dutch audience, this impact could be measured. The
role of generic conventions in the interpretation process could be tested
by showing a number of Van Straaten cartoons to one group of (Dutch)
subjects familiar with his work, and another group who has never seen it,
allowing for predictions such as that the first group would more quickly
recognize the two women in Figure 3 as a therapist and her client than
the second group; or that more people in the first than in the second
group will say that the man in Figure 8 will not divorce his wife. Such
research which can be extended to other comedy genres (newspaper
cartoons, stand-up comedy, pornographic jokes on internet sites) also
brings the examination of jokes and cartoons into the broader realm of
cognition studies.
University of Amsterdam

Notes
Correspondence address: c.j.forceville@uva.nl
I am indebted to Harmonie publishers, especially Marielle Boukens and Elsbeth Louis, for
providing me with an intact copy of Peters Zeurkalender 2001 and to Peter van Straaten

Addressing an audience in cartoons

277

for permission to reprint his cartoons. I thank Etienne Forceville and Tom van Klingeren for
technical help with the pictures. All translations from Dutch (in Van Straatens cartoons and
Dutch secondary sources) are mine. I have benefited from comments by Kurt Feyaerts,
Geert Brone, two anonymous peer reviewers, and the editor-in-chief of Humor on earlier
drafts of this paper. A version of the paper was presented at the international Semiotics conference at Lumie`re II University, Lyon, France, July 2004.
1. Smith (1996) refers to various subtypes of pictorial runes, such as waftaroms (smell
lines), hites, vites, and dites (lines indicating horizontal, vertical and diagonal direction of movement respectively), and agitrons, lines around a body or body part suggesting motion.
2. Since Van Straaten regularly collects his best cartoons, readers could indeed come
across the same cartoons in one of his books without the days and dates (for instance,
at least seven cartoons from Peters Zeurkalender (2001) also occur in Van Straaten
(2001).

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