Abstract

This paper focuses on resolving ambiguous jokes that were contemporaneous with 2011 revolution in Egypt. It observes that some jokes are easily understood by some and are unintelligible to others. The current study is a qualitative descriptive research that depends on collecting and analysing qualitative data. The data is classified into three groups each of which represents a group of ambiguous jokes corresponding to a degree on a proposed scale of specificity. This scale comprises linguistic and socio-pragmatic aspects that contribute to disambiguating such jokes and achieving the humorous effect. It finds that understanding a joke in general and an ambiguous one in particular depends not only on linguistic aspects. It also finds that the integration of the scale of specificity into the analysis proves crucial. The degrees on the scale help explain why a joke is understood by some and incomprehensible to others. Those degrees are relative in that what is deemed as a general degree may be regarded as a specific one to others.

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