Pragmatics & Cognition - Volume 32, Issue 1, 2025

A frequent response to someone taking offence in response to conversational humour is to claim the utterances in question were ‘not serious’, ‘taken out of context’, or that any offence taken was ‘unintended’. Yet in some instances such claims are construed as inadequate or irrelevant. In this paper we consider why that is the case. Building on a detailed analysis of incidents in which ostensibly joking utterances are construed as offensive, we propose that offence is a fundamentally scalar phenomenon: not simply in the sense of the joking in question being open to evaluation as more or less offensive, but with respect to the morally ordered scope of that offence. The degree to which perceived offences become impervious to claims that any offence caused or taken was ‘unintended’ is a function of the scope of the spatiotemporal scales invoked through the joking itself and subsequent responses to it.

The ongoing and divisive discourse regarding the use of offensive humour in stand-up comedy is taking place both off-stage and on-stage: comedians use jokes that target sensitive characteristics ostensibly to show that no topic is ‘off limits’, while also taking a stance against those who argue for more empathetic comedy that does not reinforce stereotypes and discriminatory beliefs. Taking Jimmy Carr’s ‘holocaust joke’ (2021) as a case study, we examine the entire life-cycle of jokes from their live-performance context to entering the public sphere, questioning what a joker can be held accountable for in stand-up comedy. Specifically, we look at the performance frame, comedian personality and persona, and how different types of audience may react to a joke, in order to shed light on what exactly it is that the producer of an offensive joke can, or should, be held accountable for.

This paper examines the interconnection of performers’ institutional identity, audience’s perspectives and offensive jokes in our contemporary world, where there are increasing debates on humourists’ rights to free speech and audience’s (or the target’s) right to face wants. Commonly, because of their social licence for deviant behaviour, humourists in public joking genres like stand-up comedy and satirical television shows play with the limits of jokes. However, people could take offence whether they are the target of the joke or not. Adopting a socio-cognitive pragmatics perspective, I explore the significance of participants’ institutional identity in performance humour and how institutional mapping of roles should determine saliency in the interpretation of humorous cues. Using Trevor Noah’s France world cup joke, I argue that the interactional structure of performance humour allows comedians to privatise common ground features while the audience cannot adopt the same egocentric strategy in the interpretation of jokes.

From a sociopragmatic approach, this article examines potentially offensive remarks in stand-up comedy performances by Romanian origin comedians acting in the United Kingdom. The analysis highlights the sociocultural allowances that enable comedians to engage in a type of verbal behaviour that diverges from socially accepted norms in most “serious” contexts. Following the idea that these performances do not affect the status quo but rather reinforce it (in a long tradition of carnivalesque), the analysis investigates how potentially offensive humour is designed and negotiated by Romanian comedians abroad: how they introduce and develop sensitive topics in the performances, audience reactions to potentially offensive comments, comedians’ awareness of the effects of their discourse, and how they co-create a style of humour that meets the expectations of the public.

This paper investigates the role of claims to non-seriousness in ‘jocular pretence’ teasing sequences (Haugh 2016). Drawing on 50 hours of Greek scripted interactions from popular TV sitcoms, we examined 18 ‘biting’ (Boxer & Cortés-Conde 1997) teases involving overt claims to non-seriousness. Our analysis adopts an interactional pragmatic approach (Haugh 2013) with a particular focus on the sequential and moral/social implications of claims to non-seriousness, as well as on the ways these were informed by the conventions of the said genre. The analysis brings to the fore a systematic relation between the location and uptake of such claims, namely that they emerged after serious rejections of teases, and they were subsequently responded to in low-aligning ways. It also shows that these claims were used by teasers to project positive self-identities of politeness and sensitivity while preserving their relationship with the teasees. Overall, the analysis points to an intertwined relation between humour, identity, im/politeness-in-interaction.

This paper investigates the negotiation of offensive humour through ‘only joking’ claims made by participants on the social media platform Reddit. Metapragmatic claims of jocular intent can be added to a post containing offensive humour pre-emptively or after a reaction by another participant. In both cases, the participant making the claim tries to show that problematic humour in the post is not meant to give offence, and that they should not be held accountable for such an intention. Using corpus methods and close analysis, we analyse indicators of jocular intent (e.g., “just kidding”, “take a joke”) to find out how offensive or problematic humour is presented, perceived and negotiated. The findings show how claims of jocular intent can be accepted or rejected after a negotiation of the offensiveness based on subreddit community norms. Offensive humour is negotiated verbally and through the upvote/downvote affordance of Reddit, indicating the ascription of accountability.

Pragmatic accounts of speaker’s accountability over the intended import of utterances recognize that, when engaging in a non-serious, humorous mode of communication, speakers may not be held committed to what they have said (or implicated). Still, the overt signalling of jocular intent does not rule out the possibility of humour being perceived as offensive. In this paper, we pursue the argument that the perception of humorous text and talk is determined only in part by the original intention of its producer, with the general audience’s eventual reception being additionally affected by further input from influential social actors, whose trustworthiness is automatically assessed as high. Our analysis is centred around a satirical skit delivered by Trevor Noah, the then host of The Daily Show, which was heavily criticised for insinuating that Rishi Sunak’s assumption of the Prime Minister position in the UK was met locally with racist backlash on the basis of Sunak’s ethnic origin. Given this discursive shift, which we showcase using quantitative and qualitative measures, we argue that the humorous frame and jocular intent are fundamentally affected by processes of recontextualisation, which may bypass the audience’s cognitive mechanisms of epistemic vigilance.

In everyday dialogue, people often say things that may be or are taken as offensive by their hearers. Whether or not these utterances are actually taken as offensive is highly context sensitive. Particularly important are social aspects such as the personae of the speaker and audience. Different groups of listeners have access to — and indeed embrace — different background assumptions and entertain different attitudes with regard to these. We consider such assumptions to be Aristotelian topoi and a set of topoi significant for a particular group in a particular context to be a topoplex. In this paper we present three real world examples of supposedly humorous and potentially offensive utterances. Our analysis is compatible with an established theory of dialogue semantics which formalises topoi as mechanisms for common sense reasoning that arise from specific interactional experiences.

A lie commits the speaker to the truth of an assertion they believe false. But a speaker uttering a falsehood in jest or sarcasm arguably neither asserts that falsehood nor lies. The insincere speaker essentially “uncommits” to the truth of their remark. Social media posters, criminal defendants, and politicians facing pushback regularly appeal to the sarcasm defense as a get-out-of-accountability-free card, often supporting this move by citing a purported insincerity marker accompanying the critical utterance. But proffered plausible deniability may be implausible, resulting in legal or public disputes. How credible is the sarcasm or “only joking” defense, particularly when retroactively invoked? In Grice’s terms, how do we distinguish what a speaker says from what a speaker makes as if to say? This study surveys modes of “uncommitment” and the interactional and grammatical properties of devices associated with signals of insincerity that have been employed from twenty-two centuries ago to today.