Topics in Humor Research

This book deals with the construction of diverse forms of humor in everyday oral, written, and mediatized interactions. It sheds light on the differences and, most importantly, the similarities in the production of interactional humor in face-to-face and various technology-mediated forms of communication, including scripted and non-scripted situations. The chapters analyze humor-related issues in such genres as spontaneous conversations, broadcast dialogues, storytelling, media blogs, bilingual conversations, stand-up comedy, TV documentaries, drama series, family sitcoms, Facebook posts, and internet memes. The individual authors trace how speakers collaboratively circulate, reconstruct, and (re)frame either personal or public accounts of reality, aiming –among other things– to produce and/or reproduce humor. Rather than being “finished” products with a “single” interpretation, humorous texts are thus approached as dynamic communicative events that give rise to diverse interpretations and meanings. The book draws on a variety of up-to-date approaches and methodologies, and will appeal to scholars in discourse analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics, ethnography of communication, and social semiotics.

This book offers a cognitive-pragmatic, and specifically relevance-theoretic, analysis of different types of humorous discourse, together with the inferential strategies that are at work in the processing of such discourses. The book also provides a cognitive pragmatics description of how addressees obtain humorous effects. Although the inferences at work in the processing of normal, non-humorous discourses are the same as those employed in the interpretation of humour, in the latter case these strategies (and also the accessibility of contextual information) are predicted and manipulated by the speaker (or writer) for the sake of generating humorous effects. The book covers aspects of research on humour such as the incongruity-resolution pattern, jokes and stand-up comedy performances. It also offers an explanation of why ironies are sometimes labelled as humorous, and proposes a model for the translation of humorous discourses, an analysis of humour in multimodal discourses such as cartoons and advertisements, and a brief exploration of possible tendencies in relevance-theoretic research on conversational humour.

Humour in the Beginning presents a multidisciplinary collection of fourteen in-depth case-studies on the role of humour – both benign and blasphemous, elitist and ordinary, orthodox and heterodox – in early, formative stages of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and (late-antique) Judaism. Its coherence is strengthened by four preceding theoretical essays, many cross-references and a conclusion. Thus, the volume allows for a methodologically sound comparison and explanation of historical views on humour in the world’s most important religions. At first sight, the foundational period of religions do not seem to offer much opportunities for humour. A closer look on primary sources, however, reveals the ways in which people formulated answers to existing ideas on humour and laughter, in moments of religious renewal. Main topics include the incongruous nature of the divine, the role of anthropomorphism, superior and didactic humour, moderate laughter, responses from dissenters and the gap between religious regulations and reality.

Made-in-Canada-Humour is an interdisciplinary survey and analysis of Canadian humour and humorists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book focuses on a variety of genres. It includes celebrated Canadian writers and poets with ironic and satiric perspectives; oral storytellers of tall tales in the country and the city; newspaper print humorists; representative national and regional cartoonists; and comedians of stage, radio and television. The humour gives voice to Canadian values and experiences, and consequently, techniques and styles of humour particular to the country. While a persistent comic theme has been joking at the expense of the United States, both countries have influenced one another’s humour. Canada’s unique humorous tradition also reflects its emergence from a colonial country to a postcolonial and postmodern nation with contemporary humour that addresses gender and racial issues.

Satire is clearly one of today’s most controversial socio-cultural topics. In this edited volume, The Power of Satire, it is studied for the first time as a dynamic, discursive mode of performance with the power of crossing and contesting cultural boundaries. The collected essays reflect the fundamental shift from literary satire or straightforward literary rhetoric with a relatively limited societal impact, to satire’s multi-mediality in the transnational public space where it can cause intercultural clashes and negotiations on a large scale. An appropriate set of heuristic themes – space, target, rhetoric, media, time – serves as the analytical framework for the investigations and determines the organization of the book as a whole. The contributions, written by an international group of experts with diverse disciplinary backgrounds, manifest academic standards with a balance between theoretical analyses and evaluations on the one hand, and in-depth case studies on the other.