Volume 24, Issue 1

Humor has been identified as a potentially important variable in facilitating relationship satisfaction in romantic couples. Using a measure of stable differences in how humor is expressed by individuals, the current research looks at the possibility that dating couples have similar humor styles, and at whether self-reported or perceived humor styles best predict relationship satisfaction. Individuals in a sample of 82 couples independently completed the measures of own and perceived partner's humor styles and relationship satisfaction on multiple indicators of satisfaction. The results indicate little similarity within couples on humor styles. The best predictors of satisfaction were perceptions of a partner's humor style, with humor styles that were other-directed explaining the most variability in satisfaction. The results demonstrate the usefulness of treating humor uses as a multidimensional variable to better understand the roles humor might play across circumstances and relationships.

Humorous material tends to be recalled at higher rates than non-humorous material however it is not clear why this occurs. The present study evaluated semantic elaboration, incongruity resolution, and perceived humor explanations of this memory phenomenon. Participants rated either inspirational or humorous properties of stimuli and recalled photographs, keywords and phrases. Results were most consistent with the perceived humor hypothesis. Participants' ratings of humor predicted recall performance even when semantic elaboration and incongruity resolution were controlled.

The use of humor in advertising has been well researched in Western countries. However, the study of it in Chinese societies is still in its infancy. This study aims to investigate the utilization of humor in Hong Kong television advertising. A total of 356 television commercials shown between February and May 2004 were content analyzed. Using Kelly and Solomon's (Journal of Advertising 4: 31–35, 1975) classification of humor advertising, it was found that about 20 percent of the sample utilized humorous devices to some extent. A slight increase of utilization was recorded as compared to a similar study conducted a decade ago (Cheung et al., The use of humor in advertising: The case of Hong Kong, Business Research Center, School of Business, Hong Kong Baptist University, 1995). Results also indicate that commercials for durables tend to adopt humorous attempt less often. People expect that humor, as an attention getting means, is more likely to appear at the beginning of an advertisement. Nevertheless, the current study shows that advertisers/advertising practitioners tend to place humor throughout the commercial instead of just the first part of it.

A humorous competition called “The Adventures of Naked Man” ran in a New Zealand newspaper from 1999 to 2000. The competition's protagonist is the sole naked person in a drawn setting where, because of some convenient object or body position, his penis is always obscured from sight. Entrants to the competition submitted a caption to go with the drawn setting, the task being to make humor; the common solution to this task being some form of penis joke based upon double entendre. The editors of the competition employed a “taste test” to reject entries that were too vulgar thus protecting the competition from attack by “moral guardians,” although the details of the test were never fully explained. This article analyzes the full corpus of Naked Man episodes in regard to the finely detailed work of categorization. Drawing on some basic principles of Membership Categorization Analysis, it is shown that the degree of sexual allusiveness in the humor is closely connected to categorizations of people and activities, and in this process the fine detail of quite simple drawings are very significant.

This paper uses the example of 25 young people's responses to a Daily Mail cartoon on the subject of gay marriage in order to explore the pragmatics of humor reception. The results indicate that the enjoyment of a multimodal joke depends to a large extent on the background knowledge, values and attitudes of the individual. If, for instance, a cartoon is too threatening to someone's core sense of identity, it is likely to create anger and alienation rather than amusement. Humor appreciation is also shown to depend on the broader socio-cultural context in which the cartoon is encountered.