Volume 26, Issue 1

Humorous descriptions are often couched in the form of a simile, whose flexible frame allows an author to yoke a topic to a perspective that is at once both incongruously different yet appropriately similar. Humorous similes exhibit all the commonly accepted hallmarks of verbal humour, from linguistic ambiguity to expectation violation and appropriate incongruity. But so too do non-humorous poetic similes, which exhibit an equal tendency for the ingenious and the incongruous. What then separates humorous similes from the broader class of creative similes, and can their signature characteristics, if any, be expressed via the presence or absence of specific formal, structural or semantic features? To address these questions, we describe the construction of a very large database of creative similes, and present the results of an initial empirical analysis upon this data-set. Our results are two-fold: humorous similes exhibit many of the same structural and semantic features that are considered characteristic of poetic similes, though none appears either necessary or sufficient to make a simile not just creative, but humorously creative; nonetheless, similes that employ either irony or ridicule (or both) are often explicitly marked with a marker of semantic imprecision such as “about”. We go on to show that “about”-marked similes typically exhibit an identifiable affective signature that further telegraphs an author’s humorous intent to the intended audience of the simile.

Is there a spillover effect among young adults that results from viewing candidate-centered political comedy? A panel survey was conducted where one half of the subjects, all aged 18–24, viewed four short animated online video clips lambasting the candidates during the final months of the 2008 presidential campaign. Results suggest that a negative schema was primed among viewers as the result of viewing this candidate-centered political humor, which appears to have guided evaluations of other political objects as well. In particular, viewers of the clips evaluated public officials, government and the news media lower than did non-viewers. The research adds to our understanding of the effects of political humor, suggesting that the attitudinal effects of political humor extend well beyond its explicit target.

Authors of written texts may mark the use of verbal irony in a variety of ways. One possibility for doing so is the use of so-called co-textual markers of irony (i.e., support strategies that open up a non-serious frame). This study aims to classify and categorize these co-textual irony markers. A content analysis of 2,042 co-textual utterances of irony across four text genres (advertisements, newspaper columns, book and film reviews, and letters to the editor) shows that three categories of support strategies could be identified: other ironic utterances, tropes and mood markers. The use of irony support strategies was positively related to the genre of newspaper columns: columns used more ironic utterances and tropes as irony support strategies than the other genres in the corpus.

Children with and without hearing loss were compared on their joke-telling and humor-related oral narrative skills. They were asked to tell a joke, create a funny story, and describe a funny movie they had seen. The ability to use humor in language creatively or in recall, the appropriate use of time reference in verbs, and the sequencing of story schema are advanced language skills for children. The conceptual and language skills of humor could be impacted if children do not hear some of the subtleties of language. Results revealed children with hearing loss used shorter and less complex utterances in jokes. They were significantly more likely to produce knock-knock jokes than other types such as riddles, and the knock-knock jokes were at a pre-joke stage. Children with hearing loss also produced funny stories that were less complex. They scored lower on story structure, total narrative ability, and Applebee's story schema. They were less likely to report bathroom humor as the funny part of a joke, story, or movie. This suggests that some aspects of the development of verbal humor may be impacted by hearing loss even among children mainstreamed in regular schools.

The relationship between early maladaptive schemas (EMSs) and psychopathology is thought to be mediated by the use of maladaptive compensatory coping and deficits in adaptive coping. One form of coping that might be affected by EMSs is an individual's style of humor, which can be adaptive or maladaptive. This study examined the relationships among EMS domains, styles of humor, and aggression. The EMS domain of Impaired Limits was most consistently related to aggression. Moreover, as predicted, an aggressive style of humor mediated the relationship between Impaired Limits and various aspects of aggression (i.e., verbal, physical, and hostility). In addition, self-defeating humor mediated the respective relationships between hostility and EMS domains of Impaired Limits, Disconnection, and Impaired Autonomy. Taken together, these results suggest that maladaptive humor styles may play an important role as one of the mechanisms by which early maladaptive schemas lead to later emotional and functional disturbance.

Job burnout is one factor that has led many individuals to be ineffective in their profession. Psychotherapists have been shown to be especially vulnerable to the effects of job burnout in their field of specialization. Because of this fact, coping strategies are needed to protect the psychological well-being of the therapist and the therapeutic process. Humor is one coping technique that has been used in dealing with job burnout in various professions, but humor has also been shown to be detrimental to psychological well-being. In this study, a total of 133 doctoral degreed psychotherapists responded to a survey to determine the relationship between different types of humor (affiliative humor, self-enhancing humor, aggressive humor, and self-defeating humor) and various characteristics of job burnout (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and lack of a sense of personal accomplishment). Regression results indicated that self-defeating humor contributed to the job burnout characteristics of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, whereas self-enhancing humor contributed to a therapist's sense of personal accomplishment. The results seem to indicate that different types of humor may either buffer or contribute to job burnout depending on how humor is used.

We investigated effects of humorous cartoons on students' perceptions and learning of psychological concepts with sense of humor as a moderator. One hundred fifty-six college students studied six one-page concept presentations, three with and three without content-related cartoons. All students responded to the Multidimensional Sense of Humor Scale, multiple-choice test items on the given concepts, and survey items including demographic questions and Likert-scale items on their perceptions of the concept presentations. Students reported favorable attitudes for inserting cartoons in reading passages. However, there was no apparent effect of humorous cartoons on students' learning of the concepts. Methodological considerations are discussed in terms of their likely effects on the findings of the study and suggestions for further research are offered.

Responding to current practices in the field of contemporary art, this essay is a study on humor research methodology as it pertains specifically to artistic propositions. It draws on art historical methods for visual analysis (in particular Erwin Panofsky's iconological method and Ernst Gombrich's psychology of perception) and on the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), developed by Salvatore Attardo and Victor Raskin in 1991 for the analysis of jokes and short humorous texts. It argues that mechanisms specific to the visual domain must be central to the study of humor in the visual arts.