Volume 30, Issue 2 -

Although theory and research evidence indicate that less securely attached persons are more likely than their secure peers to experience emotion regulation difficulties, this is not necessarily a pre-ordained outcome. Emotion regulation difficulties may be more proximally predicted by individuals’ maladaptive psychological defenses such as humor styles. This study explored the interrelationships between adult attachment orientations (attachment anxiety and avoidance) and perceived bonds with parents (perceived levels of parental care and control), emotion regulation (cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression), and maladaptive humor styles (aggressive and self-defeating humor). Attachment anxiety, avoidance, and maternal care and overprotection were associated in expected directions with aggressive and self-defeating humor, but paternal care and overprotection were not. Additionally, aggressive and self-defeating humor were positively associated with expressive suppression and negatively associated with cognitive reappraisal. Self-defeating humor partially mediated the relationship between a number of attachment predictors (attachment anxiety, avoidance, maternal care, and maternal control) and expressive suppression. For example, attachment anxiety predicted higher use of self-defeating humor, which in turn predicted higher levels of expressive suppression. Finally, aggressive humor partially mediated the relationship between avoidance and cognitive reappraisal. Avoidance predicted higher use of aggressive humor, which in turn predicted lower levels of reappraisal. Implications for future research and clinical practice are discussed.

We conducted three experiments to determine if engaging in self-enhancing humor can alleviate state anxiety associated with an anticipated stressful event. In all three experiments, participants imagined they were about to take a stressful math test. In Experiment 1 participants who engaged in self-enhancing humor while anticipating taking the test experienced less state anxiety than those who engaged in self-defeating humor or no humor at all. Experiment 2 demonstrated that engaging in self-enhancing humor reduced state anxiety more than mere instructions to adopt a non-serious, humorous outlook in the stressful situation. Experiment 3 revealed that self-enhancing humor alone induced participants to adopt a humorous perspective on the stressful math test, but that participants responded with the least state anxiety when they were also given instructions about how to use the humor to reframe the math test. Collectively, our findings corroborate and extend previous correlational studies showing that self-enhancing humor can alleviate state anxiety associated with a stressful event.

This paper investigates the phenomenon of stand-up comedians performing in more than one language, which poses the question of whether and how they translate their material. Past research on stand-up comedy underlines its conversational nature, sometimes at the expense of recognizing its content. Empirical evidence collected from interviews with bilingual stand-up comedians, on the other hand, suggests that they perform a form of oral self-translation, which implies a tertium comparationis , the transfer of content. The notion of mental text , borrowed from ethnography, is then productively used to define this content. As is then suggested, two types of memory, namely declarative and procedural , are involved in the memorization of this mental text. The declarative part accounts for what is repeatable across performances and is the part involved in conscious translation; its minimal content is identified in the punch lines. The procedural part accounts for variation, improvisation and interaction. A model of the oral-self translation process of stand-up is then proposed. I conclude that re-focusing on the (mental) text of stand-up comedy can offer a better understanding of its translation, which in turn can contribute to a better understanding of humor in a multilingual and multicultural context in future research.

This essay investigates the cathartic creative process of a standup comic who recounts, in a video-taped interview with the author, the act of transforming a painful meeting with a bigot in a bar into the stuff of comedy. Through reflexive engagement with his own creative process, Stewart Huff recounts building a scenario that splits his experience into two voices, enacting a breakthrough into performance within the taped interview itself. Taking to heart Bakhtin’s insight that parody involves a hostile relation between the speaker and another, and that introducing someone else’s words into our own speech results in a double-voiced narrative, I analyze Huff’s performance as a classic example of double-voiced parody. The transformation from horror to humor is an empowering performative re-creation for the comedian that serves simultaneously as humorous recreation for the comedy club audience. This essay contributes to extant scholarship on the efficacious use of parodic double-voicing and the possibilities it opens up for dialogic catharsis in comedic performance.

The incessant telling of political jokes hostile to the regime over decades had no impact on the strength of the Soviet Union. If under these most propitious of circumstances jokes had no effect then Davies concludes that jokes never do have any macro-consequences. Abedinifard disagrees claiming, using Iranian jokes about the homosexuals of the town Qazvin as his example, that jokes can have consequences where they reinforce a growing local sentiment in this case Iranian homophobia. Davies’ reply is that in Iran as in the Soviet case jokes are a puny, unimportant and ambiguous force in a world of strong unambiguous forces, in this case punitive and lethal Islamic homophobia. Davies further points out that the Qazvin jokes are the same as the ones told in Pashto in Afghanistan about the city of Kandahar and refer not to gay men in the Western sense but to macho warriors who assert their dominance by penetrating young boys who are expected to submit to them. The rigorist Islamic Taliban used capital punishment to repress these pederastic same sex practices but failed. The Afghan jokes are very funny but utterly unimportant in such a world of strong forces.