Volume 31, Issue 4 -

Satire is a type of discourse commonly employed to mock or criticize a satirical target, typically resulting in humor. Current understandings of satire place strong emphasis on the role that background and pragmatic knowledge play during satire recognition. However, there may also be specific linguistic cues that signal a satirical intent. Researchers using corpus linguistic methods, specifically Lexical Priming, have demonstrated that other types of creative language use, such as irony, puns, and verbal jokes, purposefully deviate from expected language patterns (e.g. collocations). The purpose of this study is to investigate whether humorous satirical headlines also subvert typical linguistic patterns using the theory of Lexical Priming. In order to do so, a corpus of newspaper headlines taken from the satirical American newspaper The Onion are analyzed and compared to a generalized corpus of American English. Results of this analysis suggest satirical headlines exploit linguistic expectations through the use of low-frequency collocations and semantic preferences, but also contain higher discourse and genre level deviations that cannot be captured in the surface level linguistic features of the headlines.

The article examines the role of the intertextual Jewish joke at the turn of the twentieth century, in its historical and cultural contexts. The case studies would be Alter Druyanow’s popular anthology, Sefer Habediha Vehahiddud ( The Book of Jokes and Witticisms , Frankfurt 1922), and his archived, unpublished collection of sexual jokes. The frequent use of quotations from sacred Jewish texts, characteristic of these collections, is discussed in light of the distinction between sub-genres of the intertextual joke: the allusive joke, the parodic joke, and the satiric joke. While most reflect the folklorist’s ambition to bridge the gap between Hebrew as a holy language and Yiddish as a Jewish vernacular, a deeper examination of the jokes may discover Druyanow’s subversive motivations as a national activist as well. Druyanow and his contemporaries engaged the biblical and rabbinical sources freely, as vessels capable of sanctifying the secular subject matter of the Jewish national revival. Moreover, the unpublished collection exposes satirical elements embodied in the intertextual Jewish joke of the time, potentially threatening the traditional Jewish worldview.

How does a human being deal with suffering? How can we emotionally cope with the vicissitudes of life, especially in times where they suddenly multiply themselves? In this study, we present an innovative interdisciplinary study on the use of coping mechanisms by career writers dealing with difficult life events. We focus in particular on the use of humor and sublimation, two creative mental mechanisms that contribute to the lowering of anxiety while at the same time dealing constructively with the external stressors. Never before have these mechanisms been studied in a complementary way in the context of a literary study. This paper offers an in-depth analysis of Reinaldo Arenas’ The Color of Summer . In this novel, this Cuban author introduces an autobiographical perspective of the Cuban sixties and seventies, intending to present a facet of history that would never appear in Cuban history books. The combination of both coping mechanisms, which we call humorous sublimation, offers a novel that not only helped the author cope with his tormented life, but also allowed the reader to gain an understanding of a dark period of Cuban history by means of a very funny and surreal reading.

Are our ratings of comics and the humor of their material affected by our perceived expectations? We tested the responses of fifty participants, recruited from comedy club audiences in the United States, who completed a standard personality test and then watched and rated video clips of stand-up comedy performances. The comedians in each clip were unknown to the viewers, and were either introduced with enhanced/exaggerated credentials (such as having experience writing for The Tonight Show or appearing on the Modern Family television series), or were given a more generic introduction, hinting that they have not yet achieved notable success. Participants rated their enjoyment of each comedian at three points during each eight-minute video clip, and rated their favorite joke and favorite comedian overall. Results indicated that expectations (based on exaggerated/enhanced credentials) affected humor ratings early in the performance but dissipated as the performance continued, suggesting that expectations only briefly affect one’s judgment of humor. Personality results indicated that the traits Extraversion and Agreeableness were significantly and positively correlated with overall performance ratings but only Extraversion affected whether viewers’ ratings were influenced by enhanced/exaggerated introductions. Agreeableness, gender, and age were more salient predictors of viewers’ humor ratings of comedians than were viewer expectations based on enhanced/exaggerated credentials.