Volume 36, Issue 1

The differential satire effects across domestic and foreign audiences are largely unknown; yet, this is of growing relevance as political satire increasingly reaches international audiences. A two-country experiment was conducted in which satirical stimuli from the Netherlands with either a one-sided (only targeting the United States) or two-sided humorous message (targeting both the U.S. and the Netherlands) was presented to a domestic (in-group) or foreign (out-group) audience. Specifically, this study examines political satire’s differential emotional and attitudinal impact on audiences located in the country-of-production (Netherlands) or abroad (U.S.). Results show that satire sidedness uniformly influenced hedonic enjoyment: compared to two-sided satire, one-sided satire elicited negative emotions and decreased positive emotions for both the in-group (Dutch) and the out-group (U.S.) audience. Yet, satire differentially affected patriotic attitudes. This effect was moderated by country and age: younger U.S. citizens became less patriotic after exposure to the one-sided satire that targeted their country and decreased their positive emotions; older U.S. citizens, in contrast, became more patriotic after exposure to this one-sided satire that particularly increased their negative emotions. The Dutch audience’s level of patriotism remained stable irrespective of satire sidedness. Altogether, this study demonstrates how humor type, country-of-reception, and age matter for satire effects.

Politicians are tasked with both holding expertise and being relatable to the general population they are representing. Accordingly, politicians strategize their communication style to achieve both aims. One strategy they implement is using humor in their communication to constituents. But is this an effective strategy across humor styles? Does political affiliation or gender of the politician impact these effects? We examine these questions in an online experiment with Chilean subjects ( N  = 799) using tweets from fictitious politicians, finding evidence that both serious and humorous aggressive communication had negative outcomes on social perception of the politician compared to affiliative and self-deprecating communication. Both serious and humorous affiliative communication has a positive outcome on social perceptions compared to aggressive and most self-deprecating communications. Also, self-deprecating humor was a moderately effective communication strategy, and political affiliation did not have an effect on perceptions of likability when affiliative humor was used. Finally, we did not find evidence of differences in social perceptions based on the gender of the politician.

Using humor can be beneficial for coping with stress. Humor can elicit positive emotions, which can bolster cognitive, social, and physical resources. Individuals who use humor to cope with negative affect report more positive well-being. However, it is less clear whether there are age differences in using humor to cope with an acute stressful event (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic). We investigated whether using humor to cope with the pandemic related to lower levels of state anxiety. We further investigated age differences in using humor to cope and whether pandemic-related humor engagement reduced state anxiety levels. We surveyed 163 young adults (18–30 years) and 171 older adults (60–80 years) online during the initial months of the pandemic in the United States. Using humor to cope was negatively associated with state anxiety levels, but engagement with pandemic-related humor showed no relationship with anxiety. Using humor to cope was especially beneficial for older adults. One explanation may be that the positive emotions experienced through humor may beget a broader scope of fundamental resources needed to cope with anxiety during the pandemic. It may be that using humor to cope is a particularly efficacious coping strategy for older adults.

Over the last fifteen years, there has been growing interest in the use of comedy within science communication. This paper seeks to contextualize the emergence of science comedy, analyzing the construction of comedy within academic literature as a means for bolstering the cultural authority of science. Drawing specifically from Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on power and language, academic constructions of science comedy might be read as an orchestrated moment of carnival, with humor imagined as a means for engineering public support for science, on the premise that science communicators alone should determine what version of science the public receive. However, results from a pilot study interviewing London-based science comedians suggests that such ambitions are not shared by performers. Performers framed the value of science comedy lying predominantly in the opportunity to challenge other science communicators’ own attitudes to science. Framing scientists and science communicators as science comedy’s most relevant audience, rather than the public, performers envisaged comedy as a space in which the unspoken assumptions of science could be exposed and negotiated.

This paper builds on a novel methodology of lexical semantics exemplified on lexical field theory by using several translations of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest . The present study, a large-scale collaboration, presents and compares the results for laugh , smile , grin, giggle , and other words for laughter behaviors across 14 languages and in extensive detail. The key results answer the question of what semantic dimensions the vocabularies of the various languages distinguish as marked by lexical contrasts and can inform future research in humor as well as translation studies. Based on our findings, a key marking emerges for audible (e.g., laugh) versus non-audible (e.g., smile) behaviors, as Indo-European vocabularies treat smiling as a less marked variant of laughing, e.g., German lächeln , Italian sorridere , Polish uśmiech , Turkish gülüm, but further orthogonal dimensions are documented as well, for example, aggressive, concealed, loud, or suppressed behavior. An updated hierarchy of these semantic features is proposed, and the results are presented in graphic visualizations, which also help illustrate idiosyncrasies of individual languages that go against the general trends. Exceptions to these general trends include lemmata that can cover both audible and inaudible behavior straddling what we claimed is the most important distinction (e.g., Danish grine ). Finally, we outline a probabilistic method to compare word senses across languages based on aligned corpora large enough for computational approaches.

A recent study by Baltiansky et al. (2021), which was published in HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research tested two hypotheses related to system justification and the perception of stereotypical humor. They reported to have found evidence for a cross-over interaction, with judgments of jokes being contingent on a combination of the social status of the targets of jokes and raters’ system justification motivations. Here, we discuss the original analysis, presentation, and interpretation of the data in the target article, before presenting a re-analysis of the authors’ shared data file. We show that the framing of claims such as that “high system-justifiers found jokes targeting low-status groups (e.g., women, poor people, racial/ethnic minorities) to be funnier than low system-justifiers did” are misleading. Instead, our re-analyses suggest that ideological differences in joke perception are driven primarily by those scoring low on the system justification motivation rating jokes about ostensibly low-status groups as less funny than jokes about other social groups.

In a previous article, we observed that system justification was positively associated with the appreciation of humor targeting low-status groups (Baltiansky, Craig, & Jost, 2021). We are pleased to learn that other researchers took interest in our study, reanalyzing the data set we made publicly available and writing a commentary. We are also pleased that, using Bayesian statistical analyses, Purser and Harper (2023) reached the same conclusion we did based on frequentist analyses, namely that low system-justifiers found jokes targeting low-status groups to be less funny than high system-justifiers did. However, we object to the commentators’ use of value-laden language in characterizing the pattern of results and to several unsubstantiated insinuations and allegations of an ideological nature that they make about our motives and opinions about “cancel culture” and the deplatforming of professional comedians.