Volume 38, Issue 4

With humor increasingly at the center of social conflict, debates over the boundaries of subversive humor have moved to the forefront of public discourse. As a result, there is a growing need for a more grounded understanding of public humor literacy – understood as the ability to engage with humor in the public sphere in a way that is informed, reflective, and supportive of democratic discourse. By discussing five theses on the nature of publicly mediated humor, this article formulates a programmatic starting point for a framework on public humor literacy, and contributes to the growing academic and societal acknowledgement that humor increasingly functions as a politicizing form of public discourse and a tool for political engagement.

Previous research found that satirical news has mixed effects on attitudes among the public: both large, small, and no effects have been observed. Our research aims to improve our understanding of the explanatory mechanisms behind persuasive effects of satirical news. It tests the prediction that satirical news increases negative attitudes toward satirical targets (e.g., politicians, journalists) through increased hedonic engagement (i.e., enjoyment) and eudaimonic engagement (i.e., appreciation). Two experiments were conducted in which participants were exposed to satirical and regular news articles, one in the United States (Study 1, N  = 679) and one in the Netherlands (Study 2, N  = 675). Results showed that a satirical news article targeting a company elicited more company distrust than a relevant (but not an irrelevant) regular news article, consistently across countries. Contrary to predictions, the main effects were suppressed rather than explained by higher levels of hedonic engagement with satirical news and were explained by lower instead of higher levels of eudaimonic engagement. Going against earlier findings and based on two different interpretations of the message discounting hypothesis, we explain why our work demonstrates that entertainment experiences can also reduce rather than produce effects of satirical news articles on negative target attitudes.

While traditional gender roles have been examined in the context of online communication, less is known about the implications of encountering counter-traditional gender roles (e.g., depicting men as caring and women as independent) on social media. We investigated participants’ perceived gender identity threat upon exposure to traditional versus counter-traditional gender role jokes that targeted either men or women. An online experiment ( N  = 265) using a 2 (content: traditional versus counter-traditional gender roles) by 2 (joke’s target gender: men versus women) by 2 (participant’s gender: man versus woman) mixed design demonstrated that overall, jokes targeting women elicited greater identity threat and women perceived greater identity threat than men. Moreover, the three-way interactions showed that women, in particular, perceived greater identity threat from traditional gender role jokes targeting women. The current study highlights the damaging role of the spread of traditional gender roles through humor, particularly for women’s gender identities.

This study examines the use of verbal and visual elements on X in Spain to express racist humor that creates an opposition between the in-group –Spanish/European citizens and those who support anti-immigrant rhetoric – and the out-group –Moroccans (north) African Muslim immigrants, and those who legitimize them. Drawing on multimodal approaches (Machin, David & Andrea Mayr. 2012. How to do critical discourse analysis: A multimodal introduction . London: SAGE) to critical discourse analysis, the study analyzes the ways in which racist humor reflects social hierarchies on social media. The goal is to examine the humorous use of the neologisms ‘Jovenlandia’ (Youthland) and ‘jovenlandés’ (Youthlandian) on social media in Spain to ridicule Muslim immigrants and legitimize Maurophobia (aversion to Moors) (Zapata-Barrero, Ricard. 2006. The Muslim community and the Spanish tradition. Maurophobia as a fact, and impartiality as a desideratum. In Tariq Modood, Anna Triandafyllidou & Ricard Zapata Barrero (eds.). Multiculturalism, Muslims and citizenship: A European approach , 143–162. London: Routledge). The analysis is based on a corpus of 3,977 posts during the 2023 Spanish election campaign (May 29th – July 26th 2023) and explores the online social dynamics through which negative and exclusionary representations of immigrants are reproduced. The findings indicate that the use of ‘Jovenlandia’ primarily encompasses Morocco, followed by northern African countries, and ultimately the entirety of Africa. The posts frame the social context in terms of geographical, socio-cultural, religious, and ideological antagonisms between the in-group and the out-group.

Work on conversational humor often focuses on the use of laughter, smiling, and other contextualization cues used to frame an utterance or turn as nonserious. However, a possibly nonserious turn can also be delivered in a deadpan manner, with few or no such contextualization cues. Deadpan delivery of a possibly nonserious turn results in ambiguous framing of the turn for its recipients. In this paper, we use multimodal conversation analysis to analyze a single case from multiparty Japanese conversation in which a possibly nonserious turn is delivered in a deadpan manner and its recipients attempt, through the use of other-initiated repair, to resolve the ambiguity. We show how the producer of the possibly nonserious turn manipulates the repair work in order to generate humor. We also show how the possibly nonserious turn, and responses to it, can be seen as a type of collaborative conversational humor in Japanese, which can be referred to as manzai -like humor. This paper thus contributes to two relatively under-researched areas of conversational humor: 1) deadpan delivery of a possibly nonserious turn, including the ambiguous framing inherent in such delivery and how recipients attempt to repair this ambiguity, and 2) collaborative manzai -like humor in Japanese conversation.

Punning is a form of humorous wordplay based on semantic ambiguity between two phonologically similar words – the pun and the target – in a context where both meanings are more or less acceptable. While the pun is expressed explicitly, the target is invoked implicitly in the text. Previous work has attempted to quantify and compare phonological features of puns and their targets, looking at correlations with the understandability of the jokes in which they occur. Our study quantifies the phonological distance between pun and target words and assesses possible correlations with funniness ratings of the corresponding jokes. Our statistical analyses on a large dataset of puns reveal a significant negative correlation between phonological distance and perceived funniness for two of the four phonological distance measures we applied. This finding supports the hypothesis, often (implicitly) made in previous research but never verified at this scale, that lower phonological distance between a pun and its target is associated with higher funniness ratings. The parameters of our study suggest that future work should examine the semantic features of pun and target in order to create a more holistic understanding of what contributes to the perceived funniness of punning jokes.