Early Titanic Jokes: A disaster for the theory of disaster jokes?
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Jan Chovanec
Jan Chovanec is associate professor in English linguistics at the Department of English and American Studies, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. He has done research on various genres of written, spoken and online media from the points of view of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and interactional pragmatics. He’s the co-editor of
The Dynamics of Interactional Humor (2018, with Villy Tsakona) andLanguage and Humour in the Media (2012, with Isabel Ermida).
Abstract
This paper contributes to our understanding of the inception of disaster humor by refuting the position of ‘technological determinism’ that is central for the theory of disaster jokes. This view, developed by Christie Davies, ties the emergence of this form of humor to the visual presentation of disaster events on television. The paper reports on the discovery of several contemporary instances of pre-television disaster humor on the topic of the sinking of the Titanic from 1912, thereby explicitly challenging the premise that prior to televised coverage, there were no disaster jokes. While the data come from a culture that was cognitively very distant from the disaster (and, thus, more likely to give rise to instantaneous disaster humor creation), the paper suggests that a modification to the original theory is possible, arguing that disaster humor can be interpreted as a reaction to the more general process of mediatization, whether televisual or exclusively verbal, which constructs a shared body of knowledge that people can draw upon as a resource when constructing humor. That is particularly the case with iconic disasters, such as the sinking of the Titanic, which can be seen symbolically as an epic fail of modernity rather than a mere tragic disaster.
About the author
Jan Chovanec is associate professor in English linguistics at the Department of English and American Studies, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. He has done research on various genres of written, spoken and online media from the points of view of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and interactional pragmatics. He’s the co-editor of The Dynamics of Interactional Humor (2018, with Villy Tsakona) and Language and Humour in the Media (2012, with Isabel Ermida).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and Villy Tsakona for their helpful comments on the manuscript version of this paper. The material reproduced here comes from the digital archive of periodicals of the Institute of Czech Literature of the CAS.
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© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Introduction: Special Issue dedicated to Christie Davies
- Oppositions, overlaps, and ontologies: The general theory of verbal humor revisited
- Tearing up the sanity clause: A class action
- Was it you who died, or your brother?
- Between cant and Kant: Christie Davies and the (im?)possibility of seriousness in humor studies
- Early Titanic Jokes: A disaster for the theory of disaster jokes?
- Christie Davies at the Humor Summer School
- The Chinese as targets in Polish humorous discourse
- Racism in recent Greek migrant jokes
- Lessons learned about humor from J.C.H. Davies and examples in his home collection
- America’s faith in the laugh resistance – popular beliefs about political humor in the 2016 presidential elections
- Select bibliography of Christie Davies’ works
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Introduction: Special Issue dedicated to Christie Davies
- Oppositions, overlaps, and ontologies: The general theory of verbal humor revisited
- Tearing up the sanity clause: A class action
- Was it you who died, or your brother?
- Between cant and Kant: Christie Davies and the (im?)possibility of seriousness in humor studies
- Early Titanic Jokes: A disaster for the theory of disaster jokes?
- Christie Davies at the Humor Summer School
- The Chinese as targets in Polish humorous discourse
- Racism in recent Greek migrant jokes
- Lessons learned about humor from J.C.H. Davies and examples in his home collection
- America’s faith in the laugh resistance – popular beliefs about political humor in the 2016 presidential elections
- Select bibliography of Christie Davies’ works
