Dark, but Danish: Ethnopragmatic perspectives on black humor
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Carsten Levisen
Carsten Levisen is a Danish linguist and linguistic anthropologist. He is an associate professor at Roskilde University, and a member of the Young Academy under the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Analysing the meaning of words and discursive practices, his research focuses on language and life in a globalizing, multipolar world. His most recent work has been devoted to the emerging interdiscipline of Postcolonial Linguistics.
Abstract
This paper explores sort humor ‘black humor’, a key concept in Danish conversational humor. Sort forms part of a larger class of Danish synesthetic humor metaphors that includes other categories such as tør ‘dry’, syg ‘sick’, and fed ‘fat’. Taking an ethnopragmatic perspective on humor discourse, it is argued that such constructs function as a local catalogue for socially recognized laughing practices. The aim of the paper is to provide a semantic explication for sort humor and explore the discursive practices associated with the concept. From a comparative perspective, it is demonstrated that the Danish conceptualization of “blackness” differs from that of l’humour noir, a category of French surrealism, and English black humor with its off-limit topics such as death and handicap. In Danish discourse, sort humor has come to stand for a practice of collaborative jocular non-sense making. It is further argued that the main function of sort humor is to establish or enhance a feeling of “groupy togetherness”.
About the author
Carsten Levisen is a Danish linguist and linguistic anthropologist. He is an associate professor at Roskilde University, and a member of the Young Academy under the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Analysing the meaning of words and discursive practices, his research focuses on language and life in a globalizing, multipolar world. His most recent work has been devoted to the emerging interdiscipline of Postcolonial Linguistics.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors Christine Béal, Kerry Mullan, and the three anonymous reviewers for their comments, criticisms and suggestions. Two excellent audiences at the workshop on “Conversational Humour in French and Other Languages” in Montpellier (2015), and the “Language – Culture – Worldview” conference in Lublin (2017) helped me to rethink and reframe my analysis of Danish sort humor in a new and contrastive way. I would also like to thank the NSM research community both in Denmark and Australia for their inspiration and support. A special thanks goes to my “language and humor” students at Roskilde University: Winnie Collin, Karen Holk Jeppesen, Anne Lau and Mads Poulsen.
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Conversational humor: Forms, functions and practices across cultures
- Conversational humor in French and Australian English: What makes an utterance (un)funny?
- “Joking, kidding, teasing”: Slippery categories for cross-cultural comparison but key words for understanding Anglo conversational humor
- Dark, but Danish: Ethnopragmatic perspectives on black humor
- Divided by a common language? Jocular quips and (non-)affiliative responses in initial interactions among American and Australian speakers of English
- Is smiling during humor so obvious? A cross-cultural comparison of smiling behavior in humorous sequences in American English and French interactions
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Conversational humor: Forms, functions and practices across cultures
- Conversational humor in French and Australian English: What makes an utterance (un)funny?
- “Joking, kidding, teasing”: Slippery categories for cross-cultural comparison but key words for understanding Anglo conversational humor
- Dark, but Danish: Ethnopragmatic perspectives on black humor
- Divided by a common language? Jocular quips and (non-)affiliative responses in initial interactions among American and Australian speakers of English
- Is smiling during humor so obvious? A cross-cultural comparison of smiling behavior in humorous sequences in American English and French interactions
