Volume 23, Issue 4

It was hypothesized that sensation seeking (SS) is able to predict both the structure and content of jokes and cartoons. Five hypotheses were derived and tested in two samples from Spain and Germany comprising a total of 434 participants. The basic pattern of correlations was replicated for the two samples, and for the different measures of humor appreciation (3-WD, EAHU) and sensation seeking (AISS, SSS). Experience Seeking and Novelty were predictive of low appreciation of incongruity-resolution humor and high appreciation of nonsense humor. Disinhibition and Intensity were positively correlated with funniness of sexual, black, man-disparagement and woman-disparagement humor, and negatively with their aversiveness. When the structure variance from the content categories was removed, the correlations between appreciation of humor contents and sensation seeking increased. This confirmed that structure and content have to be separated both theoretically and empirically in studies of appreciation of content categories.

The present study examined relations between different aspects of humor and relationship quality. Participants, 114 married or cohabiting heterosexual couples from the general community, with a mean relationship length of 22 years, completed a number of measures assessing these two themes. We expected different aspects of humor of both partners to be positively related to relationship quality. In addition, we expected partners to resemble each other with regard to the different aspects of humor, and similarity with regard to humor to be related positively to relationship quality. The hypotheses were partially confirmed. APIM analyses revealed only one significant actor and one significant partner effect of sense of humor. Partners did resemble each other with regard to sense of humor, but couple similarity with regard to sense of humor was unrelated to relationship quality.

This study analyzes the use of humor in specific political contexts following different linguistic perspectives that deal with politeness (Leech, Principles of pragmatics, Longman, 1983; Brown and Levinson, Politeness: Some universals in language use, Cambridge University Press, 1987; Fraser, Journal of Pragmatics 14: 219–236, 1990; Givón, English grammar: A function-based introduction, John Benjamins, 1993) under a “social practices” view (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, Discourse in late modernity: Rethinking critical discourse analysis, Edinburg University Press, 1999; Harri, Discourse & Society, 12: 451–472, 2001). Humor is not inherently polite or impolite, but rather, it can be viewed as a discursive strategy used by the speaker to achieve a particular goal in a particular context. However, the speaker is not completely free. S/he is conditioned by certain social and cultural factors that are not negotiable. The main aim of this study is to arrive at some of these cultural factors through the analysis of the use of humor and its application to the concept of face (Goffman, Interaction ritual: Essays in face to face behaviour, Doubleday, 1967; Brown and Levinson, Politeness: Some universals in language use, Cambridge University Press, 1987) in the context of a Parliamentary debate in Spain and Great Britain on a common topic: domestic violence.

This article examines the relationship between targets and script distribution in humour, starting from some basic notions of GTVH. Script asymmetry, considered here as a property of Script Opposition, is defined in terms of a perceptual difference between scripts, which matches a fairly common distribution: a Foreground Script against a Background Script. Throughout this paper, the attributes of this script distribution are explored in verbal jokes, graphic humour and conversational spontaneous joking. This particular script distribution leads to an interesting consequence when overt targets are implied: the set of inferences that we attribute to the target arises regularly from the Foreground Script, the script that closes the joke. If this correlation of script distribution and target attribution holds, we can account for a formal connection between the structure of the joke and its derisive intention.