Volume 24, Issue 4

In this paper, I consider whether the theory of bisociation, the sudden shift from one script (or narrative outline), or language mode or register to another, first developed in relation to joke humor, can help shed light on other forms of laughter-talk (defined as the talk preceding and provoking, intentionally or otherwise, an episode of laughter), particularly that observed in one form of (semi-)spontaneous discourse, namely White House press briefings. Two corpora of briefings transcripts were compiled, one from the Democrat era and one from the subsequent Bush administration, and the laughter bouts, along with their contexts and information on speaker and audience kinesics, were collected and transferred into separate laughter files. Not only was it found that several different forms of bisociation play an important role in briefings laughter-talk, but also that these forms are employed to attempt to achieve an intriguing variety of particular rhetorical argumentative aims, from criticizing the President to threatening an opponent's face to winning audience affiliation. Corpora have only rarely been used to investigate participants' interaction in discourse and still less in studies of laughter-talk or humor interaction. This paper, therefore, is intended as a contribution to the nascent interdisciplinary field of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS).

The present paper deals with the role of humor in world language teaching and learning. The goal is to enable educators and researchers to address the phenomenon of humor in the world language classroom in its complexity by suggesting a multidisciplinary approach and by introducing a coding scheme for investigating the use of humor in the world language classroom. Finally, we will introduce an ongoing long-term study planned with the proposed design.

Miller has suggested that people seek humorousness in a mate because humor connotes intelligence, which would be valuable in a spouse. Since males tend to be the competing sex, men have been more strongly selected to be humorous. To test this notion, we explored the role of humor in marriage cross-culturally, in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Turkey, and Russia. In the first four societies, husbands were perceived to make wives laugh more than the reverse, but wives were funnier in Russia. Spousal humorousness was associated with marital satisfaction in all cultures, especially the wife's satisfaction. Spousal humorousness was less consistently related to spousal intelligence than to some alternative possibilities: spousal kindness, dependability, and understanding. Furthermore, the relationship between these four variables and marital satisfaction was mediated by spousal humorousness. Humor is gratifying in other social contexts as well. Humorists may gain social credit by providing amusement, and may also use humor to gauge another's mood and to engender liking, perhaps especially in courtship and marriage. Spouses may also take humorousness as a sign of motivation to be amusing, kind, understanding, dependable — as a sign of commitment.

This paper proposes that Chinese people have traditionally been ambivalent about humor in the following three manners: (1) they tend to value humor but consider themselves to lack humor; (2) being humorous is not associated with being an orthodox Chinese; (3) humor is important but not for everyone. The paper also proposes that the Chinese ambivalence toward humor is largely due to an appreciation-despising complex about humor that is deep-rooted in Chinese culture. To verify this, this author conducted a survey study among a sample of 337 undergraduates in Hong Kong and Huhehot. Results show that (1) participants all rated highly on importance of humor but low on perception of self humor; (2) male students considered themselves to be more humorous than female students; (3) the top ten important characteristics for humor are fundamentally different from the top ten characteristics important for Chinese personality; (4) perception of humor is more positive than that of the Chinese personality. The paper concludes with a discussion of the psycho-social implications of the present findings on studies and enhancement of humor in Chinese society as well on some thoughts on further directions of research.

This study applies recent theories about humor to a sample of talk among a group of young adults about the issues and problems associated with homelessness. In this conversation, participants demonstrate a pattern of joking and language play that expresses a complex and ambivalent set of attitudes and feelings toward homelessness and toward the homeless as both outcasts and refugees from conventional society. Humor is used both to express complex responses to homelessness and as a tool for managing the tone and direction of the conversation. The results demonstrate how the identification of patterns of joking and wordplay can provide insights into how people accomplish task-oriented objectives as well as relational and interactive objectives in everyday talk.

Stand-up comedy raises questions about the quality of and limits to democracy in post-apartheid South Africa. It does so by telling a before democracy and after apartheid story in the mushrooming of comedians and comedy venues and in the generational differences between comedians and their approaches to comedy since 1994. This before-and-after story marks out boundaries between the old puritanical strictures and censorship of the National Party's apartheid and the new possibilities for freedom and enjoyment in a democracy riddled with profound social and political problems of extreme violence and poverty — and run by the ANC, a ruling party with a strong sense of entitlement to State power.