Volume 25, Issue 3

This paper outlines the results of an on-line experiment assessing the impact of political humor on construct salience. The experiment employed a 3 condition between-subjects design on a snowball sample of participants (N = 216) to test how exposure to political jokes affect the salience of traits and issues mentioned in those jokes and how political knowledge moderates these effects. Results indicate that jokes can prime caricatured issues and traits to the same extent as non-humorous stimuli in the mind of the audience. Findings also suggest that political humor may increase political awareness among apolitical audiences, consistent with research by Baum (2005a, 2005b, 2003).

Humor has long been an important tool for presidential candidates on the campaign trail by humanizing them while endearing them to their constituents. While this humor may reduce the chasm between candidate and voter while establishing the candidates' personal qualities and enhancing prestige, it can also be used as a tool to attack and denigrate opponents both within and outside the candidate's political party. The laughter that occurs can also serve to signal support for the candidate and increase group cohesion. This paper analyzes the use of humor by Republican and Democratic Presidential candidates during primary debates of the 2008 electoral season. Data from each political party's first three debates (Democrats: April 26, June 3, June 28; Republicans: May 3, May 15, June 5) as well as data from two additional debates which focused on both parties' front-running candidates (New Hampshire [January 5] and Super Tuesday [January 30, 31]) were collected using audience laughter as indicator of a “successful” humorous comment. Hypotheses concerning differences between the two parties and the status of the candidates as front-runners or second-tier are tested by considering the target of the humorous comment and the nature of the laughter elicited in terms of the source, as well as the length and strength of the audience response.

Being one of the highest public offices, parliamentary businesses are governed by rules and protocols that severely limit the behavioral conduct of Members of Parliament (MPs). MPs must modulate their behavior to the expectations of parliamentary practices. Hence, they cannot behave as they would in informal settings when parliament is in session. Based on his or her discretion, the Chair may subject MPs who violate these written (and unwritten) rules and protocols to censure and punishments. Since MPs are expected to behave formally and avoid being emotional in order to create an impression of objectivity and distinguished professionalism, it is worth asking whether humor is a form of disorderly practice in parliaments. In this paper, I argue that it is, and that the disorderliness of humor may either be acceptable or unacceptable depending on certain parameters. Analyzing instances of humor in the Malaysian House of Representatives ( Dewan Rakyat ) during Question Time, this paper sets out to explain the conditions that make humor acceptable or unacceptable forms of disorderliness.

When information from two or more sensory modalities conflicts, this can evoke a surprise reaction as well as feelings of amusement, interest, confusion or disappointment. In concurrence to joke theory, we argue that people appreciate and enjoy appropriate incongruities that can be related back to the product, whereas they are confused by and have negative opinions towards inappropriate incongruities. This paper reports the design and the evaluation of products in two categories (rubber duckies and deodorants), with (in)appropriate sensory incongruities of three types: visual-tactual, visual-olfactory and visual-auditory. Participants evaluated the level of surprise felt and the intensity of resulting emotions. They also indicated their overall liking for the products. Both appropriate and inappropriate incongruities were evaluated as surprising as well as confusing. As expected, appropriate incongruities evoked more amusement and were generally favored. Whereas products with visual-tactual incongruities showed large differences in ratings on liking and amusement between appropriate and inappropriate incongruities, these differences were smaller for products with visual-auditory and visual-olfactory incongruities. Possibly, the appropriateness of an incongruity is more conspicuous when it is brought about by a conflict between touch and vision than when olfaction or audition are involved.

This paper describes the humor of Deaf communities, arguing that the humor is related primarily to the dominant visual experience of Deaf people, but also influenced by their knowledge of humor traditions in the hearing society at large. Sign language humor in America and Britain may be seen in the creation of new visual signs, the witty reanalysis of existing signs and in bilingual games in which English is manipulated within sign languages. The content of Deaf humor supports the in-group of community members who embrace their signing collective Deaf identity and denigrates out-group people, including deaf people who do not belong to the community and hearing people who are often seen as a threat to the community. Many of these jokes also make reference to sign language. We conclude that the visual nature of Deaf humor is one of its key characteristics and ask what else this can tell us about the Deaf cultural way of interacting with and presenting the world.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a new definition of pun, in order to describe it in a cross-linguistic perspective and to point out that puns, as verbal humorous phenomena which exploit ordinary phonetic processes, are universal. The definition is tested through a comparison among puns in 15 languages belonging to different families. I show that puns always imply the manipulation of a string through mechanisms involving all the elements of the phonetic chain. Such manipulation is realized in all possible string and syllable domains, tendentially within the threshold of five elements. Taking into account the progressive improvements in linguistic models of puns, the present study also provides a synthetic overview of the literature on puns and related phenomena. Results include some phonetic elements not considered in previous studies; a cross-linguistic formulation of phonetic distance between target and pun is also proposed.