Volume 27, Issue 2

This article proposes that the philosophical techniques found in contemporary satires can be understood using a spectrum that ranges between the cynical and the kynical. Cynicism is the belief that there is no hope for change, that truth is dead, while kynicism – a non-nihilistic form of cynicism – maintains that truth does exist, and is worth saving from political and media manipulations. By exploring the evolution of kynicism, from its origins in ancient Greek philosophy to its presence in contemporary satire, I analyze how The Chaser and The Thick of It are complex examples of kynicism and cynicism respectively. I argue that by conceptualizing contemporary political satire using a dynamic spectrum, we may better understand how satire envisages politics in a postmodern society and, in turn, how certain satires may be more resistant to co-option by politicians or the “modern cynic.”

This research examines the language and cultural maintenance of Chinese Americans of a specific heritage: Hoisan-wa people. Hoisan-wa is one of the languages linking nearly all early Chinese immigrants in the U.S., but this language background has been pushed aside by the presence of other Chinese languages in America, such as Standard Cantonese and Mandarin. It has also been perpetually omitted from research for the last 150 years. Drawing from 93 sociolinguistic interviews with Hoisan-wa heritage people, I explore instances of humor and laughter as these participants talk about their cultural and linguistic heritage. Home and family remain two of the few domains that are consistently available to heritage language speakers, making them key foci in studying heritage language development. Unsurprisingly then, many of the humorous ways in which respondents engaged with – and commented metalinguistically about – Hoisan-wa had to do with words and phrases related to the home and family. I contend that these humorous moments serve to construct a counter-hegemonic affective stance that pushes back against established negative ideologies about Hoisan-wa , thereby creating a space to reflect and comment on language ideologies and enable speakers to adopt a language-as-resource view towards their heritage language.

This investigation used a repeated-measures diary methodology to examine associations between humor styles used in the context of dating relationships and relationship satisfaction over time. Over a period of three weeks, undergraduate students ( N  = 136) completed seven online questionnaires that assessed their relationship satisfaction and dissatisfaction and their use of humor styles with their dating partners over the previous three days. This study represents a departure from previous cross-sectional designs that focus on between-person correlations. Results from the within-person level (i.e., changes within individuals over time), as well as the between-persons level are reported. For some humor styles, within-person findings mirrored between-person findings. For example, affiliative humor use at both levels was positively associated with relationship satisfaction. However, other humor styles revealed different effects at the two levels of analysis. For instance, aggressive humor was negatively associated with relationship satisfaction at the between- but not the within-persons level. A significant cross-level interaction was also found. A strong negative association between daily self-defeating humor and relationship satisfaction was found only for individuals who used high levels of this humor style overall. In contrast, no within-person association was found for those who rarely used this type of humor.

The present study focuses on how humor may affect the quality of the relationship between leader and follower (LMX). More specifically, we examined the impact of follower self-reported humor style and leader self-reported humor style on the extent to which followers perceived their relationship with their leader to be of high quality (in terms of affect, loyalty, contribution and professional respect). We also investigated the role of congruence between leader humor style and follower humor style in the reported quality of their relationship. We present the results of a multi-level study of leaders (N = 88) and their followers (N = 257) showing that LMX is positively related to follower affiliative humor style and negatively related to follower aggressive humor style. In addition, LMX is higher with stronger congruence in self-defeating humor styles: leaders' self-defeating humor was positively associated with LMX when followers were high (and not when they were low) in self-defeating humor. These results imply that future studies may benefit from differentiating between different humor styles in order to better understand the role of humor in the intricate relationship between leaders and their followers.

This study aimed to investigate the relevance of an individual's typical emotion perception and emotion regulation behavior to his or her responsiveness to humor. This was studied behaviorally by examining responses to different types of humorous stimuli in an experimental paradigm, in a sample of n = 54 participants aged between 18 to 41 years (29 women, 25 men). Individual differences in emotion perception and regulation were assessed by relevant subscales of an established self-report instrument. Higher scores on emotion perception were related to higher amusement ratings in response to the humorous stimuli. Higher scores on emotion regulation were associated with shorter response latencies for the amusement ratings, particularly when it was important to mentalize with the characters in the cartoons in order to understand the humor. The cognitive understanding of the humor was unaffected. The findings suggest that good emotion perception and emotion regulation skills may contribute to greater humor responsiveness in everyday life, which may be an adaptive trait promoting successful functioning and resilience.

Creativity now occupies a legitimate place in the curriculum of U.K. schools. Research on the benefits of creativity and an acute awareness of its necessity in the modern workplace have both served to raise its profile. A number of researchers have investigated factors which are most likely to enhance creativity. Ziv (1983) in particular, has researched how humor can be used to promote creativity in adolescents. This study investigates the potential benefits of introducing humor before tasks which require a creative output from pupils of a younger age. The experiment tested the hypothesis that exposure to humorous stimuli in the form of a film cartoon would improve children's subsequent creativity scores in the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (2006). One group observed animated cartoons with humorous spoken dialogue while the other group observed animated cartoons without humorous content before test booklets were administered. The mean overall creativity score in the humorous condition (M = 59.43, SD = 13.11) was lower than the mean for the non-humorous condition (M = 67.00, SD = 8.98). Possible explanations for the results and directions for future research in this relatively new field, exploring the use of humor within education, are discussed.

Humor at work could provide many potential benefits, but the empirical literature does not support many clear conclusions about its role. Two issues have limited the clarity of the findings. First, many studies do not consider the potential negative, as well as positive, associations with humor. Second, no available measure allows researchers to quantify the broad presence of humor in the workplace. The current research describes the development and initial validation of a brief measure, the Humor Climate Questionnaire (HCQ), which assesses positive and negative styles of humor in the workplace climate. The HCQ has a clear four factor structure, good internal reliability for each dimension, and it explains variance in multiple indicators of job satisfaction and commitment beyond that explained by individual differences in humor uses. The HCQ provides a research tool that could be used to assess a variety of predictions about the roles that humor could play in the workplace.

This research aims to examine the use of humor in early adolescents for coping with imagined situations. The main issues investigated are the response patterns of participants to requests to answer the imagined questions by taking both general and humorous perspectives. The Interpersonal Coping Questionnaire was used to survey 485 fifth- to eighth- grade elementary school students in Taipei County and Taipei City for their answers to the imagined questions. The results show that, compared to the general answering perspective, elementary school students taking the humorous answering perspective tended to use specific coping strategies, humor techniques and content. The analysis of techniques of humor in our study has also revealed that irony, imitation, and metaphor were the most used strategies to cope with embarrassing interpersonal conditions in cases where a humorous approach was requested. In terms of age, both male and female junior high school students use more humorous techniques than the fifthand sixth-graders do, indicating a significant correlation between the creation of humor and the development of cognition. In terms of gender, female junior high school students use illogic and parody/imitation more than the male counterparts do. The respondents' humorous responses were also classified as aggressive, affiliative, self-defeating, or self-enhancing. It was discovered in this study that in terms of age, male elementary students mostly frequently used aggressive humor, whereas female elementary students mostly often used affiliative humor responses. As for junior high school students, male students use more aggressive humor, while their female counterparts use more self-defeating humor. These findings of the present research provide a valuable understanding for education.

Few theoretical statements about comic drama and fiction can match the influence of Northrop Frye's essay, “Mythos of Spring: Comedy.” Particularly for scholars interested not only in classic comic literary forms such as stage comedy, but also in the popular forms of contemporary films as well as television sitcoms, Frye's theory continues to be useful for understanding basic structures within large quantities of examples. In this essay, I challenge Frye's model for comic art. Although a quasi-Oedipal plot dominates extant New Comedy, the model suppresses the fact that it is only one significant plot among others capable of generating variations. More importantly, when one examines plays structured by the quasi-Oedipal plot, Frye's summary – a generational struggle that ends in the son's triumph – misrepresents the material: the son's triumph is not a foregone conclusion. New Comedy's function as the symbolic womb of the Western comic tradition is thus far from unproblematic. My challenge has serious consequences, not just for those critics who have organized their analyses on it, but also for those critics who might theorize about literary and popular art forms, as well as for scholars who would write a history of comic forms in the West.