Volume 28, Issue 1 -

Humor scholars have made great strides in identifying markers of humor such as prosody and laughter as well as the various social functions of humor in both everyday talk and workplace communication. Less research has been devoted to understanding the mechanisms of humor or how humor is done in naturally occurring interaction. Based on videotaped data from adult English-as-a-second-language (ESL) classrooms, we describe a specific set of sequential resources for producing humor in the language classroom and do so within a conversation analytic framework. We also give some preliminary consideration to the applicability of the findings in other interactional contexts as well as to the question of whether participants are oriented towards moments of humor as opportunities for language learning.

During the last decade, radical clowning has become an increasingly popular tactic among participants in the global justice movement in the western world. In order to discuss how radical clowns differ from conventional clowns and what they have in common, radical clowning can be interpreted through the lenses of clown theory and the four concepts of play, otherness, incompetence, and ridicule. Ethnographic data from the Swedish anti-militarist network Ofog reveals how play and otherness contribute to radical clowns’ attempts to communicate nonviolent values, negotiate space, and recognize the human in the other. The findings demonstrate one way that humor can be rebellious and challenge established relations of power.

This article focuses on the construction of embarrassment humor in the British sitcom The Office (BBC 2001–2003) and will identify various aspects of this kind of humor at work by employing a multilayered analysis of the format. The analysis will focus on the specific discourse of embarrassment humor and its relation to performance and narrative will be examined through textual analysis and contextualization. Finally, I will propose an embarrassment trigger model, which will provide an overview of the various areas of social interaction and conduct that the format’s humourous discourse draws from. The study will evaluate in what ways The Office ’s embarrassment humor challenges an audience’s viewing pleasure by negotiating issues of empathy and moral disengagement with the conventions of darker forms of mediated humor and comedy.

Based on the repertoire of Belarusian oral political jokes collected between 2011 and 2013, this article compares contemporary Belarusian humor to the earlier Socialist and contemporary non-Belarusian jokes. During this study, I discovered that Belarusian oral jokes mostly have versions created through various schemes of adaptation in other countries and about other figures (not necessarily political). The continuity goes far beyond the exchange of jokes between dictatorships (as it may initially seem after the comparison of Belarusian and Socialist jokes). I also discovered that Belarusian oral jokes are mostly authoritarian – ridiculing the regime and the president, unlike post-totalitarian ones targeting ideology. Finally, drawing from the emic perspective which coins many more forms and themes as the markers of political jokes than the scholars usually do, I show how expansive the notion of political humor may be.

Partly in response to the French Revolution, British political satirists in the 1790s re-imagined some visual techniques found in earlier European graphic art, including contrast, incongruity, and distortion, but with the addition of irony and violence. These satires demonstrate the deep structural similarity of humor with emotions often considered its opposites, such as horror, fear, and disgust, and visualize a phenomenon that was also theorized by philosophers of incongruity such as Joseph Priestley and Francis Hutcheson. The humor of art-horror grew in both theory and practice during the latter half of the eighteenth century and indicates the importance of incongruity in assessing modern life. These satires exemplify an obsession with death and offer an important precedent for modern political satires that engage violence and victimization for humorous effect. Extreme incongruity invites a range of different viewer responses and gives modern satire an uneasy edge.

Despite advances in women’s equality, and perhaps as a result of it, sexist humor is prevalent in society. Research on this topic has lacked realism in the way the humor is conveyed to participants, and has not examined perceptions of both men and women who use sexist humor. We embedded jokes in printed Facebook profiles to present sexist humor to participants. We manipulated the gender of the individual in the profile (man or woman), and the type of joke presented (anti-men, anti-women, neutral) in a 2×3 between-groups design. We found that both men and women rated anti-women jokes as more sexist than neutral humor, and women also rated anti-men jokes as sexist. We also found that men who displayed anti-women humor were perceived less positively than men displaying anti-men humor, or women displaying either type of humor. These findings suggest that there may be different gender norms in place for joke tellers regarding who is an acceptable target of sexist humor.