Volume 28, Issue 4 -

This paper explores three interrelated aspects of young Bahraini women’s laughter: the subjects and genres of their humor, the social relationships between the women involved with a particular focus on homo-social friendships, and their humor’s potential as an instrument of resistance or social control. After discussing local ideals of femininity, the paper analyzes three distinct genres of humorous conversation: self-mockery, mutual teasing, and joking about absent third parties. The data show that the ambiguity of humour allowed for great freedom regarding women’s play with gendered identities and the expression of critical views on Bahrain’s gender hierarchy. Simultaneously, different kinds of humor were employed to negotiate closeness or distance in social relations. Among women friends, humor was often drastic, intimate, aggressive, and revelled in the taboo subjects of Bahraini society. Through humor, women questioned existing gender ideals and played with alternative identities. Their laughter, however, also served to maintain conventional ideas about “proper” women and confirmed existing social hierarchies. Thus, Bahraini women’s humor captured the contradictions and ambiguities of their fragmented and hybrid social environment replete with the uncertainties accompanying rapid social change.

Stephen Colbert’s announcement that he would take over Late Night for David Letterman signaled the end of nearly a decade long project in political satire. The evolution of political humor since Colbert began his satirical news program has been accompanied by a dramatic expansion in scholarly understanding of the effects of political comedy. This study contributes to research on the effects of political comedy by adopting a dual-processing approach to determine if exposure to political comedy can affect the political knowledge and attitudes of viewers. Two experiments were conducted to test the learning and persuasive effects of viewing a single clip from Colbert’s well-documented Super PAC parody. The first demonstrated that exposure to Colbert’s Super PAC programming generated modest short-term issue recognition characteristic of online learning. The second experiment demonstrated a substantial priming effect such that viewing argumentative forewarning in a Colbert segment about Super PAC attack ads significantly diminished the persuasive effect of those attacks.

This study integrates satire literature and uncertainty-based theories in order to introduce more theoretical organization into the political communication and discussion literature. In doing so, the main goals of this study are (1) to bring conceptual organization to various types of political messages (i.e., satire and news), (2) to show how and why satire, in particular, is linked with uncertainty, and (3) to examine the extent to which satire and news can arouse uncertainty and encourage discussion of uncertainty in political conversations. Four types of political media messages (traditional news, opinion news, juvenalian satire, and horatian satire) are used in a computer-mediated discussion experiment to answer the study’s hypotheses. Results show that uncertainty differed across political messages (i.e., satire aroused more uncertainty) and uncertainty was expressed in discussion.

This study investigates the underlying grounds and outcomes of nationwide antigovernment demonstrations that began as an environmentalist protest against the razing of Gezi Park in Istanbul. Humor became a weapon for the protestors for targeting and degrading Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the government and the police forces. Captions, caricatures, graffiti, posters and slogans that were used as a means for humorous criticism of social reality in Turkey proliferated during and after this period. The slogan “the only thing they do not know how to deal with is passive activism and humor” was prevalent among protestors. The phrase ‘disproportionate intelligence’, which was used as an umbrella term for all humorous material, showed the protestors’ effort to react to the disproportionate violence they were exposed to while positioning themselves as more civilized and able as compared to the police and the government who could only resort to violence. This study includes semiotic analyses of composition and content of examples with humorous content.

The Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ; Martin et al. 2003) was developed using a construct-based scale construction approach to measure four humor styles, namely affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating. The present study investigates to what extent the HSQ scales converge with and represent the conceptualizations (i.e., the definitions and construct descriptions) of the four humor styles as outlined by Martin et al. (2003). To this end, 340 participants provided self-reports on the definitions, construct descriptions, and the 32 items of the HSQ. Two multitrait-multimethod analyses yielded a good convergence of the self-defeating humor style, yet for the affiliative, self-enhancing, and aggressive humor styles convergence was lower and they were partly mismatched. The discrimination between the humor styles was mostly supported with the exception of affiliative and self-enhancing. Further, the HSQ scales predicted about two-thirds of the reliable variance in the conceptualizations in multiple regression analyses, so they represented several conceptual elements. Overall, these findings do only lend partial support for the convergence of the HSQ with the original conceptualization of the humor styles. If replicable, this implicates that either the constructs and model of the humor styles need to be adjusted or newly developed, or the HSQ does.

I applaud Heintz and Ruch (this issue) for their efforts at evaluating the construct validity of the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ). However, their study has several weaknesses that limit the conclusions that can be drawn. Most importantly, the measures developed by these authors to test the validity of the HSQ have questionable reliability and validity themselves, due to the challenges inherent in measuring humor styles via self-report. These limitations are discussed, and suggestions are provided for further research along these lines.