Volume 29, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Comedy Matters, Guest Editor: Sharon Lockyer

The three-year (2012–2015) AHRC-funded research project Make Me Laugh: Creativity in the British Television Comedy Industry worked with writers, producers, directors and other industry personnel to map the productions they work on and follow their labor as they move from one job to another and strive to maintain a career. This article draws on interview material from this project to investigate the ways in which comedy workers negotiate the maintenance of their creativity within economic, cultural and industrial contexts such as policy, funding, and the whims of broadcasters and production companies. It argues that while such contexts are evident for all cultural production, there are specifics of the comedy sector because of humor’s relationships with the social role of broadcasting. It therefore highlights the specificity of comic creative labor, contributing to ongoing Humor Studies debates focused on the particularities of comedy as a category.

This paper reports the nurse-peer interactions of a negative case; a Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS) working with female drug users in the area of sexual and reproductive health – derived from a qualitative constructivist grounded theory study looking at spontaneous humor in Clinical Nurse Specialist – patient interactions and their respective peer groups. Spontaneous humor in nurse-peer interactions is reviewed and compared and contrasted with those observed in the CNS-patient interactions. A ninety-minute follow-up interview and ten hours of field note observations of the interactions of nurse-patients and nurse-peers was analyzed using an interpretative and illustrative framework following a constant comparison approach. A specific kind of humor (harsh humor) characterized the negative case and enhanced CNS-patient interactions. In nurse-peer interactions, this visceral humor was sometimes recreational; filling downtime between non-attending patients and building team rapport. However, nurse-peer humor also had a more serious import acting as a release: a way of venting emotions and diluting the daily tragedy, making palatable what is ultimately unpalatable while still retaining a sense of self-worth. Further study of humor in non-accomplishment settings may provide useful insights into the potential for humor to build staff resilience and enhance therapeutic uses of humor in healthcare interactions.

Satire’s critical bite exposes it more often than other forms of humor to various kinds of restraint or control. While most studies of satire focus on its formal censorship (by editorial, legal or political decision), others acknowledge the additional role of internalized constraints (such as personal humor tastes and cultural conventions) that influence satirists in their creative work (self-censorship). This paper argues that constraints on satire (and humor generally) are not limited to those summed up as censorship and self-censorship and that examining reactions that occur after the initial success of a published satire helps to identify a wider range applying to satire and humor in different cultures and times. Focusing on reception rather than creation, therefore, this paper looks at specific cases of successfully published satire that subsequently stirred expressions of public offence in contemporary Australia, Japan, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). A distinction is drawn between reactions stemming from personal and cultural constraints and opposition shaped by economic and politico-legal forces and interactions between the two are also considered. Moderators of the backlash effect also include the medium of communication and some stylistic features of satire.

Clowning for refugees, clown performances in refugee camps or conflict zones is a performative practice which has existed for almost 30 years. However, very little academic attention has been paid to performance of this kind. This article, therefore, outlines the history of clowning with refugees (drawing on the practice of Clowns without Borders (CWB), the primary organisation in this field and on the work of other individual clowns). It establishes the key principles which guide this kind of performance, focusing on the practitioners’ emphasis on the therapeutic power of laughter and play, particularly, but not exclusively, for children. Drawing on interviews with practitioners, email questionnaires, videos of clown refugee performance, internet newspaper articles and published material, the techniques and strategies of clown performances in refugee settings are explored through three examples of practical encounters. These case studies (CWB in Lesotho, Circus2Iraq and Mimi the Clown working with the Red Cross in Tunisia) facilitate the exploration of the aims of such work and how such performances might best be evaluated. Whilst the article’s focus is on examining the performative and therapeutic nature of clowning, play and laughter on those who experience clown performances; the fact that such performances take place in difficult and potentially dangerous settings also raises issues in relation to cultural and ethical considerations which are also explored.

Practitioners, audiences and critics are often dismissive of political comedy’s impact. It is argued that audiences only attend political performances if they already agree with the performer; further, that audiences will not laugh at ideas that they find too subversive. As laughter depends upon consensus and success depends upon laughter, the comedian merely preaches to the converted. This article challenges these assumptions by examining the diverse strategies of two political comedians: Mark Thomas and Stewart Lee. Through analysis of performance, and their methodology and intent as related in practitioner interviews, I demonstrate that the nature of consensus in political comedy is more complex than has generally been supposed. Far from being a sign of comedy’s impuissance, consensus is used as a tool to enhance and develop political engagement. I suggest that in order to discover whether political comedy matters, we must first broaden our understanding of how it matters.

In the context of the many and persistent Islam controversies, we investigate how activist Muslim comedy aims to unite Muslims and non-Muslims. To this purpose and to further current research and theory on humor functions, we develop a morality-based analytic framework that demonstrates the social potentials of humor. We propose to approach humor as engendering moral appeals that function as sign posts, indicating to audiences whom they ought to support based on their shared virtues, and which people ought to be defied for their vices. Our case study focuses on the documentary The Muslims are Coming! Based on a semiotic analysis, we find that this movie invites non-Muslims to unite with Muslims based on their shared normality, modernity and peacefulness. Furthermore, the unified in-group is invited to oppose three out-groups: conservative Muslims, terrorists, and ignorant media. These appeals can be properly understood in the context of the general and official aim of the documentary, which is “combating Islamophobia”, but they also produce particular limitations, for instance with respect to gender, and tend to smoothen legitimate difference.

Since the late 1990s, Sacha Baron Cohen’s characters have raised controversy, criticism and protest from various groups (for example, from Black activists in 2002 and Hasidic Jews in 2012). The comedy has also been described as satirical or anti-racist. Baron Cohen, as either Ali G, Borat, Bruno, or General Aladeen, has consistently provided comedy that leads to public debate on the relationship between comedy and race, ethnicity and stereotype, and the nature of racism and “othering” in comedy. Despite this tendency, very little research has been conducted on how audiences receive the comedy. We present results from a recent focus group, audience reception study of the comedy of Baron Cohen, which recorded discourse from young people aged 18–29 years (n 49). The article examines the perceptions of Islamophobia or anti-Muslim racism in the comedy, focusing on The Dictator . Four discourses are outlined from the focus groups. First, discussions that show agreement in the focus group and argue the comedy is Islamophobic or anti-Muslim; second, discussions that show disagreement in the focus group over the presence of Islamophobic or anti-Muslim content; third, discussions that view no, or almost no, signifiers in the comedy that denote either Islam as a religion or Muslims as an ethnic group; and forth, one example that suggests the comedy uses signifiers of the “other” for ironic satire. These conversations are analysed through rhetorical discourse analysis to highlight the tropes that construct meaning in each.

This present article is part of a larger study on speaker-hearer allocation of attentional resources in face-to-face interactions. The goal of the paper is twofold: first, we present results concerning the degree of correlation, in computer-mediated conversation, between speaker’s timing and intensity of smiling when humor is either present or absent in the conversation. The results were obtained from the analysis of five dyadic interactions between English speakers that were video and audio recorded, transcribed, and analyzed to establish a baseline of synchronicity of smiling among participants. From the study it emerged that conversational partners engaged in humorous conversations not only reciprocate each other’s smiling, but also match each other’s smiling intensity. Our data led to the identification of different smiling and non-smiling synchronic behaviors that point to the existence of a synchronous multimodal relationship between humorous events and smiling intensity for conversational partners. Second, in the last part of the paper, we argue for the need of a multimodal conversational corpus in humor studies and present the corpus that is being collected, annotated, and analyzed at Texas A&M University–Commerce. The corpus consists of humorous interactions among dyads of native speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese for which video, audio, and eye-tracking data have been recorded. As part of this section of the paper, we also present some preliminary results based on the analysis of one English conversation, and some exploratory analysis of Chinese data, that show that greater attention is paid to facial areas involved in smiling when humor is present. This study sheds light on the role of smiling as a discourse marker (Attardo, S., L. Pickering, F. Lomotey & S. Menjo. 2013. Multimodality in Conversational Humor. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 11(2). 400–414.), and therefore as a meaningful device in verbal communication.