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Appreciating the humor in jokes involves incongruity-detection and resolution, which requires good language skills. Foreign language comprehension is challenging, including interpreting words within their sentence context. An implication is that jokes in a foreign language will be more difficult to understand and therefore probably less humorous, compared to native language jokes. To study this question while preserving humor across translations, jokes were selected from Turkish and English websites to minimize language play and cultural references. Turkish university students rated both Turkish and English jokes for humor. Humor for foreign language jokes was positively correlated with ease-of-understanding of specific jokes and also by the individual-differences characteristics of English proficiency and likely career investment (e.g., preparing for a future career as English teacher or translator). We propose the proficiency X investment theory: Foreign language jokes will be experienced as funnier than native language jokes when proficiency levels are high (ranging from good to excellent) and bilinguals have a high level of L2 investment. When proficiency levels are only adequate, and without special investment in L2, native language jokes will be evaluated as funnier than foreign language jokes. With intermediate proficiency and investment, jokes can be experienced as similarly humorous in the two language. Important in this pattern is the proposal that weaker L2-proficiency can trade-off with language investment to bolster L2 humor appreciation.

This paper proposes the use of quantitative indicators to evaluate the comedic success of Japanese “Manzai” performances without using semantic processing or time sequence information. The validity of the proposed indicators was verified by predicting the rankings of the final rounds and decision matches of ten M1 Grand Prix, a national-level humor contest in Japan, using leave-one-out cross validation. The results demonstrate that the proposed indicators are able to predict the ranking of Manzai championships as the mean prediction precision was 0.58 (rank correlation) for final rounds, and 0.70 (champion prediction accuracy) for the decision matches.

This article focuses on humor embedded in the delivery and lyrics of a form of song sung by Zulu women in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa still widely practiced in rural areas, called amaculo omgonqo ‘puberty songs.’ The aim is to ascertain how and why young Zulu females sing these unusual songs which are normally sung in the days preceding two rites of passage ceremonies; firstly, the umhlonyane ceremony, which is held to mark a young girl’s first menstruation during her puberty years, and secondly, approximately 10 years later, the umemulo ‘coming of age’ ceremony which is held for young girls who have reached marriageable age. Analysis is made of the unusual use of scatological and ribald language in these songs, which are sung by young girls before these two ceremonies. These songs are rendered socially acceptable only because of the context in which they are sung, and for the bawdy humor which is core to the lyrics.

The current research examined whether social power affects what people find funny. In two experiments, participants’ psychological state of social power was experimentally manipulated and their evaluations of offensive jokes were assessed. Results showed that participants in a psychological state of high power – as compared to low power – evaluated offensive jokes as less inappropriate, less offensive, and funnier. Mediation analyses showed that power increased the funniness of offensive jokes through decreasing the perceived inappropriateness of these jokes. Implications for research on power and humor are discussed.

We conducted three studies to test our overarching hypothesis that racial humor may increase or decrease subsequent expressions of prejudice by setting social norms that indicate prejudice is either more or less acceptable, respectively. We selected riddles that were disparaging, confrontational, or neutral, and examined their effects on subsequent prejudiced expressions. We predicted humor that disparaged Blacks would convey that prejudiced expressions are more socially acceptable, resulting in increased expressions of prejudice toward Blacks. Conversely, we predicted humor that confronted prejudiced expressions would convey that prejudiced expressions are less socially acceptable, resulting instead in reduced expressions of prejudice toward Blacks. Our studies demonstrated that, consistent with prejudiced norm theory, disparagement humor, and confrontational humor perceived as disparaging, has the potential to disinhibit expressions of prejudice when used, even in brief social interactions. Our studies also showed that individuals often misinterpreted the subversive nature of confrontational humor, frequently perceiving the confrontation intended to challenge expressions of prejudice as instead intending to disparage Blacks. Thus, while it is possible racial humor may have the potential to tighten norms inhibiting prejudice, the perceptions of confrontational jokes as disparaging may result in jokes (created to subvert and inhibit prejudice) ironically reinforcing prejudiced responding.

The current study examined sexist humor and participants’ level of sexism and femininity ideology using two research approaches: (1) a quasi-experimental design in which participants were primed with sexist humor and (2) a correlational approach using content analysis to estimate exposure to sexist humor in media. It was hypothesized that exposure to sexist humor would influence viewer’s sexist views and femininity ideology. It was also hypothesized that the quasi-experimental design would yield confirmatory results of our initial hypothesis while the correlational design would not. Participants included 1,559 male and female college students who were randomly assigned to three experimental conditions (viewed sexist humor, viewed non-sexist humor, viewed no videos) and then answered questions related to sexism and femininity ideology followed by general demographic items and media viewing preferences. Results confirmed that the quasi-experimental design, in comparison to the correlational design, yielded more confirmatory results in that those exposed to sexist humor had higher scores on all outcome measures examined. Limitations of priming and content analysis are discussed as well as directions for future research.