Volume 32, Issue 4 -

This short paper responds to Oring’s renewed and detailed criticism of the General Theory of Verbal Humor (2019). While conceding the need for some clarifications and elaborations in multidisciplinary collaboration, it mainly points to misunderstandings and misdirections of that criticism.

While significant debates are still ongoing, modern scholarship has made great strides in describing the nature of verbal irony and the sorts of markers that signal its use. Much of this research, however, has focused on the English language, leaving significant linguistic and historical data untouched. This study aims to fill a portion of this lacuna by investigating the typical cues for indicating sarcastic irony amongst those who invented it—or at least the term—the ancient Greeks. To this end, taking modern scholarship as our starting point, we shall proceed by investigating the extent to which various cues discussed in the literature are also present in ancient sarcasm, while taking note of cases where certain markers are more idiomatic to the ancient world. Our dataset for this task will be drawn from two diverse corpora, the writings of Lucian—arguably one of antiquity’s most prolific sarcasts—and the New Testament. While the cues that signal sarcastic intent across these texts share many similarities to those discussed in modern research, significant differences attest to the impact of both cultural and linguistic forces on the ways in which the ancient Greeks went about being sarcastic.

The theme of resistance has been a popular topic in Asterix scholarship, whether this resistance is applied to the historical Gauls in their defiance of imperial Rome, to later nationalist or regionalist sentiments in France against invading forces, to any small groups of locals in opposition to foreign or global forces, to a cultural war between France/Europe and America, or to the dominant educational canon of Western history and literature. What is missing in current scholarship on Asterix is a discussion of how these acts of resistance are created and implemented. To that end, this paper identifies ‘low-key’ humor as a seminal means of achieving this resistance in Asterix ; this effect involves a ‘lowering’ where figures of the grand or sublime are supplanted, nullified, or defeated by the more restrained figures of the commonplace. The aim of this paper is to identify the typical character of this low-key humor in Asterix through analyzing an exemplary version of this humor – in the animated film The Twelve Tasks of Asterix (1976). From the perspective of humor studies, this analysis serves as a corrective to a commonly held impression of the Asterix bandes dessinées as being characterized by more overt or puerile forms of humor. From the perspective of Asterix scholarship, this study is the first to analyze one of the animated films; far from being an outlier in the oeuvre, The Twelve Tasks both consolidates and extends the lowering humor of Asterix by opening up the possibilities of a new medium.

Over the past two millennia, satire has transformed from a uniquely Greco-Roman theatrical and poetic form into an ambiguous catch-all applied to political and sociocultural commentary, humor, parody, sarcasm and irony. Despite being a subject of study in any number of fields, explications of satire are limited. It is likely for this reason that there are inter- and intra- disciplinary disconnects in theoretical and methodological approach. Given the contemporary proliferation of satirical work, a proper explication of satire will improve text identification, empirical measures, and interdisciplinary collaboration in satirical research. To that end, this paper explicates satire, evaluates contemporary satirical research in the context of this explication, and recommends future research lines to expand the study of a pervasive construct.

In this paper we explore the creation of jokes told on late night talk shows targeted at major party nominees for president from 1992–2008. We hypothesize that the number of jokes told about candidates are related to variations in polling numbers, mainstream media coverage, and party identification of the candidates. Our results show a positive relationship between the number of jokes told at a candidate’s expense and the amount of negative news coverage about the candidate. In addition, we find that Republicans are targeted with more frequency than Democrats. Results suggest that favorability ratings and whether or not a presidential candidate is an incumbent has no effect on the number of jokes targeting a candidate.

The aim of the present study was to analyze the link between the five moral codes proposed in the Moral Foundations Theory and moral judgment of disparagement humor. We presented racist, sexist, homophobic, religion-disparaging and neutral jokes to a group of 108 participants, asking them whether they found laughing at a particular joke moral or immoral. Additionally, participants rated the level of amusement and disgust evoked by each joke. We also measured participants’ moral foundations profiles (Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity). The results confirmed that Care and Fairness were significantly linked to moral judgment of racist, sexist and homophobic jokes, whereas Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity were associated with moral judgment of religion-disparaging jokes. Moreover, these relationships were mediated by emotional responses of amusement and disgust (except for racist jokes, for which we observed no mediating role of amusement).

The aim of the present study is to explore higher-order dimensions of humorous conduct derived from 100 non-redundant and comprehensive statements. These dimensions are validated in self- and other-reports and their criterion validity is assessed by relating them to other humor concepts (temperamental basis of the sense of humor, attitudes towards laughter and being laughed at, humor appreciation and creation). Four broad dimensions (mean-spirited/earthy, entertaining, inept, and reflective/benign) were supported in self- and other-reports, and two narrower dimensions (laughter and canned) were found in self-reports. These dimensions covered affective, cognitive, and dysfunctional aspects of humorous conduct and spanned across humorous temperament, attitudes towards laughter and being laughed at as well as humor appreciation and creation. These six dimensions can serve as a reference framework and higher-order categories to which humor scales could be assigned. Future studies need to test the comprehensiveness of these dimensions and conduct further validation studies.