Volume 38, Issue 1

Although American news satire trends towards the left side of the political spectrum, satire is not unique to liberal viewpoints. Conservative news satire, published by outlets such as The Babylon Bee , lend evidence to the ability for right-wing views to be advanced using satirical methods. Despite political differences, existing comparisons of left- and right-wing news satire suggest a high degree of structural similarity. In contrast, qualitative content-based analyses suggest clear political biases which differentiate the satire from these sources. In this study, we compare left- and right-wing American news satire across different structural and content-based features using a combination of quantitative, computational, and qualitative approaches. Our results mirror those of prior studies, indicating similarities in terms of structure but not content. These results further speak to the importance of taking conservative satire seriously, as well as to the necessity of a multi-pronged approach when studying the complex nature of satirical discourse.

Categories are inference-rich and do implicative work storing a great deal of knowledge that members of a society have about the society. Drawing on Membership Categorization Analysis, and sequential analysis from Conversation Analysis, this study explores participants’ categorial orientations in talk-in-interaction that is produced and/or treated as humorous in the Second Language (L2) classrooms. More specifically, this study presents an in-depth analysis of the way category-activity puzzles, which display incongruous combination of membership categories and category-bound activities, are formed, and made relevant and consequential in talk that is produced and/or treated as humorous. In doing so, it unpacks how participants invoke, negotiate, and deal with category-activity puzzles as resources for producing and/or treating utterances as humorous in L2 classrooms. The analysis will also illustrate the way participants use their understanding of common-sense knowledge and category memberships as a resource in managing and negotiating incongruities created through category-puzzles, which are treated as humorous. As such, this study contributes to the growing body of MCA and humor studies in classrooms and advances our understanding with regards to the categorial orientations of participants in L2 classrooms.

Confronting bias can reduce prejudice and subsequent discriminatory behavior. However, people often hesitate to confront because of the perceived costs. Humorous confrontation may mitigate these costs. Using hypothetical scenarios, humorous confrontation was found to be similarly effective as serious confrontation, but with fewer social costs (Woodzicka, Julie A., Robyn K. Mallett & Kala J. Melchiori. 2020. Gender differences in using humor to respond to sexist jokes. Humor 33(2). 219–238). The present research tests whether these effects hold when confronted for expressing bias in a lab-based experiment. College-aged men were confronted for sexism by a man or woman in a serious or humorous manner. Compared to past work that used scenarios, we found that men responded in a more friendly way yet were more resistant to feedback when confronted for their actual behavior. Serious confrontations led men to use fewer stereotypes, apologize more, and lower their denial of stereotypic behavior compared to humorous confrontations or a control condition. Unlike past work using scenarios, men showed a more negative reaction to humorous confronters than serious confronters. Men confronters elicited less negative affect, especially compared to women confronters who used humor.

One of the fundamental functions of humor is establishing the boundaries between groups. While it is very easy to trace this function in private settings, it often becomes more challenging in the online public sphere, where different groups of humor audiences overlap; there, using audience-restricting references can be counterproductive by establishing boundaries and preventing the efficient spread of jokes. Using the database on humor and conflicts in the public sphere, we look at how humor producers use both in-group specific and widely known humorous references (that we call universal) to create jokes and memes. Based on a corpus of Belarusian and Polish public humor, we outline the most common specific categories of references, analyze how the prevalence of certain categories and types of references depends on the nature of the controversies, and explore the connections between the types of references (verbal or visual) and their nature (in-group and universal).

The topic of humor (and laughter) in healthcare contexts has attracted considerable scholarly interest, especially in professional-patient communication. Yet much remains to be investigated about its forms and functions in backstage inter-professional interaction from a discourse analytical/pragmatic perspective. In this light, this paper explores the role of humor in interpersonal conflict management in hospital handover meetings with the aim of providing insights into both the various functions this inconspicuous discursive strategy may perform on a macro-level, as well as the way this is achieved at the micro-level. Interpersonal conflict is said to be an inherent aspect of such high-stakes medical settings, and conflict management is of vital importance for negotiating patients’ cases and treatment paths. Drawing on authentic handover meetings recorded at a hospital in New Zealand, we provide useful insights into the ways in which conflicts are managed and medical knowledge is transferred in these backstage encounters. The paper shows how different kinds of potentially face-threatening humor is used to manage and avoid conflict by those in superior as well as those in more junior positions. Finally, we argue that these ways of ‘doing’ humor in conflict management are a reflection (and reinforcement) of the team’s close-knit social relations and directly address the high-stakes nature of these medical encounters.

Chronic disease leads to death, disability, and costs. Humor has been studied as an emotion-focused way of coping with chronic disease; however, it is unclear whether type of humor used moderates the relationship between health difficulties and quality of life. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between four types of humor (i.e., affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating humor), health difficulties and quality of life in individuals diagnosed with a chronic disease ( n  = 195; mean age = 34.14, SD = 9.06; 56.7 % male; 74.1 % White/European American) using a cross-sectional, correlational design. Utilizing hierarchical multiple regression and controlling for demographic and lifestyle variables, four humor styles (affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive and self-defeating) moderated the relationships between health difficulties and quality of life. As health difficulties increased, greater use of self-enhancing, aggressive and self-defeating humor was associated with greater quality of life, while affiliative humor was associated with lower quality of life. Clinical and research applications that implement humor as a coping strategy may help to decrease the burden of living with a chronic disease.