Impact Factor: 1.1

Zeitschrift

HUMOR

International Journal of Humor Research

Editor-in-Chief: Christian F. Hempelmann

Sprache: Englisch

Erstveröffentlichung: 1. Januar 1988

Erscheinungsweise: 4 Hefte pro Jahr

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Über diese Zeitschrift

Objective
HUMOR was established as an international interdisciplinary forum for the publication of high-quality research papers on humor as an important and universal human faculty. Humor research draws upon a wide range of academic disciplines including anthropology, biology, cultural studies, computer science, education, communication, film and media studies, gender studies, history, linguistics, literature, mathematics, health and medicine, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology. At the same time, humor research often sheds light on the basic concepts, ideas, and methods of many of these disciplines.

Topics

interdisciplinary humor research
humor theory
empirical studies in humor, laughter, comedy and related fields from around the world
humor research methodologies and measurements of sense of humor
scholarly debates on the social functions of humor

Article formats
Research articles, Book reviews, Debates

ISHS Conference

35th ISHS Conference will take place in Kraków, Poland, 7-11 July 2025

For details visit the website: https://ishs2025.pl/

Ihre Vorteile

Your benefits:

International and interdisciplinary scholarly debate on humor and related phenomena such as laughter, mirth, comedy
Innovative and interdisciplinary studies in the field of humor research
Multifaceted approach to the role of humor as an important and universal human faculty
Innovative approaches and measurements in the study of humor
Studies on humor, comedy, laughter from a wide range of countries and cultures
Reviews of recent books on humor

HUMOR is the official journal of the International Society of Humor Studies (ISHS). For further information, please see the web site: www.humorstudies.org.

Geschichte

Humor was founded in 1988 and the first Editor-in-chief was Victor Raskin.

Other publications in the field

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Just kidding? Exploring the role of traditional versus counter-traditional gender role jokes on gender identity threat

27. August 2025

Ipek Guvensoy, Büşra Kaplan, Sabahat Cigdem Bagci, Irem Sakarya, Esra Kamacı, Irem Kuyucu, Duygu Yurt, Selen Akay, Emrah Kahraman

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While traditional gender roles have been examined in the context of online communication, less is known about the implications of encountering counter-traditional gender roles (e.g., depicting men as caring and women as independent) on social media. We investigated participants’ perceived gender identity threat upon exposure to traditional versus counter-traditional gender role jokes that targeted either men or women. An online experiment ( N = 265) using a 2 (content: traditional versus counter-traditional gender roles) by 2 (joke’s target gender: men versus women) by 2 (participant’s gender: man versus woman) mixed design demonstrated that overall, jokes targeting women elicited greater identity threat and women perceived greater identity threat than men. Moreover, the three-way interactions showed that women, in particular, perceived greater identity threat from traditional gender role jokes targeting women. The current study highlights the damaging role of the spread of traditional gender roles through humor, particularly for women’s gender identities.
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Maurophobia through racist humor in Spanish social media: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of the neologism ‘Youthland’

27. August 2025

Inmaculada Garnes-Tarazona

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This study examines the use of verbal and visual elements on X in Spain to express racist humor that creates an opposition between the in-group –Spanish/European citizens and those who support anti-immigrant rhetoric – and the out-group –Moroccans (north) African Muslim immigrants, and those who legitimize them. Drawing on multimodal approaches (Machin, David & Andrea Mayr. 2012. How to do critical discourse analysis: A multimodal introduction . London: SAGE) to critical discourse analysis, the study analyzes the ways in which racist humor reflects social hierarchies on social media. The goal is to examine the humorous use of the neologisms ‘Jovenlandia’ (Youthland) and ‘jovenlandés’ (Youthlandian) on social media in Spain to ridicule Muslim immigrants and legitimize Maurophobia (aversion to Moors) (Zapata-Barrero, Ricard. 2006. The Muslim community and the Spanish tradition. Maurophobia as a fact, and impartiality as a desideratum. In Tariq Modood, Anna Triandafyllidou & Ricard Zapata Barrero (eds.). Multiculturalism, Muslims and citizenship: A European approach , 143–162. London: Routledge). The analysis is based on a corpus of 3,977 posts during the 2023 Spanish election campaign (May 29th – July 26th 2023) and explores the online social dynamics through which negative and exclusionary representations of immigrants are reproduced. The findings indicate that the use of ‘Jovenlandia’ primarily encompasses Morocco, followed by northern African countries, and ultimately the entirety of Africa. The posts frame the social context in terms of geographical, socio-cultural, religious, and ideological antagonisms between the in-group and the out-group.
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Five theses on humor literacy in the public sphere

26. August 2025

Jonas Nicolaï

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With humor increasingly at the center of social conflict, debates over the boundaries of subversive humor have moved to the forefront of public discourse. As a result, there is a growing need for a more grounded understanding of public humor literacy – understood as the ability to engage with humor in the public sphere in a way that is informed, reflective, and supportive of democratic discourse. By discussing five theses on the nature of publicly mediated humor, this article formulates a programmatic starting point for a framework on public humor literacy, and contributes to the growing academic and societal acknowledgement that humor increasingly functions as a politicizing form of public discourse and a tool for political engagement.
Open Access
What’s in a pun? Assessing the relationship between phonological distance and perceived funniness of punning jokes

26. August 2025

Anna Palmann, Tristan Miller

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Punning is a form of humorous wordplay based on semantic ambiguity between two phonologically similar words – the pun and the target – in a context where both meanings are more or less acceptable. While the pun is expressed explicitly, the target is invoked implicitly in the text. Previous work has attempted to quantify and compare phonological features of puns and their targets, looking at correlations with the understandability of the jokes in which they occur. Our study quantifies the phonological distance between pun and target words and assesses possible correlations with funniness ratings of the corresponding jokes. Our statistical analyses on a large dataset of puns reveal a significant negative correlation between phonological distance and perceived funniness for two of the four phonological distance measures we applied. This finding supports the hypothesis, often (implicitly) made in previous research but never verified at this scale, that lower phonological distance between a pun and its target is associated with higher funniness ratings. The parameters of our study suggest that future work should examine the semantic features of pun and target in order to create a more holistic understanding of what contributes to the perceived funniness of punning jokes.
Öffentlich zugänglich
David Shoemaker. 2024. Wisecracks: Humor and Morality in Everyday Life. pp. 204. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN: 9780226832982. $25.00

26. August 2025

John Morreall

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“That kind of pants?!”: designedly ambiguous deadpan delivery of a possibly nonserious turn in multiparty Japanese conversation

26. August 2025

Eric Hauser, Toshiaki Furukawa

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Work on conversational humor often focuses on the use of laughter, smiling, and other contextualization cues used to frame an utterance or turn as nonserious. However, a possibly nonserious turn can also be delivered in a deadpan manner, with few or no such contextualization cues. Deadpan delivery of a possibly nonserious turn results in ambiguous framing of the turn for its recipients. In this paper, we use multimodal conversation analysis to analyze a single case from multiparty Japanese conversation in which a possibly nonserious turn is delivered in a deadpan manner and its recipients attempt, through the use of other-initiated repair, to resolve the ambiguity. We show how the producer of the possibly nonserious turn manipulates the repair work in order to generate humor. We also show how the possibly nonserious turn, and responses to it, can be seen as a type of collaborative conversational humor in Japanese, which can be referred to as manzai -like humor. This paper thus contributes to two relatively under-researched areas of conversational humor: 1) deadpan delivery of a possibly nonserious turn, including the ambiguous framing inherent in such delivery and how recipients attempt to repair this ambiguity, and 2) collaborative manzai -like humor in Japanese conversation.
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The neurology and psychiatry of humor, smiling and laughter: A tribute to Paul McGhee. Part I. Introduction and clinical studies

26. August 2017

Frank Rodden

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This review article was written for people like Paul McGhee when he was 20 years old: curious and interested in the neurology and psychiatry of humor, smiling and laughter but neither physicians nor experts in cognitive science. It begins with necessary reflections on what it even means to consider humor, smiling and laughter from within these disciplines. These frames of reference, useful as they are, are far from neutral. The reader is encouraged to be sensitive to some logical and linguistic pitfalls that can fatally endanger meaningful discussions of these subjects. The results of empirical studies of humor, smiling and laughter which have employed the tools of neurology and psychiatry are then reviewed, roughly in the order in which the techniques have emerged historically, beginning with clinical studies (Part I) and continuing with current studies employing functional imaging methods in Part II. Therapeutic approaches using humor, smiling and laughter, particularly with respect to neurological and psychiatric diseases – but also including other diseases – are discussed. Finally a short synopsis of what is known about the neurology and psychiatry of humor, smiling and laughter is presented.

Special Issue: Humor and Religion; Guest Editors: Nicole Graham and Paul S Martin

Special Issue: Festschrift for Willibald Ruch: Individual differences, measurement and theories for the psychology of humour and beyond; Guest Editors: Sonja Heintz, Jennifer Hofmann, Tracey Platt and René T. Proyer

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Special Issue: Humor and the Law: The Difficulty of Judging Jests

Special Issue: Humor in the Age of Coronavirus

Special Issue: Sex and gender differences in humor, Guest Editor: Gil Greengross

Special Issue Dedicated to Christie Davies: Jokes, Targets and Spontaneous Order

Special Issue: Festschrift for Paul McGhee – Humor Across the Lifespan, Theory, Measurement, and Applications, Guest Editors: Willibald Ruch, Jeffrey Goldstein

Special Issue: Comedy Matters, Guest Editor: Sharon Lockyer

Special Issue: The social consequences of disparagement humor, Guest Editor: Thomas E. Ford

Humor in Autism Spectrum Disorders

to be implemented...

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Die Zeitschrift HUMOR veröffentlicht Sonder- und Themenhefte, die sich auf wichtige und neu aufkommende Themen im Bereich der Forschung konzentrieren. Die Zeitschrift hat ein strenges Verfahren eingeführt, um sicherzustellen, dass alle Manuskripte für Sonderausgaben denselben Qualitätsstandards und Peer-Review-Verfahren unterliegen wie reguläre Manuskripte. Weitere Informationen über die Peer-Review-Politik der Zeitschrift finden Sie in den "Hinweisen für Autoren".

Aktuelle Themenhefte

Band 37 | Heft 2 Special Issue: Humor and Religion; Guest Editors: Nicole Graham and Paul S Martin

Journal Impact Factor	1.1	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
5-year Journal Impact Factor	1.4	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
Journal Citation Indicator	0.90	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
CiteScore	2.8	2024, Scopus (Elsevier B.V., 2025)
SCImago Journal Rank	0.423	2024, SJR (Scimago Lab, 2025; Data Source: Scopus)
Source Normalized Impact per Paper	0.847	2024, CWTS Journal Indicators (CWTS B.V., 2025; Data Source: Scopus)

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Submission of your paper via our submission management tool
Please note unsolicited book reviews will not be accepted!
Peer review process (you will be guided through every step)
Decision on your paper (14 weeks from submission to first decision)
If accepted: you have the option to publish it open access

Please note

Please see the De Gruyter Mouton journal style sheet for further information regarding the proper formatting of your manuscript
Manuscripts must be written in clear and concise English
Before submitting your article please have a look at our Instruction for Authors, Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement and our Copyright Transfer Agreement.
HUMOR follows Tier 2 of our Data Sharing Policy. Authors are encouraged to provide a data availability statement. Please refer to the Data Sharing Policy for guidance on how to write a data availability statement.　
Once your article is accepted you have the option to publish it open access
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Authors have the option to publish their article under an open access license. The standard article processing charge for a hybrid open access article is 2,000 Euro (plus VAT if applicable). Please note that corresponding authors from institutions with which we have a transformative agreement, can publish open access without paying the fee. More information on the eligible institutions and articles can be found here.

Editor-in-Chief
Christian F. Hempelmann
Dept. of Literature & Languages
East Texas A&M University, USA
e-mail: humorjournal@gmail.com

Founding Editor
Victor Raskin, Purdue University, USA

Book Review Editors (Unsolicited book reviews are not accepted!)

Nicholas Holm (Massey University, New Zealand)
n.h.f.holm@massey.ac.nz

Liisi Laineste (Estonian Literary Museum / University of Tartu, Estonia)
liisi@folklore.ee　

Eric Weitz (University College Dublin, Ireland)
weitzer@tcd.ie

Editorial Assistant
Andrew R. Olah (Kansas State University, USA)

ISHS Executive Secretary
Martin D. Lampert (Holy Names University, USA)

Editorial Board
Salvatore Attardo (East Texas A&M University, USA)
Nancy Bell (Washington State University, USA)
Delia Chiaro (University of Bologna, Italy)
Władysław Chłopicki (Jagiellonian University, Poland)
Thomas E. Ford (Western Carolina University, USA)
Gil Greengross (Aberystwyth University, UK)
Sonja Heintz (Plymouth University, UK)
Giselinde Kuipers (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Liisi Laineste (Estonian Literary Museum, Estonia)
Sharon Lockyer (Brunel University, UK)
Moira Marsh (Indiana University, USA)
Andrés Mendiburo-Seguel (Universidad Andrés Bello, Chile)
Jessica Milner Davis (University of Sydney, Australia)
John Morreall (College of William and Mary, USA)
Elliott Oring (California State University, USA)
Béatrice Priego-Valverde (Aix-Marseille University, France)
René Proyer (Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany)
Victor Raskin (Purdue University, USA)
Willibald Ruch (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
Limor Shifman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
Villy Tsakona (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece)

Consulting Editors
Goh Abe (Tokushima Bunri University, Japan)
Mostafa Abedinifard (University of British Columbia, Canada)
Sammy Basu (Willamette University, USA)
Ursula Beermann (UMIT TIROL - The Tyrolean Private University, Austria)
Hugo Carretero Dios (University of Granada, Spain)
Elisa Gironzetti (University of Maryland, USA)
Holger Kersten (Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany)
Tristan Miller (University of Manitoba, Canada)
Patrice Oppliger (Boston University, USA)
Tracey Platt (University of Sunderland, UK)
Andrea Samson (University of Fribourg, Switzerland)
Julie Aitken Schermer (University of Western Ontario, Canada)
Julia Taylor Rayz (Purdue University, USA)
Till Weingärtner (University College Cork, Ireland)
Julie A. Woodzicka (Washington and Lee University, USA)
Xiaodong Yue (City University of Hong Kong, China)

ISHS Historians
Alleen P. Nilsen (Arizona State University, USA)
Don L. F. Nilsen (Arizona State University, USA)

Former Editors-in-Chief

Victor Raskin 　1988-1999
Lawrence E. Mintz 2000-2002
Salvatore Attardo 2003-2012
Giselinde Kuipers 2012-2015
Thomas E. Ford 　2016-2020

HUMOR ist in den folgenden Services indiziert:

Baidu Scholar
BDSL Bibliographie der deutschen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft
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Cabells Journalytics
CNKI Scholar (China National Knowledge Infrastructure)
CNPIEC - cnpLINKer
Dimensions
EBSCO (relevant databases)
EBSCO Discovery Service
EMCare
ERIH PLUS (European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences)
Genamics JournalSeek
Google Scholar
IBR (International Bibliography of Reviews of Scholarly Literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences)
IBZ (International Bibliography of Periodical Literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences)
Ingenta Connect
International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (ProQuest)
J-Gate
Journal Citation Reports/Social Sciences Edition
JournalGuide
Linguistic Bibliography
Linguistics Abstracts Online
MLA International Bibliography
Naver Academic
Naviga (Softweco)
Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers
OLC Linguistik
Primo Central (ExLibris)
ProQuest (relevant databases)
PsycINFO
PSYNDEX
Publons
QOAM (Quality Open Access Market)
ReadCube
ScienceON (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information)
Scilit
SCImago (SJR)
SCOPUS
Semantic Scholar
Sherpa/RoMEO
Summon (ProQuest)
TDNet
Ulrich's Periodicals Directory/ulrichsweb
WanFang Data
Web of Science - Arts & Humanities Citation Index
Web of Science - Current Contents/Arts & Humanities
Web of Science - Current Contents/Social and Behavioral Sciences
Web of Science - Social Sciences Citation Index
WorldCat (OCLC)
X-MOL
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Zeitschriften Informationen

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eISSN:

1613-3722

ISSN:

0933-1719

Sprache:

Englisch

Verlag:

De Gruyter Mouton

Weitere Informationen

Erstveröffentlichung:

1. Januar 1988

Erscheinungsweise:

4 Hefte pro Jahr

eISSN: 1613-3722

ISSN: 0933-1719

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Researchers, students and practitioners with an interest in the scholarly study of humor and related phenomena

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