The European Journal of Humour Research

The collective and individual expressions of humour in social media spaces

Yousef Barahmeh — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

This article seeks to establish a theoretical framework for considering how the collective and individual expressions of humour in social media spaces have been used and presented in the socio-political context of Jordan after the 2011 Arab Spring. This framework moves from the collective to the individual and makes Mikhail Bakhtin and Sigmund Freud complementary to the study of Jordanian social media humour after the Arab Spring. It argues that Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of carnival and the carnivalesque (folk humour) have a functional similarity to Sigmund Freud’s theory of humour (release theory) because both seem to agree on the role of repression to influence the production of humour. Although repression is being understood differently (for Bakhtin it is political repression, which is usually a conscious decision, while for Freud it is self-repression, which is usually unconscious), humour can provide us with a strong mechanism for overcoming repression, or at least, giving the individual or the crowd the impression that they are challenging repression without necessarily challenging the status quo i.e., calling for regime change or revolution.

Caricatures as propaganda weapons during the First World War

Ágnes Tamás — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

This study examines a specific segment of visual propaganda from the First World War, the caricatures of comic papers (German: Kladderadatsch; Austrian: Figaro, Kikieriki, Wiener Caricaturen and Die Muskete; Hungarian: Borsszem Jankó and Mátyás Diák). It focuses on the visual tools used by cartoonists to depict the enemy, how they employed visual propaganda, and whether this met the criteria of effective propaganda. By way of comparison, it also briefly discusses some elements of the self-image. The symbols of the First World War cartoons still closely followed 19th century trends: cartoonists commented on the events of the war by depicting and exaggerating ancient myths, biblical stories, women representing countries and men and animals representing nations. This study will attempt a systematic analysis of these motifs and symbols.

The language of Nigerian stand-up comedy

Emama Emmanuel Ogheneakpobor, Macaulay Mowarin — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Nigeria is complexly multilingual. Arising from this, Nigerian stand–up comedians employ a variety of linguistic strategies to communicate with the audience. This research investigates the peculiarities of language use in Nigerian stand-up comedy by analysing patterns of code choices in the comic performances of four comedians. Because the stand-up comedy industry is predominant in the Southern part of Nigeria, the comedians chosen for this study are representative of the three geopolitical zones of southern Nigeria. The analysis of the data indicates that (1) although Nigerian stand-up comedians primarily use Nigerian Pidgin (NP) they also employ language alternation and code-switch between NP, English, and a variety of indigenous languages. (2) NP is mainly used in the oral medium. Consequently, features of orality: repetition, parallel structures, anaphora, lexical cushioning, semantic extension, metaphor imagery, sentence fragments, and rhetorical devices, are other dominant features of Nigerian stand-up comedy.

Pragmatic acts of humour in family discourse in selected Maryam Apaokagi's comedy skits

Ayo Osisanwo, Lekan Atoloye, Seun Akintaro — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Humour plays a crucial role in family discourse as it fosters emotional connection, diffuses tension, and promotes open communication by providing a light-hearted and relatable atmosphere. Extant studies on family discourse have focused on (im)politeness strategies and pragmatic markers. However, scant attention has been paid to the communicative functions of humour in family discourse. This study was, therefore, designed to investigate humour in Maryam Apaokagi’s comedy skits, to identify the types, their pragmatic functions, and how they contribute to the overall meaning of the discourse. Jacob Mey’s Pragmatic Acts Theory served as the theoretical framework. Data for the study comprised eight selected Maryam Apaokagi’s comedy skits, produced in Nigeria. The selection is based on their humorous reflections of family issues and subjected to pragmatic analysis. Findings reveal that pragmatic acts exist in four interlocutory contexts among family members: couple (husband-wife) relationship; sibling(s)-relationship; mother-child relationship; and distant-family relationship. The contexts are indexed by eight pragmatic acts and functions which underpin expressions of humour: warning to threaten the husband, promising to raise hopes, requesting to make a mockery of the elder brother, ordering to deliberately disrespect the elder sister, questioning to persuade and apologise indirectly, scolding to condemn a child’s inappropriate actions, exaggerating to boast and show off, speculating to impress the mother and indict the child. Employed with wit to avoid serious conflicts, these humorous acts were largely foregrounded by conversational, psychological and physical acts, and underscored by such contextual factors as inference, reference, relevance, and shared situation knowledge to humorously depict how family issues are variously handled.

Humour based on flouting Grice’s conversational maxims in Ali Douagi’s "The Star-Gazer"

Sondes Hamdi — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Attardo (1993) argues that humour in conversation is partly created by flouting or violating Grice’s Conversational Maxims. A few studies have probed the validity of this claim by investigating humour in literary texts (Amianna & Putranti, 2017; Al-Zubeiry, 2020). However, to the best of our knowledge, not one study has probed this claim on the basis of a Tunisian literary text. Situated within the theoretical framework of Grice’s Cooperative Principle (henceforth CP), this qualitative and descriptive study tries to fill this gap, at least partially, by examining humour in dialogue in Ali Douagi’s short story “The Star-Gazer”. The text is based on an interactional dialogue between a man and a woman. The study’s results suggest that utterances in the dialogue in this story flout the Maxim of Quantity by giving too much or too little information to the hearer, and are found to flout the Maxim of Relation by stating things that are irrelevant to the topic of conversation. Utterances are found to flout the Maxim of Manner by stating things that are long, unclear and ambiguous, but no flouting of the Maxim of Quality is found. The humour in the text is found to be, at least partially, determined by flouting Grice’s Conversational Maxims. As such, the study corroborates the claim that humour in conversation is, partly, determined by flouting or violating Grice’s Conversational Maxims. It is argued that this work contributes to pragmatics, humour research and literary criticism.

Humorous elements in virtual onymic creations

Magdalena Kawęcka — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Informal use of anthroponymy is an integral part of the lexical resource of every language. The subject of this article is issues related to media onomastics (the review concerns terminology in internet forums). The aim of the article is the material exemplification of proper names, emphasising their formal features and ways of functioning on a specific communication plane. The task is to show certain tendencies and motivations in the field of creating virtual proper names in terms of their humorous value. In accordance with the adopted research perspective and the purpose of this article, when explaining the process of creating media onyms, reference was made to the mechanisms of name-forming derivation and the theory of humour, in particular the theory of incongruity. The specific communication channel creates new opportunities for language users and is an interesting research field for onomasts because, with the development of computer technology, the terminology began to go beyond the traditionally accepted standards.

Humour in Macanese Creole literature as an identity creator and consolidator

João Oliveira — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Macanese Creole survives in literary works of the late 19^th and 20^th centuries. This paper explores comic literature, which constitutes the bulk of the existing corpus in this language, and analyses how this genre relates to the creation and maintenance of a Macanese identity represented as distinct from surrounding historically and demographically significant identities. I resort to the incongruity theory and to some relevant knowledge resources (script opposition, situation, target, and language) of the General Theory of Verbal Humour (Attardo and Raskin, 1991; Attardo 2001; 2008) to analyse how comic literature in Macanese fabricates a fictionalised and performative memory connected to the way in which the Macanese wish to see themselves and be seen by others.

Wordplay-based humor

Kateryna Pilyarchuk — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Translating humour is comparable to working with poetry: one has to make sacrifices for the sake of equivalence. The task is further complicated when humour is anchored in multiple communication channels, such as the verbal and visual ones. The data of this article is complete Season 5 of The Simpsons animated sitcom and its Ukrainian, Russian, and German translation versions. Selected instances from the larger corpus of 526 humorous acts are discussed in light of Attardo’s (2001) General Theory of Verbal Humour and Zabalbeascoa’s (1993) concept of faithfulness in translation. They are then evaluated according to Chiaro’s (2008) typology for wordplay translation, which is expanded with concrete techniques. The findings suggest that the translator’s creativity may play a more important role than the proximity between the source and target languages.

Incorporating humour in the educational journey of young tourists

Fatemeh Fehrest, Jenny Panchal, Anja Pabel, Laurie Murphy — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Humour for children has received attention from various academic domains. However, the topic is a less explored area in the field of tourism. Addressing this research gap, the present study aims to firstly, identify the main themes of humour which are discussed in the academic literature about children, and secondly to outline how the identified themes can be applied to children’s learning experiences in tourism settings. The study employs content analysis to systematically review 190 relevant publications from multidisciplinary fields sourced from ScienceDirect and Scopus. Five overarching themes were identified across studies of various disciplines: social, parents, play, teachers, and characters. The emerging themes were interpreted through the lens of Vygotsky’s Socio-Cultural Theory to develop a conceptual framework for children’s learning experiences in tourism contexts. The paper enhances our understanding of the children’s literature in the context of tourism by providing both theoretical and practical insights. It specifically focuses on how humour can be utilised to enrich children's learning in the realm of tourism.

An investigation on the types of humour in English Language Teaching among Malaysian lecturers in higher education

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Humour in English Language Teaching (ELT) is known to be beneficial for both the educators and students. However, the literature addressing the types of humour used by Malaysian lecturers in higher education on this matter are yet to be explored. To address these issues, the study focusses to explore on the types of humour used in ELT by Malaysian lecturers in relation to the four types of humour: verbal, visual, auditory and figural humour. The research design is a qualitative study which implements two instruments; classroom observation and semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis will be used to analyse the data. The results from the study show that there are three types of humour commonly used: verbal humour, visual humour and auditory humour. The data analysis indicates that there are four factors which influence the types of humour used in the classroom: humour used for content delivery, humour to build rapport, humour to attract attention and humour to instil discipline.

Humour Integrated Language Learning (HILL)

Mohammad Ali Heidari-Shahreza — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

There has been a notable surge in the studies on humour in the language classroom in the past two or even three decades. This burgeoning literature seems to have already entered the threshold of a field of study. In this article, humour-integrated language learning (HILL) is put forth as an umbrella term for diverse attempts to employ pedagogical humour in language education. HILL principally refers to a diverse suite of methods, tools and techniques where humour serves as a means (and/or an end) in language learning. It is envisaged that this paper can a) open a window on (L2) pedagogical humour in its diverse manifestations, b) underscore the potentiality latent in L2 humour to inform and influence language learning, c) present a more insightful, coherent picture of the attempts to use humour in language learning, and d) outline further developments and future directions in humour-informed research and practice within language education. This article also aims to broaden the borders of HILL by making connections between pedagogical (L2) humour and other relevant notions and approaches such as playful learning, creative pedagogy, critical pedagogy, technology-enhanced language learning (TELL), etc.

Amoralism and jokes

Jan Josl — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Is it possible to joke about everything? Are there topics that we should not joke about? Is it possible to say which jokes are good and which are wrong or are jokes simply beyond good and evil? This issue seems to be more pressing in today’s multicultural world. In this study I reason contrary to amoralism that there are some jokes that can be morally judged. In order to present my argument, I use the type and token distinction as well as the results of debate between Bartel and Cremaldi and Brandon Cooke’s arguments in the favour of amoralism in art in general. I argue that even though amoralism is right in the case of joke types as well as in the case of some joke tokens not all jokes are fictive utterances. Therefore, the study concludes that it is reasonable to morally assess certain joke utterances.

On the use of scale distortion for visual humour

Clara Swaboda, Tristan Miller — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

In contrast to verbal humour, visual humour remains a relatively underdeveloped area of research. In this exploratory study, we investigate whether scale incongruity – i.e., discrepancy between the expected and actual experience of the size of an object – can serve as a source of humour in the visual modality. We adapt a pre-existing visual data set of mundane scenes by altering the size of an individual object in each scene and collecting humorousness ratings from human annotators on the original and scale-distorted versions. Our analysis of these annotations reveals that scenes with distorted objects are perceived to be significantly funnier than the original images.

Book review

Jan Chovanec — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Book review

Book review

‪Anastasiya Astapova — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Book review

Book review

Paolo Vanini — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Book review

Book review

Massih Zekavat — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Book review