Polish highlander jokes and their targets

Author(s): Władysław Chłopicki,Dorota Brzozowska / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2017

The aim of the paper is to identify the characteristic features of jokes about Polish highlanders and analyse them to isolate the comic script of a highlander. This group of jokes is treated as a good illustration of Christie Davies’s ethnic jokes theory concerning canny versus stupid and centre versus periphery oppositions, as well as mind over matter. A particular type of reasoning and the use of regional dialect are distinctive features of the joke targets that make it possible to perceive these jokes as a culturally specific phenomenon. The head shepherd (called baca) is the key character of the cycle. He is a very down-to-earth person, who is proud of his practical wisdom and has a very relaxed attitude to life—a wise fool in some jokes, thus even resembling Good Soldier Švejk in some respects. His lifestyle is usually contrasted with that of ceper—a town dweller, coming to the highlands as a tourist—treated as a kind of intruder who asks stupid questions and does not know how to appreciate life and what really matters in it. The jokes about highlanders are analysed within the paradigm of General Theory of Verbal Humour, and particularly its reasoning and reversal Logical Mechanisms. Even though Christie Davies treated the Logical Mechanism with some scepticism, claiming it is of no use in the GTVH (Davies 2004, 2011b), he would not probably mind the logic of highlanders’ utterances and behaviour being analysed. We believe he may even have enjoyed that.

Globalisation and ethnic jokes:

Author(s): Liisi Laineste,Anastasiya Fiadotava / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2017

Christie Davies, the renowned humour researcher and a passionate propagator of the comparative method in studying jokes, stressed the necessity of establishing a relationship between two sets of social facts: the jokes themselves on the one hand, and the social structure or cultural traditions wherein they disseminate on the other (Davies 2002: 6). He also inspired others to examine the differences and similarities in the patterns of jokes between different nations, social circumstances and eras. By doing this and building falsifiable models and generalisations of joking relationships, he changed the way we look at and analyse ethnic jokes.This study returns to earlier findings of Estonian (Laineste 2005, 2009) and Belarusian (Astapova 2015; Zhvaleuskaya 2013, 2015) ethnic jokes and takes a look at new trends in fresh data. Starting with the jokes from the end of the 19th century and ending with the most recent jokes, memes and other humorous items shared over the Internet, the paper will give an overview of how social reality interacts with the rules of target choice, above all describing the effect of globalisation on jokelore.

“This is not a political party, this is Facebook!”:

Author(s): Villy Tsakona / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2017

The present study attempts to combine Raskin’s (1985) and Davies’ (2011) methodological approaches to political jokes to investigate Greek political jokes targeting politicians and circulated during the first four years of the Greek crisis. The proposed analysis identifies, on the one hand, what Greek people perceive as politicians’ main incongruities, namely their flaws that prevent them from fulfilling their roles ‘appropriately’. On the other hand, the particularities of the sociopolitical context in Greece and, most importantly, the pervasive lack of political trust among Greeks allow for an interpretation of the jokes under scrutiny as expressions of disillusionment and disappointment with politicians and the political system in general, and as manifestations of mild, playful aggression towards them. The findings of the study reveal that the accusations raised in the jokes against politicians capture and reproduce quite accurately most of the aspects and causes of political mistrust in Greece.

#ForgiveUsForWeHaveSinned:

Author(s): Nihada Delibegović Džanić,Sanja Berberović / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

The aim of the paper is to uncover the extent to which different forms of political Internet humour can criticise current political affairs in a developing democracy such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. Specifically, applying a cognitive linguistic theory of meaning construction, namely conceptual integration theory, the paper analyses the construction of meaning of humorous Internet forms, such as memes, demotivational posters, hashtag posts, and memetic photographs, representing innovative ways of providing political commentaries on current political affairs. The meaning of political humour is constructed in conceptual blending as a basic cognitive mechanism. As it is claimed (Coulson & Pascual 2006, Coulson & Oakley 2006, Coulson 2006, Oakley & Coulson 2008) that blending can be used as a rhetorical tool influencing the audience to change the reality and even act upon it, the analysis of the construction of meaning of political humour as products of conceptual integration can reveal hidden ideologies in political discourse.

‘The new but lonely voice against the authoritarianism’:

Author(s): Gunes Aksan / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

This study investigates the diffusion of a new political language based on humour and irony into Turkish politics. The Taksim Gezi Park Protests, in addition to introducing a new subject to Turkish politics, led to a new language that places humour at the centre. The Government’s neoliberal and authoritarian policies and tight control over traditional media shaped the resistance to be humoristic and indirect. People used alternative media to voice their dissent, mainly in the form of social media messages in addition to street performances, graffiti, videos and murals. This new wave of humour, which I prefer to call the “public square humour” emphasised creativity, improvisation and pluralism via the usage of traditional conversational humour mechanisms of the Turkish folk narratives. I investigate the effect of this new wave of humour on the professional politicians over the course of following years after the protests in an increasingly authoritarian political climate. I analyse the Twitter messages of four major party leaders and politicians who are active in Twitter, both qualitatively and quantitatively. With the methods of the discourse analysis I identify the political parties that embrace the new language of the political opposition. Finally, I conclude that Demirtas embraces the public square humour better and makes use of it to underline the transformation of HDP (People’s Democratic Party) from a defendant of ethnic politics to the representative of the new voice of Turkish political opposition.

School and the value of knowledge:

Author(s): Anastasiya Fiadotova / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

Over the past century Belarus has experienced a dramatic increase in educational level. Obtaining secondary education is now considered normal, getting a university degree is prestigious. However, such an attitude is relatively new to Belarusian society. Joke texts that date back to the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century indicate that formal education was widely considered useless, as it did not equip children with skills they needed in real life. Formal education was often contrasted with learning necessary skills at home, invariably in favour of the latter. In the Soviet era, formal education was made compulsory and suddenly became an integral part of people’s lives, but it still lacked a link with children’s future careers. Parents could not always appreciate the benefits of education, but had to send their children to school anyway. The clash between the “old” attitude and the “new” reality produced jokes. Jokes that have emerged in the post-Soviet era reflect the omnipresence of education in contemporary Belarusian society. Some school jokes point to a greater understanding of the value of knowledge in modern children―yet it is often not the formal knowledge they are expected to get in school. Overall, school in jokes has become a setting where issues prominent in society at large come to the fore, even if this goes against the will of the educators.

Commentary piece:

Author(s): Edyta Koncewicz-Dziduch / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

Ethnic jokes are a form of comical narration extremely widespread throughout the social life of various nations. They generally centre on neighbouring nations and reveal a positive assessment of one's own ethnic group, usually negatively evaluating other nations. The subject of the analysis is jokes about Montenegrins, who are known in the Balkans for their laziness and slow lifestyle. However, they are able to transform this unfair stereotype into an advantage, a cultural identifier, which is reflected in popular culture, numerous jokes and tourist promotion of the country.

A multimodal analysis of conventional humorous structures on sensitive topics within rural communities in Romania

Author(s): Violeta Rus / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

When it comes to humour, performing humorous structures means not only producing amusement, but also implies the ability of perceiving the comical, ludicrous or absurd in human life. In this paper, I consider humour as a way in which people in the rural community express themselves freely, without boundaries or constraints. Therefore, the interest of the present article is to identify and analyse sensitive humorous topics in Romanian rural communities. In conducting the study, the following steps were taken: I videotaped people from the Upper Valley of the river Mureș (selected with sociolinguistic criteria such as gender, age, occupation), I transcribed the audio-video records and I divided the data into thematic categories: jokes, traditional shouts and funeral songs or dirges with humorous structures. Starting from these methodological steps, I attempt to perform a multimodal analysis, which consists of analysing both the text and the audio-video record. In the first part of my research, the analysis of the text focuses on specific structures of conventional humour performed in jokes, traditional shouts and dirges by the main theories of humour: superiority, release and incongruity theories of humour. In analysing the audio-video stimuli, I dwell upon identifying the degree of influence of the psycho-sociolinguistic parameters (gender, occupation and context) on the performance of humour, concentrating on markers of humour such as intonation and visual cues. After analysing the humorous sensitive topics in Romanian rural communities through a multimodal perspective, my conclusion is that speakers combine linguistic and non-linguistic elements in order to make a text humorous.

Humour, food and fashion:

Author(s): Arie Sover,Orna Ben-Meir / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

This article is the first study that researches the combination of three components: humour, food and fashion. It is based on an analysis of three unique fashion shows whose designer is the American Jeremy Scott; two under his brand, and the third as an art director for the Italian brand Moschino. The three shows connect these three components, while presenting the culmination of a food-humour theme in contemporary fashion, which had started with Moschino’s brand founder, Franco Moschino, in the nineties. Combining food and fashion is relevant in contemporary culture as it compares consumption of fast food to that of fast fashion. The link between laughter and food is ancient. A few days after birth, there are buds of a smile on a baby’s face, expressing its satisfaction with food. Smiles and even laughter often occur throughout a person’s life in the context of delicious food. The uniqueness of the above-mentioned fashion shows is not humour in itself, but rather its combination with food and fashion, the two seemingly different. The combination of these three components creates a cognitive challenge for the fashion spectators. We thus argue that this threesome constitutes an important, creative breakthrough in fashion. One of humour’s important functions is to challenge social, cultural and aesthetic norms. As thus it has been infiltrated into fashion shows since the 1980s, as a norm-breaker, but also as a marketing strategy. This article discusses the cultural function of food and humour in fashion shows, from a cultural semiotic methodology.

Book review

Author(s): Ioana Ciurezu / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

Book review

Author(s): Costas Canakis / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

Book review

Author(s): Carla Canestrari / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

Laughing across borders:

Author(s): Liisi Laineste,Piret Voolaid / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2016

Internet humour flourishes on social network sites, special humour-dedicated sites and on web pages focusing on edutainment or infotainment. Its increasing pervasiveness has to do with the positive functions that humour is nowadays believed to carry – its bonding, affiliative and generally beneficial qualities. Internet humour, like other forms of cultural communication in this medium, passes along from person to person, and may scale (quickly or gradually, depending on the comic potential and other, sometimes rather elusive characteristics) into a shared social phenomenon, giving an insight into the preferences and ideas of the people who actively create and use it. The present research is primarily carried by the question of how the carriers of Internet humour, that is, memes and virals, travel across borders, to a smaller or greater degree being modified and adapted to a particular language and culture in the process. The intertextuality emerging as a result of adapting humorous texts is a perfect example of the inner workings of contemporary globalising cultural communication. Having analysed a corpus of 100 top-rated memes and virals from humour-dedicated web sites popular among Estonian users, we discuss how humour creates intertextual references that rely partly on the cultural memory of that particular (i.e. Estonian-language) community, and partly on global (primarily English- and Russian-language) cultural influences, thus producing hybrid cultural texts. The more interpretations are accessible for the audience (cf. polysemy Shabtai-Boxman & Shifman 2014), the more popular the text becomes, whereas the range of interpretations depends on the openness of the cultural item to further modification.

Gender bender agenda:

Author(s): Adrian Hale / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2016

This paper asserts that we accept or reject humorous texts discursively on the basis of what we perceive as authorial agendas. This “authorial agenda spotting” is activated by discursive “triggers”, which identify, filter, reject, endorse, or otherwise subjectively interpret the discourse of a textual author. This study was prompted by observing the negative reception of a humorous text by a predominantly Muslim postgraduate student cohort who signalled cultural identity and social cohesion by rejecting a text which subverted gender performance according to their discursive expectations. The study sought to compare this triggered effect with the reception of the same text by a distinctly pre-disposed audience comprised of same-sex-attracted bloggers. This reception in turn was contrasted with the reception of the text by mainstream media reviewers. The text itself seems to spark these discursive triggers in all three audiences. It is taken from “The Dame Edna Treatment” (2007), a TV-media entertainment programme, which features the celebrity guests k. d. lang and Ivana Trump being “interviewed” by the Australian comedian Barry Humphries in character as “Dame Edna”.

Commentary piece

Author(s): Mark Weeks / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2016

Very little has been published on the subject of solitary laughter. Yet it appears quite possible that it is experienced by a large majority of people. A pilot study I have recently undertaken involving participants of numerous nationalities, as well as searches through literature and across the Internet, suggest that solitary laughter, while not as common as social instances of laughing, is a widespread human behaviour. It is even accorded special value by some. Seeking to encourage further research into the subject, this article discusses research and examines the forces that have militated against a more thorough research engagement with solitary laughter. It argues that a primary factor may be a pervasive assumption among influential scholars that laughter is an essentially social phenomenon and that laughing in solitude may be explained away as “vicarious” or “pseudo” socialising. Doubt is cast here upon that assumption. It is argued that while the reductionism at work in the extremely broad application of a social hypothesis may be theoretically attractive, it belies the diverse, evolving operations of both laughter and humour; this may be unnecessarily, if unwittingly, restricting the field of enquiry. Solitary laughter is a significant, complex behaviour and worthy of attention in its own right.

Construction of gender identities via satire:

Author(s): Massih Zekavat,Farideh Pourgiv / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2015

Many studies underscore the societal aspects of satire, yet its role in the construction of social subjects’ identities has been mostly ignored. Since satire has been ubiquitous in various cultures and epochs, and identity is also among the primary contemporary concerns in our globalised and multicultural world, the study of the role of satire in the construction of social subjects’ identities can prove to be significantly rewarding. Accordingly, this article aims to investigate how satire can contribute to the construction of gender identity in social subjects. It is proposed that opposition/otherness/difference is the common denominator between satire and gender identity. First, different theories of humour are surveyed to show that opposition is integral to satire. Then, it is conveyed that otherness and opposition are similarly essential in the construction of gender identity in both men and women. As opposition can be a common denominator on the axis of sex, satire can be among the determinants of gender identity construction. In the end, Juvenal’s Satire VI is explicated to further illustrate the theoretical argumentation. It is concluded that the opposition essential to satire can coalesce with the integral otherness in gender identity, hence to contribute to its construction.

Book review

Author(s): Szymon Wach,Piotr P. Chruszczewski / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2015

Humour as resistance:

Author(s): Aju Basil James / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2014

This paper studies the evolution of political humour in media in the United States after 9/11. Previous research has identified patterns in the evolution of jokes on the Internet but a study of patterns of humour in mainstream media remain scarce. This paper looks at late night television shows and cartoon strips in post-9/11 United States, and tries to plot a pattern in their evolution. Television programs such as The Daily Show or cartoon strips such as The Boondocks and Get Your War On have become major sources of political news, especially for the younger section of the population. These media constitute and react to the business of political news in the United States. This paper attempts to explore what political consciousness is constructed through humour in these media. Any pattern that may emerge out of this study is also reflective of humour’s engagement with politics, especially in a time in which irony was declared to be dead. A comparison of humour on these different fora throws some light on how the United States reacted to 9/11 through humour as well as what material, political or psychological forces drive humour on different kinds of media.

Television humour and preferred meanings in the Catalan identity debate

Author(s): Luisa Martínez-García / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2014

This article analyses a sports-related satirical-parody television series as a generator of preferred meanings that may be associated with an ideological context of a stateless nation such as Catalonia, where the symbolic aspect is fundamental to the imaginary-building process. In this case, the research focuses on identifying whether representations of difference exist in the humorous content of the television series and, if they do, how they are represented and whether they propose imaginary boundaries. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis in a satirical-parody television series about sports-related news, this study shows that humour generates symbolic boundaries between two spaces. While one of the spaces is in close proximity to the context in which the series is produced and broadcast –Catalonia–, the other encompasses the rest of Spain. In the same direction, humorous audiovisual text contains preferred and also dominant meanings, and these are expressed by how characters valuate other characters, situations, contexts, etc. The nature of the valuations proposes meanings that express the idea of a positive “us” and a negative “them”. Television humour acts as a cultural agent that proposes preferred meanings to the subject, and such meanings become part of the subject’s identity process

Humour and enjoyment reducers in cinema and theatre comedy

Author(s): Arie Sover / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2014

In this research, I am trying to define a new concept which I shall call Enjoyment Reducer, referring to verbal or visual content, incorporated into comic situations, which may offend or disturb the viewer’s enjoyment. There are comic situations that are only partially enjoyable and, at times, even cause embarrassment to the point of adversely affecting our enjoyment. These types of comic situations include what I term Enjoyment Reducers since they operate contrary to the function for which the comic situations were intended, which is to cause the viewer enjoyment. It should be noted that practically every comic situation includes Enjoyment Reducers because they are based on incongruities which disrupt our normal order or values. The fact that we laugh at humorous situations means that their enjoyable effect is stronger than the Enjoyment Reducers’ effect. Additionally, Enjoyment Reducers are both culture-dependent and contingent upon the viewer’s personality traits. Therefore, what one person perceives as an Enjoyment Reducer might be understood differently by another. The research findings reveal various types of Enjoyment Reducers that relate to human values, prohibitions and taboos. In addition, I will refer to another concept that is quite known, Enjoyment Enhancers, which might shed light on the main focus of the present research, which is Enjoyment Reducers. This research focuses mainly on comedy film, although the results are also relevant to theatre and all types of comic shows.