#ForgiveUsForWeHaveSinned:

Conceptual integration theory and political Internet humour

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’:

humor and irony in Turkish political discourse after the Taksim Gezi Park Protests

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:

Transformations in Belarusian jokes about education

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:

Sociocultural characteristics of Montenegrins – the negative message in positive jokes

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.

Book review

Christopher Rea, The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China, Oakland (CA), University of California Press, 2015, pp 335 + xvi. ISBN: 9780520283848

Author(s): Christie Davies / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

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.

Give me a break:

Laughing with colleagues guards against ego depletion

Author(s): Tabea Scheel,Daniel Putz,Chris Kurzawa / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

Job demands, like time pressure, consume employees’ limited resources, which need to be restored through recovery in order to maintain psychological well-being and work performance. Employees in high-strain jobs need to replenish their emotional resources throughout the work day. This can take place during breaks if employees are able to psychologically detach from the work demands. Given the stress-relieving functions of humour, we hypothesised that affiliative humour during breaks would attenuate affective impairments related to time pressure and would decrease negative emotional spillover from breaks to subsequent work. We conducted moderated mediation analyses with bootstrapping based on a cross-sectional sample of 170 employees working at four retail stores. Time pressure was positively related to affective irritation, which in turn was related to more spillover of negative (and less spillover of positive) mood from breaks to work. Laughing with colleagues during breaks moderated the link between time pressure and affective irritation, such that this relation became nonsignificant when the frequency of joint laughter during breaks increased. Hence, pleasurable social break activities appear to be important for within-workday recovery. Employers should encourage their employees to take their breaks consistently and to socialise with likable colleagues, especially during periods of high work load.

Book review

Beverly J. Rasporich. 2015. Made-in-Canada Humour: Literary, Folk and Popular Culture. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hardbound. 300 pp. ISSN 2212-8999

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

Book review

Sombatpoonsiri, Janjira. 2015. Humour and Nonviolent Struggle in Serbia. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. xvi + 264pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9780815634072.

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

Book review

Zirker, Angelika and Winter-Froemel, Esme (Eds.) (2015). Wordplay and Metalinguistic/Metadiscursive Reflection: Authors, Contexts, Techniques, and Meta-Reflection. Berlin: De Gruyter, 311 pp.

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

Laughing across borders:

Intertextuality of internet memes

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:

Dame Edna, k. d. lang and Ivana Trump

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”.

Digital politics on Facebook during the Arab Spring in Morocco:

Adaptive strategies of satire relative to its political and cultural context

Author(s): Mohamed Mifdal / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2016

When the Arab Spring began, a growing number of Moroccan Facebookers flaunted their dissent in the face of the regime and used subversive satire to question its legitimacy or push for more freedoms. However, this expression in the form of satire waned after the situation became settled and the satirists had to adjust their satire to the new political reality. This article explores the adaptive strategies of satire in a repressive context during settled and unsettled periods. By scrutinizing satiric posts on Facebook for over four years, I argue that satire, as critique and resistance, adjusts itself to the context, either by taking advantage of increased political space and freedoms or by resorting to indirection, self-censorship or tactical play with power. In both instances, the satiric performance is bound to stay within consensual cultural and political norms even when it is most subversive as these norms profoundly shape its creation and public reception.

Construction of gender identities via satire:

The case of Juvenal

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

Brzozowska, D., Chłopicki, W. (eds). (2012). Polish Humour. Humour and Culture 2. Kraków: Tertium. 681 pp.

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

Humour as resistance:

Disaster humour in post-9/11 United States

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.

Book review

Schmidt, S. (2014). Seriously Funny: Mexican Political Jokes as Social Resistance. Translated by Schmidt, A. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. 296 pp.

Author(s): Efharis Mascha / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2014

Logic and reasoning in jokes

Author(s): Graeme Ritchie / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2014

It has often been remarked that jokes involve some form of distorted logic, but the details ofthis joke logic have not been fully explored. We offer a contribution to the methodology of thisexploration by clarifying some abstract theoretical distinctions. Firstly, we separate twocrucially different notions of “reasoning” which are relevant to joke comprehension: internallogic and audience inference. Internal logic is a system of logical rules, in the traditionalsense, which define relationships within the fictional world of the joke, particularly therelation of consequence. Audience inference is a dynamic process which the recipient of ajoke undertakes in order to make sense of it. Previous writings on the topic of logic in jokesseem to conflate these two very different concepts. Another distinction which is sometimesoverlooked is between internal logic and other joke techniques with different functions, suchas strategies for presenting information. We also consider whether the logic of jokes requiresa qualitatively different inference mechanism from that of conventional logic, concluding thatthere is not yet any evidence to suggest this. Finally, we reflect on how we might go on toaddress the open question of what is possible as pseudo-logic within a joke.