Book review
Gini, Al (2017). The Importance of Being Funny: Why We Need More Jokes in Our Lives. Lanham, Maryland: Rowan and Littlefield. 141 pp.
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Gini, Al (2017). The Importance of Being Funny: Why We Need More Jokes in Our Lives. Lanham, Maryland: Rowan and Littlefield. 141 pp.
More...synthesising humour and cyberparanoia in portrayals of artificial intelligence in Welcome to Night Vale
This article addresses the synthesis of humour and paranoia in portrayals of artificial intelligence (AI) in the popular American podcast Welcome to Night Vale (2012-). It argues that contrary to the Relief Theory, fusing humour and cyber-paranoia does not help release the tension (anxious energy) generated within the narrative. Rather, the synthesis of humour and paranoia maintains suspense by creating within the narratives moments of ambiguity with the potential to leave the reader or audience caught between fear and laughter after the story ends.
More...A common denominator for three strains of humour
Incongruity theories maintain that the core of humour is in interplay between meanings. Two incompatible meanings – of situations, verbal utterances or actions – are juxtaposed, one replacing the other or colliding with it. In this paper, I suggest that often the game is not played between two meanings, but between meaning and its carrier. I provide as examples two families of jokes and one general type of humour sharing this mechanism. One of the two families comprises jokes of self-reference, and the other consists of jokes based on deflation of symbols, which means using them in a concrete sense. The general type of humour is the subject of Bergson’s 1900 theory of the comic, mechanical behaviour where flexible human reaction is expected. The mechanism common to all three is a shift of weight from meaning to its carrier. This mechanism is then traced also in other jokes, suggesting possible universality.
More...The potential of informative comedy music as supplementary teaching material
The comedic arts have provided opportunities for humourists to spread information to audiences, sometimes intentionally and other times as a side effect while trying to create laughter. Educators have also found success incorporating comedy into the classroom with humorous activities. While research regarding comedy as a tool to spread information or educate audiences has focused primarily on literature, broadcast media, and film, the area of informative comedy implemented through music remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, the researcher defines ‘informative comedy’ and takes a critical literacy approach analysing song samples of comedy musician “Weird Al” Yankovic—one of the notable comedic music artists in the 20th and 21st centuries—and discusses how his music could be used in a classroom setting. While comedy such as Yankovic’s is not designed to be an educational tool, the researcher suggests that his songs could be used as supplementary materials in the classroom to reinforce concepts specifically regarding cultural issues through commentary as well as lessons in science and grammar. A central aspect of this exploratory paper involves Yankovic’s mix of comedy and informative content focused on culture in the United States, using the popular music genre to convey ideas in ways that may be more palatable for wider audiences and that could be used to assist classroom instruction.
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In my research paper I examine the first two election campaigns in Hungary following the Austro-Hungarian Compromise (1867). In particular, I analyse the ways the campaigns employed tools of humour in popular press products of the time, such as caricatures and texts in humour magazines (Ludas Matyi [‘Mattie the Goose-Boy’], Az Üstökös [‘The Comet’], Borsszem Jankó [‘Johnny Peppercorn’]), which were considered effective political weapons by contemporaries. After a history-oriented introduction devoted to illustrating the muchdebated content of the Compromise, the election system and the historical significance of the analysed papers, I categorize caricatures and the humorous or satirical texts related to the election of parliamentarians along the lines of the following aspects: (1) attacks against specific people, (2) standing up against the principles and political symbols of the opponent, (3) listing well-known, everyday anti-theses, (4) standing up against the press of the opponent, (5) judgment of the role of the Jewish, (6) war metaphors, (7) critique of the campaign methods of the opponent. My goal is to reveal what tools were used to ridicule political opponents, how parties were described to (potential) voters, how the parties tried to promote voting and convince people of their points of view. The analysed texts clearly depict the division of the Hungarian society (either supporting or rejecting the Compromise), and also document that the political tones became coarser and coarser, even in this humorous genre. During campaigns, the topic of elections took over the humour magazines, which serves as evidence for the intensity of public interest.
More...Genuine vs. functional ethnic jokе scripts
Most ethnic humour that has been studied so far consists of jokes which use ethnically nonspecific qualities such as stupidity or canniness in order to ridicule an ethnic group and thus to preserve and perpetuate ethnically based social hierarchies in western industrial societies. In light of this dominant logic in ethnic humour theory, the objective of this study is to problematize the relation of such non-ethnic qualities and the notion of ethnic identity, as well as their relation to a specific type of society, in an attempt to convincingly argue in favour of the need to differentiate between ‘ethnically-empty’ functional joke scripts and genuine ethnic joke scripts that are related to the ethnic identity of the target. In so doing, I extend ethnic humour theory by introducing and testing the notion of genuine ethnic joke scripts in order to motivate future research that will tackle other potential ethnic humour idiosyncrasies. Toward this end, I have collected and analysed joke material (N=369) coming from Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Albania, societies with histories and relations very different that those in the western industrial societies. Additionally, the study incorporates two questionnaires with members of the two largest ethnicities in the Republic of Macedonia, Macedonians and Albanians, to ascertain the relation between the genuine ethnic humour and ethnic identity.
More...Farjami, Mahmud (2017). Iranian Political Satirists: Experience and Motivation in the Contemporary Era. Topics in Humour Research 5. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
More...Not an easy matter
The article focuses on the interpretation of political cartoons and the means of expression a cartoonist uses to convey a message: visual metaphors, visual metonymies as well as metaphors inferred from the image and/or text. The metaphors and visual metonymies in the cartoons are analyzed from the point of view of Conceptual Metaphor and Metonymy Theory. In the analysis, visual and inferential metaphors are viewed as incongruities; there are also incongruities as a result of the interaction between image, title and/or caption. Political cartoons can have more than one focal (visual) incongruity that enables the introduction of a Logical Mechanism from the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) to (partially) resolve the incongruity/ies. Visual metonymies and images can also function as enablers of a Logical Mechanism. Image and/or text can contrast with or reinforce a Logical Mechanism. Additionally, visual metaphors and metonymies function as contextualization indexes in the interpretation of the cartoons. Humour is the means to get the cartoonist’s message across to the viewer/reader and not an end in itself.
More...Make comedy matter: Ernst Cassirer on the politics and morality of humour
Many of Ernst Cassirer’s later works are concerned with the dangers of political myth. His analysis speaks at length about the role of philosophy during the rise of the Third Reich, and Cassirer argues that philosophers failed to combat the dominant ideology. Today, philosophers struggle to explain their relevance to greater public and governmental powers that see no intrinsic value. Given the current political situation in the US, we find ourselves at a crossroads as philosophers. We can either retreat and remain within the comforts of academia, or we can take up arms against dangerous and divisive political forces. If we take Cassirer’s prescriptions seriously, we must choose the latter. Fortunately, philosophy has not disappeared from public consciousness completely. An emerging theme in contemporary cultural studies is the exploration of connections between humour and philosophy. I argue we ought to take advantage of the status of the comedian as public philosopher, and for philosophers to take seriously the political power of comedians. To do this responsibly, I analyse a portion of Cassirer’s work that has been widely ignored in scholarship – his understanding of the politics and morality of humour. By analysing these passages in relation to Cassirer’s later works, we are given the tools to understand the power of humour in political discourse, as well as the responsibility of that power. I argue that “joking responsibly”, for Cassirer, means to reveal the motives and values which underlie sophistry, particularly the sort which lends itself to political manipulation.
More...Sørensen, Majken (2016). Humour in Political Activism: Creative Nonviolent Resistance. Palgrave Macmillan.
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In the process of digitalization and the change of education in almost digital, the professional training of teachers in higher schools is of particular relevance, determined with social and pedagogical importance. This includes a set of a number of individual competences that educators need to possess and develop. The changes in the technologies and economic situation of Bulgaria set new requirements in terms of the skills and individual competencies of the teachers. The purpose of modern higher education is to take into account the current and future needs of the student, as well as to prepare a multi developed person capable of social adaptation in society for the beginning of professional realization and self-improvement. The main objective of this development is to develop a model of the individual competencies of higher education teachers in the digitalization process. The main research methods used in the development are contingent analysis, method of analysis and synthesis, intuitive and systematic approach.
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The article describes online learning against the background of theCOVID-19 pandemic in the Bulgarian context of higher education and the challenges faced by university professors during this period and examines their readiness for online learning. The strengths and weaknesses of online learning are considered, as well as the opportunities of higher education to respond to educational problems arising from the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The article highlights the problem of interaction of the ancient Egyptian laughter culture with the category of sacred. A person is confronted with the fact that the examples in question can often be phenomena of a different order, and the use of terms such as “carnival” or even “religion,” “temple” or “priest” in relation to ancient Egypt requires an additional explanation. We find “funny” images on the walls of tombsand in the temples, where the Egyptians practiced their cult. In the Ramesside period (1292-1069 BC), a huge layer of the culture of laughter penetrated the written tradition in a way that Mikhail Bakhtin called the carnivalization of literature. Incredible events are described in stories and fairy tales in a burlesque, grotesque form, and great gods are exposed as fools. Applying the Bakhtinian paradigm to the material of the Middle and New Kingdom allows to reveal the ambivalent character of the Ancient Egyptian laughter: the Egyptians could joke on the divine and remain deeply religious.
More...epic humour and the means of its apology in antique allegorism and symbolism
Since the very beginning of its proliferation, the Homeric epic has been subject to various ways of interpretation and modes of understanding. Particular attention has been paid to those passages from Homeric poems in which the gods commit obscene, absurd, or comical actions. In the opinion of critics of Iliad and Odyssey, such myths were not worthy of the appropriate faith in the Greek gods. Therefore, my article focuses on the third, “comical” group of these Homeric grey areas, and deals with the following questions: how and why did Homer’s comical passages move from a discourse of the ridiculous and the funny to a discourse of the serious by means of philosophical interpretation over the centuries? I will try to uncover the general principles and conditions of that hermeneutical mechanism which made it possible to translate Homer’s comical plots from the language of Olympic “domestic” nonsense into the language of the most important physical, ethical, and metaphysical truths. To achieve this task, my article will conditionally distinguish two ways of transition from the comical to the serious: the first, which was carried out in ancient allegorism, was to directly produce a translation, and to declare that the “superficial” meaning of the myth is false, and its deep level is true. The second way –ancient symbolism –was to turn the comical into the serious through the immediate translation of comical myths into the religious discourse of the sacred, which did not imply a stark contrast between the comical and the serious but, on the contrary, harmonized them.
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This article arose from the scandal which broke out in Russia in 2018, when Ulyanovsk cadets made an amateur video clip parodying the Benny Benassi’s musical video (2003). Soon, this video had more than a million views. But official Russian media sharply reproached the cadets’ performance, and even Russian authorities discussed the video. The Russian Internet community issued a lot of videos in support of the cadets. The reaction of Russian media on the cadets’ parody was mainly strong and not always adequate.I am interested in the reasons behind the fear of parody because,in my opinion, the official discourse had nothing to fear. My analysis is based on the Russian theories of parody and the medieval cultural experience. Can parody be dangerous? Why did the official media overreact?
More...Evidence from Internet memes
This study aimed to test a hypothesis about the correlation between levels of gelotophobia, gelotophilia, and katagelasticism and understanding of Internet memes as a specific form of humour. Participants were 45 native speakers of Russian (aged 18 –30; 73,3 % female). The levels of Internet memes understanding were assessed independently by two judges with the use of criteria based on the results of a series of semi-structured in-depth interviews. Gelotophobia, gelotophilia, and katagelasticism were assessed with PhoPhiKat <30> questionnaire. J. Raven’s “Standard Progressive Matrices” test was used to control the level of psychometric intelligence. Concordance of judges’ scores for the understanding of memes was assessed with Kendall’s W and ranged from 0.71 to 0.84. Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient was used to test the main hypothesis. We found no correlation between the scores for gelotophobia, gelotophilia, and katagelasticism and understanding of Internet memes. Presumably, the type of attitude towards humour does not play a significant role in the understanding of comical texts. The qualitative content analysis of the interview protocols revealed some specific features of cognitive mechanisms of Internet memes understanding. Namely, successful participants with higher levels of understanding of Internet memes reflected more on their thinking process than those with lower levels of understanding of Internet memes, easily switched from an abstract level of reasoning to a concrete one, and tended to consistently develop detailed mental representations of the memes.
More...Scheel, Tabea & Gockel, Christine (2017) Humour at Work in Teams, Leadership, Negotiations, Learning and Health. Cham: Springer.
More...A new look on an old tradition in Belarus and Estonia
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.
More...Political jokes and political (mis)trust in crisis-ridden Greece
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.
More...Speech acts in standup comedy
In How to Do Things with Words (1962), the philosopher John Austin claimed that we use words to do things in the world, not merely to express a state of affairs. This proposal introduced speech acts, and essentially initiated the study of linguistic pragmatics. Speech acts in everyday communication include persuading, apologizing, criticizing, humiliating, complimenting and a host of other intended behaviours. Austin accentuated the idea of speaker intention, on one hand, and hearer’s response to that intention if successfully conveyed, on the other. We consider some of the speech acts used in the work of selected standup comedians to analyse the way they determine the relationship of performer and audience. We argue that there is a reciprocal relationship between the licensing of certain speech acts in standup comedy, and the success of these speech acts in shaping the social lives of the audience. We show that this relationship is at the forefront of standup comedy’s social impact and that it can generate heightened consciousness of the social and political environment of the time. Finally, we consider the question of whether socially critical standup can have any noticeable effect on the attitudes or behaviour of both live and digitally mediated audiences.
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