There have been many empirical studies on humor styles and humor comprehension and appreciation, but relatively few have directly addressed the relationship between these two topics of humor ...research, especially studies using a typological approach for humor styles. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine how humor styles are associated with humor comprehension and appreciation using a typological approach. The present study collected the responses of humor styles questionnaires that included ratings of comprehension and funniness of humorous pictures for 962 high school students in Taiwan. The cluster analysis result indicated that there were four humor types of participants: general humor endorsers, humor deniers, positive humor endorsers, and negative humor endorsers. The positive humor endorsers could understand the content of humor pictures better than other types of participants. The general humor endorsers found the humor pictures much funnier than the humor deniers. These findings indicate that humor styles have different associations with humor comprehension and humor appreciation.
Humor is a universal phenomenon but is also culturally tinted. In this article, we reviewed the existing research that investigates how culture impacts individuals' humor perception and usage as well ...as humor's implications for psychological well-being. Previous research has substantiated evidence that Easterners do not hold as positive an attitude toward humor as their Western counterparts do. This perception makes Easterners less likely to use humor as a coping strategy in comparison with Westerners. Despite this difference, Westerners and Easterners have similar patterns in the relationship between their humor and psychological well-being index, though the strength of the relationship varies across cultures. Implications and potential future research avenues discussed.
Humor styles are important in facilitating social relationships. Following humor styles theory, this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study is the first to use "one-liner" humor to ...investigate the neural correlates involved in appreciating humor styles that differ in terms of target (self or other) and motivation (benign or detrimental). Interestingly, we observed greater activation in response to humor that facilitates relationships with others (self-defeating and affiliative humor) than to humor that enhances the self (self-enhancing and aggressive humor). Self-defeating humor may play an important role in Chinese culture in facilitating social relationships at one's own expense. Psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis revealed temporal pole (TP)-frontal functional connectivity underlying the appreciation of self-directed humor, and temporo-parietal junction (TPJ)-frontal connectivity underlying the appreciation of other-directed humor. Amygdala-frontal coupling was observed during the appreciation of detrimental humor, while nucleus accumbens (NAc)-temporal coupling and midbrain-frontal coupling appear to play a role in the affective experience of amusement in response to benign humor. This study contributes to our understanding of the neural correlates of appreciating different humor styles, including humor that facilitates social relationships.
This book traces the development of religious comedy and leverages that history to justify today’s uses of religious humor in all of its manifestations, including irreverent jokes. It argues that ...regulating humor is futile and counterproductive, illustrating this point with a host of comedic examples. Humor is a powerful rhetorical tool for those who advocate and for those who satirize religious ideals.
The book presents a compelling argument about the centrality of humor to the story of Western Christianity’s cultural and artistic development since the Middle Ages, taking a multi-disciplinary approach that combines literary criticism, religious studies, philosophy, theology, and social science. After laying out the conceptual framework in Part 1, Part 2 analyzes key works of religious comedy across the ages from Dante to the present, and it samples the breadth of contemporary religious humor from Brad Stine to Robin Williams, and from Monty Python to South Park. Using critical, historical, and conceptual lenses, the book exposes and overturns past attempts by church authorities, scholars, and commentators to limit and control laughter based on religious, ideological, or moral criteria.
This is a unique look into the role of humor and comedy around religion. It will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Humor Studies, and the Sociology of Religion.
Authoritarian Laughter
explores the political history of the satire and humor
magazine Broom published in Soviet Lithuania. Artists,
writers, and journalists were required to create state-sponsored
...Soviet humor and serve the Communist Party after Lithuania was
incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940. Neringa Klumbytė
investigates official attempts to shape citizens into Soviet
subjects and engage them through a culture of popular humor.
Broom was multidirectional-it both facilitated
Communist Party agendas and expressed opposition toward the Soviet
regime. Official satire and humor in Soviet Lithuania increasingly
created dystopian visions of Soviet modernity and were a forum for
critical ideas and nationalist sentiments that were mobilized in
anti-Soviet revolutionary laughter in the late 1980s and early
1990s.
Authoritarian Laughter illustrates that Soviet Western
peripheries were unstable and their governance was limited. While
authoritarian states engage in a statecraft of the everyday and
seek to engineer intimate lives, authoritarianism is defied not
only in revolutions, but in the many stories people tell each other
about themselves in jokes, cartoons, and satires.
Since its inception in the early 1830s, southern frontier humor (also known as the humor of the Old Southwest) has had enduring appeal. The onset of the new millennium precipitated an impressive ...rejuvenation of scholarly interest.Beyond Southern Frontier Humor: Prospects and Possibilitiesrepresents the next step in this revival, providing a series of essays with fresh perspectives and contexts.
First the book shows the importance of Henry Junius Nott, a writer virtually unknown and forgotten who mined many of the principal subjects, themes, tropes, and character types associated with southern frontier humor, followed by an essay addressing how this humor genre and its ideological impact helped to stimulate a national cultural revolution. Several essays focus on the genre's legacy to the post-Civil War era, exploring intersections between southern frontier humor and southern local color writers--Joel Chandler Harris, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Sherwood Bonner. Mark Twain's African American dialect piece "A True Story," though employing some of the conventions of southern frontier humor, is reexamined as a transitional text, showing his shift to broader concerns, particularly in race portraiture.Essays also examine the evolution of the trickster from the Jack Tales to Hooper's Simon Suggs to similar mountebanks in novels of John Kennedy Toole, Mark Childress, and Clyde Edgerton and transnational contexts, the latter exploring parallels between southern frontier humor and the Jamaican Anansi tales. Finally, the genre is situated contextually, using contemporary critical discourses, which are applied to G. W. Harris's Sut Lovingood and to various frontier hunting stories.
Historians and critics often view R. F. Outcault’s comic strip Buster Brown (1902–1921) as a subversive series, as it is headlined by a naughty boy who constantly challenges adults and whose pranks ...appear to undermine family stability. The strip, however, also has a conservative function. While Buster Brown depicts the home as a site of conflict, it also celebrates the middle-class family as a resilient institution. The series specifically suggests that humor is effective in dealing with domestic conflict, suggesting that laughter and playfulness alleviate tensions and allow family members to sympathize with one another. In Buster Brown , the mischief-making child is made delightful rather than threatening. At a time when many Progressive Era Americans worried that the institution of the family was in a state of crisis, Buster Brown assured its readers that poking fun at family matters fortified the home.
Los profesionales de los medios están llamados a manejar la información de una manera competente y esa es la intención de este libro: ofrecer recursos que iluminen y sirvan de referente a las ...personas que trabajan en interacción con los demás, para que puedan situarse con claridad en el actual escenario de su profesión y así poder aportar, crear y optimizar la comunicación. La parte segunda versa sobre la comunicadón eficaz incluyendo varios capítulos que analizan y reflexionan sobre los aspectos verbales y no verbales de la comunicación, la importancia de la pregunta y la escucha, los diferentes estilos comunicativos (entre los que destaca el estilo asertivo), las habilidades de comunicación y la necesidad de evitar los prejuicios y los rumores en los medios. La parte tercera se ocupa de la comunicación como influencia social profundizando en procesos como el poder y la persuasión y en el uso del humor en la comunicación.