What made the Romans laugh? Was ancient Rome a carnival, filled with practical jokes and hearty chuckles? Or was it a carefully regulated culture in which the uncontrollable excess of laughter was a ...force to fear—a world of wit, irony, and knowing smiles? How did Romans make sense of laughter? What role did it play in the world of the law courts, the imperial palace, or the spectacles of the arena? Laughter in Ancient Rome explores one of the most intriguing, but also trickiest, of historical subjects. Drawing on a wide range of Roman writing—from essays on rhetoric to a surviving Roman joke book—Mary Beard tracks down the giggles, smirks, and guffaws of the ancient Romans themselves. From ancient “monkey business” to the role of a chuckle in a culture of tyranny, she explores Roman humor from the hilarious, to the momentous, to the surprising. But she also reflects on even bigger historical questions. What kind of history of laughter can we possibly tell? Can we ever really “get” the Romans’ jokes?
Two experiments (N = 449; 246 men, 198 women) examined how political identity moderates appreciation of disparagement humor that violates different moral foundations described in moral foundations ...theory. In Experiment 1, liberals evaluated memes violating the individualizing moral foundations as more offensive and less funny than conservatives, whereas conservatives rated memes violating the binding moral foundations as more offensive and less funny than liberals. Moreover, conservatives judged the memes across all experimental conditions more favorably than liberals because they more strongly endorse cavalier humor beliefs. Experiment 2 examined the mediating role of perceived personal moral violations. Specifically, liberals evaluate humor violating the individualizing foundations as more offensive than conservatives because they see it as a greater personal moral violation. Similarly, conservatives judged humor violating the binding foundations as more offensive compared to liberals because they see it as a greater personal moral violation.
El color del verano (1991), del escritor cubano Reinaldo Arenas, ha sido invariablemente leída bajo la clave autobiográfica y el concepto de carnavalización. Eso ha impedido que se cotejara esta ...novela con la larga tradición latinoamericana de la novela de dictador, ignorándose el aspecto trágico y la seriedad que se esconden bajo el humor areniano. En este ensayo, me enfoco en el personaje del dictador, Fifo, y la manera como su representación linda con lo sublime, encerrándolo en la misma dinámica de atracción y repulsión que se observa en otras novelas de dictador. Al hacerlo, considero las reflexiones de Slavoj Zizek sobre lo monstruoso y lo sublime kantianos, así como el concepto de abyección de Julia Kristeva. Asimismo, analizo cómo Arenas le da una vuelta de tuerca a la novela de dictador tradicional a través de su manejo de la (homo)sexualidad, estableciendo una perversa identificación entre lector, narrador y el tirano - identificación que pasa tanto por el terror, como por el deseo. Espero así no sólo ofrecer una contribución a la interpretación de la novela de Arenas, sino repensar el humor negro como un registro alternativo a lo trágico en la escritura del trauma.
We present the results of HAHA at IberLEF 2021: Humor Analysis based on Human Annotation. This year's edition of the competition includes the two classic tasks of humor detection and rating, plus two ...novel tasks of humor logic mechanism and target classification. We describe the corpus created for the challenge, the competition phases, the submitted systems and the main results obtained.
After 2.5 millennia of philosophical deliberation and psychological experimentation, most scholars have concluded that humor arises from incongruity. We highlight 2 limitations of incongruity ...theories of humor. First, incongruity is not consistently defined. The literature describes incongruity in at least 4 ways: surprise, juxtaposition, atypicality, and a violation. Second, regardless of definition, incongruity alone does not adequately differentiate humorous from nonhumorous experiences. We suggest revising incongruity theory by proposing that humor arises from a benign violation: something that threatens a person's well-being, identity, or normative belief structure but that simultaneously seems okay. Six studies, which use entertainment, consumer products, and social interaction as stimuli, reveal that the benign violation hypothesis better differentiates humorous from nonhumorous experiences than common conceptualizations of incongruity. A benign violation conceptualization of humor improves accuracy by reducing the likelihood that joyous, amazing, and tragic situations are inaccurately predicted to be humorous.
How are humorous meanings generated and interpreted? Understanding a joke involves knowledge of the language code (a matter mostly of semantics) and background knowledge necessary for making the ...inferences to get the joke (a matter of pragmatics). This book introduces and critiques a wide range of semantic and pragmatic theories in relation to humour, such as systemic functional linguistics, speech acts, politeness and relevance theory, emphasising not only conceptual but also interpersonal and textual meanings. Exploiting recent corpus-based research, it suggests that much humour can be accounted for by the overriding of lexical priming. Each chapter's discussion topics and suggestions for further reading encourage a critical approach to semantic and pragmatic theory. Written by an experienced lecturer on the linguistics of the English language, this is an entertaining and user-friendly textbook for advanced students of semantics, pragmatics and humour studies.
Although both creativity and humor elicit experiences of surprise followed by appreciation, it remains unknown whether shared or distinct patterns of effective connectivity are involved in their ...processing. The present fMRI study used dynamic causal modeling and parametrical empirical Bayes analysis to examine the effective connectivity between the amygdala and frontoparietal network during two‐stage creativity and humor processing. We examined processing during the setup and punch line stages for creativity and humor, including typical forms (alternate uses for creativity and incongruity‐resolution humor), atypical forms (aesthetic uses for creativity and nonsense humor), and baseline forms. Our focus was on the mesolimbic pathway during the punch line stage. We found that the amygdala plays a key role in expectation violation and appreciation. Broadly, amygdala‐to‐IFG connectivity was important for evaluating typical and atypical forms of both creativity and humor, while amygdala‐to‐precuneus connectivity was involved in evaluating typical forms. Amygdala‐to‐IFG connectivity was involved in the expectation violation to resolution stage of processing for typical and atypical forms of creativity and humor. Amygdala‐to‐precuneus connectivity was involved in processing the novelty and usefulness of typical forms of creativity (alternate uses) and understanding others' intentions in typical forms of humor (incongruity‐resolution). Interestingly, VTA‐to‐amygdala connectivity was involved in processing the appreciation of both typical (incongruity‐resolution humor) and atypical (nonsense humor) forms of humor while amygdala‐to‐VTA connectivity was involved in processing the appreciation of atypical (aesthetic uses) forms of creativity. Altogether, these findings suggest that the amygdala and frontoparietal circuitry are critical for creativity and humor processing.
Las paredes del lugar están decoradas con fotografías de algunos de los proyectos de Arenys Solidari, asociación no lucrativa nacida en 1994 con el objetivo de «promover la cooperación y difundir la ...realidad social, política y cultural de los países empobrecidos». Los reunidos en la larga mesa de El Turó recuerdan a Paco como una especie de mago capaz de conseguir lo que se proponía con creatividad y humor, paciencia y bondad. La capital del país había estado creciendo de una forma desordenada y la población seguía muy marcada por la guerra civil. Ir, ver y después volver. Así comenzaron a ir cada año junto a las diversas brigadas a desarrollar los proyectos que se hubiesen preparado con anterioridad, a invertir el dinero recaudado en los eventos culturales organizados previamente, como la obra Jeu-vah, del grupo Salta a la Fama, de Canet de Mar; o la exposición titulada Imágenes de Guatemala, con fotografías tomadas por Paco Robles expuestas en la Sala Lloveres y a la que asistieron los alumnos de todas las escuelas de El Maresme. La aldea estaba ubicada en la Boca Costa de Sololá, con un volcán de por medio, y tomaba más de una hora de camino llegar allí desde la capital del departamento. Así nació, con una dotación de nueve mil volúmenes, la Biblioteca Popular Arenys Solidari de Samayac, en el departamento de Suchitepéquez, ubicada a ciento cincuenta y ocho kilómetros de la capital del país, la cual llegó a ser una de las tres bibliotecas con más libros de Guatemala. Por ejemplo: qué significaba tener o no una pelota, vivir en un país con temblores de tierra o guardar los implementos de la escuela sin tener mochila.
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