Modern black humour represents a rich history of radical innovation stretching back to the antebellum period. Laughing Fit to Kill reveals how black writers, artists, and comedians have used humour ...across two centuries as a uniquely powerful response to forced migration and enslavement. Glenda Carpio traces how, through various modes of “conjuring,” through gothic, grotesque and absurdist slapstick, through stinging satire, hyperbole, and burlesque, and through the strategic expression of racial stereotype itself, black humourists of all sorts have enacted “rituals of redress.” In highlighting the tradition and tropes of black humourists, Carpio illuminates the reach of slavery’s long arm into our contemporary popular culture. She convincingly demonstrates the ways that, for instance, Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle’s modes of post-Civil Rights tragicomedy are deeply indebted to that of William Wells Brown and Charles Chesnutt’s 19th-century comedic conjuring. Likewise, she reveals how contemporary iconoclasts such as Ishmael Reed and Suzan-Lori Parks owe much to the intricate satiric grammar of black linguistic expression rooted in slavery. Carpio also demonstrates how Robert Colescott’s 1970s paintings and Kara Walker’s silhouette installations use a visual vocabulary to extend comedy in a visual register. The jokes in this tradition are bawdy, brutal, horrific and insurgent, and they have yet to be fully understood. Laughing Fit to Kill provides a new critical lexicon for understanding the jabbing punch-lines that have followed slavery’s long legacy.
This book is the first extensive sociological study of the relationship between humor and social background. Using a combination of interview materials, survey data, and historical materials, it ...explores the relationship between humor and gender, age, social class, and national differences in the Netherlands and the United States. The exploration of social differences in sense of humor starts off from one specific, and not very prestigious, humorous genre: the joke.Good Humor, Bad Tasteexplains why jokes are good humor to some, bad taste to others.
This book explores the fascinating discourse on Jewish wit in the twentieth century when the Jewish joke became the subject of serious humanistic inquiry and inserted itself into the cultural and ...political debates among Germans and Jews against the ideologically-charged backdrop of anti-Semitism, the Jewish question, and the Holocaust.
This title deals with the construction of diverse forms of humour in everyday oral, written, and mediatised interactions. It sheds light on the differences and, most importantly, the similarities in ...the production of interactional humour in face-to-face and various technology-mediated forms of communication, including scripted and non-scripted situations. The book draws on a variety of up-to-date approaches and methodologies, and will appeal to scholars in discourse analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics, ethnography of communication, and social semiotics.
This volume presents an in-depth analysis of mock politeness, bringing together research from different academic fields and investigating a range of first-order metapragmatic labels for mock ...politeness in British English and Italian. It is the first book-length theorisation and detailed description of mock politeness and, as such, contributes to the growing field of impoliteness. The approach taken is methodologically innovative because it takes a first-order metalanguage approach, basing the analysis on behaviours which participants themselves have identified as impolite. Furthermore, it exploits the affordances of corpus pragmatics, a rapidly developing field. Mock Politeness in English and Italian: A corpus-assisted metalanguage analysis will be of interest to scholars and postgraduate students researching im/politeness and verbal aggression, in particular those interested in im/politeness implicatures and non-conventional meanings.
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.
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 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.