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.
This timely study sheds new light on debates about humour and identity in France, and is the first book about humour and identity in France to be published in either English or French that analyses ...both debates aboutCharlie Hebdo and standup comedy. It examines humour, freedom of expression, and social cohesion in France during a crucial time in France's recent history punctuated by theCharlie Hebdo attacks of January 2015. It evaluates the state of French society and attitudes to humour in France in the aftermath of the events of January 2015. This book argues that debates surroundingCharlie Hebdo, although significant, only provide part of the picture when it comes to understanding humour and multiculturalism in France. This monograph fills significant gaps in French and international media coverage and academic writing, which has generally failed to adequately examine the broader picture that emerges when one examines career trajectories of notable contemporary French comedians. By addressing this failing, this book provides a more complete picture of humour, identity, and Republican values in France. By focusing primarily on contemporary comedians in France, this book explores competing uses of French Republican discourse in debates about humour, offensiveness, and freedom of expression. Ultimately, it argues that studying humour and identity in France often reveals a sense of national unease within the Republic at a time of considerable turmoil.
•Humor styles are linked with well-being even after controlling for shared variance.•Self-enhancing and affiliative humor are linked with lower distress, health problems.•Self-defeating humor is ...linked with greater health difficulty, distress over time.•Reappraisal and social support are mediators of relations to well-being.•Social competence moderates the relation of aggressive humor with outcomes.
Two studies examined relations of humor styles with well-being, social support, cognitive reappraisal, and social competence. In Study 1 (N = 108), self-enhancing and affiliative humor were associated fewer health difficulties and less psychological distress, mediated by reappraisal and social support, respectively. Self-defeating humor was associated with greater distress, mediated by both reappraisal and social support. Social competence moderated the relation of aggressive humor with social support: Individuals high on both aggressive humor and communication difficulties reported the least support. Study 2 followed undergraduates (N = 193) over ten weeks. T1 results for psychological distress replicated Study 1. Social support and reappraisal mediated relations of humor styles with T1 distress, and social support indirectly mediated the relation of aggressive humor with increased T2 distress. Aggressive humor was associated with T1 health difficulties, and self-defeating humor predicted greater health difficulties over time. Reappraisal and social support indirectly mediated the relation of self-enhancing and affiliative humor with fewer T1 health difficulties, and social support indirectly mediated the relation of aggressive humor with increased health difficulties over time. Communication difficulties moderated the relation of aggressive humor with fewer T1 positive interactions and greater somatic symptoms over time. Relations largely held controlling for shared variance among humor styles.
This introduction to the “Festschrift for Willibald Ruch” outlines his impressive achievements in humor research, especially in the areas of measurement, individual differences as well as models and ...theories. Though mostly focusing on the psychology of humor and the sense of humor, Willibald also pioneered interdisciplinary and cross-cultural humor studies. This Festschrift comprises seven invited commentaries and eight articles, which expand areas of research that Willibald significantly shaped and advanced, including humor appreciation, comprehension and production, cheerfulness, dispositions towards laughter and being laughed at, as well as comic styles and humor dimensions.
The aim of the present study is to locate eight comic styles in basic and broad concepts of humor, namely the temperamental basis of the sense of humor, humor appreciation, and humor creation. The ...comic styles represent individual differences in how people display humor, differentiating between fun, (benevolent) humor, nonsense, wit, irony, satire, sarcasm, and cynicism. Two samples of 234 and 223 German-speaking adults completed the Comic Style Markers, the standard self-report measure to assess the eight comic styles, as well as self-reports of cheerfulness, seriousness, and bad mood (Sample 1) or behavior tests of humor appreciation (funniness and aversiveness of incongruity-resolution, nonsense, and sexual humor) and humor creation quantity and quality (Sample 2). The results showed that the comic styles could be uniquely and meaningfully located in these basic and broad humor concepts. Specifically, the comic styles spanned the affective component of the temperamental basis of the sense of humor, from cheerfulness to bad mood. Furthermore, the findings supported the convergent validity of the nonsense and wit scales of the Comic Style Markers, as they related to behavior tests of the appreciation of nonsense humor and the quantity and quality of humor creation, respectively. This study thus contributes to the growing field of the psychology of humor by extending the nomological network of the comic styles to the general tendency to enjoy and engage in humor and by providing a behavioral validation of the Comic Style Markers.
