No joke Wisse, Ruth R
2013., 20130521, 2013, 2013-05-21, Volume:
4
eBook
Humor is the most celebrated of all Jewish responses to modernity. In this book, Ruth Wisse evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking--as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks ...by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth. At the same time, Wisse draws attention to the precarious conditions that call Jewish humor into being--and the price it may exact from its practitioners and audience.
Wisse broadly traces modern Jewish humor around the world, teasing out its implications as she explores memorable and telling examples from German, Yiddish, English, Russian, and Hebrew. Among other topics, the book looks at how Jewish humor channeled Jewish learning and wordsmanship into new avenues of creativity, brought relief to liberal non-Jews in repressive societies, and enriched popular culture in the United States.
Even as it invites readers to consider the pleasures and profits of Jewish humor, the book asks difficult but fascinating questions: Can the excess and extreme self-ridicule of Jewish humor go too far and backfire in the process? And is "leave 'em laughing" the wisest motto for a people that others have intended to sweep off the stage of history?
Conversational humour, which broadly encompasses (sequences of) utterances that are designed to ‘amuse’ participants or are treated as ‘amusing’ by participants across various kinds of social ...interaction, is an inherently social phenomenon involving not only the speaker but at least one recipient. An episode of conversational humour includes (at least) a humour bid proffered by the speaker and the response to it by the recipient. This study focuses on the recipient’s responses to humour and introduces a framework for analysing responses to humour bids which is grounded in a close analysis of the sequential trajectory of humour episodes. Drawing on data from intercultural initial interactions in English, and focusing on the sequential trajectory of humour episodes through the lens of interactional pragmatics, this study proposes a typology of responses to humour bids, offering a basis for operationalisation in talk-ininteraction. Within this framework, there are five sequentially distinct types of responses that can follow a humour bid: 1) disattending humour, 2) minimal response to humour: sequence closure, 3) minimal response to humour: serious response, 4) minimal response to humour: agreement, and 5) post-expanding humour.
•This paper introduces a systematic model for analysing responses to conversational humour in their interactive context.•Humour can be responded to in five distinct sequential ways.•This model makes the study of humour responses more analytically tractable.•It is premised on the assumption that participants are held (normatively) accountable for their responses to humour bids.
This book is the result of almost a decade of research in several related aspects of the linguistics of humor. As such, it is inevitably a composite and the result of a compromise between my desire ...to cover, on the one hand, as much as possible of the scholarship pertaining to humor research in linguistics and, on the other, my own research interests in the field. The book combines a representative, if not exhaustive, survey of the literature in the linguistics of humor, with critical analyses of the more significant approaches and my own original ventures. For the most part, I hope I have provided enough indications to indicate which is which. No chapter is anyone of those three things exclusively, but the beginning of the book clearly tends towards the survey, the middle towards the critique, and the end towards original work.
The Language of Humour Ross, Alison
1998, 20050802, 2005-08-02T00:00:00, 2005-08-02, Volume:
16
eBook
The Language of Humour:* examines the importance of the social context for humour* explores the issue of gender and humour in areas such as the New Lad culture in comedy and stand-up comedy* includes ...comic transcripts from TV sketches such as Clive Anderson and Peter Cook
Eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophers took interest in humour and, in particular, humorous incongruities. Humour was not necessarily their main interest; however, observations on humour ...could support their more general philosophical theories. Spontaneous and unintentional humour such as anecdotes, witty remarks and absurd events were the styles of humour that they analysed and made part of their theories. Prepared humour such as verbal jokes were rarely included in their observations, likely dismissed as too vulgar and not requiring intellectual effort. Humour, as analysed by several eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophers, was seen as part of daily life or life simulated on stage. In the twentieth century, Freud emphasized a possible ‘relief’ function of ‘prepared’ humour such as jokes. Additionally, linguists began developing theories to analyse jokes. A joke has a particular structure that is constructed with the aim of achieving a humorous effect. This structure makes jokes suitable for linguistic analysis. In the present-day humour research, jokes have become a main topic of research. This linguistically oriented joke research neglects many other forms of humour: spontaneous humour, non-verbal humour, physical humour, and many forms of unintentional humour that appear in real life. We want to survey and re-evaluate the contributions to the humour research of these eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophers and clarify that their more general contributions to the humour research have been neglected in favour of the very restricted form of prepared humour and linguistically expressed and analysed humour as it appears in jokes. We hope that the views expressed in this paper will help to steer the humour research away from joke research and help to integrate humour in the design of human-computer interfaces and smart environments. That is, rather than considering only verbal jokes, we should aim at generating smart environments that understand, facilitate or create humour that goes beyond jokes.
The purpose of this study was to examine humour from the perspectives of 60-72-month-old children and their teachers in Turkey. A phenomenological method was used to collect data through ...semi-structured interviews, which included each child making a drawing about something they thought was ‘funny’. Teachers were also interviewed via semi-structured questions related to children’s humour. Data collected from 22 children and five teachers were analysed using McGhee’s humour development theory and Martin’s descriptions of four humour styles. The humour produced by our sample mainly included items related to incongruity. Teachers described children’s humour development in terms of how the children behaved within their social group, and some believing that children who do not make jokes about their peers, have no humour development. Our findings pointed to a lack of awareness of the benefits of humour to the learning process and early years’ education, particularly with teachers needing to account for age, developmental level and cultural differences.
A radical new approach to humor, where traditional targets become its agents Humor is often dismissed as cruel ridicule or harmless fun. But what if laughter is a vital force to channel rage against ...patriarchy, Islamophobia, or mass incarceration? To create moments of empathy and dialogue between Black Lives Matter and the police? These and other such questions are at the heart of this powerful reassessment of humor. Placing theorists in conversation with comedians,Uproarious offers a full-frontal approach to the very foundation of comedy and its profound political impact. Here Cynthia Willett and Julie Willett address the four major theories of humor-superiority, relief, incongruity, and social play-through the lens of feminist and game-changing comics such as Wanda Sykes, Margaret Cho, Hannah Gadsby, Hari Kondabolu, and Tig Notaro. They take a radical and holistic approach to the understanding of humor, particularly of humor deployed by those from groups long relegated to the margins, and propose a powerful new understanding of humor as a force that can engender politically progressive social movements. Drawing on a range of cross-disciplinary sources, from philosophies and histories of humor to the psychology and physiology of laughter to animal studies,Uproarious offers a richer understanding of the political and cathartic potential of humor. A major new contribution to a wider dialogue on comedy, Uproarious grounds for us explorations of outsider humor and our golden age of feminist comics-showing that when women, prisoners, even animals, laugh back, comedy along with belly laughs forge new identities and alter the political climate.
Winning battles with a joke Sumagna Bhowmick; Vijaya R
European journal of humour research,
03/2023, Volume:
11, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Humour in military organizations can be antithetical given the rigid hierarchy, high degrees of work formalization, and obedience to hierarchy. This paper explores how humour is initiated, propagated ...and maintained in the Indian Army. We conducted twelve in-depth interviews with retired army professionals and used Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis to capture the study's main findings. Three major themes emerged – organizational humour, leader humour, and team humour. We found humour is essential in combating stress, increasing social cohesion, facilitating newcomer assimilation, and promoting a positive work environment. We also found evidence of subversive humour used in forms of resistance to challenge the hierarchical structure subtly. We have provided a three-part schema of workplace humour which sheds interesting insights on workplace humour. Our findings will contribute to understanding how military humour helps to maneuver challenges of a stressful work situation.
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