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Mock impoliteness is a social practice typifying the interaction of close friends consisting in the use of rude jokes or utterances that signify the speaker's intent to show solidarity and intimacy with the interlocutor. Nonetheless, as an impolite load is still carried by such utterances, how targets of mock impoliteness will react to them, namely whether they will find them amusing or outright offensive, may depend on a series of factors. The present research focuses on how Spencer-Oatey's (2000) face and sociality rights categories, together with gender (male/female) and lingua-culture (British English and Italian) interact to determine the acceptability degree of mock impolite jokes. This cross-cultural and cross-gender perception study, which placed its focus on the hearer's evaluations, consisted in a rating task administered through an online questionnaire, and revealed that the interaction of the three factors determine the offensiveness versus acceptability of the jokes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that when an American president speaks in a way that is later characterized as joking/kidding, a wide range of interpretations become possible. Topics include considered that at a minimum, there are two basic interpretations: serious and non-serious and at the other extreme, there may be as many nuanced interpretations as there are audiences for the discourse.

This study undertakes a contrastive lexical-semantic analysis of a set of related verbs in English and French (English to joke and to kid, French rigoler and plaisanter), using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to semantic analysis. We show that the semantic and conceptual differences between French and English are greater than commonly assumed. These differences, we argue, have significant implications for humor studies: first, they shed light on different cultural orientations towards "laughter talk" in Anglo and French linguacultures; second; they highlight the danger of conceptual Anglocentrism in relying on English-specific words as a theoretical vocabulary for humor studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terms like to joke (and joking) and to tease (and teasing) have a curious double life in contrastive and interactional pragmatics and related fields. Occasionally they are studied as metapragmatic terms of ordinary English, along with related expressions such as kidding. More commonly they are used as scientific or technical categories, both for research into English and for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison. Related English adjectives, such as jocular and mock, are also much-used in a growing lexicon of compound terms, such as jocular abuse, mock abuse, jocular mockery, and the like. Against this background, the present paper has three main aims. In the first part, it is argued that the meanings of the verbs to joke and to tease (and related nouns) are much more English-specific than is commonly recognized. They are not precisely cross-translatable even into European languages such as French and German. Adopting such terms as baseline categories for cross-cultural comparison therefore risks introducing an Anglocentric bias into our theoretical vocabulary. Nor can the problem be easily solved, it is argued, by attributing technical meanings to the terms. Detailed analysis of the everyday meanings of words like joking and teasing, on the other hand, can yield insights into the ethnopragmatics of Anglo conversational humor. This task is undertaken in the second part of the paper. The important English verb to kid and the common conversational formulas just kidding and only joking are also examined. The semantic methodology used is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach, which depends on paraphrase into simple, cross-translatable words. Building on the NSM analyses, the third part of the paper considers whether it is possible to construct a typological framework for conversational humor based on cross-translatable terminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter traces the history of Paul McGhee's theoretical views, research methods, and body of writing focused on children's humor development. It describes the state of such research before he became involved, the decision-making process that led him to focus on this area of knowledge, his initial research paradigms and later research methodology, his extensive writings on humor development, and the theoretical ideas about children's humor development that he proposed, drawing on Piagetian theory. It also briefly discusses his later work in broader fields of humor development. The chapter briefly describes the ways that the body of knowledge he provided and his emphasis on the importance of early humor development have been influential for many subsequent humor development researchers, including that of the author. It also recognizes the playfulness that Paul McGhee has brought to both his scholarly and advocacy work, which provides a model for future researchers in the field of children's humor development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This experiment relied on social identity theory to investigate jokes that express superiority and denigration toward social groups. In particular, the social identity of gender is examined in the context of sexist-nonstereotypical jokes. Results revealed that sexist-nonstereotypical jokes had the greatest impact on women. Specifically, women rated jokes about men funnier than jokes about themselves, and highly identified women found jokes targeting men significantly funnier than jokes targeting women. These results, and others relating to prototypicality, offer insight into how disparaging intergroup jokes function to accentuate and attenuate intergroup relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of humor informed by an understanding of rhetoric offer a number of conceptual tools for the analysis of disparagement humor. This article examines recent rhetorical approaches to humor analysis and evaluates their strengths and weaknesses. Where possible, it seeks to synthesise these approaches for what might be called an emerging methodological branch of humor studies. Although not all rhetorical analysts can be considered critical theorists, the article argues for the particular usefulness of these approaches for critical humor studies. A sample of 28 online anti-Semitic jokes is used to illustrate the various methods of rhetorical humor analysis. The discussion examines the fundamental assumptions, propositions, uniqueness and limitations of each theory. The central observation is that rhetorical humor analysis provides methods that add to disparagement theory. This central observation is supported by three points: that humor is structured with rhetorical devices that might, in various ways, convince; that the context of utterance influences the meaning of humor and thus the context of utterance is rhetorical; and, that the discursive content of humor provides the material to be reinforced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the KINSA project (The Communicative Situation of Immigrants at Swedish Workplaces), which aimed to identify communicative factors that have a positive impact on the integration of second language speakers in the workplace and in their immediate work team. The focus here is on humour and swearing as strategies for doing collegiality and for building and maintaining good relations between co-workers. The article presents data from five second language speakers, permanently employed industrial or office workers in a major Swedish company. Theoretically and methodologically, the paper has its basis in discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication. By means of fieldwork, a large body of empirical data was collected, comprising detailed field notes, audio and video recordings of naturally occurring talk, and texts processed and produced by participants. The analysis of the data shows that metalinguistic and metacultural awareness and performance of relational communicative acts among the participants appear to have helped to facilitate and consolidate integration in the workplace and the immediate work team. To foster good relations at work, the five participants make strategic use of jokes, compliments, narratives, swearing and greetings. In this article the use of jokes and swearing is highlighted. It closes by making a case for future research in the area of integration in the workplace through relational communication, especially among second language speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study applies recent theories about humor to a sample of talk among a group of young adults about the issues and problems associated with homelessness. In this conversation, participants demonstrate a pattern of joking and language play that expresses a complex and ambivalent set of attitudes and feelings toward homelessness and toward the homeless as both outcasts and refugees from conventional society. Humor is used both to express complex responses to homelessness and as a tool for managing the tone and direction of the conversation. The results demonstrate how the identification of patterns of joking and wordplay can provide insights into how people accomplish task-oriented objectives as well as relational and interactive objectives in everyday talk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between targets and script distribution in humour, starting from some basic notions of GTVH. Script asymmetry, considered here as a property of Script Opposition, is defined in terms of a perceptual difference between scripts, which matches a fairly common distribution: a Foreground Script against a Background Script. Throughout this paper, the attributes of this script distribution are explored in verbal jokes, graphic humour and conversational spontaneous joking. This particular script distribution leads to an interesting consequence when overt targets are implied: the set of inferences that we attribute to the target arises regularly from the Foreground Script, the script that closes the joke. If this correlation of script distribution and target attribution holds, we can account for a formal connection between the structure of the joke and its derisive intention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The point of this article is to show how the “You might be a redneck” joke cycle is appropriated to designate a lower social category within the Southern working class in Alabama, and to negotiate the boundaries between the good old boy working class “red neck” and the lower category of “white trash.” Close attention to language is important in the analysis because the jokers exaggerate features of the vernacular dialect to perform members of the lower social category. Within the tradition of the study of conversational joking (Fry, Sweet madness: A study of humor, Pacific Books, 1963; Tannen, Conversational style: Analyzing talk among friends, Oxford University Press, 1984; Davies, C. E., Joint joking: Improvisational humorous episodes in conversation: 360–371, 1984, Language and American ‘good taste’: Martha Stewart as mass-media role model, Routledge, 2003a, Journal of Pragmatics 35: 361–1385, 2003b; Norrick, Conversational joking: Humor in everyday talk, Indiana University Press, 1993; Kotthoff, Coherent keying in conversational humour: Contextualizing joint fictionalisation, John Benjamins, 1999), combined with the discourse analyis of radio talk (Coupland, Language, situation, and the relational self: Theorizing dialect-style in sociolinguistics, Cambridge University Press, 2002; Goffman, Forms of talk, The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), and “performance speech” (Schilling-Estes, Language in Society 27: 53–83, 1998), this study examines joking interaction on a popular morning radio talk show in Alabama that is hosted by two men, known to their audience as Jack and Bubba. The data are a set of CD recordings identified as “The Best of . . .” supplemented with additional regular shows. Examining the joking as an important part of a linguistic “presentation of self” (Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life, Doubleday, 1959; Davies, C. E., Texas Linguistic Forum 44: 73–89, 2002), the analysis reveals how the joking between the two hosts and with members of the studio audience is rooted in sociolinguistic and cultural dimensions of the working class American South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at communication between staff and residents in a Japanese elderly care facility. It discusses the role of politeness in this special type of health care setting from a cross-cultural perspective. Starting with a review of previous literature on the topic, some basic characteristics of communication between staff and residents in nursing homes are outlined. The overall conditions that apply in the caring context with regard to linguistic politeness are described on the basis of Brown and Levinson's framework. The main part of the paper presents speech data from a Japanese nursing home, analyzed in direct comparison with data from other cultural contexts. In so doing, an attempt is made to outline some common communicative features in institutional elderly care. The summarizing discussion focuses on the question of whether the special conditions of institutional elderly care may indeed generate very similar types of communication across different cultural settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1980s, a substantial cycle of lawyer jokes appeared in the United States. Unlike earlier waves of American jokes, the jokes did not spread to Britain and Europe, nor did the peoples of these countries invent large numbers of new jokes about lawyers at this time. The dominant theme of the American jokes was that lawyers are canny—i.e. calculating, crafty, and fond of money. It is striking that such jokes should be told about a group so close to the very core of American society, a society defined by its laws to a far greater extent than the countries of Western Europe. The nearest comparison is with the jokes told about the stupidity of politicians and apparatchiks, the groups at the very center of the former socialist regimes in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. The latter were an indication of the economic stagnation and irrationality of socialism, and the price of stupidity was collapse and failure. The American lawyer jokes relate to the price of American success, namely the intensifying of economic competitiveness that took place in America in the 1980s. American jokes about lawyers are often sadistic tales in which we are invited to rejoice in their meeting a painful death or being slain. Yet death threat jokes about lawyers have no serious counterpart; indeed it is because the jokes do not connect with reality that they circulate so freely. The relationships between our social frustrations and resentments, our choice of targets for “hostile” jokes, and our manifestations of real aggression are complex and uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After 1980, there was a marked increase in the presence, prominence, and hostility of lawyer jokes in the United States. The long-established themes of joking about lawyers were joined by a whole set of new themes, including those depicting lawyers as objects of scorn and as deserving of extermination or removal from society. Several possible explanations for the shift are examined and found insufficient, including worsening behavior by lawyers, the general spread of cruelty, and the dictates of political correctness. The article argues that the shift in lawyer joking is best understood as a recoil against the pervasive legalization of life in combination with the distinctive American style of diffuse court-and-lawyer centered governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A previously ignored method of assessing relative levels of alienation is the content analysis of work jokes exchanged in different venues. This study uses quantitative content analysis to code 1,085 joke-texts collected from ten job-sites and from the Internet. Using past measurements of powerlessness, meaninglessness, social isolation, and self-estrangement, the author develops a content protocol that is consistent with popular alienation indexes. Past methods for assessing both the functions of humor and the concept of alienation are criticized as tautologies, and null-categories for the social-psychological aspects of alienation (empowerment, understanding, social integration, and self-actualization) are introduced and critically examined. Research expectations are developed, and evaluations of predictions are made by comparing the proportion of jokes between the data sets within each of the conceptual categories. Jokes posted to the Internet are found to have more expressions of alienation in each of the social-psychological aspects except meaninglessness, which was slightly higher for entry-level service workers. The study concludes that the content analysis of jokes may prove to be a more direct way of accessing group sentiment than the study of either individual sentiment or the social structure of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since mediaeval times the joker, jester, fool, or clown has been a privileged individual able to comment upon social structure, and parody rules, and authority while remaining immune from repercussions. Similar functions are fulfilled by their modern counterparts, and a study of workplace humor functions revealed the existence of jokers who created and instigated many of the humor ‘events’ in the studied companies. The joker expresses alternative possibilities and can question authority without subverting it. Although not officially appointed to the role, the modern organizational joker negotiates within his workgroup in order to assume this social position. The role evolves through the joker's involvement and participation in a community of practice using shared history and practices. The jokers were considered to be important organizational members by both their peers and managers, and their joking skills were highly valued. Although instances of humor are often multifunctional, the jokers use humor to fulfill some key functions in their workplaces. Four key functions of the jokers were identified and discussed and form the focus of this paper: challenging management; pushing the boundaries; developing the culture; and providing relief. The functions are explored using the community of practice framework (Wenger 1998) and also drawing on both organizational and humor literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Without an objective metric for identifying how funny humorous material “really” is, a person may rely on external information in evaluating the humor of a particular humorous joke. In two experiments, we examined the effect of expectations on participants' ratings of jokes. When participants received a message that jokes had previously been rated as either funny or unfunny, they rated the jokes accordingly. In addition, participants who were told less plausible messages about the jokes (“hysterically funny” or “horribly unfunny”) tended to discount the messages and give ratings comparable to the control group. In a second experiment, we examined the effect of testing participants individually or in groups. As predicted from previous research, group effects, which may be social and emotional, did not influence participants' ratings of jokes. We discuss the findings in terms of the role of information in cognitive evaluation versus affective appreciation of humor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we suggest a semiotic approach to the study of visual humorous texts. Our method is based on the multimodal script analysis, which is a useful tool for examining not only verbal texts but also more complex texts, which combine the presence of images and sounds with verbally expressed humor. The resulting framework highlights how some visual comic mechanisms may enhance a different perception of semiotically expressed humor. Moreover, we present a statistical model in order to detect and measure how the resolution of some incongruities may also be determined by specific variables, which help to establish the existence and the strength with which the appreciation of humor varies according to the ethnic group of origin. In particular, the study analyzes the clip ‘Jodhpur Station, 1947’ from a very popular British Asian sketch-show, Goodness Gracious Me (GGM). The sketch shares some similar features with the narrative strategies typical of joke-tellers and is characterized by a complex humorous apparatus depending on different levels of understanding relating to encyclopedic, cross-cultural, and even diasporic knowledge of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examined the hypothesis that gelotophobia blurs the emotional responses between ridicule and good-natured teasing. Ridicule should induce negative feelings and teasing happiness and surprise in individuals not suffering gelotophobia. Gelotophobes will discriminate less between the two. Their responses to teasing will be similar to ridicule. A sample of adults (N = 105) specified which emotions they would experience in nine scenarios of social interactions pre-selected to represent bullying ridicule or good-natured teasing. Ridicule elicited strong responses of shame, fear and anger, and other negative emotions but low happiness and surprise. Responses of gelotophobes and non-gelotophobes were highly parallel, with the exception that among extreme gelotophobes stronger shame and fear were displayed than among non-gelotophobes. Good-natured teasing seemed to elicit happiness and surprise and low levels of negative emotions among the non-gelotophobes. Among the gelotophobes, however, it was the negative emotions; primarily shame, fear, and anger that were exhibited as the emotional response pattern. In fact, the emotion profile to good-humored teasing was highly similar to the profile in response to the bullying-ridiculing situations. Gelotophobes' perceptions do not discriminate between playful teasing and good-natured teasing. They do not identify the safe and non-threatening quality of the teasing situations. Treatment of gelotophobes should, therefore, involve helping them to identify the play-signals, i.e., the meta-message that the interaction is playful, for fun and that no harm is intended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Females have formerly been under-represented in jokes. Many scholars have claimed that joke making is primarily a male activity, particularly in the domain of sexual jokes. In this paper, I discuss sexual jokes that women share with each other both in all-female groups and by e-mail. After reviewing some widely held assumptions about women and jokes, I explore liberated women's jokes, including their structure, use of stereotypes, and subversive ideas. Finally, I discuss why humor theory is incomplete without the inclusion of a female perspective and suggest that women should tell more jokes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article focuses on David Levi jokesan Israeli joke cycleas a catalyzing agent in the evolution of Israeli identity. Although the manifest referent in the jokes is a concrete political and ethnic figure, the article argues that the actual referent is the whole of Israeli society. The cumulative effect of composing, hearing, recalling and especially repeating these elements, all in a spirit of self-mockery, enables mediation of national ambivalences and vulnerabilities. Through these jokes, an Israeli Levantine identity is internalized as teller and listener try on aspects of the Levantine national self through imagery, language, and gesticulation. Characteristic of these jokes are riddles conveyed through a meta-linguistic device. The joke-telling event is thus in effect a mimetic model of the interaction between the linguistic and the social, which enacts certain relationships pertaining to belonging and identity; as such, it is a unique prism for exploring the cultural matrix within which the construction of identity is carried out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the relation between independently rated joke cruelty and joke appreciation within the thematically homogeneous category of jokes about the disabled. We found a negative linear relation between appreciation and cruelty for females and no relation for males. This remained true even after controlling statistically for four other rated joke properties: surprise, incongruity, difficulty, and resolution. There was no evidence of an inverted-U relation between appreciation and cruelty. We conclude that an optimal cruelty model of joke appreciation is not supported when thematic joke category and other rated predictors are controlled. In contrast, a previous finding that cruelty matters more for females than for males was replicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every interacting social group develops, over time, a joking culture: a set of humorous references that are known to members of the group to which members can refer and that serve as the basis of further interaction. Joking, thus, has a historical, retrospective, and reflexive character. We argue that group joking is embedded, interactive, and referential, and these features give it power within the group context. Elements of the joking culture serve to smooth group interaction, share affiliation, separate the group from outsiders, and secure the compliance of group members through social control. To demonstrate these processes we rely upon two detailed ethnographic examples of continuing joking: one from mushroom collectors and the second from professional meteorologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many jokes fall outside the province of script theory, because they depend on performance in various ways. Interactional features of the joke performance, along with pantomime, gestures, voice shifts, and so on, require modes of description separate from the verbally oriented script theory. There are significant differences between the written joke text and the oral joke performance, and these differences cast doubt on the simple extendibility of script theory from written joke texts to the spoken joke performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the function of humorous interchanges in the negotiation of roles and identities on an acute geriatric ward. Humour is not often discussed as a feature of interactions between medical professionals and patients, but some authors have noted that joking interactions often characterise care-giving relationships and may be interpreted as a way of easing the face-threat of physical examinations. In many studies, Brown and Levinson's (1987) theory of politeness is invoked, assuming that joking behaviour is one manifestation of face work, being a form of positive politeness (since it is based on shared knowledge). However, Brown and Levinson's alternative explanation may be applicable in the hospital ward context: joking may be seen as an exploitation of politeness strategies, wherein the speaker seeks to redefine the face-threatening act through humour. A full account of the relational impact of playful talk needs to take account of both the macro context and the local, sequential unfolding of turns at talk. I argue that the function of these exchanges is somewhat ambiguous, giving the impression of a solidarity relationship on the one hand, but also having the potential for underlying controlling and aggressive messages on the other. As such, it can be argued, it is a strategy which seeks to maintain power and control over the interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a survey of logical mechanisms (defined as the resolution of the incongruity of a joke) and a first attempt at a taxonomy. Possibility of representing several concept of the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH); Formalization of the GTVH; Attempt to show that script overlapping and opposition can be modeled using set and graph theory.

The article discusses the usefulness of a linguistic theory of verbal humor for humor heuristics. The process of application of 'state-of-the-art' modern linguistics to humor research began only a few years ago as a result of two independent processes. On the one hand, humor research has forcefully reemerged as a serious and legitimate study of a basic human faculty, namely to perceive certain stimuli as funny and to distinguish them from the nonfunny stimuli. On the other hand, a major change has been taking place in linguistics since the early 1970s. After the explosion from within the Chomskian camp, which had come to dominate modern linguistics by that time, the best of the rebels started opening up the field to newer and better things. The few elements of linguistics which could, and unfortunately still can, be encountered in humor research fail to take into account not only the current advanced stage of development in linguistic theory but even a few stages preceding it. The lexicon in the proposed semantic theory of humor is set up in such a fashion that each word in a sentence evokes a script; that is, a formalized and structured chunk of related semantic information. The script-based semantic theory of humor defines the major tasks the joke maker faces when trying to improvise a joke in a given situation. It definitely falls short of rendering the procedure of joke making algorithmical, thus leaving many options to the speaker. It is possible that the discipline of linguistics can be stretched beyond its proper boundaries so as to include a more detailed analysis of joke-presentation techniques.