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In this paper, I discuss two roles for the concept of joking in political speech. First, I discuss how claiming to have been joking can provide speakers with a powerful form of deniability. I argue that the aesthetic dimension of jokes makes such a denial especially well placed to undermine both a hearer's evidence for an utterance having been sincere, and, separately, their belief that it was sincere—I call the latter 'aesthetic gaslighting'. Second, I discuss the use of jokes to influence hearers' thinking and behaviour under the radar. I show that not only does the fact that an utterance was a joke fail to prevent it from influencing hearers, but in some cases, the fact that it was a joke actually makes it more influential than a sincere utterance would have been. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined how adolescents make meaning of racist jokes and their impact on daily well‐being using a sequential mixed‐methods research design with interview (N = 20; 60% girls, 5% gender‐nonconforming; 45% Asian American, 40% Latina/o/x, 10% Black, 5% biracial/multiethnic) and daily diary data (N = 168; 54% girls; 57% Latina/o/x, 21% biracial/multiethnic, 10% Asian American, 9% White, 4% Black). Qualitative results revealed that racist jokes were common, distinct from other overt forms of discrimination, and perceived as harmless when perpetrated by friends. Quantitatively, approximately half of adolescents reported hearing at least one racist joke during the study period, and racist jokes by friends were associated with higher daily angry, anxious, and depressed moods and stress. Racist jokes by known others and strangers were also significantly associated with poorer well‐being, although less consistently. Findings highlight the hidden harmful effects of racist jokes on adolescents' daily mood and stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Research on adolescent relationship violence often involves having adolescents report on physically forceful acts, such as pushes and hits, that have occurred in the context of dating relationships. The present study compares: (a) adolescents who reported having experienced acts of physical force by a dating partner and attributed it solely to playfulness (playful only); (b) those who reported having experienced such acts and attributed at least some to conflict, anger, or jealousy (violent); and (c) those who reported not having experienced acts of physical force in their dating relationships (no physical force). Adolescents were compared on anxiety, depression, relationship satisfaction, and psychological violence. Method: Adolescents (n = 1,077) completed measures of anxiety, depression, relationship satisfaction, and psychological violence. Results: Adolescents in the playful-only group reported lower levels of anxiety and higher levels of relationship satisfaction, compared to adolescents in the violent group. Additionally, adolescents in the playful only group reported higher levels of depression than those in the no physical force group. Adolescents in the playful only group reported higher levels of psychological violence than those in the no physical force group and lower levels than those in the violent group. Conclusions: Adolescents who experienced physically forceful acts only in a playful context were not as distressed as those who experienced such acts in the context of conflict, anger, or jealousy; however, adolescents who experienced physically forceful acts only in a playful context still appear to be more distressed than those who do not experience physically forceful acts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This article elaborates on the significance of humor and playful interactions in an ethnographic research project among 14- and 15-year-old teenagers in an international middle school in Finland. First, it discusses the role of humor among students and their teachers in the school. Second, the article elaborates on the role humor played when an adult ethnographer was negotiating her role and actions with these teenagers; humor and playful interactions provided useful tools with which to negotiate the researcher's role and made the project a fun and enjoyable experience for the researcher and participants alike. The article employs the concept of reality play when analyzing everyday interactions in a school context, and it argues both that the use of humor can contribute to forming meaningful and ethically sound relationships between researcher and participants and that elaborations on research and ethics should pay more attention to the significance of humor and playfulness as essential parts of human life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regarding joking as the central act, this article approaches humour from Speech Act Theory. The focus is on two interactive scenarios in the praxis of joking, expressed in ordinary language by means of such turns of phrase as 'not to accept jokes' and 'to take something as a joke'. The deontic aspects of joking reveal its connection with societal forms of life. This is followed by an examination of hostile humorous acts (teasing, ridiculing), which have distinctive interactive features. This general framework is then applied to the study of discursive injustice, meaning who has the right or permission to joke and/or to take something as a joke. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strong comic immoralism maintains that every time a humorous demonstration (for example, a joke) involves a moral defect, it is enhanced aesthetically in virtue of having this moral defect. I want to show that strong comic immoralism is a coherent position, that it is possible to defend, and that there is, in fact, some reason to defend it. By doing this, my hope is that, moving forward, those who are interested in questions about the relationship between immorality and the aesthetic value of jokes will take more seriously the objections that may be presented against their views by the strong comic immoralist, rather than claiming that "no one on this side of Satan" would be one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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When the American President speaks in a way that is later characterized as joking/kidding, a wide range of interpretations become possible. At a minimum, there are two basic interpretations: serious and non-serious.At the other extreme, there may be as many nuanced interpretations as there are audiences for the discourse. In this study, I will first examine the “just/only joking” strategy, considering how it fits within a theoretical understanding of humorous discourse, and lay out the prototypical strategic moves. Then I will explore how the two main audiences (the currently polarized political groupings in the United States) tend to interpret the “joking” in relation to the performance style of President Donald J. Trump. Using three examples, I will attempt to show how the same utterance can be interpreted by one audience as a harmless joke and by the other as a grave threat.

Our study examines the impacts on workers when organisational humour is repeated, sustained, dominating, and potentially harmful, and thus can be considered to be bullying. In an ethnographic study of an idiosyncratic New Zealand IT company, we observed humour that was sexualised, dominating, and perpetrated by the most powerful organizational members. We argue that the compelling need for belonging in this extreme organizational culture influenced workers to accept bullying humour as just a joke and therefore acceptable and harmless even when it contravened societal workplace norms. Our contribution is in identifying and extending the significant theoretical relationship between workplace humour and bullying that, to date, is not well-explored in organizational research.

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.

Our study examines the impacts on workers when organisational humour is repeated, sustained, dominating, and potentially harmful, and thus can be considered to be bullying. In an ethnographic study of an idiosyncratic New Zealand IT company, we observed humour that was sexualised, dominating, and perpetrated by the most powerful organizational members. We argue that the compelling need for belonging in this extreme organizational culture influenced workers to accept bullying humour as just a joke and therefore acceptable and harmless even when it contravened societal workplace norms. Our contribution is in identifying and extending the significant theoretical relationship between workplace humour and bullying that, to date, is not well-explored in organizational research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of disparaging humour and slurs in Norwegian high school boys' friendship groups to shed light on the complexity of adolescent males' friendships and everyday socialization through a phenomenon that is usually connected to bullying. The study employed a qualitative approach consisting of participant observation and individual interviews with students. The article addresses the ambiguity embedded in the boys' use of disparaging humour and slurs. The findings of this study suggest that the boys employ prejudiced and discriminatory language frequently with friends; however, the intent behind it is not linked to discriminatory or prejudiced attitudes or practices. Thus, adolescent boys utilize a form of humour where lines between harmful and harmless are blurred and inherently complex. The ambiguity of disparaging humour and slurs may cause challenges for teachers, and this article offers valuable new knowledge that may support them in their daily work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These literary pieces by Gordon Lee Johnson accompany Juan Delgado's interview with him, also in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sport has traditionally been a hostile environment for lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people. More recently, however, research on a range of British sports has documented a considerable shift toward inclusivity for sexual minorities. Curiously, despite its global popularity, no research has yet measured attitudes toward homosexuality in cricket. By drawing on 12 semi-structured interviews with a club cricket team in the South East of England, we show inclusive attitudes toward homosexuality in sport and society. We also explore how forms of 'banter' among members of the club are complex and multifaceted. Accordingly, we propose that banter in grassroots cricket can be conceptualized into 'inclusionary' forms (incorporating how a close team relationship can facilitate inclusive forms of banter) and 'exclusionary' forms (incorporating jokes which transgress acceptable forms of banter). This research therefore acts as a point of departure for further investigations of the operation of banter across different levels of sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that humor should be taken seriously as it plays a key role in understanding larger issues such as gender relations, social interactions, power, and status in a society. Acknowledging its significance as more than a cultural object, the paper first focuses on the theoretical approaches to humor in anthropology and then constructs a conceptual framework by adding to these theories a new approach that treats the production, sharing and consumption of humor in daily life more effectively. Following this novel theoretical framework, humor interactions among women of a mountainous village of Yeniköy in the city of Muğla are analyzed by positioning them within the context of social and power relations in everyday life. The argument of the analysis is that humor creates a space of agency for the women of Yeniköy who occupy a marginal space in their society and that these women creatively manipulate humor as a tactic for resisting existing power structures. As anthropological studies of humor are increasing in the world, Turkish studies on humor are yet to discover the potential of humor in pointing out important dimensions of everyday life. This study aims to contribute to such studies in Turkey through an analysis of the physicality of humor and the way it resonates through the individual and social body through a long-term participatory observation, and a localized and experience-based investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Logos: A Journal, of Religion, Philosophy Comparative Cultural Studies & Art (08687692) is the property of Logos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study investigates the role interactional competence plays in the performance of political roles by examining the use of humor in events such as speeches, election campaign rallies, press briefings and televised news interviews. In this case study of a prominent United States Senator (the late Senator Edward Kennedy), twenty publically available video recordings from the C-SPAN online archives are analyzed using a conversation analytic approach. Two main types of humor were found in these data, self-deprecatory humor and humor that criticizes others. Three main functions of humor were identified (subtle self-promotion, managing challenging political and interactional situations, and creating solidarity with an audience). The results of this study contribute to our understanding of how humor can play a role in doing the work of a Senator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary comedy audiences are accused by some comedians of being too morally sensitive to appreciate humor. To get closer to an answer, I will first briefly present the argument over audience sensitivity as found in the nonphilosophical literature. Second, I then turn to the philosophical literature and begin from the idea that "funny" is a response‐dependent property. I present a criticism of this response‐dependence account of "funny" based in the claim that funniness is not determined by what normal audiences actually laugh at, but by what merits laughter. Third, I argue that excessive or deficient moral sensitivity distorts audience receptivity to humor. Fourth, I turn to candidates for ideally sensitive audiences. I conclude by returning to the particular cases of supposed oversensitivity or undersensitivity to jokes to see how we might judge them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This position paper draws on findings from the Straight White College Men Project, a qualitative study with heterosexual white college male participants across college campuses in the United States. The purpose of the larger project was to explore and understand how participants perceived institutional and community diversity issues; how they conceptualized their own privileges; and how they articulated their own responsibility to engage in social change. Thus, this paper delivers “lessons learned” from engaging white men in conversations on racism and to provide recommendations for medical educators in the U.S. and in Europe.Methods: Following purposeful sampling methods using expert nominators, data were collected in phenomenological focus groups at 10 U.S. 4-year universities. Focus groups included 3 to 8 participants and were 60 to 90 minutes in length. Analysis included open and axial coding and two themes emerged from a single question focusing on students’ potential dissent of racist family or peer comments. Results: Participants struggled articulating how and in what contexts they would challenge family members or friends on inappropriate language or behavior. Reasons for their reticence included struggling to confront parents, not wanting to ruin male friendships, or jeopardizing being ousted by the male peer group. Conclusion: Educators must find ways to help male university students explore their privileges and proclivity to engage in oppressive behaviors. Men also need to understand how their inactions perpetuate systemic oppression and create environments in which minoritized individuals cannot thrive. Recommendations for medical school educators are provided.

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]

The power asymmetries operating through debt include not only the domination of conduct and the extraction of wealth but also unequal struggles to define value. Long-term ethnographic fieldwork on a low-income housing estate in southern England revealed a 'suspensory' approach to debt, in which those who cannot afford to comply with their creditors' debt repayment demands suspend both the temporal point at which debts will end through repayment or enforcement and the dominant morality of repayment through amoral humour about being a bad debtor. This shows that the form of power asymmetry that debtors experience, if any, hinges on their relation to both the morality and temporality of repayment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Sense of humor" refers to an embodied practice whereby identity is performed and constructed in daily life in interaction with others. Whereas ethnographic studies of humorous activity have a long tradition in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics (cf. C.E. Davies, 2017 for overview), the focus of analysis has never been on the joking practice of an individual in a longitudinal way. Psychological studies of the sense of humor (Ruch, 1998) tend to focus on reactions to humorous materials. Using an approach adapted from autoethnography (Chang, 2007; Ellis et al., 2011), this study documents and analyzes the sense of humor of an individual across a range of contexts in the conduct of ordinary life. It thus considers an individual sense of humor as a dimension of identity in embodied practice. The study attempts to characterize an individual sense of humor in terms of a particular style, while showing how aspects of the style are modified in relation to particular contexts. It shows how a sense of humor is primarily expressed toward others and constructed with others in discourse but that it can also occur privately. The data, drawn from field notes that are supplemented by audio recordings, are analyzed using interactional sociolinguistic techniques of discourse analysis that focus on the agency and insights of the joker concerning intent of the joking and interpretation of the contextualized interaction. • The sense of humor of an individual can be studied using autoethnography • Sense of humor can be expressed both interactionally and intrapsychically • Autoethnography offers tools for understanding identity construction through humor • The embodied practices of sense of humor are learned as part of socialization • An individual sense of humor can be characterized in terms of a particular style [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines humour and indexicality as resources for identity construction in a group of young South London men, with a particular focus on the ideological meanings which are ringfenced by the young men's conversational humour about hair and fashion style. The young men's self-recorded, playful talk includes instances of joking as well as of high risk teasing which, as the paper shows, in many ways conforms to rules of ritual insulting. The references to hair and fashion choices throughout the playful competition constitute indices of group membership at various levels, from hip hop culture to aspects of what Silverstein (2004) calls the 'macrosociological order', in particular with respect to race. The paper argues that by considering both the style and the substance of conversational humour, we gain a fuller picture of the range of indexical meanings which are invoked on micro and macro social-levels, and therefore of the multi-layered authenticating practices at the core of the young men's identity construction. • Young men from South London exploit humour and indexicalities of style to authenticate themselves. • Boundaries between high-risk teasing, jocular mockery and verbal competition are blurred. • Conversational joking about hair and fashion style bonds but also polices group norms. • Both style and substance of humour need to be explored to gain full understanding of authenticating processes. • Young men construct themselves in opposition to mainstream trends, signal their membership in hip hop culture, and index racial authenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Intersecoes: Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinares is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Findings from years of research on fear appeals suggest that individuals with low efficacy utilize avoidance strategies when they perceive a significant threat—a process called fear control. Some research suggests that joking could be an avoidance strategy. The current study identifies conditions in which people are more likely to joke about colorectal cancer and explores how this behavior may be associated with screening avoidance. Older adults (N  = 209) recruited from eight different worksites completed a survey measuring fear appeal constructs and enactment of colorectal cancer-related joking. Results of a moderated mediation analysis suggest that men were more likely to joke about colorectal cancer than women, particularly if they perceived significant threat but had limited self-efficacy, signifying fear control. Results support prior fear appeal research, suggesting that an increase in joking behavior concerning colorectal cancer may be indicative of screening avoidance, and describe belief-based mechanisms that explain differences between biological sex and joking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Located on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco, the Spanish enclave of Ceuta depends almost entirely on subsidies from Madrid. When the newly elected conservative government initiated a rigorous austerity regime in 2011, Ceuta quickly became Spain's "unemployment capital," and my fieldnotes started overflowing with stories of disorientation as personal life-trajectories collapsed and national narratives developed over four decades of modernization and Europeanization became untenable. However, my diaries also contain page upon page of informants telling jokes, sharing caricatures, and watching satirical videos mocking Spain's political classes and, ultimately, themselves. Answering a call by Angelique Haugerud (2013b), this article asks what anthropology can learn from local jokers and tricksters. Following Karin Barber (2005) and Nicolas Argenti (2016), and reading Ceuta's obscene humor as a form of textual practice warranting serious ethnographic investigation, I argue that tricksters, locally appreciated as excellent social analysts, have anticipated anthropological efforts to encourage lay audiences to rethink "the economy," often considered to be an abstract, natural force. Indeed, my informants' humor not only locates the crisis in human relations, but it also describes "neoliberal" discourses as an ideology used by the financial class to claim resources and [End Page 143] redistribute blame. This article, however, urges caution when dialoguing with tricksters. The burgeoning literature on humor in times of crisis has tended to focus on showing that laughter is not merely a weapon of the weak, but a liberating practice that turns trauma into creativity, maintains solidarity, mobilizes political resistance, and is therefore central to social change. But my Ceutan informants often forget that tricksters are rarely the heroes they think they are. Their lewd jokes create conflict between the enclave's inhabitants, hindering effective political mobilization and reproducing gender, ethnic, and racial stereotypes that raise methodological and ethical problems for anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]