Humor Creation Research Articles

“Tin-Can Tommy The Clockwork Boy”: A case study in incompleteness for humorous effect in British children’s comics of the 1930s

This article explores the format and construct of longer humorous comics strips through the close analysis of “Tin-Can Tommy The Clockwork Boy” from D C Thomson’s The Beano Comic, a publication aimed at children and launched in 1938. This study of one specific strip argues that the use a seriality somewhere between open-ended and discontinuous, continual fluctuations between flat and round characterisation and a style wavering between completeness and expressivity constructs an aesthetic of incompleteness which is essentiel in the creation of humour. Following investigation of the ways in which this particular format constructs funniness as a process of continual negotiation, specifically through the use of exaggeration, asymmetry, dissatisfaction and imbalance, the article concludes that a quality of unfinished-ness is integral to the relationship these comics create with their readers, and therefore fundamental to laughter.

Semantic Transformation of French Phraseological Units

The actualization of phraseological units, mainly the creation of humor or humor in a particular text, is based on a general stylistic need. This type of actualization is distinguished by the fact that the compound is understood simultaneously, in the same text in the sense of a phrase and in the sense of a free compound. There are two ways to understand and use a compound in a person's speech. The main condition for two different understandings is the situational context, extra-linguistic factors. The media is rich in such contextual contexts.

Making Sense of the Pandemic: Kenyan Covid-19 Jokes and Online Liveness

The words, the phrases, and the faces of those delivering news regarding the Covid-19 pandemic from the Ministry of Health—new cases, number of deaths, number of recoveries, and efforts towards “flattening the curve”—became a routine television feature in Kenya. This drove Kenyans to adapt to an abnormal situation as the new norm. Kenyan comedians, especially Eric Omondi, built their jokes around the personalities that delivered the Covid-19 messaging and the expectations and fears of Kenyans regarding the effects of these special Covid-19 announcements. This article, in contrast to the extant literature’s treatment of ethno-centric humour, seeks to explore online jokes surrounding the Ministry of Health’s Covid-19 announcements and the monthly presidential addresses, as expressed by Eric Omondi, a Kenyan comedian. The aim is to understand how Kenyans made sense of the pandemic through the creation of incongruous humour.

Turnover among medical clowns early in their career

In recent years, several investigations of the medical clowning profession have appeared in the literature. However, few studies have focused on factors associated with turnover among medical clowns early in their careers. The current study examined whether individual differences in humor disposition predicted turnover behavior. Participants were 111 medical clowns in a three-phase longitudinal study. Humor disposition was measured in the first week of their training, clowns' job satisfaction two months later, and turnover six months after that. Results showed that humor appreciation decreased actual turnover through the mediating role of job satisfaction, whereas individual differences in humor creation directly decreased turnover. In addition, previous traumatic experiences moderated the associations between humor appreciation and turnover. Overall, our research findings support the notion that humor disposition can help predict which clowns remain in the hospital.

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Taboo: Interaction and Creativity in Humour.

In this paper we treat humorous situations as a series of events underpinned by topoi, principles of reasoning recognised within a socio-cultural community. We claim that humorous effect in jokes and other discourse is often created by the juxtaposition of topoi evoked. A prerequisite for this is that there is a shift where the interpreter of the discourse updates their information state with regard to a second topos being evoked. This view of humour is consistent with an incremental analysis of dialogue, and we therefore argue that interaction is central both for humour creation and interpretation. We point out some different ways in which topoi are juxtaposed in humorous dialogues as well as in jokes published in social media or in joke books, and take jokes from the coronavirus pandemic as an example because this makes lots of new topoi available and therefore offers the opportunity of creating novel jokes based on the juxtaposition of the new and existing topoi. We explore how the mechanisms of inference in dialogue can be applied to humour through the four elements from our title: old (existing), new (not previously existing), borrowed (associated with a different situation) and taboo (inappropriate in the context).

Mapping the 'funny bone': neuroanatomical correlates of humor creativity in professional comedians.

What are the neuroanatomical correlates of expertise in a specific creative domain? Professional comedians, amateurs and controls underwent a T1 MRI anatomical scan. Measures of cortical surface area (gyrification and sulcal depth) and thickness were extracted for each participant. Compared to controls, professional comedians had a greater cortical surface area in the left inferior temporal gyrus, angular gyrus, precuneus and right medial prefrontal cortex. These regions have been previously implicated in abstract, divergent thinking and the default-mode network. The high degree of overlap between the regions of greater surface area in professional comedians with the regions showing greater activation in the same group during comedy improvisation in our previous work (particularly the temporal regions and angular gyrus) suggests that these regions may be specifically involved in humor creativity.

A Manipulation of Semantic Meanings as a Humor Construction Strategy

This research is conducted to reveal how humorous utterances are constructed by manipulating semantic meaning especially dealing with lexical semantics. Lexical semantics provides multiple meanings that portray their meanings’ relationship among a word and they are potentially exploited to elicit humor. This research examines utterances manipulating lexical semantics as the strategy of humor creation in Mind Your Language situation comedy. Applying a descriptive qualitative approach, the findings indicate that five types of lexical semantics are utilized as strategies of humorous utterances creation. Those types of lexical semantics are polysemy, homonymy, homophone, hyponymy, dan synonymy. Because of their multiple relation meanings, the speaker can refer to other meanings to construct different meanings with the hearer. The speaker constructs an incongruent meaning between what the hearer’s perception is and what the speaker meant. The deviation of lexical semantics between the hearer and the speaker completely illustrates the concept of incongruity theory of humor.Â

Impersonated personae – paralanguage, dialogism and affiliation in stand-up comedy

Abstract This paper argues that paralinguistic resources employed by stand-up comedians to construe textual personae (impersonated characters) make a substantial contribution to the creation of humor by allowing the comedian to distance themselves from particular social values and by referencing shared cultural stereotypes. A stretch of stand-up comedy discourse is analyzed to explore how gesture and voice quality contribute to the construal of projected personae. These are mapped in relation to the interaction between comedian and audience to discern how they evoke specific social values. The results suggest that textual personae are deployed by the comedian to embody stereotypes that connote particular value positions, and that the comedian can construe blended or hybrid personae through the use of multiple semiotic resources. Impersonation thus constitutes a powerful resource for negotiating social values in order to generate tension and create humor.

Verbal Humor in Modern Family from the Perspective of Cooperative Principle

Humor is everywhere in our daily life. From the perspective of Cooperative Principle, this research selects dialogues from the sitcom Modern Family as the corpus. Through the study of the dialogues violating the four maxims under the Cooperative Principle, this research analyzes how the sitcom achieves the comedy effect by violating the Cooperative Principle with the hope of providing certain reference for the creation of humor in the sitcom.

Semantic Approach to Verbal Humor Across Cultural Barriers in Comic TV Shows

This research paper aims to approach verbal techniques of humor creation in comic TV shows. Comedians usually play with words and expressions to create various readings. The various readings are the basis of humorous incongruity. Following Raskin’s (1985) Semantic Script Theory of Humour (SSTH), the research paper’s approach is semantic, aiming to analyze linguistically how comedians joke verbally in front of an audience in comic TV shows. The research paper also sheds light on whether or not semantic sense relations, especially homonymy and polysemy, are the basic techniques of verbal incongruity. Besides, figurative language and parody are approached to show to what extent they are creating elements of humor in comic TV shows. Cultural barriers are put into consideration throughout the analysis via the role of cultural literacy between the comedians and the audience. Consequently, the contribution of the research paper is the semantic approach via a qualitative framework to analyze techniques of verbal humor in addition to the role of culture in comic TV shows.

A Rat in a Maze: Analysis of Violation and Flouting Of Maxims in the Television Adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

The influential work of H.P. Grice (1975) on Cooperative Principle has been extensively applied in both authentic and fictional contexts. Scholars in the field of pragmatics argued that non-observance of maxims lead into the creation of humor (Khosravizadeh and Sadehvandi, 2011; Jorfi and Dowlatabadi, 2015; Zeb, 2019; Kuang and Zhao, 2017) and character development (Pertiwi , 2013; Saradifa, 2020; Sembiring and Ghozalo, 2017). Built on this argument, the present study was conducted to confirm such claim by focusing on the instances of violating and flouting of maxims and the purpose it served in an intertwined context of reality and fiction in the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Findings revealed that characters deliberately violated and flouted the maxims in order to avoid conflict and to also highlight information, which are deemed indispensable in building the narrative. This study also found instances of violation and flouting of maxims as a product of suppression of women characters that mirror gender inequalities in many parts of the globe.   Â

Realization of Maxim Flouting to Create Humour in Incredibles 2

This study focuses on the analysis of humour creations based on the Grice’s cooperative maxim flouting. It applies descriptive qualitative study where we examined the utterances in Incredibles 2 were flouted to create humour. The results of the study showed that (1) There were 7 kinds of humour created from 19 flouting of quality maxims. (2) There were also 7 kinds of humour created from 45 flouting of quantity maxims. (3) There were only 9 kinds of humour created from 57 flouting of manner maxims. (4) On the flouting of relation maxims, all 11 humour categories were fulfilled from 59 flouting of relation maxims. Furthermore, it is suggested that through the occurance of maxim flouting in the movie especially animation genre which is addressed to the audience gives the knowledge about conversational implicatures. With regard to the creation of humour, it is suggested that the humour is not only a deviation of the cooperative principle and its maxims. Other theory of pragmatics can also be used to analyze the humour such as, politeness principle and also the acts of speech acts.

Humor creation and the ambiguity of morpho-syntactic phenomena

Ambiguity of different types contributes significantly to humor creation, as predicted by incongruity theory This holds for homonymy, polysemy, structural and scope ambiguity, as well as any multiplicity of meanings that arises due to pragmatic factors. A consideration of languages with rich inflectional morphology, such as Russian, further reveals that linguistic humor may be based on the semantic indeterminacy of certain grammatical phenomena. The present paper provides evidence in favor of this claim by taking the imperfective aspect, genitive case-assignment and instrumental case-assignment into account. It is demonstrated that the ambiguity / indeterminacy associated with these phenomena gives rise to the creation of humorous effects. We further generalize that the core functions of case and aspect correlate with the less salient readings of ambiguous sentences (often the absurd, non-bona-fide ones). In contrast, the more peripheral and even idiomatic functions give rise to the salient, bona-fide readings. A functional explanation is put forward for this apparent discrepancy: the prototypical, easily accessible functions of case and aspect make it easier for the hearer to process a sentence in its non-salient interpretation.

Personal and social influences on the use of humour in the interactions of student nurses in UK clinical settings

Humour is a centuries-old phenomenon studied by many disciplines. Social and personal identity play a role in the creation, recognition, understanding, appreciation and use of humour. This study, which used interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore preregistration nursing students' experiences of the use of humour in the UK clinical setting, highlights what affects the students' use of humour. The influence of sex, age, and culture and ethnicity on the participants' use of humour with patients and healthcare staff is evidenced and explored; the influence of sex did not strictly follow traditional expectations.

The humor characteristics of young epileptic patients and its correlation with depression

Objective: To explore the characteristics of humor in young adult epileptic patients and examine the relationship between humor and depression. Methods: We recruited 55 young adult epileptic patients who visited outpatient clinic of the Department of Neurology of Yijishan Hospital of Wannan Medical College between October 2018 and March 2019 and 44 healthy controls to complete the multidimensional humor scale (MSHS), humor style questionnaire (HSQ) and Beck depression scale-Ⅱ (BDI-Ⅱ), and compared their differences between the two groups. Results: The results showed that the young adult patients with epilepsy (PWEs) were affected in humor creation, coping with humor and the totally scores of MSHS. The scores of humor creation, coping with humor and the totally scores of MSHS in the young epilepsy patients were 25.3±5.9, 16.7±5.0 and 61±10, which were significantly lower than those in the control group 29.8±6.1, 21.1±2.6 and 71±8. As for the humor style, self-defeating humor scores in PWEs were higher than controls 14±5 vs 9±3, and the self-enhancing humor scores were lower than controls 18±7 vs 23±6. The scores of BDI-Ⅱ in PWEs were significantly higher than those of normal controls 13±7 vs 6±4. Pearson's correlation test showed that the scores of BDI-Ⅱ were negatively correlated with humor creation, coping with humor, the totally scores of MSHS and self-enhancing humor scores (r=-0.566--0.721, P<0.05), while it was positively correlated with self-defeating humor scores (r=0.818, P<0.05). Among the clinically relevant factors, the scores of BDI-Ⅱ were correlated with seizure control and gender. Multiple stepwise linear regression showed that coping with humor, self-defeating and self-enhancing humor scores were closely related with depression in young epileptic adults. Conclusion: The young adults with epilepsy are affected in sense of humor and humor style, which are closely related with depression.

Im/politeness, gender and power distance inLady Windermere’s Fan

AbstractIm/politeness has attracted considerable attention over the past decades (starting withLakoff 1973;Brown and Levinson 1978;Leech 1983) and has kept expanding rapidly with the discursive turn (Eelen 2001;Mills 2003;Watts 2003;Bousfield 2008;Locher 2008). There is a growing interest in examining im/politeness from a number of perspectives, e.g. society, gender, cross-cultural etc., and multiple definitions have been proposed, however, impoliteness as such has not had a distinct theoretical framework yet.This study investigates impoliteness through drama translation data. It focuses on manipulation of im/politeness in target versions of a playtext, in terms of gender, and examines how humour may be facilitated through such shifts. The aim is to confirm that impoliteness does interact with gender (Mills 2003), and that humour creation draws on reversed gender stereotypes. It also shows that power (ensuing from reversed gender stereotypes) interacts with impoliteness strategies, to manifest humour in the target versions. The study usesBousfield’s (2008)model to account for im/politeness shifts, between the two versions.Oscar Wilde’sLady Windermere’s Fan(1892) is a comedy and a satire targeting the aristocratic society of the time. The two Greek translations of the play (2006 by Karhadakis and 2010 by Belies) are a most suitable context for examining how impoliteness interacts with power distance and gender to create humour, because of its humorous aspects and cross-gender talk. The paper also intends to show impoliteness scholarship that translation has a rich potential for deciphering or confirming pragmatic aspects of the phenomenon, which are elsewhere pursued through monolingual research.

Compilation of Humor Scale for Applied Undergraduates in Fuzhou

The objective of this study aims at developing measure scale of sense of humor (SOH). The initial measure items were collected by reverent literature review of previous studies. Data was collected by questionnaire survey from an applied college and a total of 350 valid samples were received with a responded rate of 83%. The results of structure equation modeling (SEM) showed that the adequately reliability and validity of the scale could be met. Furthermore, five factors named humor creation, humor applied, humor attitude, humor collection, and humor copy were extracted from twenty measure items. Finally some suggestions were drawn to the college.

An Analysis of Verbal Humor in Preaching of Ustadz Abdul Somad

There have been many studies about humor, especially verbal humor. Most of them were related to the areas of, for example situation comedy, movie, song and so on where humor can easily be found because it is the main focus of those areas. However, there were no prior studies which explore the verbal humor in the areas where its main focus is not to produce funny remarks. Therefore, the researcher attempted to find the exitence of verbal humor in such area, particularly in preaching where the main focus is to deliver religous teachings, but the existence of humor is also there. The object of this research was the preaching of Ustadz Abdul Somad. The general therory of verbal humor (GTVH) proposed by Attardo and Raskin (1991) was employed in order to analyse the humor creation process of each types of verbal humor. The results showed that Ustadz Abdul Somad produced a significant number of verbal humor, in terms of types, numbers and knowledge recources. Ustadz Abdul Somad produced 9 out 12 types of verbal humor.

Early Titanic Jokes: A disaster for the theory of disaster jokes?

AbstractThis paper contributes to our understanding of the inception of disaster humor by refuting the position of ‘technological determinism’ that is central for the theory of disaster jokes. This view, developed by Christie Davies, ties the emergence of this form of humor to the visual presentation of disaster events on television. The paper reports on the discovery of several contemporary instances of pre-television disaster humor on the topic of the sinking of the Titanic from 1912, thereby explicitly challenging the premise that prior to televised coverage, there were no disaster jokes. While the data come from a culture that was cognitively very distant from the disaster (and, thus, more likely to give rise to instantaneous disaster humor creation), the paper suggests that a modification to the original theory is possible, arguing that disaster humor can be interpreted as a reaction to the more general process of mediatization, whether televisual or exclusively verbal, which constructs a shared body of knowledge that people can draw upon as a resource when constructing humor. That is particularly the case with iconic disasters, such as the sinking of the Titanic, which can be seen symbolically as an epic fail of modernity rather than a mere tragic disaster.

Humor creation during efforts to find humorous cognitive reappraisals of threatening situations

This interdisciplinary study examined the structure of humor creation in the specific context of efforts to positively reappraise stressful situations for effective coping. In a sample of n = 101 participants, a performance test was used to assess the quantity (fluency, number of generated ideas that qualified as humor) and quality (rated funniness) of humor creation in cognitive reappraisal. Linguistic mechanisms were identified and quantified using cognitive-linguistic methods of corpus analysis, and their employment was correlated with humor production performance on the level of the individual. Almost all individuals were able to come up with reappraisal ideas that qualified as humorous. Depressive symptoms, a negative mood state, and high perceptions of threat did not compromise the participants’ capability to create humor. Individuals who were more serious-minded as a trait produced ideas that were rated as less funny, but their basic ability to create humor was unaffected. Metonymy (a contiguity-based principle of meaning extension) emerged as by far the most prominent semantic mechanism in the creation of humorous re-interpretations. Furthermore, its use was related to good humor creation performance in terms of quantity and quality, which is in line with its assumed importance in the extension of meaning in general and the creation of humor in particular. Further effective linguistic mechanisms and conceptual phenomena were identified. The empirical data may be valuable for the development of interventions involving the creation of humorous ideas for cognitive reappraisal.