Humorous Genres Research Articles

Gender and joking: On the complexities of women's image politics in humorous narratives

The present article contributes to contextualization research, genre analysis, and gender studies. It deals with anecdotes in which a female narrator humorously presents her own personal misadventures or inadequacies. In my corpus of informal dinner conversations among good friends from the German academic milieu, I have found many instances where women presented comic perspectives on themselves; only one man did this. 1 1 I was not primarily interested in gender but in humorous genres and activity types in general, such as teasing, banter, witty remarks, funny anecdotes, standardized jokes, fabrications (make-believe-activities), humorous theorizing, activities of upgrading the trivial. I was surprised to discover many activities for which we have no name in our everyday language, e.g., the upgrading of the trivial. German intellectuals often make a game of playfully taking trivial media news extremely seriously, e.g., during dinners among friends they might ask the group whether they think Prince Charles and Lady Di were ever suitable for each other. They can then jointly develop comical, half-serious theories about Charles and Diana. This kind of acting in a theater frame is found amusing by all participants. There are also other gender differences in my corpus that I do not deal with here: men tell more standardized jokes and practice sexual teasing. Women generally laugh more than men. In contrast to psychological gender research, which frequently shows a tendency for women to depreciate themselves in their humor (women regard jokes at their own expense as funnier than do men), I prefer to view the phenomenon in the context of complex conversational image politics. I use Erving Goffman's concept of face to describe personal faces or identities. In detailed data analyses, it can be shown how female narrators organize their presentations so that other people do not laugh at their expense, but rather at the expense of the norms which they mock collectively by laughing at them. Drawing on a theory of interactional perspective, we can tell from listeners' reactions that they share the narrator's perspective. The comparison of my data with Jefferson's ‘troubles talks’ (1979) shows the relevance of an early keying of the humorous modality. In self-mockery, tellers try from the very start not to give the impression of I having a problem. In making jokes about their own experiences, the women in my corpus communicate specific sides of their personal identity. Instead of ascribing fixed, essentialist humor styles to men and women, I favor analyzing humorous episodes in natural contexts. Finally, I see a need to explain why men seldom employ complex forms of self-mockery, as compared to what many women do.

Should We Laugh or Should We Cry? John Callahan's Humor as a Tool to Change Societal Attitudes Toward Disability

While cartoon scholarship in the communication discipline seeks to uncover the persuasive functions and semiotic techniques of cartoons , the discipline has predominantly looked at editorial cartoons and largely neglected the area of gag cartoons . Gag cartoons , as a particular genre of humor , provide a unique form of public argument . Drawing from the rhetorical theories of Stephen Toulmin on practical reasoning ( 1958 ) and of Kenneth Burke on perspective by incongruity ( 1959 ), this article provides a rhetorical analysis of the activist humor of quadriplegic cartoonist John Callahan . Specifically , the article seeks to demonstrate how Callahan ' s cartoons contribute to the ongoing struggle over the construction of disability in American culture .