Humorous Utterances Research Articles

Humor in Dakwah: A Socio-Pragmatic Study

This study aims at analyzing the forms, functions, and meanings of humor used by preachers in delivering religious sermons. This study uses a qualitative descriptive method that focuses on the act of identifying, classifying, analyzing data that has been obtained, and describing it in the form of language as it is. Qualitative research emphasizes the depth of data with the researcher as a key instrument in the research. The research data consists of humorous utterances delivered by preachers in Islamic religious sermons, namely Ustadz Anwar Zahid, Ustadz Wijayanto, and Ustadz Da'as Latif. The form of humor is analyzed using morphosyntax theory, the function of humor is linked to sociolinguistic theory, while the meaning of humor is dissected using semantic and pragmatic theory. The results of the study show that there are five dominant forms of humor that appear in dakwah humor, namely line humor, dialogue, stories, poems, and wordplay. The use of humor as a strategy in dakwah is proven to be effective in achieving its communicative goals. Humor helps make religious messages easier to understand and remember by the audience. This is because humor can simplify complex concepts and make them more interesting for listeners. This study also found that humor is not only a form of entertainment, but also an effective communication tool in spreading religious teachings.

Rhetorical strategies in Chinese and English talk show humor: a comparative analysis.

Humor is a kind of cognitive psychology activity, and it is diverse among individuals. One of the main characteristics of talk shows is to produce humorous discourse to make the audience laugh; however, rare studies have made a deeper comparative investigation on the rhetorical strategies in different language humorous utterances. Therefore, the current study adopted a mixed method of sequential explanatory design to identify the types of rhetorical strategies in the monolog verbal humor of Chinese and English talk shows, examine their similarities and differences. Two hundred monolog samples from 2016 to 2022, which consisted of 100 monologs of Chinese talk shows (CTS) and 100 monologs of English talk shows (ETS), were downloaded from the internet as language corpus. Berger's theory was adopted to identify the types of rhetorical strategies. Based on the obtained findings, this study found that both language talk show hosts use a variety type of rhetorical strategies to produce humorous discourse. The comparison of similarities and differences revealed that the most frequently used rhetorical strategies in both talk shows were almost similar (e.g., satire, exaggeration, facetiousness, and ridicule), but the percentage of usage of these various rhetorical strategies in both talk shows was slightly different. Interestingly, misunderstanding occurred 20 times in CTS but was not found in ETS. Meanwhile, simile and personification were used more often in ETS. Conclusively, this study contributes valuable insights on the use of different types of rhetorical strategies to create verbal humor in different language contexts.

Stereotypical humour in the sitcom "Will and Grace"

Stereotypes have often been associated with negative outcomes such as discrimination, prejudice, and bias. Nonetheless, this study investigates the potential for humour within stereotypical discourse in a sitcom. Through an analysis of humorous language used in sitcom, this research aims to uncover ways in which stereotypical utterances might bring about laughter as an outcome. Using the data from seven U.S. sitcom Will and Grace episodes throughout the eighth season, I generated the data from the show's transcript. I analysed how two characters, a white American woman and her maid, communicate with each other with a content analysis approach to categorize the different themes of humour presented in the seven chosen episodes. To determine of what is considered to be humorous utterances, I used the audience's laughter as the marker (Messerli 2016). The research demonstrated that the use of stereotypical humor involves exploiting the preconceived notions about another party's country of origin, physical appearance, and cognitive capacity. Further, my findings showed that an individual with higher power often performed stereotypical humour towards that with less power, while Holmes et al. (2003) saw humour as a linguistic technique for people who lacked power to establish a favourable image of themselves by challenging authority. Ultimately, this research promises to advance our understanding of the complex relationship between humour, stereotyping, and societal attitudes.

Propuesta de etiquetaje pragmático para un corpus conversacional en español

This paper proposes a system of pragmatic tagging for the VALESCO.HUMOR corpus, available at the Observahumor.com website. To date, the work of the GRIALE group has involved the study of irony and humour in Spanish, leading to the creation of a taxonomy of humour markers and indicators that serve to identify ironic and humorous utterances in the corpus. Markers are elements that help in the interpretation of an utterance as humorous (e.g., intonation or laughter), whereas indicators are humorous elements per se (e.g., certain suffixes or phraseological units). Timofeeva and Ruiz Gurillo (2021) have developed a pilot version of a pragmatic tagging system, based on markers and indicators, for the CHILDHUM corpus (also available at Observahumor.com). However, their system incorporates characteristics which are applicable to that specific corpus of children’s narratives, and as such cannot easily be extrapolated to all the corpora hosted at Observahumor.com. For this reason, it is necessary to carry out a detailed study of the pragmatic tags that might best be used towards a better interpretation of each text therein, and hence that would be suitable for each type of corpus. In the present study we present a proposal for the VALESCO.HUMOR corpus, which comprises 148 ironichumorous sequences extracted from 67 colloquial conversations of the Val.Es.Co. corpus (http://www.valesco.es/). The aim of this proposal is to provide the reader with all the necessary information to be able to interpret these humorous sequences and thus be able to analyse the corpus adequately..

Can you amuse the audience through an interpreter?

Abstract In this article, I investigate how interpreters handle humorous utterances during plenary debates of the European Parliament, focusing on the input by one Polish Member of the European Parliament (MEP), Janusz Korwin-Mikke. The source speeches (in Polish or English) are analysed bottom-up to identify the types of humour favoured by the speaker. The most frequent ones are irony, ad hominem arguments with an element of ridicule, absurdity, and shifts in register. Subsequently, a pragmatically oriented comparative analysis is conducted to assess whether and how individual instances of humour are transferred by interpreters. Additionally, possible side effects are considered, such as shifts accompanying transferred humour and message incoherence resulting from humour loss. Register humour is typically removed by interpreters. The successful handling of absurdity relies mainly on compression and often fails, while ad hominem and irony appear to be relatively less challenging to interpret. Interestingly, irony is occasionally added by interpreters, either to boost the speaker’s comical intent or to distance themselves from his views.

Humour in the Situational Comedy Balada Kampung Riwil

Humor is a universal human phenomenon that is culturally bounded. As an instance of expressive culture, humor communicates a set of beliefs and thoughts held by and shared in a community. This is the reason humor has for recent decades attracted the attention of anthropologists. A lot of humors are expressed in verbal language, and in this way linguistics, particularly pragmatics, provides an analytical tool to understand the meanings of humor. Humorous utterances in this study were taken from episode 118, entitled “Dyah Puspa Jaladri#1”, of a Javanese comic serial Balada Kampung Riwil. The data were analyzed using Grice’s Cooperative Principle to reveal the meanings behind the humor. The result shows that amusing effects arise when Grice’s maxims are intentionally flouted and humor in the serial serves various functions.

Conversational implicature forms of Banyumasan humorous utterances on YouTube

This study focuses on conversational implicatures in humorous utterances. In pragmatics, implicature analysis is used to reveal the additional meaning or implied meaning of the speech conveyed by the speaker. An implicature can occur because of a violation of the principle of conversation. Conversational implicature (especially) only appears in the context of certain utterances and has an implied meaning. An utterance in a conversation can imply a pragmatic function implicitly or imply some meaning indirectly through language. This study aims to describe the implicature forms of Banyumasan humorous utterances on YouTube. This study was analyzed using Searle’s (1969) speech acts theory and Grice’s (1975) theory of conversational implicature. The method in this research was descriptive qualitative. Based on the results of the analysis found in Banyumasan humorous speech, there are assertive, directive, expressive, and commissive implicature forms.

Non-Observance Maxims in Banyumasan Humor Speech

Humorous utterances can cause humor because listeners, readers and audiences find unexpected utterances, attitudes or things, language games and deviations in speech conveyed by a speaker or comedian due to a discrepancy between the concept and the actual situation and exaggerated and unreasonable expressions, so it can cause laughter. In a conversation, what the speaker means often goes beyond what is said. Other implied meanings can be inferred and predicted based on the context. Implicature can occur due to a violation of the principle of conversation. The violation of the cooperative principle has the aim of creating humor in the conversation. There is another basic theory of cooperative principle, namely the non-observance of the conversational maxims theory proposed by Grice (1975). It is one of the pragmatic studies in determining the implied meaning of utterances that contain humor. This study aims to analyze the non-observance maxims found in Banyumasan humorous utterances on youtube. The data collection technique in this study was to use a purposive sampling technique, namely by looking for videos that match the research object. The methods used in this research were observation, documentation and transcription. The data analysis technique in this study used descriptive qualitative data analysis techniques and was carried out through three stages according to the data analysis model of Miles and Huberman (1984), namely data reduction, data presentation and drawing conclusions. The results of the study showed that in Banyumasan humorous utterances there are several non-observance maxims, including flouting the maxims, violating the maxims and infringing the maxims. From these data, the most common is the flouting of quality maxims. This is because in humorous utterances there are non-observance of maxims that aim to create a funny impression.

Лингвокогнитивное моделирование категории "участник дискурса" (на материале интернет-мемов профессиональных сообществ юристов в социальных сетях)

The aim of the research is to identify semantic models of humorous utterances that express the stereotypical ideas of the lawyers’ professional community about the content of the categories of its participants in informal settings. The research methodology integrates two approaches: a critical analysis of discourse and a semantic approach to humour based on scripts by Salvatore Attardo and Victor Raskin. We applied the following analysis model: (1) discursive analysis of texts in accordance with the procedure presented in the papers of foreign and Russian scholars; (2) analysis of humour in accordance with the six-level model of analysis proposed by Attardo; (3) as the research includes transformed statements consisting of a complex of elements and their interrelationships to varying degrees, the methodology is supplemented by the theory of conceptual integration developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. The research methods are: discourse analysis, including standard techniques of communicative-pragmatic and semantic analysis; content analysis, the semantic categories of which are the parameters of the sociocommunicative level of the model, and the units are their typical lexical markers. The data include Internet memes constituting the content of professional legal groups on the social networks Instagram and Facebook. The data include 260 units. The analysis revealed a quantitative predominance in Internet memes expressing the subjects of legal discourse of models based on contrast and referential humour. The semantic dominants actualised in such models coincide with the stereotypical attitudes currently existing in society in relation to the legal community and its professional participants. The uneven distribution of models in accordance with the categories of participants indicates the predominance of reflection in relation to several professional participants – an advocate and a lawyer: intensity of professional activity and high fatigue, prestige of professional status and high social responsibility of professional participants, competence and professionalism (unprofessionalism), complexity and incomprehensibility of the language, high profit. In relation to non-professional participants (client/ accused/ defendant/ respondent/ witness), the stereotypes about their stupidity, greed, arrogance, venality are replicated. Referential models are distinguished by the diversity of the subjects represented and the uniformity of the meanings expressed: the subject’s originality of thinking, cunningness and resourcefulness. Semantic models based on conceptual integration were identified only in relation to professional participants – a lawyer. They actualise such values as professionalism, reliability, competence; stress associated with responsibility at work, danger and charm of the profession, special status; superiority; friendliness; help and superpowers of the professional.

HUMOUR IN BARACK OBAMA'S SPEECH: A CONVERSATION ANALYSIS (CA)

Evaluation and critics are two essential aspects in assessing a perfect performance. Public speaking is a platform to convey critics as well as evaluations publicly. Critics and Evaluation is an embodiment of check and balance in a democratic nation. Barack Obama attends White House Association Correspondents Dinner annually as a sign of USA democracy establishment. This event is a mark of good relationship between government and mass media correspondents. This study finds critical and evaluative humorous utterances as Obama’s tactical strategy to deliver his critics and evaluation. This research is qualitative research that uses conversational analysis (CA) as the method. The data were transcribed by Jefferson transcription system (2020). It has an aim to examine implicature theory (Grice, 1975) further in humour. This study shows that pragmatical utterances, that is conveyed in humorous concept, need a construction of common understanding, named as common ground. Turn taking is seen from speaker’s speech and various responses of audiences such as laughter, applauses, or short verbal responses. These responses become essential part of discourse constructions in seizing its goal, to criticize and evaluate colleagues’ performance.

The Production of Conversational Humor by Flouting Gricean Maxims in the Sitcom <em>The IT Crowd</em>

This study focuses on the Gricean maxim floutings found in the production of verbal humor by the characters in the show The IT Crowd, seasons one and two. This research aims to identify and classify the flouting of maxims, explain the rhetorical strategies employed, and the functions behind each flouting of the humorous utterances in the sitcom. Qualitative methods were used in analyzing the data, which are the humorous utterances resulted from the maxims flouting found in the first 12 episodes of the series. However, quantitative data is also taken into consideration in the analysis. In the series, a total of 102 occurrences were identified as maxim floutings. The most frequently occurring maxim flouting is of the quality maxim with 56 occurrences (54.90%).The result shows the characters produced verbal humor by flouting the conversational maxims using varied rhetorical strategies. Their most preferred rhetorical strategy is allusion, with 12 occurrences (11.70%) found in the series. It was also discovered that the characters use a variety of rhetorical strategies when they flout the maxims to achieve different communicative goals. The most frequent goal to appear is self-disclosure, with 26 data indicate the speakers flout the maxims to disclose personal information through humor.

The Analysis of the Interpersonal and Declaratory Acts of the Humorous Utterances In Bernard Shaw's Comedy You Never Can Tell A Pragmatic Study

The Analysis of the Interpersonal and Declaratory Acts of the Humorous Utterances In Bernard Shaw's Comedy You Never Can Tell A Pragmatic Study

An Analysis of Humorous Utterances in Young Sheldon Based on Relevance Theory

Humor reflects the wisdom of the speaker and their positive attitudes towards life. The study of cognitive mechanisms of language humor is an important research topic in the field of cognitive linguistics. Relevance Theory holds that understanding humor is a cognitive process of seeking relevance and it is conducive to making a reasonable illustration of the general rules of how humor can be understood. Based on Relevance Theory, this study analyzes the humorous utterances in the American sitcom Young Sheldon (season 4) by employing a qualitative research method, aiming to explore the cognitive mechanism of humor generation. The findings indicate that: (1) Humor tends to be generated when there is an implicature caused by rhetoric in ostensive information; (2) The inconsistency between maximal relevance and optimal relevance generates a humorous effect; (3) Humor is likely to be created when a contextual effect is insufficient, especially between an adult and a child. To further explore detailed cognitive steps in humor generation, more research combined with other cognitive theories can be conducted in the future.

A pragmatic analysis of humour strategies and functions in 'Jenifa's Diary' and 'Professor JohnBull'

Studies on humour in Nigeria have been extensively carried out from the perspectives of stand-up comedy and computer-mediated communication. There is a dearth of scholarly enquiries on humour in situation comedies (sitcoms). This paper investigates humour in the interactions of characters in Jenifa’s Diary and Professor JohnBull, with a view to accounting for the manifestations of humour, the humour strategies deployed and the functions that the humorous utterances serve in the sitcoms. The work is situated in Culpeper’s Impoliteness Theory. Eight excerpts from the sitcoms were subjected to pragmatic analysis. Two discourse functions of amusing and castigating are discovered in the data. The former serves the function of facilitating discourse and changing presumed power and status, while the latter serves the function of maintaining one’s own space and autonomy, and demanding respect. Allusion, parody, retort, tease, banter and putdown are the humour techniques employed in the sitcoms. The study corroborates the claim of earlier studies that humour in every sphere of language use serves certain functions beyond the interactional need to create amusement.

The variable of gender and its interplay with mother tongue in the humor and laughter of bilingual couples

Abstract The variables of gender and mother tongue are usually considered independently in humor research. This article aims to explore the role of gender and its interplay with mother tongue in the production, reception, and assessment of humor among 10 bilingual, bicultural couples. It investigates whether the gender patterns commonly observed are also evident in these couples’ conversations, namely that women laugh more than men (Mehu, Marc & Robin I. M. Dunbar. 2008. Naturalistic observations of smiling and laughter in human group interactions. Behaviour 145(12). 1747–1780.), that women laugh more about men than the reverse (Jefferson, Gail. 2004. A note on laughter in ‘male-female’ interaction. Discourse Studies 6. 117–133. DOI:10.1177/1461445604039445.), and that men produce more humorous utterances than women do (Ross, Elaina M. & Jeffrey A. Hall. 2020. The traditional sexual script and humour in courtship. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 33(2). 197–218. DOI:10.1515/humor-2019-0017.). On average, the female bilinguals produced 29.6% more laughter pulses and laughed 7.4% more frequently, and their laughter episodes were consistently longer than their partners’. However, the participants’ mother tongue was found to have a stronger influence on their production and reception of laughables than their gender, and the native speakers produced more successful laughables, despite their partners’ high level of L2 proficiency. Interestingly, the couples’ self-assessments often did not match their actual laughing behavior and appeared to be clearly gendered; no couple considered the female partner to be funnier, and several men even questioned their partner’s sense of humor, while male humor was often praised.

For the Linguistic Conceptualization of Social Humor

Humor plays an important role in people's lives, which helps them to communicate and share their feelings and thoughts among each other. Jokes and various humorous utterances are a form of communication that is constantly shared in the process of social interaction. That is why humor is, to some extent, recognized as a social phenomenon.Since humor covers all areas, social media is no exception, as the latter is the most powerful tool of communication in the modern global world. People joke almost on everything despite difficult socio-economic circumstances and pandemic is no exception.The main goal of our research was to observe and analyze the so-called pandemic-related posts on social networks, particularly Facebook and to make their thematic and linguistic analysis. COVID 19 posts turned out to be quite diverse and very interesting. The observation has revealed that most of the posts on the social network concern the family relationships that are full of humor or sarcasm. This is not so surprising as people were forced to be locked in a family environment, That’s why numerous examples of this type have been gathered around this very topic. Interesting materials on educational and travel topics were also found during the study.Linguistic analysis of texts from social media, more precisely identification and analysis of the linguistic and literary means of expression, appeared to be very interesting.The research has revealed that various stylistic means such as repetition (parallel constriction), metaphors, comparison/simile, metonymy etc. are frequently used for constructing COVID 19 texts in social media. Thus, the analyzed examples are very interesting material from a psycho-linguistic point of view.

VERBAL HUMOUR CREATED BY NON-OBSERVANCE OF COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE IN MIRANDA

Humour is one of essential aspects to communicate with other people comfortably. Most of verbal humours, especially implicit humours generate because people break Grice’s four conversational maxims. Concerning this phenomenon, this research aims to find out types of non-observance of cooperative principle found in verbal humour, which uttered by the characters in British Situational Comedy Miranda. Qualitative method was adapted to analyze the data, which was conducted through identifying, classifying, interpreting the data. Humorous utterances from nine episodes of Miranda were the primary sources of data. In collecting the data, the researchers observed the whole episodes and the scripts, checked the suitability, took a note, and classified it into tables. The study concludes that there are four types of non-observance of cooperative principle, namely violating, flouting, infringing, and opting out a maxim. The result reveals that there are 80 humorous utterances, which do not obey the maxim. There are 66 utterances (82,5%) of flouting maxim, 10 utterances (12,5%) violation maxim, 3 utterances (3,75%) of infringing maxim, and 1 utterance (1,25%) of opting out maxim which are found in the sitcom.

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

Violation of the Conversational Maxims in the Humorous Utterances in Comedy Program ‘The East’

This study is conducted in order to reveal the violated maxims in the humorous utterances and the implicature of the maxim violations in NET comedy program ‘The East’, from a discourse analysis point of view. The writer analyzes the types of maxims that are violated found in the humorous utterances in episode 397 entitled ‘Ribet Milih Tempat Kerja Baru’ (Complication in choosing a workplace) of the comedy program ‘The East’. This study is conducted by using a descriptive-qualitative approach, aimed to create a description from the perspectives or experiences of the writer. The findings reveal there are totally 26 (twenty-six) violations, each with its implied meaning in the episode of the program. Among the four maxims, the most frequent occurrence is the violation of maxim of Quality with 11 occurrences. Key words: Cooperative Principle, violation of conversational maxims, implicature

Flouting of Grice’s Maxims in the Humorous Utterances in American Situation Comedy 2 Broke Girls

In daily life, when people interact, they sometimes use humorous utterances in the conversation. Humor may occur because the speakers flout Grice’s maxims. This study aims to describe how Grice’s maxims flout in the humorous utterances in American Situation Comedy 2 Broke Girls in Season 6 Episode 3-9 and the humorous utterances usually contain laughter. The finding of this study shows that all types of maxims were flouted by the actors and there are different language styles involved in the conversations. The maxim which is flouted the most is quantity and the language style which is found the most is hyperbole. The contents of situation which cause the actors to flout Grice’s maxims are as follows; the actors flout maxim of quality when they say something which is blatantly untrue or they lacks adequate. Then, in flouting of maxim of quantity, the actors sometimes give too little information and too much information. The third, the actors flouts maxim of manner when they say ambiguous, sometime being obscure. Last, the actors flout the maxim of relation if they say something irrelevant in responding to the previous topic. This study can be concluded that Grice’s maxims flouted in humorous utterances and the language styles are also found. The most dominant maxim that flouted is quantity.