People Laugh Research Articles

The Psychology of Patients With Oral-Facial Clefts: A Review of Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs (L'homme qui rit).

In Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs, the protagonist has a facial cleft. The authors aimed to comprehend the psychological experience of a patient with a facial cleft by analyzing this novel. The novel concerns the life of a young nobleman, Gwynplaine, disfigured as a child, who travels with his protector and companion, the vagabond philosopher Ursus, and Dea, a baby girl he rescued. During the oppressive rule of the king, one of his adversaries was Lord Linnaeus Clancharlie, who had taken refuge in Switzerland. The tyrannical monarch ordered the execution of Gwynplaine's father and commissioned a surgeon, Dr Hardquannone, to carve the boy's face into a perpetual grin. The king declared that he should "laugh forever at his fool of a father." Subsequently, the king sold the boy to a group who specialized in the mutilation and disfigurement of children. On the psychology of a boy with an appearance giving the impression of laughing, Hugo wrote: "By laughing Gwynplaine made people laugh. However, he wasn't laughing. His face laughed, his thoughts did not." When Ursus met Gwynplaine, Ursus asked the boy: "What are you laughing at?" The boy replied: I'm not laughing. Ursus: Then you are terrible. Gwynplaine's unnatural laughter, which stems from an artificial deformation of the muscles, is a silent form of laughter. It represents the eternal laughter of those who do not truly laugh, signifying emotional emptiness and an accompanying sense of indifference. Plastic surgeons can restore an "unnatural laughing face" to a "natural smiling face."

TV 예능 프로그램 자막에 나타난 언어유희의 표현 양상과 한국어교육

The purpose of this study is to analyze the linguistic levels and functions of language play in the subtitles of TV entertainment programs, which have not been well studied in the field of language education, and to suggest pedagogical implications. For this purpose, 475 subtitles containing language plays in 36 TV entertainment programs were extracted and categorized into the following types: Use of homophones and similar sounds, Sound repetition, Syllable substitution and addition, Transformation of existing texts, Utilize the spacing, Antithesis, Three-line acrostic poem, Use of homophones and polysemy, use of Chinese characters, abbreviations and Paraphrasing, visual pun. As a result, we found that in addition to its basic function of making people laugh, language play in subtitles also plays a role in drawing the viewer's attention and emphasizing the content to be conveyed, and even in covertly presenting sensitive or taboo expressions. Based on these findings, we concluded that language humor in subtitles can be used to enhance learners' linguistic and cultural knowledge, meta-linguistic awareness and multimodal literacy, and can be used as a language assessment tool.

LA SATIRE ET L’HUMOUR : PROCÉDÉS SCRIPTURAUX OU VERTUS CORRECTIVES CHEZ VOLTAIRE

To expose injustices or vices, one can either directly provoke horror and indignation by stating the facts, or use satire, which consists of making people laugh so that the reader will condemn the facts. Voltaire favours the second solution. Humour, irony

FunnyNet-W: Multimodal Learning of Funny Moments in Videos in the Wild

Automatically understanding funny moments (i.e., the moments that make people laugh) when watching comedy is challenging, as they relate to various features, such as body language, dialogues and culture. In this paper, we propose FunnyNet-W, a model that relies on cross- and self-attention for visual, audio and text data to predict funny moments in videos. Unlike most methods that rely on ground truth data in the form of subtitles, in this work we exploit modalities that come naturally with videos: (a) video frames as they contain visual information indispensable for scene understanding, (b) audio as it contains higher-level cues associated with funny moments, such as intonation, pitch and pauses and (c) text automatically extracted with a speech-to-text model as it can provide rich information when processed by a Large Language Model. To acquire labels for training, we propose an unsupervised approach that spots and labels funny audio moments. We provide experiments on five datasets: the sitcoms TBBT, MHD, MUStARD, Friends, and the TED talk UR-Funny. Extensive experiments and analysis show that FunnyNet-W successfully exploits visual, auditory and textual cues to identify funny moments, while our findings reveal FunnyNet-W’s ability to predict funny moments in the wild. FunnyNet-W sets the new state of the art for funny moment detection with multimodal cues on all datasets with and without using ground truth information.

Belief revision and incongruity: is it a joke?*

Incongruity often makes people laugh. You have to be smart to say stupid things. It requires to be even smarter for understanding them. This paper is a shameless attempt to formalise this intelligent behaviour in the case of an agent listening to a joke. All this is a matter of revision of beliefs, surprise and violation of norms.

The rhetoric of comedy: exploring the language and humor styles of Filipino stand-up comedians

Stand-up comedy is an act in which a certain person performs to make people laugh with the intention of appealing to them. It illustrates various language and humor styles that are used by comedians in performing; these styles vary depending on the audience, place, and theme of the event and are unique to each performer. This study aims to provide information regarding the specific approach that Filipino stand-up comedians used during their performances and how effective it was for the delivery and reception of humor. This study employed a qualitative research design using interpretative phenomenological analysis as the specific approach with which it is concerned in exploring experiences in their own terms (Smith et al, 2009). The study also uses thematic analysis approach as proposed by Braune and Clarke which revealed two themes under language styles utilized by stand-up comedians (1) incorporating language based on the audience (2) use of colloquial words and phrases. Three themes under humor styles utilized by stand-up comedians are (1) audience-centric performance, (2) observational comedy, (3) improvisational comedy. Also, three themes underlie the effectiveness of using language and humor styles: (1) importance of building connections, (2) extensive influences of endeavoring to be funny and, (3) enhancing audience satisfaction.

Inferring the Target of Self-defeating Humour in Internet Memes: A Pragmatic Analysis

Nowadays, people spend hours on social media conversing and sharing information through jokes and references made online. Digital memes are one of the most favourable means of internet communication, which thrives on humour. The main purpose of humour is to entertain and make people laugh. So, to avoid hurting others by joking at the expense of others, many people turn to self-mockery. One type of self-mockery is self-defeating humour in which the speaker targets himself/herself in a “poor me” fashion. By using a mixed approach of qualitative and quantitative analysis, this research investigated how internet users interpret the target of self-defeating humour in memes. This analysis used the relevance theory of Sperber and Wilson (1995). On this account, this research addressed the process of decoding and inferential enrichment, and lexical pragmatic adjustment. It is said that making oneself the target of a joke is safer and less sensitive than targeting other people. After analysing the inferences of 100 netizens that were drawn from five self-defeating memes, it has been concluded that targeting oneself could be as sensitive as targeting others.

What did the Portuguese laugh at 200 years ago?

This article aims to identify the existence of a laughter community in Portugal in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Based on research into the beginnings of humour in periodicals published in Portugal, a corpus consisting of newspapers published between 1797 and 1835 was analysed, from the first in which humour was used systematically as a resource (Almocreve de Petas) until the establishment of the Constitutional Monarchy. With the concept of laughter community in mind, evidence was sought that it was present in the period that covers the political, social and economic transition from the Ancien Régime to modern society, having as main players writers, editors, printers, readers and listeners, in a process of production, reception, circulation and appropriation of ideas and meanings. This process, which developed in the public sphere, also played a part in forming incipient public opinion. To detect evidence of this community, clichés, jocular expressions and comic stories conveyed by the periodicals were identified. Very often they were found to have kept the same meaning they had at the time, while some expressions have survived with slight changes, and others simply no longer make people laugh.

Religious Humor Digitalized by New Media

The relationship between religion and humor requires more research with in the religious context. The main purpose of the study, which focuses on the entertaining appearance of the religious-themed visuals in social media and their comforting qualities, is to determine how religious humor in physical life is transformed into a digital form in electronic media. For this purpose, Facebook application, which has millions of users in Turkey, was chosen as a sample. Visuals with religious content were handled particularly in line with the approaches of Morreal, and with Thorson and Powell, who conduct research in a framework close to him. Discourse analysis model, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in the study. As a result of the study, it was seen that religious humor is fictionalized with the possibilities offered by the electronic environment within the integrity of the visual and text. In the visuals analyzed during the research process, traces of religiously recommended humor were seen mostly. As with other humor types, religious humor elements were produced for the purpose of coping with life's difficulties, forgetting the troubles and relaxing psychologically, having fun, motivating oneself in a positive way, showing a positive perspective in the face of negative situations, making other people laugh and creating funny social environments through humor.

ANALYSIS OF INSULT AS HUMOR IN THE CONTEXT OF POLITICS THROUGH STAND-UP COMEDY SHOW

This research explains the humor styles used in the stand-up comedy show by Kiki Saputri. She owns material that is known as "Roast." It is used for a specific person on the show. A roast consists of an insult, which is the background of this research. This kind of comedy can be found on TV programs or Youtube videos that contain comedy content because they get special attention from the viewers. Besides that, many films featured comedians, particularly stand-up comedians. They can use comedy to not only make people laugh but also to criticize, deliver messages, and capitalize on unrest. In this research, the researcher used descriptive qualitative research as the method of the research. The analysis used the theory of Arthur Asa Berger. In this theory, Berger said that there are 45 indicators of humor, but the researcher just used insult as one indicator to focus on this research. The researcher wants to analyze the use of insults in the Roast Stand Up Comedy Show in a political context from Youtube. The research results show that using insults can be humorous because it can make the audience laugh. Furthermore, the show was served in good humor but not for serious insults in front of politicians. Thus, they not only entertain the audience but also deliver messages or criticism directly to the politicians. Keywords: Humor, Roast, Insult, Comedian, Politician.

Laughing with Young Ben: Vivian Grey, Flim-Flams!, and the Perplexities of Satirical Writing

From his unpublished juvenilia to The Young Duke (1831), Benjamin Disraeli tested his literary potential mainly through writing in the satirical, comic, or even farcical mode. One way or another, all his fictional works from 1826 to 1830 were meant to make people laugh, or at least smile, and appreciate the young author’s wit and humorous talent for irony and comic exaggeration. He sidelined this practice in the 1830s, when he mainly experimented with other narrative genres and modes of representation, eventually parading in Venetia (1837) a new sobriety of tone such as suited an aspiring Tory politician in the year of Victoria’s accession. Working within this developmental framework, my article sets out to investigate the young Disraeli’s penchant for laughter in connection with the fun-loving vein running in the family. It focuses on Vivian Grey, Part I, and relates it to Flim-Flams!, or, the Life and Errors of My Uncle and the Amours of My Aunt (1805), a quirky satirical ‘romance’ Isaac D’Israeli completed round about the time his eldest son was born. In highlighting the contextual similarities and carnivalesque qualities of the two works, the article offers an eccentric approach to the Romantic/early-Victorian generational changeover.

Character Speeches in Brazilian Soap Operas: if They Make People Laugh, They Don’t Represent Us

RESUMO: Conhecendo a abrangência da televisão para a disseminação de informações, entretenimento e ideologias, este trabalho investiga a caracterização das falas de personagens de duas obras da teledramaturgia brasileira, O Sétimo Guardião ( 2018) e Verdades Secretas ( 2015), buscando (re)conhecer se a representação pode encaminhar os telespectadores a uma avaliação negativa desses personagens devido à sua forma de se expressar pela fala, ou se a representação legitima os falares como marcas de identidade. Os estudos da sociolinguística fundamentam as análises, sobretudo teóricos como Labov ( 2008), Pagotto ( 2004), Bortoni-Ricardo ( 2009, 2011) e Bagno ( 2015). Por meio de uma pesquisa qualitativa que utilizou como método a proposta de Bortoni-Ricardo ( 2009), em que se alocam os falantes analisados em pontos de linhas imaginárias de acordo com sua expressão linguística, em especial na alocação dos falantes no “contínuo de urbanização”, foi possível concluir que uma das narrativas televisivas se mostra repleta de traços caricaturais, oportunizando avaliações negativas enquanto a outra traz representatividade por apresentar as identidades representadas com fidedignidade.

Language Craft in Eugene Ionesco’s Theater: Neological Word Games

We call artisans of comic, ironic, satirical language all writers of the stature of Boris Vian, Jacques Prévert, Jacques Audiberti, Eugène Ionesco who denote an awakened linguistic curiosity for the riches of literary, popular or spoken language. They actualize everything: phoneme, afixoid, pun, oxymoron, logogriph, etc. Ionesco in this pleiad is still at the head. His characters, their language must make people laugh, cry, die of happiness, otherwise they become dumb, deaf, deaf-mutes. And so Ionesco invents and puts on their tongues anagrams, antimétaboles, bouts-rimés, homéotéleutes, mots-valises to accomplish his essential task: “to create a new language”. This one will live as much as its heroes speak a neo-language where the absurdities become syllogisms, where the approximations are only true axioms. In this article, we are going to submit to a more or less detailed analysis the linguistic nature of the puns of Ionesco's theatrical language.

Political Extravaganzas and a Jonsonian Comedy

Political Extravaganzas and a Jonsonian Comedy

UYUMSUZLUK TEORİSİ BAĞLAMINDA MİRZA ELEKBER SABİR’İN QORXURAM ADLI ŞİİRİ ÜZERİNE BİR İNCELEME

Temelde insanı güldürmeyi amaçlayan mizahi ürünler, gerek sosyal gerekse kişisel olayların etkisi ile vücut bulmuş edebî yapıtlardır. Güldürme, alay ve hiciv gibi çeşitli işlevleri ortaya koyan mizah, sosyal hayatın yazınsal ürünlere yansımış şeklidir. Hemen hemen bütün edebiyat yapıtlarında karşımıza çıkan mizahi unsurlar, Türk edebiyatının muhtevasında da geniş yer tutmaktadır. Doğrudan ya da dolaylı olarak birçok değişime maruz kalmış ve her seferinde yeni bir kültür aşamasının katlarını aşmış olan toplum, mevcut şartlara ve psikolojik amillere göre mizahi üslubu; çeşitli anlatı türlerinde teşekkül ettirmiştir. 20. yüzyıl Azerbaycan Türk edebiyatının temsilcilerinden biri olan Mirza Elekber Sabir, ele alacağımız Qorxuram adlı şiirinde uyumsuzluk unsurlarını bir araya getirerek poetik düzlemde mizahi teorinin en güzel örneklerinden birini vücuda getirmiştir. Makalede, toplumsal sorunları satirik bir üslupla ele alan Mirza Elekber Sabir’in Qorxuram adlı şiiri, bir mizah teorisi olan uyumsuzluk bağlamında ele alınacak ve bu teori ekseninde açıklanmaya çalışılacaktır.

PROJECT INDIGO – DOCUMENT, DISSEMINATE & ANALYSE A GRAFFITI-SCAPE

Abstract. Graffiti is a short-lived form of heritage balancing between tangible and intangible, offensive and pleasant. Graffiti makes people laugh, wonder, angry, think. These conflicting traits are all present along Vienna's Donaukanal (Eng. Danube Canal), a recreational hotspot – located in the city's heart – famous for its endless display of graffiti. The graffiti-focused heritage science project INDIGO aims to build the basis to systematically document, monitor, and analyse circa 13 km of Donaukanal graffiti in the next decade. The first part of this paper details INDIGO's goals and overarching methodological framework, simultaneously placing it into the broader landscape of graffiti research. The second part of the text concentrates on INDIGO's graffiti documentation activities. Given the project's aim to create a spatially, spectrally, and temporally accurate record of all possible mark-makings attached in (il)legal ways to the public urban surfaces of the Donaukanal, it seems appropriate to provide insights on the photographic plus image-based modelling activities that form the foundation of INDIGO's graffiti recording strategy. The text ends with some envisioned strategies to streamline image acquisition and process the anticipated hundreds of thousands of images.

ORALITY AND HEALING IN THE STAND-UP COMEDY PERFORMANCE OF SELECTED NIGER DELTA COMEDIANS

Stand-up comedy is a sub-genre of oral literature or orality. It involves a comedian standing in front of an audience to crack jokes and tell funny stories in order to make people laugh. It is also a therapeutic tool used to heal wounds through humour and comedy and this eventually leads to mental balance, happiness, peace and tranquility among the people. In line with the above, this paper attempts to explicate the various ways selected Niger Delta stand-up comedians have achieved this therapeutic or healing function among the people of that region. It also studies the psychological effects this brand of comedy has on the audience especially Niger Deltans of Nigeria. The selected stand-up comedians used in this study include I Go Dye, Gordons and Liki Liki Mouth. It is discovered that in relation to the basic functions of the arts generally and literature in particular, the selected Niger Delta stand-up comedians have, in no small measure, contributed their quota in bringing peace, harmony and a stable mental health to the people of the region.KEYWORDS: Orality, Stand-up Comedy, Niger-Delta, Healing, Performance

LANGUAGE, VISUAL IMAGERY AND CORONAVIRUS MOTIVATED HUMOUR ON THE SOCIAL MEDIA: A CRITICAL- SEMIOTIC STUDY

The social media has witnessed a frenzy and influx of discourses from the broad street and world street because of the novel Coronavirus which has infected and killed many people world over. In Nigeria, the ways in which news of the virus is framed communicate ideological meanings which have a range of effects on the readers particularly on social media. Nigerians have taken the issue of Covid-19 pandemics as a form of humour so as to release their stress and tension of the agony which is relatively new. This paper therefore investigates humour that reflect the social, economic and health challenges in Nigeria shared through the social media in order to identify CMH as a form of humour through which real-life experiences of other people can be understood. Insights are drawn from Kress’ Critical Semiotic theory to analyse a total of ten (10) purposively selected humour on Coronavirus from social media, specifically Whatsapp and Facebook. The study found that the pictures are framed using both episodic and thematic framing. These frames are interlarded with pregnant ideological meaning(s) as to warn corrupt and inefficient leaders in Nigeria, particularly on health facilities in the country. Also, the paper concludes that humours do not only make people laugh, but also comment on certain societal maladies that finger the minds of Nigerian citizens.

Does laughing with others lower the risk of functional disability among older Japanese adults? The JAGES prospective cohort study

While laughter is evoked mainly in social contexts, the potential link between laughter in daily life and health benefits is unclear. This study aimed to examine the association between laughter in daily life and the onset of functional disability among older adults in Japan. Data were obtained from a 6-year follow-up cohort of 12,571 participants (46.1% male) in the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study, aged ≥65 years, who could independently perform daily activities. We evaluated their laughter in daily life from three perspectives: the types of situations in which people laugh, the number of situations in which people laugh with others, and the persons with whom people laugh. Using the Cox proportional hazards model, the risk of functional disability was estimated. A total of 1420 functional disabilities were observed during follow-up. After adjusting for potential confounders, participants who laughed with others (e.g., during conversations with friends) were at a reduced risk of functional disability (hazard ratio, 0.77; 95% confidence interval, 0.65–0.92) than those who laughed alone (e.g., during watching television). Similarly, the number of situations to laugh with others was inversely associated with the risk of functional disability (Ptrend < 0.001). Laughing in a conversation with friends reduced the risk of functional disability by approximately 30% compared to laughing alone. Overall, laughing with others was associated with a reduced risk of functional disability. Having more situations to laugh with others or at least the situation to laugh with friends might contribute to reducing the risk of functional disability later in life.

No Laughing Matter: Why Educators Need to Take Humor More Seriously

Humor may make people laugh, but linguistically it is no laughing matter. This paper proposed to the educators, teacher preparation programs, and educational researchers who need to take humor and the related phenomenon of play more seriously in their approach to understanding the dynamics of classroom interaction and how challenging humor and play can be to interpret and navigate as they unfold spontaneously in teacher-student interactions. This study aimed to identify the kinds of metacommunicative awareness that teachers, particularly novice educators, need to develop to navigate the interactions they engage with successfully. Meta communicative awareness referred to a deep-seated understanding of how meaning in interaction is constructed and an ability to step outside one’s immediate interpretive frame. The study was conducted between 2016 and 2018 in a community-based afterschool program. The program serves adults and children in the surrounding area who identify as Bangladeshi. The data were collected through audio-recorded interviews with 18 university participants, approximately 40 hours of audio-recordings of homework help sessions, samples of university students’ notes and reflective writing from their time as volunteers, and samples of the children’s schoolwork. The homework helpers were undergraduate and graduate students from two universities. Some of the homework helpers were pursuing master’s degrees in education. They aspired to careers as teachers, and others had volunteered for the program to fulfil institutional community service requirements. At the program, these homework helpers were referred to as “volunteers,” and they occupied both the institutional and interactional role of “educator” concerning the children. It can be concluded that humor and play-interpreted talk in educational settings quite challenging. Moreover, a failure to recognize talk as play could have serious consequences for what ultimately happens between teachers and students and how they come to see one another.