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Made-in-Canada Humour is a journey through space and time in Canadian humour. Rasporich, Arts Professor at the University of Calgary, masterly creates a general picture of Canadian humour culture, thus revealing its particularities. What I particularly enjoyed about this research is the fact that the story line is easy to follow. The author structured the chapters geographically, leading the reader...
Book review: Zirker, Angelika and Winter-Froemel, Esme (Eds.) (2015). Wordplay and Metalinguistic/Metadiscursive Reflection: Authors, Contexts, Techniques, and Meta-Reflection. Berlin: De Gruyter, 311 pp.
This is the kind of title scholars working on Serbia (and, indeed, ex-Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, more generally) would be prone to consider a rare treat. However, as I will try to show there is little there that is of interest to anyone engaged in humour research beyond a thorough description of activities that were meant to elicit humorous reactions. Therefore, it may be useful to the ones among...
This article is the first study that researches the combination of three components: humour, food and fashion. It is based on an analysis of three unique fashion shows whose designer is the American Jeremy Scott; two under his brand, and the third as an art director for the Italian brand Moschino. The three shows connect these three components, while presenting the culmination of a food-humour theme...
Job demands, like time pressure, consume employees’ limited resources, which need to be restored through recovery in order to maintain psychological well-being and work performance. Employees in high-strain jobs need to replenish their emotional resources throughout the work day. This can take place during breaks if employees are able to psychologically detach from the work demands. Given the stress-relieving...
When it comes to humour, performing humorous structures means not only producing amusement, but also implies the ability of perceiving the comical, ludicrous or absurd in human life. In this paper, I consider humour as a way in which people in the rural community express themselves freely, without boundaries or constraints. Therefore, the interest of the present article is to identify and analyse...
This paper argues in favour of considering humour and laughter as embodied signs of the ancient, sympathetic, figurative mode of the human mind, still working with us in dance, music, singing and literary activity. Starting from steady evolutionary provisos, both the continuity and the departing lines between nonhuman vocalisations and human laughter are considered. Along the Duchenne and non-Duchenne...
This article discusses the relationship between lexical priming and humour. Since incongruity, unpredictability and ambiguity are often associated with humour theory, the article explores the possibility that many jokes or unintended humour depend upon the overriding of lexical priming. Using the Cobuild Bank of English to investigate priming using collocational statistics, the article analyses eight...
Book review: Christopher Rea, The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China, Oakland (CA), University of California Press, 2015, pp 335 + xvi. ISBN: 9780520283848
Book review: May, Shaun (2016). A Philosophy of Comedy on Stage and Screen: You Have to Be There. Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. London: Bloomsbury, 213 pp. ISBN: 9781472580436
The aim of the paper is to uncover the extent to which different forms of political Internet humour can criticise current political affairs in a developing democracy such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. Specifically, applying a cognitive linguistic theory of meaning construction, namely conceptual integration theory, the paper analyses the construction of meaning of humorous Internet forms, such as memes,...
Different phenomena related to humour and laughter, such as humour styles, gelotophobia, gelotophilia and katagelasticism, were investigated in a series of psychological studies in Russia. As far as the samples were rather heterogeneous in regard with age, gender, region of Russia, and included besides big cities also small towns and villages, the data allows to discuss not only psychological, but...
Over the past century Belarus has experienced a dramatic increase in educational level. Obtaining secondary education is now considered normal, getting a university degree is prestigious. However, such an attitude is relatively new to Belarusian society. Joke texts that date back to the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century indicate that formal education was widely considered useless, as it did...
Ethnic jokes are a form of comical narration extremely widespread throughout the social life of various nations. They generally centre on neighbouring nations and reveal a positive assessment of one's own ethnic group, usually negatively evaluating other nations. The subject of the analysis is jokes about Montenegrins, who are known in the Balkans for their laziness and slow lifestyle. However, they...
This study investigates the diffusion of a new political language based on humour and irony into Turkish politics. The Taksim Gezi Park Protests, in addition to introducing a new subject to Turkish politics, led to a new language that places humour at the centre. The Government’s neoliberal and authoritarian policies and tight control over traditional media shaped the resistance to be humoristic and...
Joking Asides: The Theory, Analysis and Aesthetics of Humour is a collection of twelve essays on humour, and more specifically on jokes, written by Elliot Oring, professor emeritus of anthropology and folklorist. In this review, I try to present his work, briefly sketching the author’s main positions and critiques about others’ work and the state of the art on humour research. I would strongly recommend...
Anna T. Litovkina’s most recent book presents the stereotypical traits of lawyers and politicians as they are reflected in Anglo-American jokes and anti-proverbs. The book represents the first comprehensive collection and content interpretation of lawyer jokes and proverbs without offering linguistic analysis. It classifies and explains content-wise several lawyer jokes and proverbs that had been...
As the title and introduction explain, Sophie Quirk’s monograph sets out to investigate the reasons and ways comedians manipulate and influence their audience. The term manipulation, however, should be considered apart from its often negative connotations and should be interpreted as the comedian’s attempt to skilfully communicate with their audience, elicit laughter and, most importantly in this...
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