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Book review

Book review

This article marks the first decade of the European Journal of Humour Research. We wish to thank all our Authors and Editorial Team members – Editorial Assistants, members of the International Editorial Board, and Reviewers from all over the world, who have been working hard for many years – all pro bono publico. We welcome new contributors and collaborators in the coming decade.

The aim of the paper is to show the characteristic features of jokes about Polish highlanders and analyse them to identify the comic script of a highlander. This group of jokes is treated as a good illustration of Christie Davies’s ethnic jokes theory concerning witty versus stupid and centre versus periphery oppositions, as well as mind over matter in general. A particular type of reasoning and the use of regional dialect are distinctive features of the joke targets that make it possible to perceive these jokes as a culturally specific phenomenon. The head shepherd (called baca) is the key character of the cycle. He is a very down-to-earth person, who is proud of his practical wisdom and has a very relaxed attitude to life. His lifestyle is usually contrasted with that of ceper – often a tourist – treated as a kind of intruder who asks stupid questions and does not know how to appreciate life and what really matters in it. The jokes about highlanders are analysed within the paradigm of General Theory of Verbal Humor, and particularly its reasoning and reversal Logical Mechanisms. Even though Christie Davies treated the Logical Mechanism with some scepticism, claiming it is of no use in the GTVH (Davies 2004, 2011b), he would not probably mind the logic of highlanders’ utterances and behaviour being analysed. We believe he may even have enjoyed that.

Academic event report on 15th International Pragmatics Conference (IPra2017), 16-21 July 2017, Belfast, Northern Ireland

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This special issue of the EJHR, inspired by the humour session of the 7th Across Borders conference. held in Tartu, Estonia in April 2017, refocuses on Eastern Europe then. While in 5.2 humour from Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Russia and Turkey was represented, here Poland, Hungary, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia and Albania add to the picture, while Belarus, Montenegro and Turkey remain within the scope of interest again.

From the Editors of the European Journal of Humour Research

Scrapbook for the 10th anniversary of the European Journal of Humour Research

Editorial note on the publication of academic event reports

After more than forty years of existence, the field of humour research is flourishing. It seems that now more than ever the time is right for the study of humour in general. But how do we facilitate progress in our field? As Willibald Ruch rightly pointed out, “(…) as academics we don’t only have the obligation to conduct research and further our understanding of humour and laughter. We also have the obligation to teach our knowledge to those who want to learn and also to inform the public about what we know and what we don’t know in this area” (Ruch 2003: 5). Now that the field is mature and the work of researchers has moved into the mainstream of scholarly dialogue, the establishment of new alternative forums is the path to follow. Consequently, the present journal aims at promoting diversity in the field and providing a meaningful arena for discussion. Moreover, given that humour research spreads across many different journals and author or edited volumes, it is in our best interest, as an academic community, to be able to provide a new freely accesible scholarly journal that addresses the humour research community at large. Thus, the European Journal of Humour Research is an open-access multidisciplinary forum which is complementary to the leading HUMOUR: International Journal of Humour Research or the newly-born yet already acknowledged Israeli Journal of Humour Research: An International Journal.