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This work tries to demonstrate the importance of Saussurean concepts both when it comes to identifying symptoms in neurolinguistic pathology and devising resources that allow carrying out a therapy based on verbal humor. A sense of humor and laughter are attributed important physical, psychological and social benefits. The joke is a short saying or sharp and funny occurrence that contains a verbal or conceptual game capable of causing laughter and that is often illustrated by a drawing. In aphasic syndrome, the loss of verbal understanding not only affects internal communication and with others, but also prevents the enjoyment of verbal humor because it is based on lexical ambiguity. In this paper we analyze jokes involving puns from the concepts of structural linguistics, in order to propose them a therapeutic resource in the last stage of aphasic patient's recovery, according to the level of severity. The speech therapist must have linguistic and neurolinguist training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting the bounds of Sperber and Wilson's relevance-theoretic framework, this paper examines the emergence of humor in puns and the way puns are used in phatic communication. It argues that there is a so far unrecognized factor, which underlies their perceived humorousness, and which allows them to function as rapport builders. This factor, dubbed interpretative non-prototypicality, directly follows from the relevance-theoretic stand on utterance comprehension, and refers to the way the interpretation process plays out in puns, yielding utterances that go against what we have come to expect based on the default interpretative mode observed in the meaning derivation of non-punning utterances. The objective of the article is to argue, based on examples from English and Chinese, that it is the departure from the interpretative benchmark that can translate into the perceived humorousness of puns, whether linked to incongruity, the element of surprise or the manipulation of strategies used to inferentially work out utterance meanings. This departure, manifested in the low informative content characterizing puns used in such social practices as ping-pong punning, can also make them ideally suited for phatic communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sketches a taxonomy of Aristophanic puns and explores the strategies employed by 'faithful' English translations for rendering such jokes. No pun is untranslatable. At the same time, there is no perfect translation but a range of options, more or less effective for a certain context, audience, and type of pun. The challenges which translators face with Aristophanic jokes, as well as the ingenious solutions they offer on occasions, invite us to reappraise the original puns, whose wittiness is too often denied by scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I discuss Wittgenstein's conception of music, musical understanding and the sense of comparing music to language. I argue that for Wittgenstein, musical understanding is describable as a specific kind of experience that is public and sharable. I then reject any formalist view, which asserts that musical understanding is exclusively an ability to follow a set of established rules. Second, I illustrate the scope of Wittgenstein's comparison between languages and posit that music is useful for clarifying the concept of linguistic understanding in the case of certain specific language‐games, such as making jokes or puns. I will finally show that no thesis on the nature of language parallels and follows such a comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advancements in transformer-based language models have demonstrated substantial progress in producing good translations. Despite these achievements, challenges persist in translating playful requests, especially when users intentionally introduce humor. Deciphering the hidden pun among such playful requests is one of the major difficulties for modern language models, which causes user dissatisfaction. This paper targets a specific niche of humor translation, which is the translation of English-named entities containing puns into French using small-scale open-sourced transformer models. The transformer architecture serves as a foundation for popular language models like chatGPT. It allows learning long-range contextual relationships within sequences. The main novelty of the paper is the proposed extractive question/answering (Q/A) styled technique based on the transformers to find relevant translations for the provided English nouns using the openly available parallel corpora. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we utilize a dataset provided by the JOKER CLEF automatic pun and humor translation 2022 team. The dataset contains single-word nouns from popular novels, anime, movies, and games, each containing a pun. The discussed methodology and experimental framework are adaptable and can be extended to any language pair for which an open, available parallel corpus exists. This flexibility underscores the broader applicability of our findings and suggests the potential for enhancing humor translation across various language combinations. • The paper presents a novel method for pun translation to French. • It focuses on English-named entities containing puns. • Utilizes open-sourced small-scale transformer models. • Employs an extractive question-answering style for translation. • Evaluated on the JOKER CLEF 2022 dataset by expert translators. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Punning is an important means of creating humorous effects by intentionally exploiting semantic ambiguity. Previous psycholinguistic research on puns has mainly focused on the process of meaning retrieval in homograph puns, while it is still not entirely clear how readers dynamically utilize contextual information to understand homophone puns. In the current investigation, 68 native Chinese participants were recruited to read three types of experimental sentences while their eye movements were recorded: (1) the homophone-pun sentences where the less salient homophone was visually presented, (2) the homophone-salient sentences where the salient homophone was used, and (3) the homophone-error sentences where the critical context noun in the homophone puns was replaced with an unrelated word. Humor rating results of the homophone puns and the homophone-salient sentences demonstrated that the less salient homophones rather than the salient ones elicited much larger humor responses when presented visually in the same potential pun context. In addition, the reverse fixation pattern in the homophone area and the spill-over region also suggested that meanings of the salient homophones were more recoverable even when not presented visually. Statistical analyses of the homophone puns and the homophone-error sentences showed that the semantic relatedness between the critical context noun and the less salient homophone could significantly predict the humor rating scores of Chinese readers. Taken together, less salient homophones need to receive more contextual support to balance out the advantages of salient homophones before generating a humorous pun interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humor and pun are widely used in our daily life. Due to the incongruous and inconsistent expressions in humor and pun, humor recognition and pun detection are challenging tasks in sentiment analysis and natural language processing. Pun is usually used as one of the humorous rhetorical devices. Thus, determining the puns in the texts can be pertinent to the successful recognition of humor and vice versa. Existing models of humor recognition and pun detection usually dealt with the two tasks independently. Therefore, we propose an attention-based multi-task learning model (ABML) to train the two tasks jointly. Our model unifies the two highly pertinent tasks, including the humor recognition and pun detection. In the ABML model, we design a Co-Encoder module to capture the common features between the two tasks by weight sharing. Apart from the Co-Encoder module, we also design two Private Encoder modules for the two tasks, respectively. The Private Encoder module is used to capture the private semantic feature of the two tasks. We conduct sufficient experiments on two widely used datasets, including a humor dataset and a pun dataset, to verify the effectiveness of our model. The experimental results show our model can get comparable performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using participants' reactions to puns (words or phrases with two or more possible meanings) embedded in hypothetical scenarios, we investigated how perceptions of punning are influenced by characteristics of both the social situation and the punster. Consistent with the reversal theory of humor, Study 1 (N=185) showed that puns are considered funnier and more appropriate in playful than serious situations and less appropriate when they interrupt conversation than when they complete a conversation sequence without causing an interruption. Consistent with age-based developmental expectations of punsters, Study 2 (N=333) indicated that obvious puns told by children are perceived more favorably than those told by adults of varying ages and levels of expertise in the subject area of the pun. Future research might benefit from using more naturalistic settings and examining the extent to which various contemporary humor frameworks (e.g. benign violations theory) apply more specifically to punning in context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This article reveals eight heretofore undiscussed puns on the pimp’s name, Lucus (from Λύκος, “Mr. Wolf”). Three of these puns were original to Alexis, author of the Greek comedy Plautus used as a model for Poenulus. Five puns, however, are originals ascribable to the Umbrian. Of these, four are crucial to our understanding of the entrapment scheme whereby Lucus is enticed to commit robbery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Puns revolve around two or more semantically incompatible meanings as they are formed by polysemic and homophonic words used in a certain context. According to the incongruity theory of humour, humour is created due to incongruity between expectation and reality. All kinds of puns are based on ambiguity principles. This study aims to describe and compare lexical, phonological, morphological, syntactical and idiomatic puns and literal translations used in the context of Urdu sitcoms "Hum sub Umeed say hain" and "Hasb-e-Haal" by the help of descriptive-analytical method. Five episodes of each sitcom are analyzed. The rational of choosing these programs is that they revolve around important social issues and sensitive political themes to highlight and eradicate those problems. Findings indicate that lexical and idiomatic puns occur the most in our data, whereas morphological ambiguity is present least in number. The cause of ambiguity of more than a quarter of the data is due to literal translations and code switching. Since little work (and none to my knowledge in Urdu) has been done on puns and working of humorous literal translations of words and idioms in the context of sitcom and comedy discourse, this paper can be a linguistic contribution to the areas of media and humour studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on Greek philosopher, mathematician and poet Plato being apparently fond of punning on one's name. It is said that punning on names was in especially common usage in Old Comedy. Plato's "Symposium" is due to follow the rules of a real drinking party, where wit and humor must play a key role.

A distinctive rhetorical device, puns are wittily applied in advertisements, daily conversations, riddles, etc. Formed by the combination in certain contexts with polysemic or homophonic words, puns naturally lead to more than one interpretation in an actual communication. Puns have many different functions in utterances as well. In this paper Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory is used to analyze how the humor effects of puns are constructed. In the process of comprehending a pun, the audience decodes the communicator's ostensive utterance in its a context. If the context contradicts the usual interpretation, the audience rebuilds a new assumption with their encyclopedic knowledge, logical and lexical information, and deduces the real implication of the utterance-and appreciates the great humor effects of English puns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pun is a rhetorical device widely used in English. It is a witticism involving the playful use of a word in different senses or of words, which differ in meanings but sound alike. Pun's translation into Chinese has long been considered a difficult problem. Many people regard it as untranslatable. In the author's opinion, a perfect pun's translation is impossible according to the three traditional principles of faithfulness, smoothness and elegance. However, it doesn't mean the pun is untranslatable. It's obvious that in pun's translation, something has to be dropped in order to well preserve the other more important parts. In this paper, the author will introduce two most widely used methods in pun's translation, namely, adding footnotes and rewriting. In spite of their respective disadvantages, the two methods do partly fulfill the purpose of conveying more and better the information from different angles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of ethnic humour may be defined as a type of humour in which fun is made of different traits (especially personality, behaviour and customs) of a group and/or its members thanks to their social, political, cultural and economic background. Within Portuguese society we may find numerous jokes, riddles and puns about several nations and countries with which Portugal, by virtue of its historical past, had some kind of connection. From an anthropological perspective it is then particularly interesting to try to identify the reasons hidden behind each and every nation's selection. By recalling the three major humour theories we are sure that the jokes, riddles and puns were especially generated either to release tension regarding a tragic situation or to reveal the incongruity of certain behaviour, thus showing Portuguese superiority over the other nations. It is therefore the aim of the article not only to introduce and share with you a part of Portuguese humour but also to analyse what may be the particular cause of its original creation and today's usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the influence of empathizing and systemizing on cogni-tive and affective humor processing in two studies. Three cartoon types differing in their logical mechanisms (LMs) and cognitive requirements were presented to participants with high scores on one scale and low scores on the other (empathizers and systemizers) : visual puns, semantic cartoons and Theory of Mind cartoons. Empathizers and systemizers were expected to process these cartoon types differently. While empathizers and systemizers did not dif-fer in recognition time and comprehensibility in study one (N = 33), empathizers did portray higher funniness scores in study two (N = 55). Furthermore, empathizers more often gave emotional/motivational explanations as well as more mentalistic explanations as to why they think a cartoon is funny. In addi-tion, Theory of Mind cartoons provoked the highest number of mentalistic explanations. This shows that stimulus characteristics (such as LMs) as well as inter-individual differences influence whether mentalizing is required and applied to processing humor, and that empathizing and systemizing influence humor appreciation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a contrastive analysis of puns in English and German based on a bilingual corpus of 2,400 jokes from published collections. The main assumption is that punning in the two languages differs in quantity and quality because of contrasts in morphosyntax, lexis and phonology. More precisely, given that the creation of most types of paronomastic jokes is considered to be facilitated in English, the English data set is expected to show a higher number and a greater variation of puns. However, a few manifestations of punning are assumed to occur particularly often in the German data. Seven hypotheses related to these predictions are tested. The most significant finding is that puns in the English set clearly outnumber puns in the German set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: While wordplay is typically considered to be humorous, this paper intends to present its multifunctionality: wordplay can be an instrument of humour production but is not always used for this purpose. Taking this assumption as a basis, the article shows that there is a formal and functional difference between wordplay and the pun as its subcategory. This assumption can be converted into the formula wordplay ⩾ pun ("KanaM6yp"). Verifying this formula, the study gives numerous Russian and Hungarian examples from various "genres". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • This study examined the relationship between cognitive stages and feeling of humor. • ERPs independently reflected incongruity detection and resolution were measured. • Funny and unfunny puns were separated according to the participant's rating. • Compare to unfunny puns, funny puns enlarged P600, but not N400. • The resolution, not the incongruity detection, is related to the feeling of humor. This study examined the relationship between two cognitive stages of humor processing (i.e., detecting incongruity and resolving it) and the subjective feeling of humor, using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Unlike traditional English jokes, Japanese nazokake puns have a structure in which the detection of incongruity and the resolution of it are separated, which enabled this study to observe the ERPs for these two stages independently. In addition, to investigate how the cognitive stages work when people subjectively find a pun funny, the ERPs elicited by funny and unfunny puns, categorized according to participants' subjective ratings, were compared. This subjective feeling has not received enough attention in previous literature. The results showed that N400 and P600 responses occurred during the incongruity detection stage and the resolution stage, respectively. Furthermore, funny puns enlarged the P600 amplitude compared to unfunny ones, but the N400 amplitude did not significantly differ between the funniness categories. These findings indicate that the resolution stage of humor processing is related to the subjective feeling of humor, rather than the incongruity detection stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that punning (shuãngguãn) is commonly found in Hong Kong Chinese media, especially adverts. As a rhetorical device and a form of language play, punning - monolingual or bilingual - is generally used to enhance the communicative impact of what is said. Linguistically a punning effect may be achieved through homonymy or (near-) homophony. In the literature published in English, research on punning straddles stylistics and linguistics. With reference to Heller's (1980, 1983) linguistic typology of punning, our analysis of selected examples from Hong Kong Chinese media shows that most instances of punning may be characterized as 'retentional - non-disambiguational' puns. Orthographic puns are very common, in that the punning effect is only apparent in the printed, but not in the spoken medium. Functional shift in the signaling device of the pun is another salient feature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1990s, there have been a number of small-scale computer programs that automatically constructed simple verbal jokes (puns), but none of these were fully developed systems that could be used for a practical application. We describe the building and testing of the STANDUP program - a large-scale, robust, interactive, user-friendly pun-generator (inspired by Binsted's JAPE program), which is aimed at allowing children, particularly those with communication disabilities, to develop their linguistic skills. The STANDUP system was designed in consultation with potential users and suitable experts, was rigorously engineered using public-domain linguistic data, and has a special purpose, child-friendly, graphical user interface. The software was tested successfully with real users (children with complex communication needs). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how Kinesias, son of Meles, was portrayed in the works of Greek playwright Aristophanes, particularly at "Frogs" 153. Kinesias was introduced by Aristophanes as a character on the comic stage, dwelling mainly on his innovative contributions to choral poetry. The author argues that Aristophanes had some aspects of Kinesias' musical productions at "Frogs" 153 but he was also having fun by engaging on punning, as shown in two other passages of Aristophanes' plays which bear on Kinesias: "Frogs" 366 and "Ecclesiazusae" 327-30.

This article critiques the poem "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" by Wallace Stevens. In this poem he shows a style that is different than his other poems. It is a style that leaves the reader to untangle the puns and riddles. He shows a playfulness through the use of individual words and phrases.

The formation of slang words in English often relies on the combined action of ellipsis and homophony. Both these processes are also used for humorous effect, and in much the same way, in the creation of nicknames. This article explores how puns based on the ellipsis of homophones or near-homophones (i.e., 'cut-down puns,' as the author terms them) may give rise to nicknames and slang words. In the first part, the author focuses on so-called 'inseparable nicknames' and examines in detail the role of allusions and cut-down puns in their formation. The second section then describes and analyses the coinage of punning slang terms derived from proper names. To this purpose, the author delves into the main subclasses of cut-down puns and, in the final section, gives good evidence of their use by offering a glossary of name-derived slang words, both old and new, drawn from a number of sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the "Freudian" dimensions of two instances of psycholinguistic performance error in Plautus' comedies, viz., a slip of the tongue in Rudens 422 and a tip-of-the-tongue situation in Trinummus 996-22. In each case, I argue, the error serves as a vehicle for puns and ironic jokes. So understood, novel implications for interpretation, staging, and possible modes of delivery are suggested. An appendix discusses the text of Trinummus 915 and 922. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A humorous competition called ‘The Adventures of Naked Man’ ran in a Wellington (New Zealand) newspaper from 1999 to 2000. The competition's protagonist is the sole naked person in a drawn setting where, because of some convenient object or body position, his penis is obscured from sight. Entrants to the competition submitted a caption to go with the drawn setting, the point being to make humour. Without explicit instruction, most entrants constructed some form of dick joke, the interesting questions being, just how, and with what variations? These questions are pursued by drawing on the full corpus of Naked Man settings and captions. Basic principles of conversation analysis, including some early work of Sacks on punning, are used to analyse the nature and popularity of the Naked Man competition. The article also offers some more speculative comments to do with gender and the organisation of language about sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores a variety of puns used in talmudic and midrashic biblical exegesis. The explanation of midrashic puns which distort biblical phrasing, spelling and style is discussed. Pun refers to a literary technique of distortion of spoken or written texts to impart relevant secondary meaning. Furthermore, spectrum of intent levels in puns from homiletic, to intended, to rules of style is also presented.

In previous research, (L. G. Lippman, K. Bennington, & I. L. Sucharski, 2002; L. G. Lippman & M. L. Dunn, 2000; L. G. Lippman, I. L. Sucharski, & K. Bennington, 2001), the body of the material (one-liners or fables) had been manipulated to increase its contextual connection to the final word or sentence. In the present study, the body of 6 fables remained constant, and only 1-3 words of the final sentences were manipulated. The pun version had dual connections to the story. Final sentences of 2 other versions had the same meaning, only a single connection to the story, but 1 was related acoustically to the pun. University students, instructed to pretend that someone was telling them each story, rated the fables and their reactions. Compared with its acoustic counterpart, the pun version provoked more reported humor reactions. For the nonpun versions, the one related acoustically to the pun yielded reliably greater reported inclination to smile, suggesting that participants may have inferred or created a pun. The groan, as a communication device, is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present study, redundancy (low, medium, or high association between the adverb and sentence content) and contextual connection (presence vs. absence of a meaning-based connection between the adverb and other information in the sentence) were manipulated systematically in Tom Swifties (single-sentence wordplays in which a pun is based on the adverb at the end of the sentence). Sixty-nine university students provided ratings of each Swifty's humorousness, cleverness, and coherence and of their reactions to each (tendency to smile, laugh, and groan). Added context led to greater perceived coherence. In keeping with optimal level of arousal arising from resolution of incongruity, an inverted-U redundancy effect was obtained for all scales except "groan." The authors suggest that a social setting is a required but not a sufficient condition for a pun to evoke a groan. It also requires material of greater length that includes some build-up, as found in a fable or shaggy-dog story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Puns are popular rhetorical figures in advertisements. A distinction can be made between puns in which both interpretations are relevant to the advertiser''s message (e.g., “The gift that leaves you beaming” in an advertisement for a small flashlight) and puns in which only one interpretation is relevant (e.g., “Roses grow on you” for Cadbury''s Roses chocolates). In recent publications, different predictions have been made as to whether slogans containing puns in general are appreciated more than slogans without a pun, and also whether puns containing two relevant interpretations are appreciated more than puns containing only one relevant interpretation. This paper reports on an experiment to test these hypotheses. Sixty-eight participants rated their appreciation of 24 slogans. The results showed that the presence or absence of puns had a significant impact on the respondents’ appreciation of the slogans. Furthermore, whether the pun contained two relevant interpretations or only one did not influence the extent to which they were considered funny, but the former were considered a better choice than the latter. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Examines several verses derived from a discussion of mushrooms in Athenaeus that appear to describe a local community and the miserable diet they enjoy. Argument for the presence of at least two speakers in the verses; Argument that lines 9 to 11 derive from a similar scene and respond to concerns raised in lines 1 to 8; Unnoticed pun that will further help clarify the issue

ABSTRACT. Previous research conducted with short fables was replicated in this study with Swifties in which sentence length and presence of a pun were controlled. Of the 24 one-sentence word plays shown to each participant, half had an enhanced contextual connection that was predicted to increase appropriateness and detection of the incongruity, resulting in heightened perceived cleverness and humor. Results supported predictions, showing especially strong enhancement of perceived cleverness. The authors suggest that this outcome could be generalized to other forms of word play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. Adding material that provided an associative connection to a pun enhances perceived humor, as shown in a previous series of studies. Because those results had been based on one-sentence statements that may have relied, in part, on brevity for humor, the purpose of the present study was to evaluate reactions to context and puns (mostly spoonerisms) with more lengthy material to add generality to those findings. Three within-subject studies were conducted in which short fables were manipulated systematically such that the final sentence was or was not a pun and contextual information pertaining to both meanings of the pun was or was not present in the body of the stories. Results showed that the pun itself was a powerful contributor to perceived humor and cleverness and that contextual information amplified those perceptions. Arousal, surprise, and detection of appropriate incongruity are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. The supposition that perceived humor or cleverness would be enhanced by adding separate content to the alternative meanings of a pun was explored, using Tom Swifties as the research vehicle. Because detecting a punning word relationship might induce arousal, requiring more effort and attentional resources for processing than noting a contextual connection, memory strength for adverbs was also examined using a recognition procedure. Five studies were conducted in which college students were asked to judge 24 Swifties (content counterbalanced across participants) in which presence of pun and context were manipulated. The punning relationship was primarily responsible for perceived humor and cleverness. Presence of a pun also enhanced memory strength (d') as long as the familiarization task focused on humor and cleverness. Coherent context enhanced perceived cleverness inconsistently. It was suggested that a coherent contextual connection may make a greater contribution in more lengthy forms of pun-based word play, such as fables or "shaggy dog" stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article talks about imperfect puns, markedness, and phonological similarity. There are many metrics of similarity between phonological segments. In particular, there are metrics based on linguistic competence. Research in this last category has examined substitutions of segments in slips of the tongue, substitutions in slips of the ear, replacements of segments in nonsense expressions like puppy-wuppy, and systems of half rhyme in verse. Here, the author opens up the study of a new metric of this sort, based on imperfect puns.

The article presents information on the importance of puns while teaching English as a second language. Use of puns in classes creates interest in the students to learn the language. Advertising is the main source of learning puns. Puns can be instantly recognized, and can create surprise and humor. Puns are based on current English, and they are produced by modern mentality. Due to this, they can be very useful in teaching spoken language, and in introducing the culture. Use of puns makes the process of teaching more easy. They are educational tools for many functions. They help the teachers to enlarge the vocabulary of the students, and are also helpful in explaining the anomalies of English spelling, syntax, and phonetics. Puns also help students to understand the meaning of English poetry. Students can learn how to manipulate the knowledge through puns, and can learn the language amusingly, without putting much effort.

Explores how puns are used to put humor in advertisements. Features of homophonic puns; Examples of puns based on slang; Literalization of the cliché as advertising puns.

The article examines the reception of Bruce Nauman's work in order to clarify the interest it generates on its audience. The sense of humor, the wordplays and the wit of Nauman's works are described. Nauman's "Raw War" represents the arbitrary connection of wordplay and a penchant of the apocalyptic. In his 1967 neon sign "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths," he attempted to maintain the bourgeois illusion of an artistic position external to society from which it would be possible to describe that society.

The article discusses humor as observed in National Art Education Association (NAEA) conventions. It cites the kinds of humor observed in a setting that was often held with the aim of holding academic discussions and socializations. Humor was observed in odd witty session title or subtitles or puns in presentations or repartees. Most humor is observed when incidences of forgotten and upside-down slides were presented or any other embarrassing incidences. Humor is also evident in satirical comments and presentations. Humor is seen as an important component to the success of conferences such as the NAEA conventions.

Discusses the use of puns and punning in literature. Information on the noble uses of puns; Stigma of the pun.