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This article presents a schema describing the 'humor transaction,' that is, the processes by which what is generally called humor is created, communicated, experienced, responded to and used. It describes in three stages the rich creative process shared between a humorist and an audience. This starts with the perception and/or formation of an amusing stimulus by a humorist and passes in a second stage to its communication by the humorist to others and their processing of the stimulus. The third stage captures the range of experiences and responses by the recipient/s, including personal consequences and possible re-use of the humor (which creates further functions and consequences). Although experiencing and using humor are both holistic processes, dependent on synchronization of social behaviors by humorist and recipient, the schema simplifies in order to summarize the general outline of a typical shared humorous 'transaction' while allowing for complex detail within each stage. It offers a framework within which scholars and practitioners can locate their different foci of research and application. It aims to assist in developing a shared vocabulary of concepts and terminology to foster exchange across the many disciplines involved in humor research. It provides a linked glossary of relevant terms designed to facilitate interdisciplinary exchange in studying humor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an essay version of Carlos Morton's keynote address delivered at the conference organized by the Polish Academy of Sciences' Committee on Migrations held at the University of Gdańsk in September 2021. The prolific Chicano playwright had been asked by the IBSC to speak about his life on the borderlands. His life story is told in the first person, in anecdotes and observations, revealed in a vibrant dialog with processes in the world around him. Morton is a cultural historian, essayist and a humorist in the tradition of José Antonio Burciaga or Carey McWilliams. Morton relishes paradox, seeks facts, and connects the subjective of the private life with the events of the world. His testimony is playful, associative, Taoist. Morton's vision is cosmopolitan and culture specific. The "Tao of Mestizaje" is to suggest that Morton's mestizaje is a type of consciousness, a way of life. The text as well as its accompanying artworks by Ricardo Duffy or other photos are also its iterations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses popular joke cycles about American tourists and comparable 'others', published in the first decades of the twentieth century in the satirical press of the Yishuv. This rich corpus of humoristic literature, which has never received adequate scholarly attention, might shed new light on the nascent Israeli view of competing Jewish centers, and expose the difficulties that accompanied the early formation of local Israeli identity The article focuses on the satirical expression of identity representations and images, and their affinity to different humoristic genres. It shows how parodies on pilgrimages to Israel allowed Yishuv writers to express self-criticism and mark symbolic inner boundaries, while the more universal jokes let them express ideological criticism and apparently mark symbolic external boundaries. However, since the satirical press of the Yishuv was written in Hebrew for local readerships, we can assume that its 'boundary work' was aimed in each case at establishing a new social hierarchy, by setting new criteria for inclusion, and deepening readers' solidarity and self-awareness, at the expense of similar Others from competing Jewish centers., INTRODUCTION 'A GLOSSARY OF 20TH CENTURY SPEWLOSOPHY' (BEHILOSOFIA), published in June 1939 in issue no. 4 of the satirical paper Egel HaZahav, offers 'definitions' for key concepts of the Jewish [...]

The Bugulma Tales are a series of nine short stories written by Jaroslav Hašek in 1921, a few months after his ignominious return to Prague, the capital of the newly-established democratic Czechoslovak Republic, from Russia. A famous prankster of pre-war Prague, Hašek had defected from the Czechoslovak Legions during the World War to join the Red Army, an act that earned the once-popular humorist the reputation of a traitor. At first eschewing requests for information about Soviet Russia, Hašek ultimately responded by publishing quasi-autobiographical stories fictionalizing his time in Russia in a politically-neutral Czech newspaper. I show, however, that Hašek employed just enough recognizable autobiographical material to expose his readers’ curiosity without in fact satisfying. The central character of the Bugulma Tales is named Gašek, the Russian transliteration of Hašek, but he deviates from his authorial model in several significant ways. Gašek’s main antagonist is a rival Red Army commander who displays some of the attributes commonly associated with Hašek, such as drunkenness and unpredictability. The Bugulma Tales were Hašek’s first major publication after his return from Russia and his last important work before he began his masterpiece, The Fortunes of the Good Soldier Švejk in the World War. Two recent English translations of these stories (2018, translated by Charles Kraszewski), and Behind the Lines (2012, translated by Mark Corner) suggest that at last they are being recognized as critical texts in Hašek’s oeuvre. In my analysis of three exemplary stories from the series, “A Strategic Hitch,” “Potemkin Villages,” and “Before the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Eastern Council,” I first show the importance of improvisation as both a literary technique and a theme. Second, I argue the Bugulma Tales play with authorial representation. Third, I demonstrate how improvisation and authorial representation come together in the stories’ focus on competing forms of authority. In and around the conflict between Gašek and Jerochymov, Hašek weaves a critique of the Red Army as a disorganized and unprincipled institution. The critique, however, is so subtle as to confound readers no matter what their view of Hašek’s character: patriotic republican Czechs would not find an apology or repudiation of Bolshevism, while Czech communists would not find a ringing endorsement of life in Soviet Russia. Ultimately, readers who sought in these texts validation of their moral or political judgment of Hašek were destined for disappointment, as the notoriously enigmatic author uses the stories to reclaim authority for himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), the American humorist and author better known as Mark Twain, was skeptical about clairvoyance, supernatural entities, palm reading, and certain medical fads, including phrenology. During the early 1870s, he set forth to test phrenology—and, more specifically, its reliance on craniology—by undergoing two head examinations with Lorenzo Fowler, an American phrenologist with an institute in London. Twain hid his identity during his first visit, but not when he returned as a new customer three months later, only to receive a very different report about his humor, courage, and so on. He described his experiences in a short letter written in 1906 to a correspondent in London, in humorous detail in a chapter that appeared in a posthumous edition of his autobiography, and in The Secret History of Eddypus, the World Empire, a work of fiction involving time travel, which he began to write around 1901 but never completed. All three versions of Twain's phrenological ploy are presented here with commentary to put his descriptions in perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I aim to study comedy and humour from an ethical perspective. My main proposal is that comedy and humour can be understood alternatively in the light of ethics, and in one sense, they actually begin, more effectively, with an ethical sensibility. Effective comedy and humour initiate through an ethical sensibility called "hospitality"; ideally, they are preceded by this ethical openness. I will argue that it is this pre-original ethical hospitality and openness that can give rise to more effective moments of comedy, humour, carnival, festivity and also laughter, opening the Self to the Other in order to be able to enter into a disinterested humorous (dialogic) experience. Hospitality is of prime importance here because it turns out to be part and parcel of comedy as it also underlies the ethics of alterity. I therefore suggest that the thoughts of both Emmanuel Levinas and Mikhail Bakhtin can give rise to a fruitful study of ethics, comedy and humour. I will "reduce" socio-political complexities of our daily life-world to comic moments through Bakhtin, and then expose the reader to a Levinasian simplicity and ethical openness that actually takes place before effective comedy and humour can begin. In this essay, I mainly have literary/critical aims, and to fulfil that aim, I will briefly discuss two Shakespearean works and contextualize my thesis. The matter of studying comedy, humour and ethics in a broader cultural, social and/or philosophical context is open for other thinkers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to examine Eva Hache’s humorous gender-related monologues, broadcast in the show El Club de la Comedia [The Comedy Club] in Spain between 2012 and 2013. The corpus comprises 24 stand-up monologues, which have been analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The present paper offers a case study in three different ways. First, an analysis of different humorous sequences makes it possible to distinguish a representation of both feminine and masculine identities, as well as a confrontation between the two genders. In fact, Eva Hache’s style supports the feminine identity and facilitates the teasing and mockery of men. Second, a polyphonic study of men as speakers (locutors) and utterers (Ducrot 1996) will serve to differentiate certain features of their identity from a discursive perspective. Finally, a detailed examination of humorous sequences shows how these performative sequences can prove useful to maintain hierarchy, to reinforce an in-group, i.e. a women’s group, to solidify men’s group boundaries, and even to subvert gender normativity (Bing 2004). As it will be demonstrated in our analysis, humorous markers and indicators play an important role in the construction of jab lines and the final punch line of these sequences. Furthermore, the results show that there are few strategies aimed at challenging the status quo in this corpus, although they illustrate an ongoing movement towards a feminist humour that has been almost non-existent in Spain so far. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the results of a multimodal analysis of humorous instances found in a collection of 14 interviews from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The interviews have been imported and annotated in ELAN for head movements and face gestures. Only the interviewees’ remarks are studied in order to ensure the analysis of spontaneous speech, avoiding mostly pre-scripted host’s comments and questions. The results demonstrate that there are no gestures consistently and recurrently paired with humour. Therefore, none of the multimodal cues found in the sample can be considered markers of humour. Furthermore, the functions of gestures identified are consistent with the uses reported in previous multimodal studies of humorous and non-humorous communication found in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Hephaestus, the only physically disabled Olympian deity, occupies an important position in the history of comedy and the Greek tradition of laughter. From the Homeric epics to fourth-century comedy and vase-painting, Hephaestus is consistently to be found in cultural contexts which explore the instrumentality of laughter in domestic and social relationships, rituals and entertainments. The article proposes that the structure of the mythical narrative of the Return of Hephaestus, with its estrangement of the protagonist from his community, riotous reconciliation, and komastic procession, underlies several Old Comedies. It also suggests that his banausic profession and deformity helped to make him particularly popular in cultural artifacts—vases and dramas—produced in Athens in the democratic period because neither his trade nor his appearance would have disqualified him from wielding sovereign power, κράτος, as a citizen there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the appeal of humor lies, typically, in its very spontaneity and original contextual incongruity, there is also the chance of an ‘afterlife’ for the humorous text. In most cases, the humorist seeks an immediate response for what is an ephemeral, fleeting, linguistic transaction. A permanent place in humor culture is probably the least of the humorist’s goals- after all, the immediate, positive response is prioritized as an evidence of skill. Thus, most humor studies focus on the first instantiation of humor, as being generative of the act of humor. This prioritization of the immediate surprise, over the ‘echoes’ of an instance of humor, does not address the fact that many people enjoy revisiting a familiar joke, or comic film, or an entire TV comedy series, and that these revisited texts become incorporated into group and cultural artefacts. These recontextualizations in themselves are potentially funny, but they are also important in sustaining the original instance of humor as a type of ongoing conversation: a very distinctive feature of humor’s social importance. This paper will present a theorization of an interdependency between author, text, and interlocutors for the ‘afterlife’ of texts, and will furnish high-profile examples to support this concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a widely held belief that humor contributes to better health, but the research on this topic yields mixed results. To assess the relationship between humor and health, we compared the susceptibility to various infectious diseases of 511 comedy performers (amateur improvisational artists) and a control group of 795 non-performers that were matched to the comedy performers sample in age and sex. Subjects reported the number of episodes and the total days they had had various infectious diseases. Contrary to the prevailing sentiment that humor boosts health, results showed that the comedy performer group reported more frequent contagious diseases and more days having these infections diseases, compared to the control group. Improv artists had significantly more infections and reported more days infected than the control group on respiratory infections, head colds, stomach or intestinal flu, skin infections, and autoimmune diseases. The control group had significantly more bladder infections with non-significant difference on days infected. Results held after controlling for BMI, age, number of antibiotics used and neuroticism. We found no evidence that humor positively contributes to health, and a career in a humor-related profession may be detrimental to one’s health. Our research highlights the complex relationship between humor and health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article invites a closer look at the misleading use of the term "humorist" to describe Mark Twain, as well as any other number of authors who write comic material, and to suggest the pernicious effects of that practice. The near ubiquitous use of "humorist" in critical commentary masks or at least obscures the satiric elements in laughable texts, repressing the darker shades of those texts. Light-hearted or amiable laughter has become the sign of the humorist. In a regime that assumes "humorist" as the umbrella term, what happens to the assaults of (ridiculing) laughter that are a hallmark of satirists? Two sets of examples are offered: contemporary reviews of the works of Mark Twain published at the beginning of the twentieth century and remarks taken from recent critical commentary about comic writing. This article also offers a brief description of what its author believes constitutes the core of satire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]