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The Mirror of Laughter
... What however, in a minimal sense has been seen as creating an identity for humour, regardless of its range, is the defining function of a contrast with the non-humorous, specified as the serious. According to Kozintsev, this provides the only universal criterion for circumscribing humour (Kozintsev, 2010;Kuipers, 2009, pp. 221-2); hence also the notion that all humour is contained within a play-framethe very metaphor of a frame making things seem neat and tidy; but the strong associations of play with a game take us onto treacherously variable territory, for games are anything but uniform in their relationships to seriousness (Wittgenstein, 1968, paras 69-75). ...
The word humour is often taken as an ‘umbrella term’. This article first briefly situates umbrella terms within a context of logically stable and unstable forms of classification. It outlines the reasons why the scope of what is studied as humour justifies the general designation that also encompasses a necessary degree of interdisciplinarity. The implications of this, however, can be at odds with how humour is treated in analysis: there can be few general conclusions about humour per se; global theories of humour, or uniform conceptual vocabularies for its analysis are likely to remain unsatisfactory. The article concludes by pointing to a category mistake analogous to Russell’s set theory paradox when humour, accepted as an umbrella term is then conflated with what the classifier subsumes.
... Especially studies in Conversation Analysis have shown its crucial role in managing conversations at several levels: dynamics (turn-taking and topic-change), lexical (signalling problems of lexical retrieval, imprecision in the lexical choice), pragmatic (marking irony, disambiguate meaning, managing self-correction) and social (to smooth and soften difficult situations, to show (dis)affiliation and mark group boundaries) [104,40,80,51]. It is not surprising therefore that laughter has been object of scholar investigation since millennia from many different disciplines (for reviews see [55] and [14]). Nevertheless, the taxonomies available and the theories proposed, especially for what concerns the classification of laughter uses, resulted hard to integrate. ...
In the current work a brief overview of some studies conducted on laughter taking a multidisciplinary perspective will be presented. The integration of analyses of corpus data, theoretical and formal insights, behavioural experiments, machine learning methods, and developmental data, turned out to be fruitful to gain insight into laughter behaviour and on how its production contributes to our conversations. A crucial claim emerging from the studies presented is that laughter conveys propositional meaning interacting with other modalities, in a manner akin to other content bearing words. The implications that such results have for the implementations of more competent, from a semantic and pragmatic perspective, spoken dialogue systems will be outlined. Especially the qualitative and quantitative analysis of developmental data will offer the basis for the proposal of some specific applications.
... Especially studies in Conversation Analysis have shown its crucial role in managing conversations at several levels: dynamics (turn-taking and topic-change), lexical (signalling problems of lexical retrieval, imprecision in the lexical choice), pragmatic (marking irony, disambiguate meaning, managing self-correction) and social (to smooth and soften difficult situations, to show (dis)affiliation and mark group boundaries) [104,40,80,51]. It is not surprising therefore that laughter has been object of scholar investigation since millennia from many different disciplines (for reviews see [55] and [14]). Nevertheless, the taxonomies available and the theories proposed, especially for what concerns the classification of laughter uses, resulted hard to integrate. ...
Teesid: Uurimuses analüüsitakse ajaloomeeme Vene sõja kohta Ukrainas. Leidsime materjalis korduvad motiivid ning vaatlesime suhteid meemide ajalooalasete viidete ja hoiakute vahel. Selgus, et ajaloomeemid võivad olla vahendiks, kuidas õigustada tänapäeva sündmusi, tekitada vaenlaste suhtes üleolekut, anda hinnanguid sündmustele ning naeruvääristada või tunnustada olukorraga seostuvaid inimesi. Analüüsides meemides ajaloolisi viiteid, tuleb arvestada hoiakute mõjuga viidete valikule. On 24 February 2022, Russia started the full-scale war in Ukraine. It provoked a lot of parallels with earlier conflicts in the vernacular reactions. There was an abundance of serious and humorous reactions and comments on the war, and the creation and dissemination of memes soared. Some of these used historical motives to underline the stance and message of the utterance. Historical memes are widely spread cultural units that explicitly relate to a particular historical event or personality. They are linked to memory practices that strengthen or help to propagate the meme. Historical memes reanimate the past with the help of historical artefacts (such as photos and videos), to adapt the memories of the past to the circumstances of the present. In times of war, or in any other conflict context, memoricity plays a significant role in narratives related to collective security and evokes affective responses by re-activating feelings associated with past experiences. Historical memes accentuate the emotional and intertextual load by tying contemporary commentary to emotionally charged historical and cultural motifs such as visual and/or verbal references to historical events, characters, catch phrases, etc. They function as shortcuts to basic categorisations of “us” and “them”, friends and enemies. Our aim is to analyse how historical motives contribute to the meaning-making in memes: which historical memes are commonly used in the context of the Russia–Ukraine conflict from 2014, which recurrent motifs transpire in the data, and what the relationship between the historical references and stance of the memes is. Memes offered a vernacular viewpoint on this conflict already since the illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, and have been actively used throughout the years up to the ongoing military invasion. Some of the memes referred to (pre) historical events, but most of the references res ort to the history of 20th century. The motif of WWII was the most prevalent historical reference in memes on the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine that circulated in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. While the references to ancient and mediaeval times are generally used to create a certain distance to the 2022 war and place its events and participants in a completely different context, references to the Russian Empire and WWII often draw direct parallels between historical and the contemporary events. The instrumentalist approach to history that is consciously employed by the state can also function on a vernacular level by employing and recognising certain historical references in memes. The results show that historical memes can offer a way of legitimising contemporary events through history. The current actions and political decisions acquire firmness and justification if they are linked to historical events and actors that everyone remembers from school. They also contribute to establishing superiority over enemies, as the audiences find proof in their reasoning when they compare the past with the present. Memes ridicule or praise the people involved with the help of intertextuality pointing at well-known historical personae like Hitler, Goebbels or Stalin. In doing that, memes with historical references seem to demand a more nuanced cultural literacy, while other memes simply depend on the more basic shared cultural background of their creators and audiences to be understood and spread. Approaching historical memes from this angle, we can reveal the workings of intertextuality and their role in different kinds of memes, given that previous research has shown that not all the references and allusions need to be understood to find a meme funny.
Comedy and humour have intrigued and puzzled philosophers and scholars since time immemorial. What is the difference between tragedy and comedy? What is the essence of comedy? What are the traits that qualify something as humorous? Why do we laugh? At the same time, with the philosophical curiosity came an inveterate suspicion: comedy and humour have been considered lowly genres not worthy of serious study and unbecoming for intellectually superior audiences; comedy can stir up base instincts that are better kept hidden behind the propriety of good manners; comedy can be immoral and malicious and hence is to be condemned. The chapter surveys this tension between scholarly curiosity and haughty condemnation in philosophy, religions, and aesthetic criticism. It presents the three principal theoretical families which have tried to account for the mechanics of humour and laughter: the superiority theories, the release theories, and the incongruity theories, from ancient Greece to the present day. Finally, the specificities of film comedy are considered—what devices make a comedy a film comedy and which techniques of the medium are deployed by film humour—and a summary and discussion are offered of the principal theories within film studies, from Gerard Mast’s to Jerry Palmer’s to Andrew Horton’s.
The article highlights the problem of interaction of the ancient Egypt laughter culture with the category of sacred. A person is confronted with the fact that the examples in question can often be phenomena of a different order, and the use of terms such as “carnival” or even “religion”, “temple” or “priest” in relation to ancient Egypt requires an additional explanation. We find “funny” images on the walls of tombs and in the temples, where the Egyptians practiced their cult. In the Ramesside period (1292-1069 BC) a huge layer of the culture of laughter penetrated a written tradition in a way that Mikhail Bakhtin called the carnivalization of literature. Incredible events are described in stories and fairy tales in a burlesque, grotesque form, and great gods are exposed as fools. Applying of the Bakhtinian paradigm to the material of the Middle and New Kingdom allows to reveal the ambivalent character of the Ancient Egyptian laughter: the Egyptians could joke on the divine and remain deeply religious.
Vladimir Maiakovskii travelled to America to give public readings: to be seen and, more importantly, to be heard. However, the fact that Maiakovskii spoke no foreign languages complicated his travels. This is the subject of the author’s inquiry: how does a master of verbal expression cope with being rendered incomprehensible among foreigners, and how does this predicament influence the artistic representation of his experience abroad? The distinguishing feature of Maiakovskii’s travelogue, and the consequence of his temporary muteness in America, is heavy reliance on colour and non-verbal sound to describe and interpret what he sees. Maiakovskii focuses on alternative, non-verbal means of engaging with the foreign that rely on the senses, rather than language. The author traces the functions of colour, sound, and laughter in My Discovery of America: from the poster-like graphics of Maiakovskii’s representation of American cities to a more complex interpretation of their sounds, to the thought-provoking use of laughter.
Drawing on a range of American, Australian, British and Scandinavian research into laughter, the current paper will use the form of pragmatic analysis typically found in qualitative research and apply it to data produced by the quantitative methodology common in the author’s own discipline of psychology. Laughter will be examined as an indexical that serves both a discourse deictic function, designating the utterance in which it occurs as non-serious, and a social deictic function, marking the laughing person’s preference for social proximity with fellow interlocutors. The paper will then analyse examples and data pertaining to three types of laughter bout derived from taking laughter as an indexical. First, solitary listener laughter will be argued to signify a deferential acknowledgement of continued solidarity with the speaker. Second, solitary speaker laughter will be suggested to mark a simple preference for solidarity. Third, joint laughter will be accepted as a signifier of actual solidarity that may also be used to mark status depending on which party typically initiates the joint laughter. Joint laughter thus acts in a manner closely analogous to the exchange of another set of indexicals, the T and V versions of second person pronouns in European languages. Finally, the paper will conclude by examining the problematic case of laughing at another interlocutor, before briefly considering the implications of this pragmatic perspective for traditional accounts of laughter as well as for future research.
This chapter lays a theoretical foundation for this book. The Politics of Laughter in the Social Media Age: Perspectives from the Global South focuses on the politics of ridicule, humour and laughter in the Global South. There are many different contexts in the Global South where humour has been used by ordinary citizens targeted at exposing the follies of those in power and the consequences have been devastating. Ridicule and humour, while making people laugh and at times grasp their conditions of existence or even pushing them to make alterations, has been one of the accessible ways for coping or bringing about change in society. Focus on the Global South is brought about by an appetite to explore humour and its uses in some unique and yet complex systems of governance, social configurations and political communication. Thus, Global South scholars should be given a chance to tap from the intellectual traditions and cultures of their region and bring forth understandings and analyses of people’s lived experiences. This chapter contends that digital media could be powerful platforms for the marginalised, spaces to share humourous moments about life and politics or could weapons of the weak in complex relationships between politics, politicians, challenges and citizens.
Charles Philipon (1800-1862) was the founder of the satirical illustrated press in France. With the newspapers he owned and directed, La Caricature and Le Charivari, he led an unprecedentedly coherent and vitriolic campaign of disrespect against King Louis-Philippe and his regime. Using a group of young caricaturists (the most talented of whom were Daumier, Grandville, and Travies) and the collaboration of a gifted team of writers (including Balzac) he crafted a new language of opposition. This book is the first full scholarly study of the structure of the illustrated press in the 1830s, its contribution to political debate in France, the dissemination of caricature and its potential as political propaganda, and the links between caricature and other forms of political-cultural discourse under the July Monarchy.
Human faces present complex visual patterns that mediate a rich variety of social activity including the recognition of individuals, the perception of emotion, and lipreading. In recent years considerable progress has been made in understanding how these complex images are interpreted by the brain, and in the development of computer systems for the processing, transmission, and graphical display of faces. This volume provides state-of-the-art reviews of the processes involved in perceiving and recognizing faces, with perspectives from neurophysiology, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, and developmental psychology. It also includes contributions from engineering and computer science. The authors are internationally recognized experts drawn from these various disciplines, and they review their own recent contributions to the field. Much of the current impetus and excitement comes from the remarkable degree of communication and collaboration, often spanning traditional disciplinary boundaries, that characterizes this field of research which is well illustrated by the chapters assembled in this volume.
This book argues convincingly against the widespread opinion that very few syntactic studies were carried out before the 1950s. Relying on the detailed analysis of a large amount of original sources, it shows that syntactic matters were in fact carefully investigated throughout both the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century. Moreover, it illustrates how the enormous development of syntactic research in the last fifty years has already condemned even several recent ideas and analyses to oblivion, and deeply influenced current research programs. The wealth of research undertaken over the last two centuries is presented here in a systematic way, taking as its starting point the relationship of syntax with psychology throughout this period. The critical ideas expressed in the text are based on a detailed illustration of the different syntactic models and analyses rather than on the polemics between the different schools.
The orphaned son of an Anglican clergyman, David Hartley (1705–57) was originally destined for holy orders. Declining to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, he turned to medicine and science yet remained a religious believer. This, his most significant work, provides a rigorous analysis of human nature, blending philosophy, psychology and theology. First published in two volumes in 1749, Observations on Man is notable for being based on the doctrine of the association of ideas. It greatly influenced scientists, theologians, social reformers and poets: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who named his eldest son after Hartley, had his portrait painted while holding a copy. In Volume 1, Hartley utilises Newtonian science in his observations. He presents a theory of 'vibrations', explaining how the elements of the nerves and brain interact as a result of stimulation, creating 'associations' and emotions.
