Delia Chiaro

Debra Aarons

Playing with Food: Language, Humor, and Disgust is the first book to explore the interplay of food, humor, and disgust in multimodal media. Chiaro and Aarons note that, whenever food and comedy intersect, disgust is rarely far behind. Grounded in the theoretical framework of Carnival, the authors analyze the affective, cognitive, and corporeal responses to food, highlighting the central role of humor both in the way we talk about food and in our perception of the body and disgust. Through a rich array of texts, from everyday language and literature to video, advertising, music, politics, and beyond, this book advances a comprehensive examination of the wider notion of taste. With diverse, detailed case studies and an accessible, lively style, Playing with Food is an invaluable resource for students and researchers of Linguistics, Humor Studies, Food Studies, Psychology, Media Studies, Social Anthropology, and related fields.

Language, Humor, and Disgust

Playing with Food

Through the lens of cognitive science, Jokes and the Linguistic Mind investigates jokes that play on some aspect of the structure and function of language. In so doing, Debra Aarons shows that these 'linguistic jokes' can evoke our tacit knowledge of the language we use. Analyzing hilarious examples from movies, plays and books, Jokes and the Linguistic Mind demonstrates that tacit linguistic knowledge must become conscious for linguistic jokes to be understood. The book examines jokes that exploit pragmatic, semantic, morphological, phonological and semantic features of language, as well as jokes that use more than one language and jokes that are about language itself. With its use of jokes as data and its highly accessible explanations of complex linguistic concepts, this book is an engaging supplementary text for introductory courses in linguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive science.

Debra Aarons

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