Jan Chovanec

Villy Tsakona

This book deals with the construction of diverse forms of humor in everyday oral, written, and mediatized interactions. It sheds light on the differences and, most importantly, the similarities in the production of interactional humor in face-to-face and various technology-mediated forms of communication, including scripted and non-scripted situations. The chapters analyze humor-related issues in such genres as spontaneous conversations, broadcast dialogues, storytelling, media blogs, bilingual conversations, stand-up comedy, TV documentaries, drama series, family sitcoms, Facebook posts, and internet memes. The individual authors trace how speakers collaboratively circulate, reconstruct, and (re)frame either personal or public accounts of reality, aiming –among other things– to produce and/or reproduce humor. Rather than being “finished” products with a “single” interpretation, humorous texts are thus approached as dynamic communicative events that give rise to diverse interpretations and meanings. The book draws on a variety of up-to-date approaches and methodologies, and will appeal to scholars in discourse analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics, ethnography of communication, and social semiotics.

Creating and negotiating humor in everyday encounters

The Dynamics of Interactional Humor

Diana Elena Popa

If politics is a serious matter and humour a funny one, this volume investigates how and why the boundaries between the two are blurred: politics can be represented in a humorous manner and humour can have a serious intent. It shows how political humour can be manipulated in public debates or become an integral part of postmodern art.

In Between Political Critique and Public Entertainment

Studies in Political Humour

Humor may surface in numerous and diverse contexts, which at the same time determine how humor works, its form, and its functions and consequences for interlocutors. Adopting a sociolinguistic and discourse analytic perspective, this study is aligned with approaches to humor exploring the variety of humorous genres, the wide range of sociopragmatic functions of humor, and the more or less dissimilar perceptions speakers may have concerning what humor is, what it means, and how it works. The chapters of this book propose a new theoretical approach to the analysis of humor by bringing context into focus. Furthermore, the study explores how we can teach about humor within a critical literacy framework creating classroom space for everyday humorous texts that are part of students’ social realities, and simultaneously taking into account that humor may yield multiple, disparaging, and often conflicting interpretations. This book is intended to appeal to humor researchers from various disciplines (such as linguistics, media studies, cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, anthropology, folklore) as well as to professionals or researchers in education.

Rethinking the Analysis and Teaching of Humor

Recontextualizing Humor

Argiris Archakis

The Narrative Construction of Identities in Critical Education explores the issue of identity construction in conversational and humorous narratives, as well as the exploitation of such texts in language education programs cultivating critical language skills. Based on approaches from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, the study first proposes a model of analysis focusing on the linguistic and discursive means narrators use to construct a variety of identities in everyday stories told in peer groups. The data investigated comes from recorded conversations among adolescents belonging to different sociocultural groups. It involves past events of their personal and social lives and refers to their relationships with, and behavior towards, their peers, families, teachers, and other authority figures. The authors then suggest how this kind of material and analysis could be included in language teaching curricula, aiming at raising students' critical language awareness. In this context, a model for the exploitation of conversational narratives in language teaching is proposed.

Villy Tsakona

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