Dad Jokes and the Deep Roots of Fatherly Teasing

In: Within Language, Beyond Theories (Vol. 1). Ed. Anna Bondaruk & Anna Prażmowska. 361-373. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Dedicated to the study of humor and laughter and communicating their relationship with holistic health with respect to medical, psychological, social, and spiritual well-being.

The European Journal of Humour Research, 2018

Incongruity theories maintain that the core of humour is in interplay between meanings. Two incompatible meanings – of situations, verbal utterances or actions – are juxtaposed, one replacing the other or colliding with it. In this paper, I suggest that often the game is not played between two meanings, but between meaning and its carrier. I provide as examples two families of jokes and one general type of humour sharing this mechanism. One of the two families comprises jokes of self-reference, and the other consists of jokes based on deflation of symbols, which means using them in a concrete sense. The general type of humour is the subject of Bergson’s 1900 theory of the comic, mechanical behaviour where flexible human reaction is expected. The mechanism common to all three is a shift of weight from meaning to its carrier. This mechanism is then traced also in other jokes, suggesting possible universality

16. Uluslararası Dil, Edebiyat ve Kültür Araştırmaları Kongresi Tam Metinleri, 2022

Jokes are funny stories that are usually narrated with the intention of creating amusement or laughter in everyday life which makes them a significant part of oral tradition as well as culture. Even though jokes are primarily considered to be used as a form of entertainment, many jokes-especially those with a specific theme, like race, religion, or politics-serve a deeper purpose by subtly criticizing society. In this regard, it is possible to divide jokes into two categories as the jokes only aiming at eliciting laughter and those disguising their criticism behind humour. In the jokes of the second category, criticism of certain delicate matters frequently relies on generalizations, stereotypes and stock characters which makes them the target of accusations of debasing particular ideals or adopting racist viewpoints. Contrary to general accusations, however, jokes do not degrade sensitive matters but rather avoid using debasing expressions while criticising de facto thoughts and conventional bias of society through the use humour as well as indirection. As a result, by mainly utilizing "puns," "ambiguities," "repetition," and "stock characters or stereotypes," as well as stylistic methods such as foregrounding, deviation, implicature, assumption, and presupposition jokes succeed in both alleviating their criticism and being a source of amusement. Using a stylistic approach, which is essentially the analysis of the way an author constructs his or her words, sentences, or context, this study will not only look at the structures, themes, and literary techniques of the jokes, but also the way they use humour to mitigate their criticism. The study thus seeks to demonstrate that jokes, in particular the thematic jokes like political, religious and ethnic jokes, essentially address issues that go beyond the scope of language and stylistic analysis will aid in exposing their criticism which is covered and mitigated by the humour and entertainment.

2016

The article analyses, from folkloristic and humour theoretical aspects, humorous material of children's remarks collected during the all-Estonian kindergarten folklore collection campaign held from October 2010 to January 2011. The main focus is on this subtype of jokes as they appear in kindergarten environment and from the point of view of kindergarten teachers. The material is divided into two groups: 1) spontaneous sayings, recorded during daily activities and interaction; 2) answers to the teacher's questions, guided by her interest (the teacher may have recorded discussions on a given topic). The article aims to investigate the utterances that teachers have perceived as funny or worth recording and to analyse the theoretical mechanisms of humour they are based on. We have all heard, some of us more than others, the candid and direct remarks children make that put a humorous twist on reality. Parents who witness their children growing up probably hear these remarks more often, but preschool teachers who spend even more time with children during their waking hours than their parents also hear them a great deal. The widespread custom of writing down what children say can be regarded as part of family and preschool lore. Children's remarks are often circulated in video, audio, and social media as a separate form of humour. Discussions of adult topics from a child's point of view as well as the imaginative linguistic creativity of children come across as sincere, genuine, and often funny. This sincere and genuine way of speaking has also brought the word lapsesuu ('child's mouth') into the Estonian language, which is used figuratively to characterise someone who speaks as frankly as a child (EKSS 2009: 55). Sounding childish can sometimes be an intentional rhetorical method, similar to the way politicians sometimes speak. Writing down the funny things children say is a popular tradition in modern written culture, but Estonian folklorists have not carried out any detailed research on the subject to date. The main reason is that such funny remarks are associated with a specific child at the moment they are uttered, so they

Journal of Pragmatics, 2018

Salvatore Attardo's Handbook of Language and Humor is part of the Routledge series of handbooks devoted to topics in Linguistics. As Attardo himself acknowledges in his introduction, this handbook could not have been possible three decades ago, when he started researching humor (p. 3). However, the turn of the century has demonstrated that times are now ripe for this comprehensive collection devoted to such a multifaceted and overarching phenomenon as humor. This handbook comprises 35 chapters which have not been grouped into specific subsections. However, its general structure is meaningful and well organized around a series of topics. Due to space limitations, I have concentrated on those chapters that are more likely to be of interest to the readers of this journal, and left some others aside (e.g. Raskin's 'Script-Based Semantic and Ontological Semantic Theories of Humor', L opez and Vaid on 'Psycholinguistic Approaches to Humor', Chen et al.'s 'Neurolinguistics of Humor' or Taylor's 'Computational Treatments of Humor'). Chapters 1e5 offer compelling summaries of humor theories by discussing punning in particular. Larkin-Galiñanes's 'Overview of Humor Theory' provides a thorough yet concise overview of Superiority and Disparagement, Release and Incongruity Theories. Her reflections on the way humor and laughter were denied by Christianity because they were associated with frivolity, vulgarity and sin are worth reading (6e7; cf. Trouvain and Truong in this volume for an extensive discussion on laughter). Guidi's 'Humor Universals' concentrates on humor as a universal mode of communication, which is used and/or manipulated for specific purposes (e.g. persuasion, legitimation, etc.). Recurrent patterns of phonetic similarity and their violations are shown to be markers of potential humor, which corpus-based studies can detect in a well-defined manner. Hempelmann's 'Key Terms in the Field of Humor' reviews the way terms such as 'humor' and 'wit' have come to be used in English. Moreover, corpus-based research on parallel corpora from original and translated texts can be used to show how these concepts are conveyed across language and culture (cf. also Helmpelman and Miller's 'Puns. Taxonomy and Phonology' in this volume for a similar approach). Attardo and Raskin's 'Linguistics and Humor Theory' is certainly an engaging piece of reading in its poignant defense of both Raskin's SSTH and Attardo's GTVH. The criticism of both theories arguing that script oppositions also apply to non-humorous texts is dismissed by a straightforward explanation that 'each theory comes with a purview, and it applies only to the phenomenon within this purview' (p. 52) and not all texts belong to the humor purview. Chapters 6e8 also review the main tenets of important theories of humor by looking at punning as a verbal and/or nonverbal (i.e. visual) realization of humor. Aljared's discussion of 'The Isotopy Disjunction Model' is engaging but not always easy to follow due partly to the fact that information is not well presented and signposted. That said, its value certainly lies in the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic application of IDM to a set of Arabic jokes. The findings are then compared to previous studies using IDM in American, German and Italian jokes to verify whether some similar or dissimilar characteristics can be detected. This approach can certainly reveal interesting insights on how different languages and cultures construct jokes and what their marked and unmarked features are in humor creation. Aarons's 'Puns and Tacit Linguistic Knowledge' is a clear and well-structured explanation of the mechanism at work in punning and how tacit knowledge is required to process it. A wealth of examples makes this a fitting contribution to the handbook, providing a sound overview of the issue at hand, especially when it demonstrates that ambiguity and overlapping are indeed necessary features of humorous texts like jokes. Attardo's 'The General Theory of Verbal Humor' offers the reader a sound discussion of the development and application of this theory 25 years on. Most notably, Attardo defends the validity of his theory by clarifying those concepts that, probably, were not well comprehended by fellow scholars (e.g. narrative strategy and logical mechanisms among the six Knowledge Resources informing the theory; p. 130e133). Although Attardo only briefly comments on the fact that 'Target' is sometimes a difficult knowledge resource to pinpoint within as humorous text, I am inclined to think that it deserves more attention, especially when investigating the perception of humor in texts such as (political) cartoons (Tsakona, 2009) or controversial advertising (Dore, 2018b). Chapters 11e14 consider humor from different angles, which are clearly interconnected by the approaches proposed in Stylistics and Pragmatics. Chłopicki's 'Humor and Narrative' draws on narratology and humor research to deal with the issue of detecting humor in texts longer than jokes. Simpson and Bousfield offer a concise but well-presented summary of the main

This article claims that the capacity of humorous works to influence our attitudes is limited. We can only find something funny if we regard it as norm-violating in a way that doesn't make certain pragmatic demands upon us (e.g. to defend the norm). It is compatible with these conditions that humour reinforces an attitude about a norm-violation. However it is not compatible with these conditions that we reject some existing attitude. Such a rejection would require that we recognize our attitude as norm-violating in a way that has pragmatic force. Thus if a humorous work reveals the absurdity of something, we can either find it funny and not have our attitudes significantly influenced, or else be significantly influenced but not find it funny.

Intercultural Pragmatics, 2018

Terms like to joke (and joking) and to tease (and teasing) have a curious double life in contrastive and interactional pragmatics and related fields. Occasionally they are studied as metapragmatic terms of ordinary English, along with related expressions such as kidding. More commonly they are used as scientific or technical categories, both for research into English and for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison. Related English adjectives, such as jocular and mock, are also much-used in a growing lexicon of compound terms, such as jocular abuse, mock abuse, jocular mockery, and the like. Against this background, the present paper has three main aims. In the first part, it is argued that the meanings of the verbs to joke and to tease (and related nouns) are much more English-specific than is commonly recognized. They are not precisely cross-translatable even into European languages such as French and German. Adopting such terms as baseline categories for cross-cultural comp...

Erkenntnis

We defend a fitting-attitude (FA) theory of the funny against a set of potential objections. Ultimately, we endorse a version of FA theory that treats reasons for amusement as non-compelling, metaphysically non-conditional, and alterable by social features of the joke telling context. We find that this version of FA theory is well-suited to accommodate our ordinary practices of telling and being amused by jokes, and helpfully bears on the related faultless disagreement dispute. Our ordinary practices of telling and being amused by jokes have a normative dimension. We criticize those who joke and laugh too much as buffoons, and those who joke and laugh too little as bores. Similarly, we criticize some senses of humor as crass or immature, and praise others as funny, or witty. To those who are amused more than we are we might say ''come on, it isn't that funny,'' and sometimes we might protest ''that's not funny at all.'' Any adequate theory of humor will have to account for this normative dimension of our joke telling practices. One way to account for this normative dimension is to appeal to evaluative properties of the object of amusement. On this sort of view, the normativity of our humor judgments derives from the goal of getting the object of amusement right. We think that the most attractive view of this type is a version of fitting attitude (FA) theory that holds that something is funny just in case it provides sufficient reason, of the right kind, for an associated sentiment; here, comic amusement. Such