Jokes

The paper will discuss the following subtopics: Arthur Koestler's bisociation theory of humour and its reception; Victor Raskin's script-based theory of jokes (SSTH) in his "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor; the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) by Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo and the attempt of testing GTVH by Willibald Ruch; Salvatore Attardo's Linear Theory of Humor (IDM); The analysis of puns by Attardo; Humour and pragmatic maxims (Raskin, Attardo, etc.); Attardo's Setup-Incongruity-Resolution -model (SIR); The further taxonomy of "logical mechanisms" (LM) of jokes by Attardo, Hempelmann, and Di Maio; the "Anti-Festschrift" for Victor Raskin.

This paper foregrounds the disciplinary power of ridicule, as a form or aspect of humour, vis-à-vis gender norms. While much theoretical and empirical research in gender studies recognizes the punitive function of gendered humour and/or ridicule, this function is given no theoretical significance. To resolve this tension, I integrate social psychologist Michael Billig's theory of ridicule as a universal reinforcer of the social order, along with the notion of gender order (as a particular type of social order) as outlined in masculinities theorist Raewyn Connell's gender hierarchy model. I contend that as a form of mainstream gender humour, ridicule serves as a tool for policing the gender order and creating selfregulating gendered subjects. The argument enables a rereading of mainstream gender humour, especially when it deploys ridicule to target non-hegemonic gendered subjectivities, practices, and performances. Such apparently banal humour, as I illustrate with examples of contemporary Anglo-American mainstream gender humour, speaks to and protects the fundamental elements of the gender order of the society and culture in which the humour circulates. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of the main argument for pro-gender democracy research and activism.

This book offers a cognitive-pragmatic, and specifically relevance-theoretic, analysis of different types of humorous discourse, together with the inferential strategies that are at work in the processing of such discourses. The book also provides a cognitive pragmatics description of how addressees obtain humorous effects. Although the inferences at work in the processing of normal, non-humorous discourses are the same as those employed in the interpretation of humour, in the latter case these strategies (and also the accessibility of contextual information) are predicted and manipulated by the speaker (or writer) for the sake of generating humorous effects. The book covers aspects of research on humour such as the incongruity-resolution pattern, jokes and stand-up comedy performances. It also offers an explanation of why ironies are sometimes labelled as humorous, and proposes a model for the translation of humorous discourses, an analysis of humour in multimodal discourses such as cartoons and advertisements, and a brief exploration of possible tendencies in relevance-theoretic research on conversational humour.

For almost a century, a Persian ethnic joke cycle has circulated among Iranians about the men and women of the northern Iranian city of Rasht, labelling them as cuckolds and promiscuous women. A foray into the historical background and possible (gendered) functions of these jokes is long overdue. I argue that the central motif of Rashti jokes is gheyrat-a gendered social construct based on a man's sense of honour, possessiveness and protectiveness towards certain female kin-which remains pivotal to our understanding of the texts and the historical context of the jokes. Critically reviewing extant theories on the historical origins of Rashti jokes, I argue they have roots in two modern phenomena: (a) debates among turn-of-the-twentiethcentury Iranian thinkers over women's (un)veiling; and (b) Reza Shah's methodical promotion of an Aryanist, pan-Persian ideology. Focusing on the gender-disciplinary functions of the jokes, I then show how some contemporary Rashti jokes are deployed to project and inscribe gender-hierarchical notions that clearly surpass the jokes' immediate, ethnic targets by commenting on broad socio-political topics. Such instances suggest that as a culture-wide joke cycle, Rashti jokes may also reinforce a form of Iranian masculinity obsessed with gheyratmotivated control and aggression.

Pissing putti, virtually always male, merrily populate the imagery of early modern visual culture, from illuminated manuscripts to tableware, frescoed walls to working fountains. Their very ubiquity and charm has perhaps inured us to the valence of masculine bravado conveyed by the imagery. In particular, the exuberant jet nearly always issues from a babe shown standing erect, and the discharge of fluid is accentuated by forcefulness and exhibitionism. Furthermore, in early modern European culture, the fluids emitted by the blatant male organ were often considered interchangeable, and visual as well as verbal jokes were made about urine, semen, water, and wine. In a medical system determined by attention to the physiology and variability of the humors alongside the fixed taxonomy of forms, the sexual economy was as much characterized by liquidity as it was obsessed with penile penetration. Pissing and standing might appear meaningless and uninteresting, but such overlooked acts, I argue, indicate that the somatics and semiotics of early modern masculinity consisted of more than sexual intromission or inhibiting anxiety, and that visual metaphors presented manliness in ways that were often humorous, usually public, and always assertive.

Following closely public debates of the 1920s–1950s about the nature and purpose of a distinctively “Soviet” laughter and comedy, I will try to distill arguments and rationales that were used by producers of Stalinist culture for determining a socially acceptable (discursive)place for the comic in the country that was going through dramatic transformations of every aspect of its life.

1. “Mickey Marx”: Ėjzenštejn with Disney, and Other Funny Tales from the Socialist Realist Crypt, Dragan Kujundžić. 
2. The Sharp Weapon of Soviet Laughter: Boris Efimov and Visual Humor, Stephen M. Norris.
3. Useless Actions and Senseless Laughter: On Moscow Conceptualist Art and Politics, Yelena Kalinsky.
4. Laughter at the Opera House: The Case of Prokofʼevʼs The Love for Three Oranges,  Anna Nisnevich 
5. “Нам смех и строить и жить помогает”: Политэкономия смеха и советская музыкальная комедия (1930-е годы), Илья Калинин.
6. Радионяня, или Что смешного в кенгуре, Мария Литовская.
7. Subversive Songs in Liminal Space: Womenʼs Political Častuški in Post-Soviet Russian Rural Communities,  Laura J. Olson.
8. Laughing at Carnival Mirrors: The Comic Songs of Vladimir Vysockij and Soviet Power,  Anthony Qualin.
9. The Stiob of Ages: Carnivalesque Traditions in Soviet Rock and Related Counterculture, Mark Yoffe.
10. Sergej Kurechin: The Performance of Laughter for the Post-Totalitarian Society of Spectacle. Russian Conceptualist Art in Rendezvous, Michael Klebanov. 
11. Постсемиозис Андрея Монастырского в традициях московского концептуализма: Экфразис и проблема визуально-иронической суггестии,  Денис Иоффе.

Focusing on the disciplinary function of humor as an understudied subject in humor studies, this article addresses Qazvini jokesthe contemporary Persian joke cycle targeting men from the Iranian city of Qazvinas mainstream gender humor that uses ridicule as a means of supporting heteronormativity and fueling homophobia. Adopting an historical-analytical approach and considering examples of and references to Qazvini jokes, I argue that the joke series likely originated as a disciplinary tool to buttress the emerging heteronormative gender order of early modern Iranian society. Contextualized instances of these jokes not only illustrate that this punitive function has endured to the present but also indicate their ongoing homophobic role. This argument problematizes the claim made in humor studies that jokes have no social consequences. Qazvini jokes may be inconsequential in the limited sense that they might not affect attitudes toward their direct targetsthat is, individual men of Qazvinyet their heteronormalizing and homophobic functions clearly speak to larger social structures within Iranian society and culture. This form of ethnic humor both adheres to and informs Iran's prevailing gender and sexuality norms; as such, in this broader sense, the jokes may indeed have far-reaching consequences.

"Laughter under Socialism: Exposing the Ocular in Soviet Jocularity(pp. 247-255)
Serguei Alex. Oushakine

The Tramp in a Skirt: Laboring the Radiant Path(pp. 256-278)
Anna Wexler Katsnelson

Mr. Twister in the Land of the Bolsheviks: Sketching Laughter in Marshak’s Poem(pp. 279-306)
Yuri Leving

A Parasite from Outer Space: How Sergei Kurekhin Proved That Lenin Was a Mushroom(pp. 307-333)
Alexei Yurchak"

Digital cultures engage users’ social, creative and emotional labour – a process that can be described as affective. For some theorists and artists, this dynamic is inherently exploitative. However, within this exploitation is the potential, particularly in social media and games, to provide fuel for playful critique. The concept of ‘play’ is frequently used to describe users’ engagement within such cultures. This phenomenon evokes a long history in the arts of deploying ‘critical play’ modalities. In light of this situation, how might we begin to sketch a broader portrait of a ‘player’ engaging with the site of ‘critical play’?

This PhD project explores this question through a mapping of artists’ critical play within digital environments. With the focus upon affective engagement in digital environments, I argue that it is the reflection and interrogation of processes of identity representation that, in turn, drive much of the motivation for ‘playing critically’ as a productive probe. More generally ‘Critical Affection, an expanded portrait of the artist-as-player in digital cultures’ seeks to contribute to play debates at the intersection of games studies, new media and contemporary art.

This article offers points of intersection and difference across communication research on political comedy. Based on our findings, we argue that political comedy scholarship can be usefully divided into two areas: (1) features and (2) effects. Under features, we find three overlapping but distinct areas of emphasis: political comedy's rhetorical devices and conventions, its ideological and ethical functions, and its contributions to public culture. Under effects, we construct another four areas, including knowledge and learning, attitudes and opinion, cynicism and engagement, and processing, understanding, and affinity. The essay provides an overview of studies on political comedy's features and effects, before concluding with five pathways that can bridge these divides and bring conceptual clarity to future research.

In this dissertation, I read gender humor through the lens of masculinities studies and critical humor studies to contribute to gender studies and humor studies. I engage two crucial problems and propose solutions and possibilities for redress. The first problem concerns the state of the concept of ridicule—as a form/aspect of humor—within gender-related debates and specifically ridicule’s place in challenging and enforcing gender hegemony. In such discussions, ridicule and humor are frequently mentioned as insidious social control strategies through which certain forms of masculinity and femininity are abjected. Despite their recognizing such role of ridicule, however, the above debates never grant the role any theoretical significance. Critically reviewing the related literature, I draw on Michael Billig’s theory of ridicule as a universal reinforcer of the social order to argue that ridicule, as occurring in mainstream gender humor, plays a panoptical role in enforcing inequitable gender relations. As a pervasive disciplinary tool, gendered ridicule causes self-regulation in social agents who then wish to consent to the cultural ascendancy of certain modes of gender performance and the subordination of certain other forms of performing gender. By connecting this fearful consent to debates in gender studies about the role of abjection in the creation of gendered subjectivities, I also hypothesize that ridicule occupies a necessary role in the creation of gendered beings in the first place. I raise my main argument in Chapter One. In Chapters Two to Four, I illustrate the argument by analyzing various types of mainstream gender humor—with a particular emphasis on the genres of canned joke and sitcom—from Iranian and Anglo-American (mainly the U.S. and the U.K.) societies and cultures. The main humor types and/or categories include those targeting women, homosexuals, effeminates as well as bodily non-normative and ethnic/racial femininities and masculinities. For the Anglo-American sections (Chapter Two and parts of Chapter Four), besides related joke cycles, episodes from the sitcoms Two and a Half Men (2003-2015) and Ellen (1994–1998) as well as spots from the Get a Mac Ad campaign (2006-2009) are analyzed. For the Iranian part (Chapter Three and parts of Chapter Four), the main focus is put on the contemporary Qazvini and Rashti joke cycles, the sexual humor of the classical Persian satirist Ubeyd Zakani (d. ca. 1370), and his modern counterparts. My main argument, given humor’s well-known potential for subversion, may arouse the objection that ridicule always exists as a counterhegemonic tool to resist hegemonic gender norms. I tackle this possibility in the last Chapter Five, where I discuss the possibilities and restraints of feminist and in-group lesbian humor as representative categories of fringe or non-mainstream gender humor. I argue that this resistant humor, due to its minimal normalizing power—compared to the heft of mainstream gender humor—apparently cannot offset the latter’s disciplinary power and thus be effectively subversive of patriarchy. The second problem I focus on is the way gender theories inform prevalent textual analyses of gender humor. Examining the pertinent literature, I argue that the critical blind spots need redress and enrichment. While analyzing gender humor, I argue, many humor scholars either resist gender theories or employ theories incapable of explaining intricacies related to gender. To address this insufficiency, I suggest that we use—as I have done throughout—comprehensive theories that not only embrace multiple masculinities and femininities but also heed the intersection of gender and other identity elements. I use Raewyn Connell’s gender hierarchy model as a case in point. In contrast to much work in gender studies that recognizes, yet understates, ridicule’s political force in favour of gender hierarchy, this research contends that the above force is universal and central, and therefore must be foregrounded in gender studies. Within humor studies, too, the research contrasts with exculpatory accounts of humor that downgrade or deny humor’s effect on the social order. My findings indicate that mainstream gender humor, while reflecting the gender order, is most likely to affect that order, too. Finally, unlike much research in feminist humor studies that puts too much hope in seditious functions of fringe or marginal gender humor, I find that such humor cannot find recognition among mainstream audiences unless its underlying assumptions find cultural ascendancy.

A partir de materiales etnográficos de campo, se describen diversas instancias de fenómenos que hacen reír a los chacobo (Pano) de la  Amazonía boliviana en contextos discursivos o prácticos como la caza, las fiestas, las relaciones interétnicas, las relaciones de parentesco, la onomástica o la mitología, y se propone una hipótesis sociológica de interpretación del humorismo chacobo.

"Serguei Alex. Oushakine
Introduction: Jokes of Repression
East European Politics & Societies November 2011 25: 655-657

Neringa Klumbytė
Political Intimacy: Power, Laughter, and Coexistence in Late Soviet Lithuania
East European Politics & Societies November 2011 25: 658-677,

Bill Martin
Slatan Dudow’s Christine (1963/1974) and the Social Comedy of Character
East European Politics & Societies November 2011 25: 678-703

Maria Ioniţă
Hunting Lizards in Romania: Oblique Speech and Humor in Ioan Groşan’s 2084: A Space Epic and Planet of the Mediocres
East European Politics & Societies November 2011 25: 704-719

Alena Ledeneva
Open Secrets and Knowing Smiles
East European Politics & Societies November 2011 25: 720-736

Costica Bradatan
To Die Laughing
East European Politics & Societies November 2011 25: 737-758"

This article focuses on folk expressions on " the election without choice", as the state elections in authoritarian societies are often labeled. The research is based on the case of Belarus, where the electoral fraud has become a matter of common knowledge both for the Belarusians themselves and outside observers. Yet, even though the independent opinion polls are not exactly as positive for the Belarusian president as the official results of the election, they show that Alexander Lukashenko wins within the self-sufficient system he has created. This hegemony is nurtured, for instance, by various manifestations of the election sham reproduced by Belarusians. At the same time, the election rumors and jokes circulating in the oral communication and on the Internet question the existing hegemony. By means of fieldwork examples I show in this article how the genres of rumors and jokes are interconnected, sometimes to the point of being indis-cernible. Rather than looking at the borders of the two genres, I will concentrate on their interplay, intertextual bridges between them, the ideologies they share, and new directions for understanding the non-verifiable folklore they provide.

This article for Nautilus sheds light on dark humor among nuclear professionals. It tells anthropological tales of how Finland's young nuclear insiders played edgy outdoor games mimicking meltdowns, terrorism, and battlefield ops during their summer work retreats. It then explores ways dark humor and play can raise workforce morale in high-intensity professions. The article closes by reflecting on whether dark humor can be a sign of sensitivity and care.

Humor and things related (such as the category of the merry [veselost’]), played an unusually prominent role in what is often considered the first school of contemporary literary theory, Russian Formalism, or, to be specific, its Petrograd wing, mainly represented by Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, and Boris Eikhenbaum. Humor helped these Formalists in their battle against approaching literature from the standpoint of “psychologism”. The comic let them emphasize literature’s own agenda (centered round the interplay of its constructive elements, not only within a single work but also across history), at the cost of the “serious” authorial purpose, previously identified with the meaning of the work. In fact, an artistic breakthrough, the Formalists maintained, tends to be (taken as) humorous at the beginning, its “serious” explanations being a later development;
accordingly, the Formalists considered as the prototype of all novels the parodic works of Cervantes
and Sterne. Humor advanced Formalist theory, helping it take its eyes off the tenor of the work and see
the vehicle, off content and see the medium, which now was considered the true message. However,
when it came to their special theory of the comic, this approach threatened to deconstruct the literary
significance of humor in literature, humorous works no longer distinguishable from non-humorous
ones. Why this was so is analyzed in the forthcoming second part of this article, titled “Literature as a
Joke”.

Memes are small units of culture, analogous to genes, which flow from person to person by copying or imitation. More than any previous medium, the internet has the technical capabilities for global meme diffusion. Yet, in order to spread globally, memes need to negotiate their way through cultural and linguistic borders. This article introduces a new broad method, Web memetics, comprising extensive Web searches and combined quantitative and qualitative analyses, to identify and assess: a) the different versions of a meme;

This article explores citizenship and sovereignty at the Mexico–U.S. border through jokes told about and around checkpoint encounters—most centrally, those staged at the main port of entry connecting Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego, California. In Tijuana, I argue, U.S. state recognition validates the proper, middle-class citizenship of Mexicans resident in Mexico. Attitudes towards the United States, however, remain ambivalent. I begin by exploring the checkpoint jokes of drug-traffickers as represented in several narcocorridos (popular ballads about drug-trafficking). Though this music is disapproved of by most people invested in U.S. state recognition, I show next how middle-class jokes build on the trope of the trickster-trafficker to parry state interpellation. The jokes work as performative arguments where people begin to articulate the tensions that constitute citizenship and sovereignty at the border. Finally, I examine the consular interview for the U.S. Border Crossing Card, a key site knitting together U.S. and Mexican regimes of citizenship. Folk theories of how the interview works anticipate the jokes’ bald thematization of duplicity, explaining why middle-class people would turn to jokes that frame them as traffickers. Understood in the context of the BCC interview, middle-class checkpoint jokes reveal Mexican citizenship as embedded in an international system organized not by principles of authentic identity, but by ambivalence, contradiction, and undecidability.

In this essay, we argue that the popular joke, "that's what she said" is a symbolic representation of rape that contributes to and insulates rape culture. Drawing on Joseph Boskin's notion of the "joke cycle" and extant literature on rape culture and misogynistic humor, we critique several instances of the joke on the popular television series The Office. From there, we extend our critique of the joke cycle, noting the conspicuous absence of concern over the joke and its implications in other scholarly treatments of the program. Our primary contention is that the joke cycle, which may be the most prominent cycle in recent decades, reinscribes rape culture by normalizing discourses that dismiss and silence rape victims, justify violence against women, and even blame victims for having been assaulted. "That's what she said" avoids the critical eye because it disguises itself as a joke like any other.

The article, based on two recent collections of Stalin jokes, explores these texts from the standpoint of humor theory. The principal feature distinguishing most of them from satire is that they do not mock their ostensible target. Rather than expressing any relation to reality, they mock all the stupid ways reality can be represented. Viewed from the metalevel, these jokes are parodic in the broadest sense, which includes self-parody. They ridicule not only the official view of reality, but any other views of it as well, including the satirical view. The basic principle underlying these and all other jokes is the clash between the author and the intellectually inferior implicit narrator, who is the principal target of the jokes. As a result, the relevance of Stalin jokes for reconstructing either Soviet reality or people's attitude to it is minimal, whereas their relevance for humor theory is considerable, since they highlight the contrast between satire and humor, specifically black humor.

The article situates a new type of stand-up comedy, performed in Kinshasa’s
mourning spaces (matanga), within the city’s social universe. This type of funerary
joking, enacted by comedians unrelated to the bereaved, represents a clear departure
from the customary funerary humour in which accepted jokers occupy particular
social positions vis-à-vis the deceased. Following recent changes in the
organization of mourning rituals within the circles of Kinshasa’s wealthy, these
rather intimate events are ever more open to ‘strangers’, who anticipate the spending
capacities of the gathered crowd. Comedians constitute one among a wide
range of outsider groups who approach the bereaved community as a space of
opportunity. It is argued that this emergent cultural form is utterly urban, and
could only appear within urban life worlds where conviviality with others, and
in particular an understanding of people’s need to make a living in precarious circumstances,
transforms the mourning community into an audience that pays for a
cultural performance. Humour is not only derived from a symbolic difference
between the poor and the rich, but also through the performance of exaggerated
flattery, producing the illusion of patronage and situating the comedian within a
feigned patron–client relationship for the duration of that performance.

Abstract

Two lexical decision semantic priming experiments examined when, in the course of reading a joke, the initial and the intended meanings are primed; whether the meanings overlap in time; and what happens to the initial reading when the punchline is encountered. In Experiment 1, probes related to the first activated sense (S1) vs. the second sense (S2), or true meaning, were presented at each of three temporal sites for visually displayed joke tests: shortly after joke onset, at an intermediary position, and at punchline offset, whereas in Experiment 2, probes were presented at joke offset following prolonged viewing. The results from Experiment 1 showed S1 priming effects at the initial and intermediary time point. Priming for S2 also emerged at the intermediary time point and persisted at the final time point. In Experiment 2, the priming effect at joke offset was reliable only for S2. The results are taken to support a concurrent meaning activation view [in line with Attardo, Humor 10 (1997) 395] at incongruity detection, and a selective activation view [in line with Giora, Journal of Pragmatics 16 (1991) 465] at incongruity resolution.

In my previous research, a distinction was made, in a general classification of jokes, between those jokes that are based on the speaker’s manipulation of the audience’s interpretive steps leading to an interpretation of the joke, and those jokes whose main source of humour lies in the reinforcement or invalidation of commonly assumed social stereotypes. However, interpretive strategies for obtaining interpretations work in parallel to the processing of cultural information and also of mental frames, schemas and scripts that are retrieved by the hearer in order to make sense of the text of the joke. In this chapter, a more realistic picture of joke comprehension (the Intersecting Circles Model) is proposed to account for how some or all of these interpretive procedures may be manipulated for the production of humorous effects.

On the shopfloor of an Indian automobile plant, a multi-ethnic workforce exchanges potentially offensive ethnic jokes with one another while remaining largely silent on actual incidences of communal violence. This paper shows how silence and profane humor are important aspects of an inter-ethnic sociality in the workplace, which distances itself from the retaliatory logics of communal violence. Speaking in the indirect register of irony, I argue that jokes about one another’s religion and ethnicity are a means by which cultural intimates articulate anti-communal perspectives on public life. I suggest that profanity is a style of interaction that relates to an anti-communal sociality which distances itself from the politics of sanctity.

Understanding jokes involves the challenge of incongruity-detection and resolution. Foreign language understanding involves significant processing difficulties, such as interpreting words within their sentence context.  An implication is that jokes in a foreign language will be more difficult to understand and therefore probably less humorous, compared to native language jokes. To study this question while preserving humor across translations, jokes were selected from Turkish and English websites to minimize language play and cultural references. Turkish university students rated both Turkish and English jokes for humor.  Perceived humor for foreign language jokes was influenced by English ability. L2-English jokes were perceived as more humorous, on average, than L1-Turkish jokes for the one-quarter of our sample with good English proficiency who were also preparing for an English-centric career such as English teacher or translator. This novel finding is consistent with achievement/satisfaction theory.  Students with the opposite characteristics, also approximately a quarter of our sample, rated L1-Turkish jokes as more humorous.  Ratings of ease-of-understanding influenced humor ratings in a graded manner similarly for native speakers rating their L1, and both low and high-proficiency foreign language learners.  This lends quantitative support to the theoretical view that L2 humor processing lies on a continuum with L1 humor processing.  Results also supported the inverted-U theory, which is that humor has an inverse relation to processing difficulty. This supports Raskin's sophistication theory and the concept of a "sweet spot" for humor processing that is shifted due to the inherent challenge of incongruity detection and resolution in a foreign language.

When it comes to jokes, philosophers are perhaps less astute in theory than practice.  The greatest thinkers in the history of philosophy created theories of jokes that were too particular to explain jokes in general or too general to explain particular jokes.  This essay reflects on the shortcomings of these theories in order to formulate a theory that eschews their weaknesses while exceeding their explanatory power.  I argue that since jokes must be understood if they are to be enjoyed, jokes can be classified into the structures of thought through which they are understood.  Such a framework is general enough to explain every joke and provides the standpoint from which to appreciate familiar features of particular jokes.

How do philosophical accusations of talking nonsense relate to the layperson’s notions of meaning and meaningfulness?  If one were to explain carefully what philosophical nonsense was supposed to be, would one be greeted with incredulity?  How do people react to being accused of talking nonsense themselves?  Is anything analogous to an illusion of meaning recognised in everyday life?  In dream-reports perhaps?  Or in the utterances of schizophrenics or those under the influence of drugs?  Or in certain jokes and hoaxes?  Are contradictions felt to be meaningless?  I argue that, though it is clear that experimental philosophy could shed some light on these questions, their subject matter creates special difficulties.  First, it is more difficult than usual to formulate questions and produce ‘vignettes’ that do not subtly encourage certain responses at the expense of others.  Second, the fact that philosophical nonsense is a metaphilosophical concept ensures that its investigation is going to be more indirect than would be that of knowledge or intention, for example.

This article explores the surprisingly decisive role that Kant's "incongruity theory" of laughter plays in his aesthetic and broader critical philosophy. First, laughter constitutes a highly specific form of aesthetic judgment in Kant. Laughter involves a discordant relation between the cognitive faculties characteristic of the sublime, but this relation obtains between the understanding and the imagination, the two faculties at play in judgments of taste on the beautiful. Second, laughter is the transcendental condition of possibility for both the beautiful and the sublime. While most commentators dismiss laughter as an afterthought of Kant's aesthetics, laughter in fact constitutes the most basic aesthetic judgment in Kant. Third, an account of aesthetic judgment that begins with laughter transforms how we understand Kant's argument that judgment unites nature and freedom. Namely, it reveals how an empirical world at odds with the subject's purposes can nevertheless advance the subject's rational vocation to think and act beyond the empirical. I conclude by arguing that Kantian critical philosophy is itself a philosophy of laughter.

Social theorists have long regarded humor as a window into the hidden layers of the mind; with the advent of brain imaging technology, today's researchers are able to directly observe a joke's effect on these fundamental neural processes. Nine young adult subjects were asked to rate 84 cartoons-half funny, half unfunny-while inside an fMRI scanner. The neural response patterns for funny and unfunny cartoons were contrasted to reveal a unique frontoparietal network that is involved in humor processing. Subsequent analyses revealed that the humor response across this network becomes greater when a series of jokes are presented in close temporal proximity, a pattern of neural adaptation known as response expansion. Finally, subject scores on the various portions of the Sense of Humor Questionnaire (SHQ) were found to co-vary with their activity patterns during the humor task.

This study analyses the concept and phenomenon of touch. It begins by demonstrating that touch is problematic for a "Science of Touch" and for human beings as well. In this context, the notion of embodiment is re-thought in order to open the discursive space for a study of touch that takes into consideration all the difficulties implied in it. The study identifies in the phenomenon of touch an element that makes the self-identity of a science of touch and of embodiment impossible. This element is the concept of self-difference.

How do philosophical accusations of talking nonsense relate to the layperson’s notions of meaning and meaningfulness?  If one were to explain carefully what philosophical nonsense was supposed to be, would one be greeted with incredulity?  How do people react to being accused to talking nonsense themselves?  Is anything analogous to an illusion of meaning recognised in everyday life?  In dream-reports perhaps?  Or in the utterances of schizophrenics or those under the influence of drugs?  Or in certain jokes and hoaxes?  Are contradictions felt to be meaningless?  I argue that, though it is clear that experimental philosophy could shed some light on these questions, their subject matter creates special difficulties.  First, it is more difficult than usual to formulate questions and produce ‘vignettes’ that do not subtly encourage certain responses at the expense of others.  Second, the fact that philosophical nonsense is a metaphilosophical concept ensures that its investigation is going to be more indirect than would be that of knowledge or intention, for example.