Taking laughter seriously

The trickster shift : a new paradigm in contemporary Canadian Native art

Perspectives on humor of families who have a member with a disability were examined using a qualitative methodology Findings offer complex and challenging lessons for those who work with and for families of children with disabilities I compared the traditional view that families of children with disabilities go through a constant process of grieving and sadness with newly emerging views of accepting relationships and making life as typical as possible with the help of humor

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Make it just as normal as possible with humor

In smart cities we can expect to witness human behavior that is not be different from human behavior in present-day cities. There will be demonstrations, flash mobs, and organized events to provoke the smart city establishment. Smart cities will have bugs that can be exploited by hackers. Smart cities can also offer their data to civic hackers, who may create useful applications for city dwellers. Humor is an important aspect of our daily activities and experiences. In this chapter, we explore how humor can become part of smart and playable cities. We do this by investigating the role of humor in game environments. In games, we have accidental humor, for example because of bugs, and we have humor that occurs because a gamer wants it to happen. This latter type of humor can be produced by looking for bugs, by not following the rules of the game, or by intentionally creating situations that lead to humorous events in the game. This may certainly include humor at the expense of others. We investigate how such views of game humor can find analogues in the humor that may appear and be created in smart and playable cities.

Mischief Humor in Smart and Playable Cities

Abstract The primary objective of this paper is to discuss humorous political cartoons contingent on pictorial and textual components, with the heuristic apparatus provided by Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books) conceptual blending theory. Blending is discussed in reference to three approaches to humour known in topical literature, viz. bisociation (Koestler, 1964. The Act of Creation. London: Hutchinson), the incongruity-resolution model (Suls, 1972, A two-stage model for the appreciation of jokes and cartoons: An information processing analysis. In: The Psychology of Humor, J. Goldstein and P. McGhee (Eds.), 81–100. New York: Academic Press; 1983, Cognitive processes in humour appreciation. In: Handbook of Humour Research, Vol. 1, P. McGhee and J. Goldstein (Eds.), 39–57. New York: Springer), and relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995, Relevance Theory: Communication and Cognition. 2nd. Blackwell: Oxford; Yus, 2003, Humour and the search for relevance. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(9):1295–1331; 2016, Humour and Relevance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins). Here, a corpus of 45 multimodal cartoons on the West is examined. A detailed discussion of examples aims to testify to the widespread and multifarious applicability of the incongruity-relevance-blending approach to the analysis of humorous cartoons. Additionally, an attempt is made to explain the difference between humorous and non-humorous blends.

Multimodal Humour: Integrating Blending Model, Relevance Theory, and Incongruity Theory

Holism has had a pretty bad press in anthropology for some time now. To be sure, every now and then, there are isolated attempts at reintroducing the concept, most recently in an edited volume on Holistic Anthropology, which aims at integrating the “human sciences” into a “new holism of evolving life forms” (Parkin and Ulijaszek 2007). Yet, such attempts tend to be curiously apologetic – certainly, one does not detect much enthusiasm about the concept of holism in Parkin and Ulijaszek’s book, where it is reduced to a purely heuristic tool with no theoretical purchase. As they put it, as long it is merely taken to be “no more than an odd-job word, [holism] can enjoy a short moment of interrogation and revelation before it is returned to the banality of meaning too many things” (2007: xiii). But perhaps it is possible to convey a more upbeat message about the future of holism as an analytical concept. Based on fieldwork among two indigenous peoples in northern Asia, this chapter introduces the concept of proportional holism, understood as the ongoing apportioning of different assemblages of humans and nonhumans into the right shape. Rather than being a heuristic tool anthropologists use to make sense of their data, holism emerges as a particular social practice that can be identified in different settings around the world, and that can be made the object of ethnographic description, analysis, and comparison like all other practices. To study holism anthropologically is to explore the culturally specific work actors do for their cosmos to retain its proportions. Studying holism as an empirical phenomenon requires sensitivity to the different conceptualizations of wholes held by different people, as well as to the sometimes surprising practices by which such wholes are perceived to hold together. As we show in what follows, joking is one such holistic practice in the context of North Asian indigenous societies. More precisely, we argue, joking relationships with the spirits of dead ancestors and wild animals serve to actualize these entities in ritual and everyday situations, while at the same time providing them with an irreducible virtual dimension. In that sense, the work of joking as a holistic practice is to balance between otherwise singular wholes. Acts of 15

Taking laughter seriously

Citations

The trickster shift : a new paradigm in contemporary Canadian Native art

Make it just as normal as possible with humor

Mischief Humor in Smart and Playable Cities

Multimodal Humour: Integrating Blending Model, Relevance Theory, and Incongruity Theory

Proportional Holism Joking the Cosmos Into the Right Shape in North Asia

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