of a Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Studies Office of The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

background

Taking laughter seriously

Attacking ethos: The rhetorical use of uncertainty in the 2004 election

The article discusses the television series The Simpsons in the context of disability studies. Referring to David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's theory of narrative prosthesis, the argument is that their notion of disability as a metaphorical device falls short of the specific function of disability in satire as both a source of humor and social commentary. As the reading of The Simpsons suggests, the show uses images of the grotesque as a form of graphic humor; furthermore, these images provide potentials of distanciation and critical thinking concerning the objectification of disability in the dominant discourse and the visualization of it in the media.

"People Who Look Like Things": Representations of Disability in The Simpsons

Today’s infotainment clutter puts pressure on advertisers to come up with more surprising and more memorable ads. This need for novelty, creativity, and astonishment does set the expectation bar high, steering ads towards various means of eliciting surprise, including humour, shock, and taboo. In this paper, the author will try to investigate a set of multimodal advertising messages which use (debatable) humour and surprise, with a view to finding trans-cultural similarities and differences in terms of ad appreciation. The primary objective of this paper is to explore attitudinal responses of Taiwanese informants to controversial humorous advertisements in English; to this end, an online survey was conducted to ask them about their interpretations of and feelings towards a selection of ads. Its results will be compared with those obtained from Polish respondents, described in the author’s previous study (Stwora 2020).

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Funny or distasteful? A cross-cultural perspective on surprise and humour in multimodal advertising

This paper argues in favour of a fruitful assembling of traditional dualities observed in humour (disparagement vs. incongruity, positive vs. critical aspects). After reviewing misogelastic (i.e. denigrating) and carnivalesque (i.e. enthusiastic) positions, we attempt to classify and understand both the historical alternatives and their contemporary counterparts, particularly dealing with the social vs. the cognitive divide. Here it is championed that social and cognitive dimensions must be approached in an entangled way, as part of a social semiotics. In our view, reversal theory approaches have captured the essential complication in humour, the playful mode present in interaction, plus the asymmetry implied in interpretation. Then, both the social sides of sanction and solidarity in humorous practices and the incongruous and derisive aspects of cognitive humorous triggers, show interesting correspondences and what we here have called grid effects, i.e. the combination of ridicule and incongruity both with humorous and less humorous counterparts. Moreover, the basic duality of the social (with its disciplinary or rebellious aspects) and the cognitive (having an abrupt imbalance at its core) presumably responds to the origin of social rules, through embarrassment and shame, on the one hand, as well as to the original conditions of the human mind, working on extended connectivity and figuration, on the other hand, as two complementary sides of social semiotics.

Dualities in Humor: Incongruity Meets Ridicule

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Taking laughter seriously

Citations

Attacking ethos: The rhetorical use of uncertainty in the 2004 election

"People Who Look Like Things": Representations of Disability in The Simpsons

Funny or distasteful? A cross-cultural perspective on surprise and humour in multimodal advertising

Dualities in Humor: Incongruity Meets Ridicule

Breaking the Crass Ceiling? Exploring Narratives, Performances, and Audience Reception of Women's Stand-Up Comedy

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