This chapter traces how popular and critical models of humour align with liberal discourses of freedom and reasonableness through an analysis of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” held in Washington D.C. in October 2010. Tracing this understanding of humour through a range of recent humour theory, this chapter argues that the model of humour as a form of dissent is both ascendant and reductive, and over-determines the political work of humour without sufficient attention to the actual aesthetic manifestation of humour and the politics thereof.

Taking laughter seriously

Dissent in Jest: Humour in the Liberal Moment

There is more to humor than jokes. Humor can be created in jokes, in cartoons and animations, in products, commercials, and movies, or in stand-up comedy. However, also during our daily activities, we often smile and laugh because we experience interactions and events as humorous. We can experience such events; we can also initiate such events. Smart environments offer us tools that allow the customization of urban environments to potential and personalized playful and humorous experiences. Sensors and actuators in smart urban environments can be addressed and configured in such a way that they initiate and facilitate playful and humorous events in the real world, but it is also possible that without physical changes in the real world, our imaginations are triggered to give humorous interpretations of events in the real world by observing or imagining how they could be different. In this paper, we look at humor that can be experienced by imagination, by suggestions, by changes in the environment, and by changing the environment using digital augmented and diminished reality tools. The views expressed here can help to add humor to urban play, urban games, and daily activities in public spaces using augmented reality technology.

Playful and Humorous Interactions in Urban Environments Made Possible with Augmented Reality Technology

This article analyzes Anancy's cogni- tive and sociohistorical identity beyond the moral- istic approach of the western philosophy of being. Instead, Anancy stories are studied as a decolo- nized expression of an afrodescendant Caribbeanness that struggles to survive in an impe- rial context. There is placed special emphasis on Anancy and his relationship with other animals of the forest present in the stories collected by a group of Costa Rican researchers. Walter Mignolo's concept of colonial and imperial differ- ences, the notion of the trickster, Mikael Bakhtin's carnival, the psychological theories of the id and humor are used to support the analysis. Finally, it is concluded that Anancy stories are the result of resistance but more importantly, they reveal a nontraditional subversion that guarantees hope in a hopeless system. In this sense, Anancy does not accept fatalism as a cognitive structure of his iden- tity; even though, he lives in a fatalistic society.

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Anancy stories beyond the moralistic approach of the western philosophy of being

Humor plays a central role in the poetics displayed by the poets of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States. The irreverent and impertinent humor (called by the Spanglish neologism gufeo) of poets like Victor Hernandez Cruz, Pedro Pietri or Tato Laviera exhibits the overwhelming power of this Afro-Antillean humor that goes through the Nuyorican poetic tradition, while it becomes one of the most effective tools in the counter-discursive cultural policy developed by this agonistic tradition.

/pdf/esos-negros-paraos-humor-gufeo-y-subversion-en-la-poesia-21zbq05cxs.pdf

Esos negros paraos: humor, gufeo y subversión en la poesía niuyorriqueña

Humor-related literary genres occupy a significant place in literary research and history to the extent that western scholarship in particular, often treats humor and related literary genres almost as an autonomous discipline. Although certain studies that address the emergence of humor focus on the three main theories, namely “superiority”, “incongruity” and “relief” they may be divergent in creating interdependent sub-theories. Therefore, these theoretical approaches as a whole require classification pertaining to the history of humor, to the modes of creating it, and to the disciplines that interpret it. Based on this, the subject of the present essay is the classification of the humor theories in terms of historical periods, style of humor conception, and academic  disciplines. Moreover, introduction of these classifications to Turkish scholars is the aim of the present study. Current studies on humor have been mostly put forward within certain theoretical frameworks. The most important reason for the emergence of this theoretical tendency in the current studies on humor is that a large amount of knowledge has been obtained in the theoretical sense over time since the ancient age when the origins of studies on humor, and laughter emerged. In the early period, philosophers focused more on laughter, so the first theoretical approaches to laughter emerged during this period. However, many thinkers and scholars of the modern period have introduced different theoretical approaches through different perspectives on laughter and humor. Moreover, the current laughter and humor studies based on this theoretical background have become an interdisciplinary field of study with the participation of scholars from various disciplines such as literature, education, folklore, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, history, communication, medicine, economics, and fine arts. As a result of the laughter and humor studies carried out in the course of its historical development process, laughter and humor theorists have established many humor theories. Aforementioned humor theories have been classified by scholars based on some of their unique characteristics. This study reclassifies the humor theories in terms of their similarities and differences under the titles “classifications according to historical periods”, “classifications of theory families and classifications due to the style of humor conception”, and “classifications according to academic disciplines” and evaluate these theories and classifications as a whole.

/pdf/an-evaluation-on-classification-of-humor-theories-7jp7c1s1vb.pdf

Taking laughter seriously

Citations

Dissent in Jest: Humour in the Liberal Moment

Playful and Humorous Interactions in Urban Environments Made Possible with Augmented Reality Technology

Anancy stories beyond the moralistic approach of the western philosophy of being

Esos negros paraos: humor, gufeo y subversión en la poesía niuyorriqueña

An Evaluation on Classification of Humor Theories

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