humor

[Alexandre Enkerli]

Fascinating topic!

Has anyone here encountered reluctance on the part of colleagues to
discuss humour and joking?

For those who might be interested, jokes and humour are important
issues for folkloristics in general and the discipline has an
extensive literature on humour in conversation and narratives. For
instance, jokes are often analysed as a specific verbal genre,
embedded in personal experience narratives (anecdotes), and framed as
performance. (Cf. Bauman et al.'s theory of performance.)
Indiana University's Moira Smith has published interesting things on
"latrinalia" and other forms of humour.

Two years ago, at an African Studies conference, I tried framing a
presentation on "joking relationships" among Malian hunters as a
discussion of the power of jokes as a verbal genre. It didn't really
work as planned, mostly through my own fault. It also seems that
because "cathartic alliances" are a serious matter, people were
unwilling to discuss the actual jokes which are at the surface level
of interactions between "joking relatives."

In Quebec, humour is often perceived as a defining characteristic of
interpersonal relationships. Not that we necessarily use humour more
frequently than others do, but humour is the default/unmarked mode of
much interpersonal interaction, including rather formal dialogue. In
Québécois contexts, the concept of «baver» (from the French verb for
"to drool") refers to intense teasing and is quite prominent in daily
interactions, even among strangers.

As for the Göteborg conference, any chance those papers on humour will
be available online?

Cheers!

-- 
Alexandre, in Montreal
http://enkerli.wordpress.com/


On 11/13/06, Susan Ervin-Tripp <ervintripp at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> There will be at least three panels on humor at the International Pragmatics
> Conference in Goteborg, Sweden next July.
>
> "Jokes" in the conventional sense of a retold genre are rare in the data of
> American conversational analysts. Usually joking, the exchange of
> laughter during
> conversation about intentionally humorous stories and comments, involves both
> the teller and the hearer in laughter. It is possible that in long
> retolds with a punchline, or
> even skilled telling of a switch-ending story, people deliberately
> with-hold cues of humor.
>
> However, what we usually see is that the teasing and humorous banter
> in conversations
> of friends precisely doesn't restrain laughter, in fact the mood of
> humor is crucial in
> permitting the damaging revelations about the self or the other that
> are the stuff of
> such intimate humor. We will have lots of examples in our session on
> self-revealing humor.
>
> However, it is certainly conceivable that some genres of skilled
> retold jokes require
> not laughing, in some cultural milieux. We hope by talking about
> these issues at an
> international conference that we can stoke some contrastiing evidence.
>
> Susan Ervin-Tripp
>
> >A colleague asked me about linguistic anthropological work on joking
> >in cross-cultural perspective.  Freud writes we have the urge to
> >tell a joke as soon as we hear it, and we keep a straight face until
> >the recipient gets it.  Any proof of this in other cases than Vienna
> >or the US, or refutation of this, or just some other takes?
> >
> >Someone on this list probably has a full syllabus on jokes (not just
> >joking as a key but jokes themselves of whatever form).
> >
> >Apologies for the query so close to AAA.
> >
> >Thanks,
> >Katherine Hoffman
> >
>