37.2411, Confs: Panel at IPC20: The Pragmatics of Humour in Pop(ular) Culture (Finland)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2411. Mon Jul 20 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2411, Confs: Panel at IPC20: The Pragmatics of Humour in Pop(ular) Culture (Finland)

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Date: 18-Jul-2026
From: Christian Hoffmann [christian.hoffmann at uni-a.de]
Subject: Panel at IPC20: The Pragmatics of Humour in Pop(ular) Culture


Panel at IPC20: The Pragmatics of Humour in Pop(ular) Culture
Short Title: IPC20
Theme: The Pragmatics of Humour in Pop(ular) Culture

Date: 27-Jun-2027 - 02-Jul-2027
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact: Christian Hoffmann
Contact Email: christian.hoffmann at uni-a.de
Meeting URL: https://pragmatics.international/page/IPC20Helsinki

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics

Submission Deadline: 15-Oct-2026

We invite colleagues interested in participating in the panel “The
Pragmatics of Humour in Pop(ular) Culture" to send an expression of
interest, together with a provisional title and an abstract (max. 500
words), to Michelle Weckermann (michelle.weckermann at uni-a.de) and
Christian Hoffmann (christian.hoffmann at uni-a.de) by 30 September 2026.
Participants will then be asked to submit their abstract through the
official IPrA 2027 submission platform by 15 October 2026.
The Pragmatics of Humour in Pop(ular) Culture
Organizers: Michelle Weckermann & Christian Hoffmann (University of
Augsburg, Germany)
Panel Description:
This panel combines two pragmatic research fields that have
experienced recent growth and have thus received ample attention in
research: humour and pop(ular) culture.
Humour is a field with numerous facets and a well-established
cornerstone in pragmatic research. Scholars have gone down different
avenues, investigating (among others) its different sub-types (see,
for instance, Kotthoff, 2007, Dynel, 2008 and Haugh, 2017 for teasing
and/or banter; Attardo et al., 1994 and Giora, 1991, 2003 for jokes;
Norrick, 1984 and Dynel, 2010 for puns and witticisms) and its
interface with irony and sarcasm (Kreuz & Roberts, 1993; Gibbs, 2000;
Dynel, 2014; Gibbs et al., 2014; Wilson, 2017), aggression (Zillmann &
Stocking, 1976; Orthaber, 2018; Dynel, 2021), and (im-)politeness
(Culpeper, 1996; Kotthoff, 1996; Haugh & Bousfield, 2012).
The second field concerns pragmatic research on/in pop(ular) culture,
which includes forms of communication designed for mass audiences with
a “recreational/entertainment function” (Schubert & Werner, 2022, 1).
Pop cultural artefacts can come in manifold shapes and forms, ranging
from podcasts, blogs and reddit posts, advertisements, Internet memes,
pop music lyrics, TV and movie dialogues, video games, comic books or
graphic novels (cf. Trotta, 2018; Werner, 2018; Schubert & Werner,
2022). Most notably, linguistic research on pop culture has often been
pragmatic in kind (see, for instance, Bubel, 2011; Schubert, 2020,
2023; Messerli & Locher, 2021; Tünetti Tübben & Landert, 2022).
Some studies have already tried to connect both research interests
(i.e. humour and pop culture), examining, for instance, irony in
fiction (Kapogianni, 2014) or humour in improv theatre (Landert,
2021). It seems research of this kind has arguably moved in tandem
with compatible work on the pragmatics of fiction, which has similarly
gained prominence throughout the last decade (Locher & Jucker, 2017;
Kitzelbach, 2023; Locher et al., 2023). Despite the dual success story
of the pragmatics of humour and the pragmatics of pop culture,
respectively, we argue that - to this day - the intersection of the
two has received surprisingly little attention.
To close this research gap, this panel welcomes all contributions
focusing on humour (in all of its variants, including aspects thereof)
in pop culture. This can be related to a particular pop cultural
genre, e.g. rap song lyrics, film comedies, memes, sitcoms, or improv
theatre (e.g. Dynel, 2011; Landert, 2021) or to the ways in which a
specific type of humour is realised within or across different pop
cultural phenomena, e.g. sarcasm, banter, teasing, putdown humour, or
self-deprecating humour. Submissions may contribute inter alia to the
pragmatics of characterisation or include humour as a pragmatic (e.g.
persuasive) device (e.g. strategic uses of self-deprecating humour or
humour in flirting; see, for instance, Speer, 2019 and Scharrer &
Weckermann, 2026, respectively). Another avenue fitting this
intersection is the investigation of multimodal forms of humour, where
humour is created through the interplay of visual and verbal means
(Gironzetti, 2022; Priego Valverde, 2024; Filani, 2025). Finally,
contributions might wish to investigate how humour is typically
responded to, i.e. through laughter (see, for instance, Glenn, 2003).
References:
Attardo, S., Attardo, D., Bates, P. & Petray, M. (1994). The linear
organisation of jokes: Analysis of two thousand texts. Humour, 7(1),
pp. 27-54.
Bubel, C. (2011). Television audiences as interlocutors: The
pragmatics of audience participation. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(15),
pp. 3820-3834.
Culpeper, J. (1996). Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of
Pragmatics, 25, pp. 349-367.
Dynel, M. (2008). No aggression, only teasing: The pragmatics of
teasing and banter. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 4(2), pp. 241-261.
Dynel, M. (2010). How do puns bear relevance? Relevance Studies in
Poland, 3, pp. 105-124.
Dynel, M. (2011). “I’ll be there for you!” On participation-based
sitcom humour. In: Dynel, M. ed. The Pragmatics of Humour across
Discourse Domains. John Benjamins, pp. 311-334.
Dynel, M. (2014). Linguistic approaches to (non)humorous irony. Humor,
27(4), pp. 537-550.
Dynel, M. (2021). Humour and (mock) aggression: Distinguishing
cyberbullying from roasting. Language & Communication, 81, pp. 17-36.
Filani, I. (2025). Intentions in Comedy Discourse: A
Linguistic-Pragmatics Approach to Stand-up Comedy. De Gruyter.
Gibbs, R. W. (2000). Irony in talk among friends. Metaphor and Symbol,
15(1-2), pp. 5-27.
Gibbs, R. W., Bryant, G. A. & Colston, H. L. (2014). Where is the
humor in verbal irony? Humor, 27(4), pp. 575-595.
Giora, R. (1991). On the cognitive aspects of the joke. Journal of
Pragmatics, 16(5), pp. 465-485.
Giora, R. (2003). On Our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative
Language. Oxford University Press.
Gironzetti, E. (2022). The Multimodal Performance of Conversational
Humor. John Benjamins.
Glenn, P. (2003). Laughter in Interaction. Cambridge University Press.
Haugh, M. (2017). Teasing. In: Attardo, S. ed. The Routledge Handbook
of Language and Humour. Routledge, pp. 204-218.
Haugh, M. & Bousfield, D. (2012). Mock impoliteness, banter, and
jocularity in relational work. Journal of Pragmatics, 44(9), pp.
1099-1114.
Kapogianni, E. (2014). Differences in use and function of verbal irony
between real and fictional discourse: (mis)interpretation and irony
blindness. Humor, 27(4), pp. 597-618.
Kitzelbach, M. (2023). Developments in the pragmatics of fiction.
Language and Literature, 32(1), pp. 45-67.
Kotthoff, H. (1996). Impoliteness and conversational joking: On
relational politics. Folia Linguistica, 3(4), pp. 299-325.
Kotthoff, H. (2007). Oral genres of humour: On the dialectic of genre
knowledge and creative authoring. Pragmatics, 17(2), pp. 263-296.
Kreuz, R. J. & Roberts, R. M. (1993). On satire and parody: The
importance of being ironic. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 8(2), pp.
97-109.
Landert, D. (2021). The spontaneous co-creation of comedy: Humour in
improvised theatrical fiction. Journal of Pragmatics, 173, pp. 68-87.
Locher, M. A. & Jucker, A. H. eds. (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction. De
Gruyter.
Locher, M. A., Messerli, T. C. & Jucker, A. H. (2023). Fiction and
pragmatic reality. Journal of Pragmatics, 205, pp. 112-125.
Messerli, T. C. & Locher, M. A. (2021). Humour and identity
construction in telecinematic relational work. Multilingua, 40(4), pp.
487-512.
Norrick, N. R. (1984). Stock conversational witticisms. Journal of
Pragmatics, 8, pp. 195-209.
Orthaber, S. (2018). Aggressive humour as a means of voicing customer
dissatisfaction and creating in-group identity. Journal of Pragmatics,
152, pp. 160-171.
Priego-Valverde, B. ed. (2024). Interactional Humor: Multimodal Design
and Negotiation. De Gruyter.
Scharrer, L. & Weckermann, M. (2026). “You wanna flirt?” - “Let’s
flirt”: A corpus-based analysis of flirting. Journal of Pragmatics,
251, pp. 1-13.
Schubert, C. (2020). The visual discourse of shots and cuts: Applying
the Cooperative Principle to horror film cinematography. In: Hoffmann,
C. & Kirner-Ludwig, M. eds. Telecinematic Stylistics. Bloomsbury, pp.
183–204.
Schubert, C. (2023). Tarantino's eloquent villains: A pragma-stylistic
approach to suspense. English Text Construction, 16(2), pp. 119–143.
Schubert, C. & Werner, V. eds. (2022). Stylistic Approaches to Pop
Culture. Routledge.
Speer, S. A. (2019). Reconsidering self-deprecation as a communication
practice. British Journal of Social Psychology, 58, pp. 806-828.
Tonetti Tübben, I. & Landert, D. (2022). Uh and um as pragmatic
markers in dialogues: A contrastive perspective on the functions of
planners in fiction and conversation. Contrastive Pragmatics, 4(2),
pp. 1-32.
Trotta, J. (2018). The language of podcasts and digital popular
culture. In: Werner, V. ed. The Language of Pop Culture. Routledge,
pp. 89-112.
Werner, V. ed. (2018). The Language of Pop Culture. Routledge.
Wilson, D. (2017). Irony, Hyperbole, Jokes and Banter. In Blochowiak,
J., Durriemann, G. S. & Laenzlinger, C. eds. Formal Models in the
Study of Language: Applications in Interdisciplinary Contexts.
Springer, pp. 201-220.
Zillmann, D. & Stocking, S. H. (1976). Putdown humour. Journal of
Communication.



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