Joking

Book review Bell, Nancy (ed.). (2017). Multiple Perspectives on Language Play. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 406 pp. Multiple Perspectives on Language Play, edited by Nancy Bell and published by De Gruyter Mouton, is a collection of fourteen insightful papers focusing on linguistic creativity, humour, and jocular language. The twofold aim of the volume is i) to offer a multi-and interdisciplinary approach to playful language, and ii) to prompt researchers to adopt a crossdisciplinary perspective in the study of linguistic creativity. In the introductory chapter, Nancy Bell provides a brief overview of research in jocular language, presents the general targets of the volume and discusses her conceptualization of the terms creativity, language play, and humour. The first paper of the volume "Language play in conversation", written by Neal R. Norrick, places emphasis on two aspects of playful language in daily interaction: language games with language as their object and language games with language as their medium. In particular, he examines how language structures, formulaic speech, overstatements, terms of direct address, puns, and question and answer sequences may be related to both categories of language games. He concludes that formulaic play in conversational contexts may encourage interlocutors to engage in extended practices of language creativity. Thorsten Huth's paper "Playing with turns, playing with action? A social-interactionist perspective" explores how second language learners play with the orderliness of turn taking, i.e. with turns, paired action, and preference organisation. Relying on a social-interactionist and conversation-analytic framework, he investigates compliment sequences in dyadic telephone interactions between American learners of German. He demonstrates that L2 learners exhibit their metapragmatic awareness of such interactional mechanisms in a joint, conscious, and systematic way. Tony Veale, in his study "The shape to tweets to come: Automating language play in social networks", combines cognitive and computational linguistics to display how humans assess metaphorical tweets generated by two computational systems, that is, @Metaphor Minute, which does not consider semantics, and @Metaphor Magnet, which considers pragmatics. He shows that our knowledge of playful formulaic phrases enhances our comprehension of intense linguistic innovation. Elizabeth Holt's paper "'This system's so slow': Negotiating sequences of laughter and laughables in call-centre interaction" focuses on the boundaries between serious and nonserious talk in sequences with ambivalent status. Based on conversation analytic methods, she examines turn-taking after long silences in calls to a gas-supply company, and particularly: i) turns in which employees comment on the slowliness of the system; ii) the customer's laugh response; and iii) turns with further laughables by employees. She illustrates that although fuzzy turns can be responded with laughter, and thus create a less formal key, they perform serious tasks. In their paper "Laughter as a 'serious business': Clients' laughter in prenatal screening for Down's syndrome", Olga Zayts & Stephanie Schnurr delve into the use of laughter in

This article analyses the role of Kaingang ritual life in understanding the social, political, and cosmological dimensions of their relations to alterity, which requires contextualizing sources and historical processes. I reflect on aspects of the funeral rites in historical sources, reported along with war “feasts”, both of which concern intervillage life. These rituals hence pay a fundamental role in understanding the performances carried out in the Kujá Meeting (Morro do Osso Village) and in the Kiki Ritual (Xapecó Indigenous Land). The ethnography focuses on the rules of etiquette and the ritual prestations that guide relations between the exogamous moieties. Inspired by Americanist debates, one of its aims is to highlight the place of laughter as an alternative to relations of avoidance, arguing that humour in these societies has a range of mediatory roles, particularly in what concerns the incorporation of external powers and foreigners into the interior of the collectivity.

This booklet looks on the Dondoli old earthen mosque architecture found in the Wa Municipality in the former Waala kingdom, provides a comprehensive description of the mosque as the products of trade, Islamic and Mande influence in the kingdom. It provides a tangible evidence of extant Islamic material culture in a form of earthen mosque architecture in the region. The trans-Saharan and long-distance trade had many effects on the indigenous population of northern Ghana, including its architecture. Apart from the economic activities the Muslim traders and clerics brought into the region, it resulted in the conversion of a portion of the local population to Islam and the subsequent introduction of a new type of building – mosques – initially along the trade routes and then more widely dispersed as Islamic adherence expanded. The oldest evidence of mosques and Islam in Ghana, however, appear in the communities that fell along the northwestern and northeastern trade routes of northern Ghana.
It further affords the reader an analytical study of the mosque, including the various materials employed during their construction and their current state of conservation. The mosque is constructed of sun-dried earth bricks that are not as durable as, for example, the stones used as construction materials in East Africa. Because it is built with earth, it requires constant maintenance to prolong its lifespan. Often, the conservation practices and materials used by the community are incompatible with the original building fabric.
There are ten extant of these earthen mosques across northern Ghana (figure 1), submitted by the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB) to the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Education’s (UNESCO) as “Trade pilgrimage routes of northwestern Ghana”, and they currently on the UNESCO Tentative List since January 2000, waiting to be inscribed on the World Heritage List (WHL) like the Forts and Castles of Ghana (FCG) and the Ashanti Traditional Buildings (ATBs).

Is it possible to joke about everything? Are there topics that we should not joke about? Is it possible to say which jokes are good and which are wrong, or are jokes simply beyond good and evil? This issue seems to be more pressing in today's multicultural world. In this study I reason, contrary to amoralism, that there are some jokes that can be morally judged. In order to present my argument, I use the type and token distinction as well as the results of debate between Bartel and Cremaldi (2018) and Brandon Cooke's (2014) arguments in the favour of amoralism in art in general. I argue that, even though amoralism is right in the case of some joke types as well as in the case of some joke tokens, not all jokes are fictive utterances. Therefore, the study concludes that it is reasonable to morally assess certain joke utterances.

Pendidikan Jasmani, Olahraga, dan Kesehatan (PJOK) memegang peran penting dalam pengembangan siswa secara menyeluruh, termasuk pertumbuhan fisik mereka. Pendidikan ini bukan hanya tentang aktivitas fisik semata, tetapi juga memperkenalkan nilai-nilai sosial, kerjasama tim, dan kesehatan keseluruhan(Yoda, I. K, 2020).Oleh karena itu, penelitian ini berfokus pada aspek keikutsertaan siswa dalam tim futsal di lingkungan Madrasah Ibtidaiyyah Darul Ulum Tambak Rejo Waru Sidoarjo.
Madrasah Ibtidaiyyah, sebagai institusi pendidikan Islam tingkat dasar, memiliki tanggung jawab untuk mengembangkan siswa secara holistik, termasuk aspek jasmani dan olahraga. Dalam konteks ini, keikutsertaan siswa dalam kegiatan futsal dianggap relevan untuk dipelajari, karena dapat memberikan pengalaman yang berharga dalam pengembangan keterampilan fisik dan

In this paper, I present a model to explain the mechanism of humour, combining the concept of bisociation as proposed by Koestler (1964) with the cognitive and the communicative principles of relevance as proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995). I suggest that the development of humour occurs by recourse to bisociation, which, in turn, is reflected by the junction of an enthymeme and a paradox. In order to interpret the result of the fusion of these logical procedures in some jokes, I develop an analysis based on the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure. I finally propose the concept of paradoxical implicated conclusion, a phenomenon that only occurs in humorous genre.

Throughout the centuries, jokes have accompanied people’s lives, being part of the fabric of civilisation. Constituting themselves as social practices (with a strong social impact on people’s everyday life) jokes were (and still are) an... more "Throughout the centuries, jokes have accompanied people’s lives, being part of the fabric of civilisation. Constituting themselves as social practices (with a strong social impact on people’s everyday life) jokes were (and still are) an expression of people’s joy of life in happy times and a means of escaping the harsh reality in difficult times. Our paper has in view the latter context that triggers humour, analysing a set of jokes that used to be (more or less secretly) told during the communist regime in Romania. They are culture-specific jokes, highlighting the absurdities of Romania’s political situation under the communist government, laughing at Ceauşescu (the Romanian communist dictator), his family and staff and, at the same ti...

One of the sources of relief, entertainment and socialisation during the Covid pandemic lockdown was the massive exchange of memes on social media and messaging applications. The objective of this chapter is to analyse and categorise 150 Peninsular Spanish memes collected from different interactive channels online (mainly social media and the messaging app WhatsApp) during the strict 2020 Covid lockdown in Spain (March-May 2020). The sample was then analysed under "incongruity-resolution theory" and categorized with the following research questions in mind: (a) what inferential strategies the internet user is expected to perform to interpret these Covid memes correctly; (b) what role text and image play in the eventual derivation of humorous effects from these memes; and (c) what kind of contextual information the internet user is expected to have access to for successful comprehension. Answering these research questions will eventually allow for a differentiation between Covid memes and non-Covid ones, as already intuitively felt by most users.

In his introduction to the Arden edition of Love's Labour's Lost, Henry Woudhuysen suggests that the main difficulty facing directors and actors of the play is "judging the play's tone". 1 He goes on to describe the difficulty as a matter of assessing the degree of seriousness to be attached to a given scene or action. Adducing the opening oath-taking scene as an example, he asks, "how seriously is an audience to take the play's opening vows?" 2

Sociolinguists have always tried to assess the relationship between language and society. In their works, however, some aspects of this relationship seem to be left to chance either because they are taboo or out of reach or are simply not interesting enough to them. What is undeniable is that one's integration in a foreign community depends largely on one's capacity to internalize the overall set of values. They also have to be careful not to overstep the bans. On the linguistic aspect, one of the most apparent of these bans is insulting; this is socially and morally shocking utterances meant to belittle the individual. This article focuses on the Senegalese society and seeks to highlight the sociolinguistic complexity of insulting. This implies an explicit definition of the concept, a study of its verbal and non verbal aspects, the semantic fields of insulting and its perception within society. Finally, we will study the factors that soften insults.

This study examines collective action by men and women in operational military units deployed on Israel's borders. Gender integration is generally perceived by soldiers and commanders in these units as a trivial matter rather than an issue for discussion or a disadvantage. The integration results from organizational qualities, which include: military leadership with accumulated experience in gender integration; division of labor between men and women that gradually develops during protracted training; screening processes within the units; and professional development of commanders. Our findings negate a large corpus of sociological literature on gender integration in military organizations. We discuss the microsocial processes that enable or deter mixed-gender integration in operational units. Our findings are presented as an alternative to arguments on the inevitable marginality of women in the military and that equality is neither a prerequisite of a cohesive mixed-gender unit nor a barrier for the inclusion of women into combat units.

Sociolinguists have always tried to assess the relationship between language and society. In their works, however, some aspects of this relationship seem to be left to chance either because they are taboo or out of reach or are simply not interesting enough to them. What is undeniable is that one's integration in a foreign community depends largely on one's capacity to internalize the overall set of values. They also have to be careful not to overstep the bans. On the linguistic aspect, one of the most apparent of these bans is insulting; this is socially and morally shocking utterances meant to belittle the individual. This article focuses on the Senegalese society and seeks to highlight the sociolinguistic complexity of insulting. This implies an explicit definition of the concept, a study of its verbal and non verbal aspects, the semantic fields of insulting and its perception within society. Finally, we will study the factors that soften insults.

This study examines collective action by men and women in operational military units deployed on Israel's borders. Gender integration is generally perceived by soldiers and commanders in these units as a trivial matter rather than an issue for discussion or a disadvantage. The integration results from organizational qualities, which include: military leadership with accumulated experience in gender integration; division of labor between men and women that gradually develops during protracted training; screening processes within the units; and professional development of commanders. Our findings negate a large corpus of sociological literature on gender integration in military organizations. We discuss the microsocial processes that enable or deter mixed-gender integration in operational units. Our findings are presented as an alternative to arguments on the inevitable marginality of women in the military and that equality is neither a prerequisite of a cohesive mixed-gender unit nor a barrier for the inclusion of women into combat units.

Throughout the centuries, jokes have accompanied people’s lives, being part of the fabric of civilisation. Constituting themselves as social practices (with a strong social impact on people’s everyday life) jokes were (and still are) an... more "Throughout the centuries, jokes have accompanied people’s lives, being part of the fabric of civilisation. Constituting themselves as social practices (with a strong social impact on people’s everyday life) jokes were (and still are) an expression of people’s joy of life in happy times and a means of escaping the harsh reality in difficult times. Our paper has in view the latter context that triggers humour, analysing a set of jokes that used to be (more or less secretly) told during the communist regime in Romania. They are culture-specific jokes, highlighting the absurdities of Romania’s political situation under the communist government, laughing at Ceauşescu (the Romanian communist dictator), his family and staff and, at the same ti...

In this paper the discourse of a specific type of meme in Spanish, the image macro, is analysed, together with several ways in which memes generate humorous effects. Two main areas are addressed: (a) how humour arises from the processing of the text in the meme (decoding of the text plus further inferential enrichment); and (b) how humour relies on specific combinations of the text and the image in the meme. The pragmatic framework used in the analysis will be relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995), which in previous research (especially Yus 2016) has proven to be a valid foundation for the analysis of humour.

Joking relationship, also called joking kinship, is a social practice in West Africa that allows two individuals from the same ethnic group or two distinct ethnic groups to badmouth each other or exchange insults, mockery, and any sort of criticism as a means of promoting fraternity, social harmony and reinforcing peace in society. Although this practice is often perceived as strange by people outside Burkinabè communities, it is reported to be one of the most important strategies for building and maintaining peace and social harmony in the traditional West African society. In this paper, I intend to explore its history and effects in the present-day Burkinabè communities. Due to the recent outbreak of inter-community conflicts in Burkina Faso, it is important to examine this social practice which had been a catalyst for peace and social harmony. It is also important to see how this practice can help the country maintain peace and social harmony. To do so, I will try to answer the following questions:

Throughout the centuries, jokes have accompanied people's lives, being part of the fabric of civilisation. Constituting themselves as social practices (with a strong social impact on people's everyday life) jokes were (and still are) an expression of people's joy of life in happy times and a means of escaping the harsh reality in difficult times. Our paper has in view the latter context that triggers humour, analysing a set of jokes that used to be (more or less secretly) told during the communist regime in Romania. They are culture-specific jokes, highlighting the absurdities of Romania's political situation under the communist government, laughing at Ceauşescu (the Romanian communist dictator), his family and staff and, at the same time, making (bitter) fun of the disastrous Romanian people's life which was triggered by the strict communist laws and fixed ideas. Thus, for the purpose of our study, we have referred to: a) jokes that reflect the Romanian people's frustrations in everyday life; b) jokes that reflect people's attitude of disgust against their leader; c) jokes that reflect people's bitter disappointment and hopelessness; d) jokes that make fun of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu and their staff; d) jokes that make fun of the communist regime; e) jokes that underline the (radical) solutions people dreamt of for solving their problems. The jokes about communism represent a way in which the Romanians tried to overcome the difficulties of the times, remaining united as a nation, as the humour in this case played upon the dichotomy solidarity/exclusion: people laughed together (solidarity) at Ceauşescu and his regime (exclusion). In communist times, joking about the social and political situation in the country was one of the few manners in which people could distinguish/separate themselves from the grotesque image and absurd ideas of their leader. The paper tries to depict the manner in which these jokes (which appeared as a result of the people's need to express their true feelings about the communists and their leaders) managed to ensure the Romanians' spiritual survival in a rigid regime which neither appreciated nor encouraged humour. Through the pragma-linguistic and stylistic analysis offered we intend to render the real meaning of these jokes in their cultural and social context, as well as their influence in interpersonal relationships.

Enacted in 2008, 60 years after Israel Defense Forces was established, the Israeli Reserves Law is a striking expression of the decline of military autonomy in a democratic country. While not aimed at reducing the military's discretion in regard to the training, deployment, and compensation for reservists, the formal enactment of the Law in effect did so. The legislative process was preceded by a crisis between reservists and the military and was led by several reservists' organizations who tried to improve the standing and resources allocated to the reserve forces. The article analyzes the impact of these organizations and the coalitions they created with politicians serving in the national parliament, the Knesset. By choosing the legislative option to improve the conditions of service for reservists, they de facto reduced military autonomy since the new Law mandated supervision and monitoring (by civilian institutions) of the service of reservists and extended into the core area of military action, the operational use of force. Thus, the actions of reservists' organizations turned a bilateral tie between the military and its (reserve) soldiers into a trilateral one, comprising the military, reserve soldiers, and state institutions.

This study examines collective action by men and women in operational military units deployed on Israel's borders. Gender integration is generally perceived by soldiers and commanders in these units as a trivial matter rather than an issue for discussion or a disadvantage. The integration results from organizational qualities, which include: military leadership with accumulated experience in gender integration; division of labor between men and women that gradually develops during protracted training; screening processes within the units; and professional development of commanders. Our findings negate a large corpus of sociological literature on gender integration in military organizations. We discuss the microsocial processes that enable or deter mixed-gender integration in operational units. Our findings are presented as an alternative to arguments on the inevitable marginality of women in the military and that equality is neither a prerequisite of a cohesive mixed-gender unit nor a barrier for the inclusion of women into combat units.

This article explores prejudicial and racist discourse in reader comments in internet news discussion forums. Based on data from an online debate among Czech commenters on the mainstream iDnes.cz news site, it seeks to contribute to the existing critical linguistic approaches to discursive strategies of othering. Analysing user comments referencing a news article on a sensitive social topic, namely the complicated reception of Central European Roma immigrants in the UK, the paper focuses on three salient themes found in the data: (a) the re-education of the ethnic minority; (b) the users’ perception of the media as politically correct and siding with the outgroup; and (c) the outgroup’s negative stereotype associating it with criminality. The paper argues that the discourse on these topics simultaneously relies on and reinforces the negative stereotype of the ethnic group, while revealing a complicated relationship between three stakeholders: the ingroup, represented by the commenters; the outgroup, made up of members of the ethnic groups; and the media, as representatives of the authorities and the elites. The findings reveal how quasi-humorous comments that involve such stereotypical representations contribute to the normalization of everyday racism against ethnic outgroups.

Uncountable forms of joking and laughter resound on the African continent oscillating between sense and the nonsensical, farce and tragedy, popularity and avoidance, joy and suffering. Tricksters or ritual clowns, joking relationships, satirical press, political caricatures, satire in ritual ceremonies or in entertainment. Their authors are of a wide variety as are the forms they chose: theatre plays or talk-shows, comic strips or cartoons, films and videos, publicities, contemporary artist's performances. What transpires out of these forms of communication?
Always ambivalent, laughter and the habit of poking fun can be understood in many different ways.
The tradition of joking relationships between different social categories or family groups has served as case study for the structural analysis of hierarchical orders; the moral value of these obscene insults has been questioned by foreign observers while their role in peace keeping has been claimed in political discourse (Canut and Smith 2006). Joking and laughter are known to facilitate the integration of strangers but likewise have the power to exclude a third party; they can create feeling
of belonging as much as they have the power to reproduce inequalities and social differences (Reichl and Stein, 2005). Laughter in particular seems to have a universal dimension while it is nevertheless
culturally defined (Isaak 1997).
Given the general theme Afriques enchantées, Afriques en chantiers, (Enchanted Africas or Notions of “Africa” as construction site) of the 2018 “Rencontres des Études Africaines en France” the objective
of this panel is to describe and analyse the fine line between intentions and opposing effects in the way that forms are created and produce a particular sense. Laughter and joking are never unambiguous, as they emerge from the persons present and from the situation (Handelman et al 1972, Carty et al 2008). We call for papers drawing on precise case studies in order to be attentive to tonalities or the ability of the concerned to seize one sense amongst multiple possible significations.
How to provoke laughter and what does laughter provoke? (Schnurr 2008) The aim would be to resituate the form and the sense of laughter, of gestures or words and the ecology of the situations from which they emerge. Burlesque or witticism, what makes us laugh, why would we want to create ambivalent situations, which affective and interpretative dynamics are involved?
Attention will be paid to what joking and laughter divides and what it draws closer together as for example generation gaps, genders, alterity, values, in the way these particularities are expressed as well as in their
contents. Art history, anthropology, sociology, literature, psychology, philosophy, history, media studies are all welcome.

This article investigates spontaneous humour-related phenomena in TV documentary, arguing that their presence helps to overcome the scripted nature of the genre. Focusing on the diegetic level of interaction between the presenter and other individuals present in the scene, the analysis traces how the interlocutors achieve mutual in-tune-ness that is necessary for setting up the play frame. It pays attention to several humour-related phenomena, including non-humorous laughter, joint joking and physical pranks. The findings indicate that while laughter can alleviate tension associated with face-threat or personal failure, other forms of humour emerge in the diegetic frame as part of the programme producers’ design to divert from the transactional mode of factual television to a more entertaining hybrid format based on a significant experiential component. As a result, TV viewers do not simply receive information but derive pleasure from the playful spontaneity performed for their benefit by the presenter and other interlocutors.

Researches and writers like Jean-Claude Abbric (1978), Mariko Keletegui (1990), Jean-Godefroy Bidima (2003), and Adamou Barké (2006/2008), Georges Dorlian (2007) have discussed the issue of Tabbastaka or its aspects either as social representations, social structural identity, fictional identity, alliances and relatives’ identity, or jesting kinship as a social factor of integration.
Tabbastaka is the Hausa appropriate word which defines cousinage à plaisanterie or joking cousinhood. It has different spelling depending on languages and ethnical groups as mentioned by the Nigerienne Adamou Barké (2008):
Tabbastaka in Hausa; Bassetarey in Zarma-Songhaï; Dendiragu in Fulani;
Taboubza in Tamashek; Tchindi in Gourmantche; N’gui en Kanuri; Al’muzahatu
Bil’ukhuati in Arabe; values’system translated in French in terms of cousinhood
Joking or jesting kinship. It is a system of values which links in a network of bi-
Lateral relations local ethnical communities as crossed cousins… (284).
Tabbastaka by definition is the use of these bilateral relations in jokes. Joke as something said or done to amuse people and cause laugher, especially a funny story or amusing trick. The objectives in this paper is not to come back to what the above cited researchers have done but, to develop the impact of Tabbastaka on the West African communities in term of social cohesion especially, Gobirawa and Yoruba; Gobirawa and Katsinawa; Gobirawa and Daurawa; Gobirawa and Zamfarawa; Gobirawa and Kabawa; Gobirawa and Zarma/Songhaï; Fulani and Kanuri; Fulani and Arawa/Gubawa, just to limit myself to these binomial or mates. Through effective illustrations I will show how Tabbastaka influences these communities’ relations among them up to the point that they no longer fight each other for lands, pasture areas or wells and live hand in hand in harmony.
KEY WORDS: TABBASTAKA, JOKING COUSINHOOD OR JESTING KINSHIP, SOCIAL COHISION, WEST AFRICAN COMMUNITIES.

Im Folgenden geht es um Lachen als soziale Praxis. Dabei können wir vom verbreiteten Kriegshumor nicht direkt auf das Kriegslachen schließen. Lachen in einem anthropologisch auch nur etwas strikteren Sinn bezeichnet nicht etwa die Reaktion auf einen Humor-Reiz, sondern ein differenziertes Spektrum menschlicher Äußerungsformen, deren körperliche Dimension nicht weniger wichtig ist als ihre mentale, kommunikative oder soziale.

This article explores how middle-class Jewish men on reserve duty in the Israel Defense Forces form a "proper" masculinity through humor and jokes. Reserve service creates a fruitful territory for researching four issues that have not been extensively studied in the literature on masculinities: the relation between gender and age, the periodic reaffirmation of masculinity along the life course, how women are perceived as sexual objects and how informal social pressure is placed on singles to marry and begin families, and how men not only are motivated by homophobia but use images of women and homosexuals to map and interpret power relations and competition between men.

ABSTRACT

People in urban environments practices and beliefs allow the creations of supportive social relationships important for dealing with economic and other insecurities among them. This paper examines the roles of “Waal-Nabi Biyoa” a kin-based joking relationship among Nabiihi in Upper West Region of Ghana. Waal-Nabiihi are the royal of the Waale throne and are made up of the Wa-na as well as other chiefs and their subjects who have access or legitimacy to the Wa throne. They adopted the use and other negotiated practices as well as beliefs associated with “Waal-Nabi Biyoa” for practical purposes. Participant observation, ethnographic interviews, and historical research were used to examine ways that Waal-Nabiihi uses these joking relationship to promote social cohesion, outwit the authority of the state, offer opportunities for economic gain, and preserve their cultural histories and identities in a rapidly changing global and urban environment in this twenty first century.
Keywords: beliefs, relationship, biyoa, ethnographic, joking, observation

This book offers a cognitive-pragmatic, and specifically relevance-theoretic, analysis of different types of humorous discourse, together with the inferential strategies that are at work in the processing of such discourses. The book also provides a cognitive pragmatics description of how addressees obtain humorous effects. Although the inferences at work in the processing of normal, non-humorous discourses are the same as those employed in the interpretation of humour, in the latter case these strategies (and also the accessibility of contextual information) are predicted and manipulated by the speaker (or writer) for the sake of generating humorous effects. The book covers aspects of research on humour such as the incongruity-resolution pattern, jokes and stand-up comedy performances. It also offers an explanation of why ironies are sometimes labelled as humorous, and proposes a model for the translation of humorous discourses, an analysis of humour in multimodal discourses such as cartoons and advertisements, and a brief exploration of possible tendencies in relevance-theoretic research on conversational humour.

This article addresses both well-researched and relatively unexplored questions pertaining to humor and laughter. The following are some of the questions that are
considered here: What is humor? What is the role of laughter in humor? What are the ontogenetic and phylogenetic origins of laughter? How does humor work, cognitively? What is the functional significance of humor? What are the varieties of laughter and how are they perceived?What kinds of disorders of laughter
have been documented and what do they suggest about the neural circuitry underlying laughter and humor?

On the shopfloor of an Indian automobile plant, a multi-ethnic workforce exchanges potentially offensive ethnic jokes with one another while remaining largely silent on actual incidences of communal violence. This paper shows how silence and profane humor are important aspects of an inter-ethnic sociality in the workplace, which distances itself from the retaliatory logics of communal violence. Speaking in the indirect register of irony, I argue that jokes about one another’s religion and ethnicity are a means by which cultural intimates articulate anti-communal perspectives on public life. I suggest that profanity is a style of interaction that relates to an anti-communal sociality which distances itself from the politics of sanctity.

This research identifies the practice of carrilla, a socially recognizable kind of joking used among a group of second generation Mexican-Americans from East Los Angeles.  Using
DuBois’ (2007) concept of the stance triangle, this research finds that carrilla is sustained as subjects take up by divergent stance positions in relation to objects that are considered
to be of high sociocultural and intersubjective value.  Radcliffe-Brown’s (1940) idea of the joking relationship is used as a foundation for showing how joking can simultaneously appear
hostile and friendly, and for demonstrating the social role of joking in general.  In taking up divergent stance positions, actors engaged in echando carrilla (doing carrilla) can regulate
behaviors and ideas that are considered to be socioculturally important (such as gender, race, class and assimilation, among others) by invoking specific values within a shared epistemic
framework. Carrilla as it is practiced among the participants in this study is hypothesized to be adapted from similar interactional practices present in Northern Mexico.

This article explores the ways in which the aesthetics of employees’ bodies are used as a site of control and resistance, processes which are activated through ethnic and gendered practices. By exploring three resistance strategies used by Israeli combat soldiers, we demonstrate the construction of competing identities of military masculinity. We demonstrate how, by activating a process of self-ethnicization, Israeli soldiers use an ethnic identity that empowers them and challenges the ‘appropriate‘ professionalism expected from them. This process illuminates the interrelations between ethnic and masculine identities, and emphasizes the dynamic and fluid nature of the constructing of identities within organizations.

This paper is a portrayal of some cultural aspects of the dagaare-speaking people of the north western corner of Ghana and adjacent areas of Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire. Some of the topics covered include marriage, the role of rituals, death and funeral ceremonies and the political system. The paper also highlights some of the differences and commonalities between them and their neighbors.

While most sociological and anthropological work carried out in regard to the Israel Defence Forces has focused on regulars, this article provides an inside look into Israel's combat reserves. The analysis is carried out through an examination of the place of humor and joking in the social and organizational life of two different infantry units: a high-grade unit deemed equivalent to the army's regulars and a unit of older troops who carry out less dangerous missions. We argue that reserve duty involves entering a special behavioural frame that is governed by rules different from those of everyday (civilian) life and that these are also special times that offer opportunities for exploring many of the problematic issues that the men face. Humor, in turn, provides fruitful entry points to an analysis of the taboo themes and the muted conflicts of such frameworks. Thus we show how various kinds of humor are related to core issue of socialization, cohesion, motivation, the danger of military work, and images of masculinity.

The article deals with coherence in the language of online sports reporting (also known as live text commentary), arguing that an understanding of this particular text type is closely related to the readers' awareness of the specific textual structure of the match commentary. For their coherence, the texts rely on the ability of the readers to interpret certain utterances by placing them correctly within the overall structural framework of the text. In order to make sense of such match reports, readers must be aware that the commentary proceeds along two narrative layers-the primary layer of the game description and the secondary layer of interpersonal gossip. The latter layer may be unrelated to the sports game being reported and may develop several parallel topic lines constituted by utterances threaded together by various cohesive ties. Thanks to their being co-constructed by means of comments emailed by readers and cited by the journalist, the texts of this particular kind of online sports commentary assume pseudodialogic properties. As a result, this text type manifests some properties characteristic of chat discussions and other kinds of computer-mediated interaction.

The study sought to reconstruct the Birifoh migration and intra-tribal conflict stories that were gathered mainly through sociological methods. Using a multiple approach consisting of ethnography, documented evidence and archaeology, this study found that the Sila (hawk) patriclan finally settled in Birifoh after a long sojourn from Wa. Evidence of rapid population growth at Birifoh was established as the presence of huge compound sizes were reported. As a result, coordinating human activities was constrained which led to a serious intra-tribal conflict that also caused loss of human life and property. The ethno-archaeology and history provided enough clues about bloodbath as there was evidence of multiple burials/pile of bones and some of the instrument that were widely used during that period. It is therefore concluded that this reconstruction is relevant for the, local community to remember their past, academics to do further research and promotion of dark tourism to improve the local economy in Ghana.

Military leaders and social scientists often regard unit cohesion as the key element in combat motivation and fighting resilience. However, a close look at today's battlefield calls for rethinking this assumption. This study is based on observations of combat units during the current Arab-Israeli conflict (the "Al-Aqsa Intifada"). In contrast to the usual depiction found in the scholarly literature, these units were characterized by some rather unique features. Instead of socially cohesive structures (based upon mutual, continuous, and common experiences), the action of these combat units during operations is based upon temporary frameworks based on short-term, ad hoc, and diverse components. In general, the components comprising these ad hoc frameworks do not have a common background and do not belong to the same organizational arms of the Israeli military. Nevertheless, the fighting power of the emergent amalgamations has not been diminished or damaged. Our study depicts several possible explanations for the social dynamics of such "instant units" and focuses on the importance of "swift trust" to their functioning.

With a few remaining Yaminahua and Pacaguara, the Chacobo are currently the only Pano-speaking group of Bolivian Amazonia. Through ethnographic description the paper analyses practical, symbolic and discourse contexts such as hunting, drinking bouts, interethnic relationships, mythology, gender ideology, kinship and onomastics in order to track down several phenomena that make the Chacobo laugh. After discussing some possible ways of classification of Chacobo humour, the paper proposes a sociological interpretation of joking as a form of collective thought.

The juxtaposition of ''ordinary''and ''ethics''will, for many readers, bring to mind JL Austin's brilliant exposition of everyday language in ''A Plea for Excuses.''In the course of that discussion, Austin writes that excuses provide ''a good site for field work in philosophy,''for here, in this ''pressingly practical matter,''ordinary language is rich and subtle, having evolved in response to the infinitely varied moral and ethical contingencies of daily life.

This article deals with humour construction in online newspapers. Analysing the new interactive genre of live sports commentary, it documents how humour is produced through incongruities, allusion and irony as well as co-constructed in quasi-conversational interaction between the journalist and his online audiences. It is argued that humour is crucial not only for enhancing the interpersonal dimension, i.e., building up solidarity within the virtual group of followers, but also for providing entertainment in dull moments of the game, thus having a compensatory function with respect of the ideational dimension. The quasi-conversational nature of the genre makes it possible for the audience to get involved in collective humour and even in joint fantasizing. The analysis is a case study of a report on a high-profile international football match for the online version of the Guardian newspaper.