Abstract The idea of fashion irony has existed since Elsa Schiaparelli, growing especially prominent since the 1990s, appearing in the works of fashion designers like Franco Moschino, Jeremy Scott, Viktor&Rolf, Demna Gvasalia, and Virgil Abloh, among others. There is, however, a paucity of academic research on the subject. No definition of fashion irony has ever been provided nor any analysis of the ironic undertaken in fashion objects or ideas. The aim of this article is to propose a definition of the concept of fashion irony, exploring the complexities of its perception. Using the framework of the theory of the concept by Deleuze and Guattari, the text defines fashion irony as a concept of the wider field of visual irony, discussing its links to the cultural phenomenon of camp and the sartorial expressions of its ironic aspect. Having introduced the difficulties of recognizing fashion irony outside camp, the text provides a review of further possibilities for investigation into this under-researched academic field.
Abstract Online media provides an interconnected digital world, where boundaries are limited only by users’ creative drive, and in many cases, their sense of humor. In reality, digital space is delineated by economically driven platforms. In Japan, characterized by a dynamic media mix ecosystem, online content has garnered extensive academic research. However, one issue that remains underexplored is the prevalence of internet memes and their impact on online communication, humorous expression, and community building. In particular, Bokete – a popular platform for sharing humorous meme-like content – has yet to be the focus of academic study. This paper aims to clarify how the interaction between the platform Bokete and its users leads to memetic communication. This study situates memes within Bokete by juxtaposing the term “meme” with other terms related to creative production: kontentsu (contents), neta (comedic material), and ōgiri (one-liners). It argues that while all terms are necessary to capture creative production on Bokete, none are sufficient to replace the term meme. Concomitantly, the paper examines how Bokete offers participation for its users. This study argues that Bokete creates self-sustaining memetic communication by stimulating users’ creative labor for making ōgiri iterations. A qualitative multimodal content analysis ( n = 800) reveals the systematic meme production of Bokete in terms of the memetic process, templates, and humorous rhetoric, and introduces a new typology of “memetic nonsense” – derivative silliness .
Abstract This study examines how employees’ perceptions of affiliative and aggressive humor influence creativity and constructive voice in organizational settings. We propose that affiliative humor fosters a supportive work environment for employees with higher liking of humorous situations, thereby enhancing creative thinking and encouraging proactive communication. In contrast, aggressive humor is expected to undermine these outcomes. To test our model, we collected 228 self-reported survey data in three waves from employees in Taiwan, ensuring temporal precedence and minimizing common method bias. Findings reveal that affiliative humor is positively associated with constructive voice, with creativity conditionally mediating this relationship. Liking of humorous situations moderates the positive effects of affiliative humor, such that individuals with higher liking of humorous situations exhibit a stronger relationship between affiliative humor, creativity, and constructive voice. Surprisingly, the anticipated negative effects of aggressive humor on creativity and constructive voice were not supported. These results incorporate mediating and moderating processes, offer a more detailed understanding of how humor impacts workplace behaviors and contribute to both theory and practice by clarifying the role of individual differences in humor perception.
Abstract This study compared in-person and virtual hospital clown interventions to a control group, assessing children’s negative emotions and parental anxiety before and after intervention. Ninety-five children (52 girls, aged 4–17, M = 9.75) and their parents were assigned to intervention groups: in-person ( n = 32), virtual ( n = 32), or control ( n = 31), based on randomization of the intervention day. After controlling for baseline measures and relevant covariates, no significant effects of intervention format were observed on children’s self-reported negative emotions or parents’ self-reported anxiety. However, parents in both intervention groups consistently reported positive perceptions of the clowns’ visit for their children and themselves, irrespective of intervention format. Thus, while parental perceptions were positive, quantitative analyses of self-reported emotions and anxiety were inconclusive regarding intervention effectiveness. Measurement considerations and participant characteristics are discussed.
Abstract Parliaments as ‘deliberative chambers’ exemplify the tension that is at the heart of representative democracies: the politicians must negotiate, legislate, and govern amid ideological clashes. In such a performative space, humor becomes a means to navigate the tightrope between decorum and dissent. This paper examines the role of humor in citizenship debates during 2004 and 2024 in the Lok Sabha (the lower house) of the Indian Parliament, through an interdisciplinary analysis of televised sessions. Informed by the studies in politics, performance, and humor, this paper treats parliamentarians as representatives who embody the citizens’ capacity to speak, decide, and adjudicate on collective affairs. In this sense, each parliamentary act is simultaneously an exercise of the representatives’ political agency and a surrogate enactment of a citizen’s claim to citizenship. Humor enables articulation of grievances and anxieties, overall affect, that remain subdued in formal legal language. Comic performances embedded in the deliberative democratic practice in the parliament foreground the fault lines of citizenship law and complicate the state’s efforts to render belongingness legible and governable. The paper establishes humor as a significant mode of political performance in contemporary deliberative democracy.
Abstract While vulnerable narcissism is known to correlate with hostile attributions, the underlying mechanisms and contributing factors to this relationship remain underexplored. This study investigated whether vulnerable narcissism predicts hostile attributions and whether this relationship is mediated by gelotophobia (the fear of being laughed at). A sample of 561 adults recruited from a psychotherapy clinic completed measures assessing vulnerable narcissism, hostile attributions, and gelotophobia. Mediation analysis was conducted to examine the indirect effect of vulnerable narcissism on hostile attributions through gelotophobia. Vulnerable narcissism, as measured by the HSNS and two facets—narcissistic antagonism and narcissistic neuroticism—significantly predicted hostile attributions. Gelotophobia emerged as a significant mediator of this relationship. Gelotophobia helps to explain the internal dynamics of individuals with vulnerable narcissism, offering insights for clinical interventions aimed at reducing hostile attributions in psychotherapy with narcissistic patients.
This paper explores feminist aesthetics in women's stand-up comedy, arguing that performances incorporating first-person accounts of injury, trauma, and pain can reimagine the laughscape as a space for resistance, camaraderie, and healing. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, feminist comedians increasingly use, what I call, testimonial humor to disrupt conventional comedic structures, centering personal narratives of injury not merely as comedic devices but as interventions into dominant affective economies in the laughscape. Viewing the aesthetics of injury as counter-aesthetics, I ask: Can stand-up mobilize injury to convey unsettling lived experiences? What are the political implications of embedding testimonial humor within the laughscape? Through an analysis of Hannah Gadsby's Nanette and performances by Cameron Esposito, Beth Stelling, and others, I propose that feminist comedians engage in "out-law stand-up" - a form that challenges traditional comedic norms by refusing resolution and amplifying discomfort. This shift transforms the comedic stage into a site of testimonio, where storytelling becomes an act of witnessing rather than mere entertainment. By unsettling audience expectations, feminist stand-up fosters solidarity, redefines humor's political stakes, and creates space for collective healing while resisting the entrenched misogyny, racism, and homophobia within both comedy and society at large.
Humor plays a crucial role in our lives, sometimes offering a valuable means for individuals to navigate and cope with traumatic experiences. While not intended to diminish the gravity of trauma, humor provides survivors with tools to process and manage such experiences constructively. This aligns with the concept of humor as a benign force, capable of eliciting positive emotions and fostering social connections. However, dark humor and irony can also serve as mechanisms to confront life's traumatic events, such as illness and loss. Within this framework, this study explores how humor operates in Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag (2019a [2013]). Fleabag: The special edition. London: Nick Hern Books). Fleabag epitomizes the modern woman, no longer confined to being an object of desire but an active agent with perspectives and truths deserving to be heard. The protagonist exemplifies postfeminist humor, which serves as a means to critique societal norms, particularly those tied to expectations of femininity. She also uses it as a coping strategy to address the pain and guilt stemming from the loss of her mother and best friend. A linguistic analysis highlights Waller-Bridge's brilliance in crafting a complex and, at times, unlikable character who consistently defies audience expectations while maintaining their empathy for her journey.
This paper summarizes the scope and content of the present Special Issue that has been conceived to explore humor as a resource for coping with trauma and adversity. Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives, it explores how verbal and performative humor facilitates emotional regulation, resilience, and social bonding across contexts such as illness, oppression, and marginalization. Emphasis is placed on the double-edged nature of humor as both a subversive and healing practice.
Unexpected movements, represented verbally or nonverbally, can give rise to cognitive shifts that function as incongruities leading to kinesic humor. The visual narrative form of silent comic strips relies on depiction of movements in humorous storytelling, and echoes the sensorimotor nature of kinesic humor. The current study adopts a cognitive-pragmatic perspective to study visualized kinesic humor in silent comic strips. Based on a holistic understanding of visual explicatures/implicatures, this study proposes general associations between narrative tokens such as various images or effect lines and their kinesic fortes reflected with inferential activities. Incorporating the concepts of jab line and hyperdetermination in humor studies into the incongruity-resolution approach, detailed analyses are conducted to demonstrate how kinesic humor is visually realized with narrative tokens, cognitively processed through inferencing, and structurally subsumed into a multilayered humor complex in silent comic strips.
From an evolutionary psychology perspective, laughter can be attributed a significant function in the formation and maintenance of social relationships. However, in educational research, this hypothesis has not yet been tested. In a randomized controlled trial, N = 660 students (Mage = 9.24, SDage = 0.81, female: 49.55 %) from a total of 34 third- and fourth-grade elementary school classes were randomly assigned to groups of four to six within their classes. In these groups, students were shown either a laughter-inducing funny cat video or a documentary video about cats for 3 min each. Before and after the manipulation, social acceptance was assessed by sociometric ratings with regard to all classmates. Data were analyzed with cross-classified multilevel models of the dyadic relationships among students within their classes. Watching a video together - regardless of type - significantly increased social acceptance, whereas the type of video had no effect. Furthermore, sociometric ratings increased corresponding to students' perceptions of other students' laughter intensity. In addition to the main results, it became evident that the higher the students rated their own laughter intensity, the higher their sociometric ratings of other students were before the manipulation. The results support the assumption that even short, mere-exposure contact promotes social acceptance of other students. Additionally, there are indications that students' own laughter or the laughter of other students correlates with social acceptance.
The TV series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, in its clever depiction of the daily life and dalliances of a woman suffering from borderline personality disorder, employs humor within parodied musical numbers to heal both the characters and the viewers from the stigma and discrimination around mental illness. In this study, the value of humor strategies centered around serious or heavy topics is analyzed by inquiring on the use of humor in the series, on the structure of parodic musical intermissions, and addressing how these parodic songs are part of the narrative. Particular attention is given to disengagement from seriousness as a potentially healing stage in humor, as it allows to playfully reinterpret an affirmation. The analysis focuses on selected songs from the four seasons of the show, following the gradual betterment of the protagonist and her journey in therapy. The results show the therapeutic and positive value of ridicule as both in-character coping mechanisms and as an active social response against a detrimental stereotype, with humor achieving perlocutionary effect intradiegetically and extradiegetically.
Dalits' cultural production has received significant attention for its role in shaping the Indian cultural landscape (Browarczyk, Monika. 2013. The double curse-a Dalit woman autobiography in Hindi by Kausalya Baisantri. Cracow Indological Studies 15(2). 169-187, Browarczyk, Monika. 2021. WE are Dalit history: Hindi Dalit autobiographies and their engagements with India's past and present. Cracow Indological Studies 23(2). 1-39; Brueck, Laura. 2014. Writing resistance. The rhetorical imagination of Hindi Dalit literature. New York, NY: Columbia University Press (ebook edition); Wessler, Heinz W. 2019. From marginalisation to rediscovery of identity: Dalit and Adivasi voices in Hindi literature. Studia Neophilologica 92(2). 159-174). However, the function of humor and satire in articulating social assertions by Dalit authors when emphasizing the idea of individual and collective trauma remains underexplored. While some contributions investigated the role of comedy in the shows of a new generation of Dalit stand-up comedians (Shivaprasad, Madhavi. 2020. Humour and the margins: Stand-up comedy and caste in India. IAFOR. Journal of Media, Communication & Film 7(1). 23-42, 2022), little attention has been paid to the connections between stand-up comedy and other cultural areas that previously articulated claims of Dalit consciousness (Dalit chetna) in the Indian public sphere. This study investigates life narratives produced in Hindi autobiography and stand-up comedy, examining the extent to which humor and satire have been used by Dalit authors as empowering instruments to process trauma (Garrick, Jacqueline. 2006. The humor of trauma survivors: Its application in a therapeutic milie. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma 12 (1, 2): 171-172). It also traces key sociocultural shifts occurring in the narratives produced by Dalit authors in Hindi or Hinglish. The first section offers a critical analysis of Murdahiya (2010), a Hindi autobiography by Tulsi Ram, a prominent author and activist of Hindi Dalit literature. The second reflects on narratives by contemporary stand-up comedians with a focus on Manjeet Sarkar, a rising figure in alternative stand-up comedy.
Previous research has shown that exposure to traumatic history, such as visits to Holocaust memorials or death camps, can have detrimental effects on people's psychological well-being. There is relatively little research showing how these negative consequences could be mitigated. Based on previous studies in which humor is an effective way to cope with stress and difficult situations, we tested how humor in memes can help cope with exposure to traumatizing historical content. An online experiment (N = 197) was conducted in which we showed participants a video of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and then tested their reactions depending on which memes they viewed (Holocaust-related vs. everyday life-related vs. no memes). The study found that individuals who effectively use humor as a coping mechanism and who view memes related to traumatic historical contents (such as Holocaust-related memes) experience a more positive mood after exposure to traumatic stimulus than those who watch everyday memes or no memes. Results suggest that humor may be an effective form of reducing the negative consequences of confrontations with traumatic historical contents.
Teacher humour is found an effective tool associated with different dimensions of instructional quality. However, its significance as a teaching characteristic has not been systematically investigated, particularly through a qualitative approach. Therefore, we conducted a qualitative study to investigate how teacher humour ranks relative to other teaching characteristics from teacher and student perspectives. The participants were 40 high school English teachers (Mage: 39.47, Mexperience: 10.68, female 63 %) in Germany and 989 ninth-grade students (Mage: 14.23, SD = 0.50, female 53 %). Teachers completed a paper-and-pencil qualitative questionnaire, while students completed an online questionnaire. Both groups answered two identical open-ended questions and one group-specific open question. Our results show that teacher humour is considered a salient characteristic of instructional quality from both teacher and student perspectives and relates to multiple dimensions of instruction. However, the role of humour in instruction is seen differently by teachers and students, especially compared to other highly prioritized instructional quality features. In addition, the most and least important characteristics of instructional quality were identified in comparison to teacher humour. We conclude that teacher humour functions as both a distinct feature of instructional quality and a potential contributor to various dimensions within this multidimensional construct. We discuss the results against the backdrop of the trainability of humour in the classroom.
This paper examines the strategic deployment of humor by Mandarin Chinese speakers during first conversations as a way of sharing affect and establishing interpersonal connections. Through this detailed analysis of first conversations, three distinct humor practices emerge as particularly salient: teasing, animated performance, and conventionalized language play. These practices are manifested through distinctive vehicles to generate humor and establish relational connections. The findings reveal that humor practices play an important role that extends beyond mere amusement, particularly in the context of initial interactions. By deploying these practices, speakers of Mandarin Chinese create moments of shared affect that help them build relational connections with their unacquainted interlocutors. This research contributes to our understanding of the intricate relationship between humor, affect-sharing, and interpersonal connections, demonstrating how speakers of Mandarin Chinese index their affective stance in order to establish relational connections with their unacquainted counterparts.
