What Does an Angel's Halo Taste Like?: Exploring the Structure of Gustatory Comedy Through Case Analysis of Ajigiri.

Humor is a universal form of expression across cultures and eras. However, it has predominantly relied on visual and auditory modalities, and the potential of humor in alternative sensory modalities, such as taste, has remained unexplored. This study investigates Ajigiri, a gustatory comedy in which participants prepare funny tastes in response to abstract textual prompts like "What does an angel's halo taste like?" and have them evaluated through blind tasting. We conducted a qualitative analysis of related videos on YouTube and data collected from a participatory workshop (N=20). Our analysis revealed that creators employed both bottom-up and top-down strategies to construct tastes in response to prompts. In some cases, they also attempted exaggerated performances by incorporating non-edible items such as screws or drugs. In contrast, evaluators tended to favor tastes that were at least somewhat aligned with the prompt and fell within an acceptable range of discomfort. By applying Benign Violation Theory, which posits that humor occurs when a violation is simultaneously perceived as benign, we show that this framework helps explain the boundaries of both creation and evaluation in gustatory comedy. We further discussed how technologies such as electrogustatory stimulation and crossmodal taste displays could help expand the range of violations perceived as benign. This study positions taste as a novel medium for humorous expression and suggests its potential as a promising application for taste displays and multimodal interfaces.