Language And Humour In The Media

Language and Humour in the Media provides new insights into the interface between humour studies and media discourse analysis, connecting two areas of scholarly interest that have not been studied extensively before. The volume adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, concentrating on the various roles humour plays in print and audiovisual media, the forms it takes, the purposes it serves, the butts it targets, the implications it carries and the differences it may assume across cultures. The phenomena described range from conversational humour, canned jokes and wordplay to humour in translation and news satire. The individual studies draw their material for analysis from traditional print and broadcast media, such as magazines, sitcoms, films and spoof news, as well as electronic and internet-based media, such as emails, listserv messages, live blogs and online news. The volume will be of primary interest to a wide range of researchers in the fields of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, intercultural studies, pragmatics, communication studies, and rhetoric but it will also appeal to scholars in the areas of media studies, psychology and crosscultural communication.

The Ethics of Humour in Online Slavic Media Communication is devoted to research on how the rules of humour used online media are changing and how these changes rearrange the traditions of speech interaction in media communication. The authors of the book are experienced researchers in the field of Slavic media linguistics and represent five neighbouring countries: Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Poland. The research in the volume is based on the data from Slavic languages. The diversity and, at the same time, relative proximity of Slavic languages make it possible to put separate studies into a wider comparative context, in order to reveal the general and ethno-cultural patterns in using means of communicative etiquette; it helps define the ethno-cultural factors behind the formation of such means. Speech practice of humour creation shows the creative potential of all languages, including the ones with a small number of speakers – Slovak and Belarusian, which have the status of state languages, but are strongly influenced by international languages (English and Russian). This volume is a valuable resource for researchers in the field of Slavic studies.

In this accessible book, Delia Chiaro provides a fresh overview of the language of jokes in a globalized and digitalized world. The book shows how, while on the one hand the lingua-cultural nuts and bolts of jokes have remained unchanged over time, on the other, the time-space compression brought about by modern technology has generated new settings and new ways of joking and playing with language. The Language of Jokes in the Digital Age covers a wide range of settings from social networks, e-mails and memes, to more traditional fields of film and TV (especially sitcoms and game shows) and advertising. Chiaro’s consideration of the increasingly virtual context of jokes delights with both up-to-date examples and frequent reference to the most central theories of comedy. This lively book will be essential reading for any student or researcher working in the area of language and humour and will be of interest to those in language and media and sociolinguistics.

Misunderstandings in technology-mediated communication can be due to a lack of tone and facial expression on the part of the speaker, which provide additional context clues into the meaning of the message beyond textual representation. As technology becomes more of a ubiquitous element in our interactions with one another, further study into the ways in which language and humor are conveyed online and impact human communication is essential. Analyzing Language and Humor in Online Communication presents a compendium of research into virtual communities, online communication, social networks, and the ways that language, and humor in particular, are being conveyed and understood in these digital environments. Emphasizing examples from popular culture and contemporary media, this innovative publication fills the current void in the literature by focusing specifically on humor creation and perception in the digital age. Students, researchers, linguists, psychologists, media professionals, and sociologists will find this publication to be a unique reference source.

Language, Creativity and Humour Online offers new insights into the creative linguistic practices found in diverse digital contexts, such as social media platforms. It introduces new digital genres and contexts, expanding existing research on computer mediated communication (CMC) and covering key concepts in research on linguistic creativity. The book presents original linguistic analyses of a variety of digital genres, including: • Novelty Twitter accounts and political humour • Tumblr Chats • Amazon review parodies. This timely book uncovers the linguistic and interactional mechanisms underlying various types of creative, playful, and humorous texts online. It is essential reading for students and researchers working in the areas of language and media, and language and communication.

In this highly readable and thought-provoking book, Delia Chiaro explores the pragmatics of word play, using frameworks normally adopted in descriptive linguistics. Using examples from personally recorded conversations, she examines the structure of jokes, quips, riddles and asides. Chiaro explores degrees of conformity to and deviation from established conventions; the `tellability' of jokes, and the interpretative role of the listener; the creative use of puns, word play and discourse. The emphasis in her analysis is on sociocultural contexts for the production and reception of jokes, and she examines the extent to which jokes are both universal in their appeal, and specific to a particular culture.

Cartoons, as a form of humour and entertainment, are a social product which are revealing of different social and political practices that prevail in a society, humourised and satirised by the cartoonist. This book advances research on cartoons and humour in the Saudi context. It contributes to the growing multimodal research on non-interactional humour in the media that benefits from traditional theories of verbal humour. The study analyses the interaction between visual and verbal modes, highlighting the multimodal manifestations of the rhetorical devices frequently employed to create humour in English-language cartoons collected from the Saudi media. The multimodal analysis shows that the frequent rhetorical devices such as allusions, parody, metaphor, metonymy, juxtaposition, and exaggeration take a form which is woven between the visual and verbal modes, and which makes the production of humorous and satirical effect more unique and interesting. The analysis of the cartoons across various thematic categories further offers a window into contemporary Saudi society.

The broad aim of this lively and engaging book is to examine relationships between the linguistic patterns, the stylistic functions, and the social and cultural contexts of humour. The material used in illustration is of corresponding breadth: schoolyard jokes, graffiti, aphorisms, advertisements, arguments, anecdotes, puns, parodies, passages of comic fiction, all come under Dr Nash's scrutiny.