Humor in Modern American Poetry (original) (raw)

Enter Laughing: American Humor Studies in the Spirit of Our Times

Studies in American Humor, 2013

As the new editor of Studies in American Humor, I welcome readers to the next phase of the oldest journal devoted to humor scholarship. I offer these remarks about the future of the journal and the field, and invite StAH readers to join me in reflecting on the theoretical, methodological, critical, and historical work needed for American humor studies to flourish today as a field that adds in significant ways to understanding American culture. Here I raise two concerns to start the discussion: theory and community. I feel keenly that our field needs new theoretical paradigms to guide our research and hope that the community of readers and contributors to this journal will rise to the challenge. “Enter Laughing: American Humor Studies in the Spirit of Our Times.” Studies in American Humor 3rd ser. 28 (2013): 1-15.

Situational Irony in Contemporary American Humorist Literature

New Writing: Journal for Contemporary Literature

This paper explores the use of self-reflection and empathy to lessen the harshness of irony in contemporary American humorist literature. Three contemporary nonfiction authors, David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, and David Foster Wallace, are showcased to demonstrate the utilization of empathy and regard for the audience in order to make humour in contemporary literature successful, approachable, and understandable to a modern readership.

Satire and the Problem of Comic Laughter

Comedy Studies, 2020

The ubiquity of satire in contemporary American popular culture suggests an opening for contributing to theory about that particular kind of comic artefact. In addition to a sketch of the necessary elements for satire to appear, I offer some theoretical remarks about the field of study—humor studies as it is usually called, The Comic as I term the enterprise. Potential meanings of comic laughter are explored in order to probe the nature of satire and its reception by audiences and readers.

Humor styles and symbolic bounaries

Journal of Literary Theory, 2009

Humor is strongly related to social boundaries. This becomes most obvious when one's sense of humor is not shared. When people never show amusement at your attempts at being humorous, never do or say anything humorous, or-even worsewhen they persistently make the wrong jokes, it is almost impossible to build up or maintain a relationship. Sharing humor signals similarity-and similarity breeds closeness. Inversely, the absence of a shared sense of humor marks unbridgeable social and personal distance. People who do not share one's sense of humor are often shunned. Laughing together is a sign of belonging: those who join in the laughter, are part of the group; those who don't join expose themselves as outsiders. This mechanism is most pronounced in humor in interaction: successful interactions typically involve humor or laughter. People often attempt to »get a laugh« at the onset of interaction to test the waters, establish rapport or to signal good will. Laughter or other positive responses are then taken as a sign of (preliminary) acceptance and success. However, similar mechanisms are at work in humor that does not directly address audiences: any humor that is written, drawn, taped or filmed. Such »mediated« humor, too, amuses some people, but very likely excludes, confuses, bores, or shocks other audiences. Hence, literary humor, like other mediated forms of humor, also demarcates social boundaries. This essay explores the mechanisms through which humor is related to social boundaries: how does humor differ between groups? What are the consequences of such differences in humor styles? What happens when different humor styles »meet«? These questions are inspired by sociological perspectives on »symbolic boundaries«: social boundaries that in specific contexts become salient, meaningful, and often imbued with status differences (Bourdieu 1979; Lamont/Molnar 2002). Humor is a very potent way of drawing symbolic boundaries: a mismatch in sense of humor is a social difference hardly ever experienced as neutral. In this essay, I look specifically at the relation between symbolic boundaries and literary humor. In doing so, I am extending the perspective developed in my studies of social differences in sense of humor in the Netherlands and the United States (Kuipers 2006a; b). These studies were mainly concerned with jokes and other forms of conversational humor. They showed that the use and appreciation of humor is related to social background-gender, education, age, ethnicity, national background-in various ways. Moreover, such differences are connected with more

Feminist Philosophy of Humor (Author Preprint)

Philosophy Compass, 2022

Over the past decades humor studies has formed an unprecedented interdisciplinary consolidation, connected with a consolidation in philosophy of humor scholarship. In this essay I focus specifically on feminist philosophy of humor as an area of study that highlights relationships between humor, language, subjectivity, power, embodiment, instability, affect, and resistance, introducing several of its key themes while mapping out tensions that can be productive for further research. I first cover feminist theories of humor as instability and then move to feminist theories of humor as generative of social relationships. Though I diagnose several tensions between these approaches that require further elaboration and discussion, I conclude that feminist philosophy of humor is a crucial area of humor research that focuses on systematic oppression, political engagement, embodiment, and affective ties.