Romanian humour in a nutshell (original) (raw)
Romanian humour in a nutshell (co-autor)
Romanian Humour, 2020
Without disregarding the contribution of different research areas (philosophy, aesthetics, literary studies, anthropology, etc.) to the multifaceted aspects of humour, this chapter offers a bird's eye view on pragmatic approaches to Romanian humour.
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 secretely) 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 annalysis 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.
he Discourse on Humour in the Romanian Press between 1948-1965
Slovo
Once the official proclamation of the Romanian People's Republic takes place, on the 30 th of December 1947, the process of imposing new cultural values on society gradually permeates all areas of Romanian social life. Humour also becomes part of this process of transforming the social and cultural life, often regarded as a powerful weapon with which to attack 'old' bourgeois mentalities. According to Hans Speier, the official type of humour promoted by an authoritarian regime is political humour, which contributes to maintain the existent social order, or plays its part in changing it-all depending on those holding the reins over massmedia. 1 Taking the Soviet Union as a model, the Romanian new regime imposes an official kind of humour, created through mass-media: the press, the radio, literature, cinematography, and television. This paper analyses the Romanian discourse on humour, reflected in the press,
Linguistically speaking, the concept of humor, which seems to be vast for people, has specific dimensions by which it is generated including: puns, irony, sarcasm, wittiness, and contrastive utterances in relation to the speakers of those utterances. It is about how the extra linguistics elements dominate the situation and the delivery of humor. The researchers of the present paper intend to show how the selected literary extract can be subjected to a linguistic pragmatic analysis and then be explained by applying the incongruity theory of humor by Kant (1790) in order to show the ways or the mechanisms that lead to the flouting, infringing and the violation of Gricean maxims can consequently lead to the creation of humor. Despite the fact that the present paper is qualitative in nature, some tables are provided by the researchers in order to reach into a better, deeper and more understandable analysis. Investigating the ways Gricean maxims are flouted, infringed and violated to create humor, and showing how the imperfect use of language sometimes create unintentional humor are the researchers' aims of this paper.
Intertextual irony and humour in Romanian postmodern literature
Humour and Culture 5: Romanian Humour, ed. by M.V. Constantinescu, S. Măda, and R. Săftoiu Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies, Kraków 2020
The present chapter investigates the relationship between intertextual irony and humour in literary fiction. Two representative Romanian postmodern texts are analysed, namely Mircea Horia Simionescu's Onomasticon [Dicționarul onomastic], and The General Bibliography [Bibliografia generală], which are included in the tetralogy The Well Tempered Wise Guy [Ingeniosul bine temperat]. Taking into account the most influential theories of verbal humour, as well as the pragmatic theories of verbal irony, the chapter illustrates how the writer can create humorous and ironical effects by exploiting the common knowledge and cultural encyclopaedia of the reader. The chapter also highlights the complex functions of irony and humour during the totalitarian communist regime, when literature had not only aesthetic purposes, but developed elaborated forms of subversive opposition and criticism against ideological and political constraints.
The European Journal of Humour Research, 2015
Book review: Zolczer, P., Litovkina, T., Barta, A., Puskas, A. (eds.) Humour in Contemporary Societies. Eruditio – Educatio 2014/3. Volume 9. 144 pp.
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor
Journal of Pragmatics, 2018
Salvatore Attardo's Handbook of Language and Humor is part of the Routledge series of handbooks devoted to topics in Linguistics. As Attardo himself acknowledges in his introduction, this handbook could not have been possible three decades ago, when he started researching humor (p. 3). However, the turn of the century has demonstrated that times are now ripe for this comprehensive collection devoted to such a multifaceted and overarching phenomenon as humor. This handbook comprises 35 chapters which have not been grouped into specific subsections. However, its general structure is meaningful and well organized around a series of topics. Due to space limitations, I have concentrated on those chapters that are more likely to be of interest to the readers of this journal, and left some others aside (e.g. Raskin's 'Script-Based Semantic and Ontological Semantic Theories of Humor', L opez and Vaid on 'Psycholinguistic Approaches to Humor', Chen et al.'s 'Neurolinguistics of Humor' or Taylor's 'Computational Treatments of Humor'). Chapters 1e5 offer compelling summaries of humor theories by discussing punning in particular. Larkin-Galiñanes's 'Overview of Humor Theory' provides a thorough yet concise overview of Superiority and Disparagement, Release and Incongruity Theories. Her reflections on the way humor and laughter were denied by Christianity because they were associated with frivolity, vulgarity and sin are worth reading (6e7; cf. Trouvain and Truong in this volume for an extensive discussion on laughter). Guidi's 'Humor Universals' concentrates on humor as a universal mode of communication, which is used and/or manipulated for specific purposes (e.g. persuasion, legitimation, etc.). Recurrent patterns of phonetic similarity and their violations are shown to be markers of potential humor, which corpus-based studies can detect in a well-defined manner. Hempelmann's 'Key Terms in the Field of Humor' reviews the way terms such as 'humor' and 'wit' have come to be used in English. Moreover, corpus-based research on parallel corpora from original and translated texts can be used to show how these concepts are conveyed across language and culture (cf. also Helmpelman and Miller's 'Puns. Taxonomy and Phonology' in this volume for a similar approach). Attardo and Raskin's 'Linguistics and Humor Theory' is certainly an engaging piece of reading in its poignant defense of both Raskin's SSTH and Attardo's GTVH. The criticism of both theories arguing that script oppositions also apply to non-humorous texts is dismissed by a straightforward explanation that 'each theory comes with a purview, and it applies only to the phenomenon within this purview' (p. 52) and not all texts belong to the humor purview. Chapters 6e8 also review the main tenets of important theories of humor by looking at punning as a verbal and/or nonverbal (i.e. visual) realization of humor. Aljared's discussion of 'The Isotopy Disjunction Model' is engaging but not always easy to follow due partly to the fact that information is not well presented and signposted. That said, its value certainly lies in the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic application of IDM to a set of Arabic jokes. The findings are then compared to previous studies using IDM in American, German and Italian jokes to verify whether some similar or dissimilar characteristics can be detected. This approach can certainly reveal interesting insights on how different languages and cultures construct jokes and what their marked and unmarked features are in humor creation. Aarons's 'Puns and Tacit Linguistic Knowledge' is a clear and well-structured explanation of the mechanism at work in punning and how tacit knowledge is required to process it. A wealth of examples makes this a fitting contribution to the handbook, providing a sound overview of the issue at hand, especially when it demonstrates that ambiguity and overlapping are indeed necessary features of humorous texts like jokes. Attardo's 'The General Theory of Verbal Humor' offers the reader a sound discussion of the development and application of this theory 25 years on. Most notably, Attardo defends the validity of his theory by clarifying those concepts that, probably, were not well comprehended by fellow scholars (e.g. narrative strategy and logical mechanisms among the six Knowledge Resources informing the theory; p. 130e133). Although Attardo only briefly comments on the fact that 'Target' is sometimes a difficult knowledge resource to pinpoint within as humorous text, I am inclined to think that it deserves more attention, especially when investigating the perception of humor in texts such as (political) cartoons (Tsakona, 2009) or controversial advertising (Dore, 2018b). Chapters 11e14 consider humor from different angles, which are clearly interconnected by the approaches proposed in Stylistics and Pragmatics. Chłopicki's 'Humor and Narrative' draws on narratology and humor research to deal with the issue of detecting humor in texts longer than jokes. Simpson and Bousfield offer a concise but well-presented summary of the main
LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF THE CONTEMPORARY THEORIES OF HUMOUR
PROCEEDINGS OF UNIVERSITY OF RUSE, 2019
Humour, laughter, fun and situational jokes are phenomena related to intelligence and are a resul t o f the evolutional development of humans. Although there are various situations which trigger hearted laugh ter, verb al jokes and humour are considered to be more sophisticated, refined and requiring more cognitive skills and knowledge. Despite the fact that the term "humour" is largely used in everyday life, it is still hard to define it and it is even hard er to explain what makes a text a humourous one. The present paper, therefore, provi des a n o verview o f so me o f t h e contemporary theories of humour and discusses their similarities and differences by providing sp ecif ic examp les o f jokes as an illustration
Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 2008
Verbal humour 1 is a phenomenon prevalent in everyday and media discourses, occurring in various contexts (e.g. formal/informal or spoken/written) and manifesting itself in an array of forms, e.g. canned jokes, witticisms, teasing or humorous lexemes. Likewise, nonverbal humour enjoys a gamut of forms, such as cartoons, pictorial advertisements, or exaggeration in facial expressions and gestures. Given its prevalence and multifariousness, it is hardly surprising that humour should garner wide-ranging scholarly interest. It is next to impossible to present a coherent and exhaustive picture of the state-of-the-art research on humour, inasmuch as this is a greatly diversified field, comprising a wide spectrum of disciplines (philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology and linguistics) and innumerable approaches within which all manner of humour's manifestations and humour-related phenomena may be studied. Even narrowing down the scope of interest to one discipline does not render the task unchallenging.
Constructing Ethnic Identity in Transylvania through Humour
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 2020
In this paper, I put forward a comparative/contrastive analysis of ethnic identity on the basis of humorous texts about Romanians and Hungarians living in Romania within the framework of the Script-Based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH). The corpus contains fifty jokes taken from websites and social media, books and recordings in which the Romanians are at the centre and the Hungarians are the butt and vice versa. The overall purpose of the study is to illustrate the main topics and stereotypes used in ethnic jokes. In this research, I will show that Romanians and Hungarians joke about similar topics, the most common ones being the “ownership” of Transylvania, rejection of the other, and language distortion but also friendship among Hungarians and Romanians. I also conclude that stereotypes can be attributed to one ethnic group, but there are also shared stereotypes, and some of them can switch from one group to the other depending on the perspective.
Cartoons in Romanian humorous news
The European Journal of Humour Research, 2020
Studying cartoons in Romanian humorous news is a great way to underline the diversity of humour’s mechanisms and construction. The common topic of cartoons in Romanian media is politics, but there are also a great number of cartoons exploring subjects such as art, science, society or famous people. Unlike verbal humour, wherein incongruities are text-based, in cartoons, incongruities can emerge through the interaction of image and text, between two elements in the image, or even between the texts in the balloons (Hempelmann & Samson 2008). The present study aims at analysing how humour emerges differently, depending on their topic, in cartoons created by the Romanian humorous media websites Times New Roman and Academia Catavencu, as these have been the two of the most controversial humorous news websites for quite some time. I intend to argue that, when it comes to political cartoons, the methods of humour are quite complex, equally relying on the image and the text, using polysemy,...
Mapping the contours of humour: reflections on recent introductory studies
The European Journal of Humour Research
Introductions to fields of studies are almost a sub-genre in their own right, but are often resistant to direct comparison. The essay discusses four recent introductions to humour published by university presses, and what more broadly they may signify about disciplinary advertisement and consolidation. It emphasises a range of difficulties endemic to the study of humour arising from its interdisciplinarity, recent establishment, the variable range of humour and its putative universality; in which context it pays attention to Austinian performatives, puns and their translation, and to the shared propensity in these introductions to mythologise the history of humour theory. Most critical attention is paid to the studies that form almost polar opposites: Nilsen & Nilsen, The Language of Humour and Attardo, The Linguistics of Humour.
Translating Humour -A Didactic Perspective
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 2020
Humour has various faces and forms, deriving from double meanings, situations, wordplay, often with hidden or obvious cultural references. It may also be subjective; the same things may seem humorous for some people and not funny at all for others. Probably most translators would agree that translating humour is definitely a very challenging task, especially when it is strictly related to the language itself or to a certain culture or community. However, there are certain forms of humour, especially situational or anecdotal, which focus on universal aspects or elements of human life, and therefore may be understood and considered as funny by people from different cultures. In this study, we discuss some theories, principles, recommended techniques and strategies related to translating jokes, wordplay, and humorous idioms which in our opinion may be included in the translator-training curriculum. We also examine the strategies and techniques used by a group of translator trainees in their second year of studies in translating humour from English into Hungarian, focusing on the difficulties they encountered, in order to assess their needs and include more practice and useful tips in the training process .
Whoever laughs afterwards laughs better- Gender stereotypes in the Romanian stand-up comedy
2020
The main theme of this work is the gender, studied in stand-up comedy shows. This paper is exploratory and aims to find the answers to three research questions: 1. How are gender stereotypes used in the stand-up comedy? 2. How do men and women artists differ? and 3. Are there significant differences between the shows broadcast on television and those published only on the Internet? To find out the answer, I used the qualitative content analysis method, because this method is best suited to my study, allowing me an in-depth analysis. I resorted to this method of analysis, as I consider relevant the way in which gender stereotypes are represented and used in the stand-up Romanian comedy. The conclusions of the research show that gender stereotypes are mainly used directly, but also indirectly through ironies or allusions. There are also counter-stereotypes. The results also showed that men and women doing stand-up comedy have different ways of approaching and producing humor, but also...