Laughter

« Rire, fécondité et dévoilement rituel du sexe féminin d’Hathor à Baubô, un parcours revisité », dans : Et in Aegypto et ad Aegyptum, Recueil d’études dédiées à Jean-Claude Grenier (Annie Gasse, Frédéric Servajean et Christophe Thiers (éds.), CENiM 5, vol. 4, Montpellier, 2012, p. 755-772.

by Youri Volokhine

“Red Laughter”: On Refined Weapons of Soviet Jesters

by Serguei Alex. Oushakine (Сергей Ушакин)

Social Research Vol. 79 : No.1 : Spring 2012

“Red Laughter”: On Refined Weapons of Soviet Jesters

by Serguei Alex. Oushakine (Сергей Ушакин)

Social Research Vol. 79 : No.1 : Spring 2012

Laughter in a Story-Telling Word Game

by Elizabeth Marsden

Unpublished MA dissertation for the completion of MA Modern English Language. Supervised by Dr. Liz Holt

Following on from the growing body of literature examining laughter in specific institutional contexts, this essay... more Following on from the growing body of literature examining laughter in specific institutional contexts, this essay seeks to examine a conversational activity falling somewhere between the norms of casual and institutional conversation. This paper looks at laughter in a specific verbal play activity, the Story-Telling Word Game, played by two groups of friends and family, a word-game played by participants co-constructing a story one word at a time. The data is a transcript of approximately 11,500 words comprising a total of five entire Story-Telling Word Games. Initially, the Story-Telling Word Game will be examined as an activity type, and responses to game-turns will be analysed in terms of preference, in order to gain a greater understanding of the Story-Telling Word Game, and to centre the laughter analyses within a frame of reference. Then certain laughter categories will be examined, specifically those occurring near or during game-turns, as opposed to turns-at-talk. This essay adds to the growing body of Conversation Analytic literature examining laughter in very specific contexts, and research that demonstrates that laughter is not always related to humour.

Keywords
Conversation analysis, laughter, humour, activity types, word games

L'espace public à l'épreuve du rire: à la recherche de nos voix

by Marie Quévreux

draft
published in Implications Philosophiques, 1er july 2011
http://www.implications-philosophiques.org/

Learning to laugh

by Erica Fudge

Laughter in professional meetings: the organization of an emergent ethnic joke.

by Florence Oloff

Markaki, V.; Merlino, S.; Mondada, L.; Oloff, F. (2010). Laughter in professional meetings: The organization of an emergent ethnic joke. Journal of Pragmatics 42: 1526-1542.

On the basis of a single case analysis of the emergence of an ethnic joke, this paper explores issues related to... more On the basis of a single case analysis of the emergence of an ethnic joke, this paper explores issues related to laughter in international business meetings. More particularly, it deals with ways in which a person's name is correctly pronounced. Speakers and co-participants seem to orient towards ‘proper’ ways of vocalizing names and to consequent ‘variations’ or ‘deviations’ from them, making different ways of pronunciation available as a laughable. In making such pronunciation variations available, accountable and recognizable, participants reflexively establish as relevant the multilingual character of the activity, of the participants’ competences and of the setting; conversely, they exploit these multilingual features within specific social practices, leading to laughter.

Our analysis focuses on the contexts of action, the sequential environments and the interactional practices by which the uttering of a name becomes a ‘laughable’ and then a resource for an ethnic joke. Moreover, it explores the implications of transforming the pronunciation into a laughable in terms of the organization of the ongoing activity, changing participation frameworks and membership categorizations. In this sense, it highlights the flexible structure of groups and the way in which laughter reconfigures them through local affiliating and disaffiliating moves, and by making various national categories available and relevant.

Keywords: Conversation analysis; Laughter; Meetings; Sequential organization; Membership categorization; Joke

"Die Sehnsucht des Rumpelstilzchens oder: Wenn das Monster lacht". How to Make a Monster: Konstruktionen des Monströsen. Hg. Sabine Kyora und Uwe Schwagmeier. Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2011. 137-155.

by Ralph Poole

Laughter in Procopius's Wars

by Judith Hagen

Review of Indira Ghose. Shakespeare and Laughter: A Cultural History. The Review of English Studies, N.S. 61:249 (2010), 301-03.

by Brian Boyd

Critiques New Historicist fashion in literary criticism, for asserting that human nature is radically discontinuous,... more Critiques New Historicist fashion in literary criticism, for asserting that human nature is radically discontinuous, in laughter as in other respects, and argues that the range of kinds of laughter in Shakespeare overlaps the range of laughter common today.

Laughter and truth in Fiji: what we may learn from a joke. Oceania 75:268-283, 2005.

by Christina Toren

The Sleep of the Beloved: Beauvoir on Patriarchal Love

by Silvia Stoller

In "Selected Essays from Northern Europe: Traditions, Transitions and Challenges (Phenomenology 2010, Vol. 4), ed. Dermot Moran and Hans Rainer Sepp. Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2011, 303-314.

What does love have to do with sleep? In her philosophical essay "The Second Sex," Simone de Beauvoir... more What does love have to do with sleep? In her philosophical essay "The Second Sex," Simone de Beauvoir reflects upon the sleep from the perspective of existentialist feminism, focusing on the French writer Violette Leduc and her novel "Je hais les dormeurs" from 1948 in which she describes how a woman unloads her hate for a man while he sleeps. These few passages remained widely unexplored within the phenomenological and feminist research. In this article, I explore Beauvoir’s existentialist reading of Leduc and suggest some alternative conclusions.

Hyenas and Heteroglossia: Myth and Ritual among the Beng of Cote d’Ivoire

by Alma Gottlieb

By focusing on how the Beng depict hyenas in oral literature and how they treat living hyenas in ritual activities,... more By focusing on how the Beng depict hyenas in oral literature and how they treat living hyenas in ritual activities, this article explores how each of these domains makes radically different statements about a single subject. In both cases, hyenas represent a form of subversion of society, but the value such subversion is given contrasts dramatically in the two realms under discussion. Bakhtin's concept of "heteroglossia" is used as a model for analyzing how two distinct realms of meaning in a single society may exist in mutual contradiction.

"Excoriations of the Understanding": Logical Tedium in Watt

by Ryan Dobran

Unpublished graduate seminar paper for English 795.6 with Professor Mark Patkowski, December 2008

"'We weren't laughing at them . . . We're grieving with you': Empathy and Comic Vision in Welty's The Optimist's Daughter"

by Adrienne Akins

Laughter Under Socialism: Exposing the Ocular in Soviet Jocularity.

by Serguei Alex. Oushakine (Сергей Ушакин)

Introduction to a special section on Soviet Jocularity. // Slavic Review, Vol. 70 (2), Summer 2011, pp.247-255.

Laughing Together? TV Comedy Audiences and the Laugh Track

by Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore

Published 2011 in The Velvet Light Trap 68: 24-34

This study contributes to academic debates around TV comedy audiences through an analysis of audience responses to the... more This study contributes to academic debates around TV comedy audiences through an analysis of audience responses to the laugh track device. Drawing on data from twenty-five focus groups with British and Norwegian viewers, it explores concurrences and discrepancies between the intended functions of the laugh track and the responses of the “viewers at home.” The analysis focuses on two emerging themes: The idea that the sitcom or sketch show laugh track demands a reciprocal response, and, secondly, distinctions between authenticity and artifice in the use of such laugh tracks. Finally, the article will examine the extent to which we can identify nation-based differences in focus group debates around these two issues, and it will argue that such diverging viewpoints can be linked to historical differences in Norwegian and British TV comedy production, as well as to ideas of nationally distinct humor.

Humor Theories and the Physiological Benefits of Laughter

by Julia Wilkins

Laughter in L2 Computer Mediated Discourse

by Charlotte Taylor

Draft only, this is a conference paper which was presented at 'Discourse Approaches to Functional Linguistics, Translation and Foreign Language Teaching', Włocławek, Poland, 24-26 October 2008. The final version is available in the collected conferences papers Dynel, M. (ed.), 2009, Advances in Discourse Analysis. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

This paper explores how ‘laughter’ is communicated in a structured language learning forum. The participants are... more This paper explores how ‘laughter’ is communicated in a structured language learning forum. The participants are English language learners at levels A1-B1 (according to the Common European Framework), and their teachers. I start by surveying what can be analysed as ‘laughter’ including the textual representation of laughter sounds; laughter/humour related terms; emoticons; intensification; the co-construction of a humorous frame. I then go on to look at the interactional functions of the laughter in this context through analysing who laughs, what at, when, and what it accomplishes.

Animal Communication: Laughter Is the Shortest Distance Between Two Apes (2009)

by David Leavens

dispatch on Davila Ross, Michael J. Owren, and Elke Zimmermann in Current Biology