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Abstract
In the face of some people's naive enthusiasm about the benefits of humor, Victor Raskin (Is humor always good for you?, Oklahoma, 1997) has explored the question “Is humor always good for you?” Rod Martin (Psychological Bulletin 12: 504–519, 2001) has shown how some kinds of humor foster unhealthy attitudes. Avner Ziv (Humor research in education: Enthusiasm vs. data, 1995) has warned that some claims about humor's value in education are exaggerated. Elliott Oring (Engaging humor, University of Illinois Press, 2003: Ch. 4) has shown how humor can express ethnic hatred. All these caveats are useful in a culture where the prevailing attitude toward humor is positive. If we consider attitudes toward humor through most of history, however, they were mostly negative. In Western religion and philosophy, indeed, no other human trait has been associated with so many vices. This article helps explain the cultural shift from a generally negative to a generally positive evaluation of humor by examining the traditional moral objections to humor, and providing modern rebuttals to them. It then develops the idea that humor in which we transcend our personal perspectives can foster virtues such as openmindedness, patience, tolerance, graciousness, humility, perseverance, and courage.
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The article examines the assumption that humour is wielded as a potent political weapon during political conflict. The rebellious character and ubiquity of the body of humor in a conflict is often marshalled as evidence of its power and efficacy. The question of whether oppositional humour operates as a weapon or not is examined through the use of anti-occupation humor in two extensive sets of Danish scrapbooks created during German occupation, 1940–1945. The differences discovered suggest that humor can be used both as a secondary reinforcement in the process of developing critical political consciousness necessary for challenge and resistance, and that it can also be a surrogate for conflict that ultimately contributes to escapism and acquiescence.
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A significant philosophical and aesthetic shift occurred in Spanish humor after WWI. The shift was inspired by Ramón Gómez de la Serna's idea that the traditional, caustic “custombrist-festive humor was fundamentally unwholesome together with his serendipitous role as one of the main proponents of the avant-garde in Spain. The New Humor, also called “Pure Humor,” was championed by his disciples “ Los humoristas del 27 ” and relied heavily upon scenic and linguistic misdirection, demystification, the absurd, rhetorical tropes and linguistic subversion: values that also made this humor virtually impossible to censor. In this article, the different uses of metaphor are studied as a way of following Spanish humor from its traditional beginnings to Gómez de la Serna's poetical greguerías and then to on the nonsense of the Los humoristas del 27 .
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In this article we explore the interrelationship of humor and conflict. We focus first on contexts where humor provides a constructive means of attenuating conflict and ending disagreements in conversation. Then we turn to conflict talk as a source of humor. We identify three characteristic strategies for constructing humor around patterns of conflict talk, both in everyday conversation and in professionally scripted dialogue. The momentum and coherence of argument structure tends toward automatization even in everyday talk, and this property lends itself especially well to the creation of humorous dialogue. We show both how humor can mitigate conflict, and how conflict talk can be funny.
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