Humour and Protest: Jokes under Communism

Computational Humour: Utilizing Cross-Reference Ambiguity for Conversational Jokes

Humour plays an important role in human conversations. People use humour to keep a conversation pleasant, to provide some relaxation during a discussion and to cover up mistakes and misunderstandings. Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) that are able to understand and use humour will therefore be more believable and increase the motivation of a user to interact with them (Nijholt, 2005). Unti...

The Humour of Exceptional Cases: Jokes as Compressed Thought Experiments

*achers Under Communism— The Case off East Germany

I N OUR always ongoing attempts to improve the education and professional status of teachers, we have often looked outside of our borders for comparisons and ideas. Generally we have observed the democracies, where political ideas have much in common with our own, and sometimes the Soviet Union, with which we are obviously in competition internationally. However, there is one European coun try—...

Jokes, drinking and life expectancy.

Epidemiology jokes! This one’s for all you epidemiologists, feverishly Googling the evening before your big seminar, searching for a little icebreaker—a little nugget of self-deprecating humor to win the crowd over. Show them you’re not some pointy-headed stiff. I get a fair amount of Google hits on this site for ‘epidemiology jokes’ for some reason, so I thought I’d cater to this important dem...

Logic and reasoning in jokes

It has often been remarked that jokes involve some form of distorted logic, but the details of this joke logic have not been fully explored. We offer a contribution to the methodology of this exploration by clarifying some abstract theoretical distinctions. Firstly, we separate two crucially different notions of “reasoning” which are relevant to joke comprehension: internal logic and audience i...