Joking is universal behaviour. Jokes provide playful ways of addressing taboo subjects that relate to the basic drives of people for sexuality, affiliation, novelty and dominance. Telling jokes is a way to achieve status, which is more a male preoccupation than a female one. But aside from the gender difference, people do not make the same kinds of jokes across the world. There are differences ...

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...

Although considerable attention has been paid to the cognitive structure of humor, its emotional structure tends to be overlooked. Humor is often associated with the single emotion of mirth or amusement, while other aspects of its rich emotional structure are ignored. The purpose of the present study was to explore this structure by analyzing the content of a Taiwanese corpus of 204 'negative' ...

Weaver (2014a; 2014b), among other researchers, states that ethnicity is a common topic in humour research. Davies (1998) mentions most ethnic minorities become the butt of ethnicity-centred jokes. In Romanian context, humorous discourses target Hungarians and Gypsies (Popescu 2011). Jokes are, usually, told from perspective Romanians as central group, while butts (i.e., minorities) represent p...

This article is intended to engage others in a dialogue about the role and meaning of jokes about suicide. Types of jokes involving suicide are examined to distinguish the different types of humor involved. A sample of 118 recent political cartoons in an online website was downloaded, of which 73 concerned suicide bombers. Examples of suicide cartons and jokes involving disparagement, incongrui...

Joke comprehension has been decomposed into surprise registration followed by a coherence stage, involving frameshifting (retrieving a new frame from long-term memory to reinterpret information in working memory). We examined this view by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from adults reading one-line jokes or non-joke controls with equally unexpected endings. Joke and non-joke ERP...

We present a machine learning approach for classifying sentences as one-liner jokes or normal sentences. We use no deep analysis of the meaning to try to see if it is humorous, instead we rely on a combination of simple features to see if these are enough to detect humor. Features such as word overlap with other jokes, presence of words common in jokes, ambiguity and word overlap with common id...

We present a complete system that generates Japanese stand-up comedy. Different modules generating different types of jokes are tied together into a performance where all jokes are connected in some way to the other jokes. The script is converted to speech and two robots perform the comedy routine. Evaluations show that the performances are perceived as funny by many, almost half the evaluation...

The article will describe the transformation of cultural heritage, focusing on ethnic jokes. Starting with the jokes from the 1890s, which were collected by Estonian folklorist Matthias Johann Eisen (1857–1934) during the country-wide folklore collection campaigns tied to the idea of national revival and ending with the most recent jokes shared on the Internet, the article will give an overview...