First published in 1996, this volume is a sequel to Humour in Society: Resistance and Control which was edited by George E.C. Paton and Chris Powell. Now, seven years later, the culturally central nature of humour seems greater than ever. This collection of original essays critically assesses the practices of humour in various role relationships in a number of social contexts, for example, in the workplace and between family members. A feature of this new volume is the critical analysis of socio-linguistic practices, including the use of jokes and cartoons, to manage tensions in social relationships at the micro- and macro-sociological levels of human interaction. Wider social and cultural issues area also examined by other contributors concerned with alternative comedy and sitcoms in British and Australian society, for example, which along with humour practices are situated by the editors in their introduction to substantiate the value of studying and researching the sociology of humour.

So this English professor comes into class and starts talking about the textual organization of jokes, the taxonomy of puns, the relations between the linguistic form and the content of humorous texts, and other past and current topics in language- based research into humor. At the end he stuffs all the various approaches to verbal humor into linguistic theory as a whole. Nobody gets it, see, so he tells them to buy the book.

This book presents a theory of long humorous texts based on a revision and an upgrade of the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH), a decade after its first proposal. The theory is informed by current research in psycholinguistics and cognitive science. It is predicated on the fact that there are humorous mechanisms in long texts that have no counterpart in jokes. The book includes a number of case studies, among them Oscar Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Allais' story Han Rybeck. A ground-breaking discussion of the quantitative distribution of humor in select texts is presented.

This book is the first comparative study of English, German, French, Russian and Hungarian anti-proverbs based on well-known proverbs. Proverbs are by no means fossilized texts but are adaptable to different times and changed values. While anti-proverbs can be considered as variants of older proverbs, they can also become new proverbs reflecting a more modern worldview. Anti-proverbs are therefore a lingo-cultural phenomenon that deserves the attention of cultural and literary historians, folklorists, linguists, and general readers interested in language and wordplay.

The occasioning of self-disclosure humor / Susan M. Ervin-Tripp & Martin Lampert -- Direct address as a resource for humor / Neal R. Norrick & Claudia Bubel -- An interactional approach to irony development / Helga Kotthoff -- Multimodal and intertextual humor in the media reception situation : the case of watching football on TV / Cornelia Gerhardt -- Using humor to do masculinity at work / Stephanie Schnurr & Janet Holmes -- Boundary-marking humor : institutional, gender, and ethnic demarcation in the workplace / Bernadette Vine ... [et al.] Impolite responses to failed humor / Nancy D. Bell -- Failed humor in conversation : a double voicing analysis / Béatrice Priego-Valverde