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Aggressive, sexist humor is often understood as expressions of inner, misogynist attitudes. This article, however, investigates rape humor as a collective and interactive phenomenon. Drawing on an infamous Swedish podcast episode, we illuminate rape humor in terms of affect, desire, and repression (Butler 1987; Billig 1999), and as such, how taboo-breaking arouses both pleasure and fear among the participants. The analyses detail affective practices that both promote and discipline affects. The men in the group interpellate one of the participants as a clown, someone whose taboo-breaking they interactionally support and simultaneously distance themselves from. The article concludes that affects, like subject positions, are interpellated in interaction. Building on Wetherell's (2013) understanding of affect as both discursive and embodied, we suggest a reintroduction of repression/desire into a discursively oriented framework. (Affective practices, rape humor, desire, repression, taboo, misogynist masculinity, podcast)*

This article explores a series of parody videos on Douyin that satirize the “greasy man” (油腻男), a gendered figure embodying performative masculinity and everyday misogyny in Chinese digital culture. Primarily produced by young women, these videos employ audiovisual mimicry and exaggerated affect to stage a gendered counter-performance. Drawing on affect theory, gender performativity, and gaze theory, the study employs digital ethnography and critical visual analysis to examine how these parodies reproduce and disrupt dominant masculine norms. Analysis of audience engagement through comment sections reveals the emergence of affective publics that negotiate humor, critique, and resistance. The findings highlight how parody on Douyin functions as a memetic and oppositional practice, challenging hegemonic masculinity and contributing to broader discussions of digital activism, platform feminism, and the politics of the gaze. This study advances understanding of how affect and humor intersect in social media spaces to articulate gendered critiques and collective affective mobilization.

This paper argues that parashah 17 of Genesis Rabbah 17, which interprets the biblical story of the creation of woman from the rib, is a carefully edited text, which tackles not only the origins of humankind but also of misogyny. It shows that its structure develops from praise of women, to parodies on women haters and hatred, using what Bakhtin referred to as carnivalesque forms of humour. It also reflects on the reasons humour has not been pointed at by previous scholars.

The present study offers an examination of laughter in comic texts from a range of fabliau in The Canterbury Tales, framing them within discussions of medieval views of eroticism that draw from religion, medicine, philosophy, and literature. These texts feature males and females who laugh and make jokes in sexual themes and plots which involve deception and sexual misbehaviour. First, the article explores medieval attitudes toward laughter in religious, medical treatises and literature. It then discusses a number of predominant themes in the Reeve’s Tale, the Miller’s Tale, the Merchant’s Tale and the Shipman’s Tale in the context of Chaucer’s the Canterbury Tales to try to tease out how these particular themes may have worked to bring erotic pleasure to the reader of the comic texts. The comic themes discussed in this article are briefly cuckoldry, culinary humour, exposure of the genitals and farting. These subjects and how they are represented are very different from modern erotic representations. They are based both on a different understanding of the body and on a different social and cultural landscape, and their complexity resists simple interpretations about misogyny or functionality that are suggested by feminist perspectives on sexual humour. All quotations from the Canterbury Tales are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Incels (involuntary celibates) may be understood as a subculture of men frequently associated with misogynistic and racist ideologies, which have been examined from multiple perspectives at the international level. Within this field of inquiry, incel communities have increasingly attracted scholarly attention, particularly in the Anglophone sphere. However, in Spanish-speaking contexts, there is a lack of empirical evidence about this community’s discourse. This research addresses this gap by analyzing the online discourse of the Spanish-speaking incel community and comparing it to the Anglo-American one. Specifically, it aims to: (1) analyze the topics present in the discourse of the Spanish-speaking incel community on X; and (2) examine its particularities in comparison with the Anglo-American discourse. For this purpose, a sample of 10,581 posts from opinion leaders of this community was collected, from 26 January 2023 to 10 February 2024. Subsequently, a topic modeling analysis (LDA) was performed using word filtering to extract the main topics from this discourse. The resulting model consists of 24 topics, which were grouped into 9 categories: (1) misogyny, (2) men, (3) immigration, (4) politics, (5) incel community, (6) football, (7) social networks, (8) sex-affective relationships, and (9) humorous and metaphorical expressions. The results obtained suggest that the discourse of the Spanish-speaking incel community aligns with previous empirical findings, despite some minor differences in the content of each topic across countries (e.g., “The fall of the West”). The analysis reveals that the main themes in Spanish-speaking incel discourse, such as misogyny, gender dynamics, and sociopolitical critiques, are also prevalent in Anglo-American discourse. However, Spanish-speaking users incorporate their cultural nuances, such as references to humor and football. These findings underscore the need to develop strategies aimed at mitigating the potential impact of these narratives on social cohesion, preventing the radicalization of vulnerable individuals, and further investigating the phenomenon within digital environments.

Throughout the course of the 2016 US presidential election, hundreds of jokes dealing with the topic appeared on the English-speaking internet. While Russian folklore could have simply exploited translations of existing American texts, representing Trump as incompetant, a statistical and semantic analysis of the corpus of jokes that appeared on Russian social media during the 2 weeks following the election shows that a different type of joke, one juxtaposing the election systems in the United States and Russia, was much more popular. Yet 70 percent of the reposts of the jokes suggested an unrelated base meaning—the idea that Russia and the United States exist in a state of constant competition, trying to influence each other’s internal and international policies. For the audience that opposes the Russian president and the loyalist mass media, Trumplore becomes a way to laugh not at the American president-elect, but at Russia’s own administration.

More specifically, the study of fake news can benefit from folkloristic attention to the epistemologies and rhetoric of truth; the transmission process of performance and its impact on form, function, aesthetics, and content; and the nuanced understanding of institutional and vernacular power that do not always adhere to expected social or political identities, thanks to the multiplicity of roles we embody and the regular code-switching we engage in to manage them. [...]the authors in this special issue of JAF apply folklore methodology and theory to interpret fake news both as, and as stimulus for, expressive culture. The outpouring of memes, jokes, T-shirts, songs, protests, and public gatherings in response to Kellyanne Conway's repeated reference to the fictitious \"Bowling Green Massacre\" (Evans 2018; Goldstein 2018) or WIRED magazine's claim that CRISPR (gene-editing technology) could solve global problems like hunger, pollution, and disease (Lowthorp 2018) emerge in response to \"fake news,\" and, in doing so, they create their own folklore traditions. According to recent Gallup polls, trust in institutions in this country is at a record low (Norman 2016).

Leacock also wrote about humour, publishing Humour: Its Theory and Technique in 1935 and Humor and Humanity in 1938. Because Leacock believed that mass media and cultural exchange were erasing national differences, he was critical of the idea of a national literature. The organization's goals include: (a) to honour and perpetuate the name and memory of Stephen Leacock, humourist, author, economist and lecturer; (b) to arrange for the annual award and presentation of The Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, also known as the Leacock Medal; (c) to encourage the growth of Canadian humour writing; (d) to initiate and support activities which widen interest in Leacock and his writings; (e) to widen public interest in the Leacock Museum and National Historic Site, and in the Leacock legend. The Awards chair of the Board of Directors supervises the judging, (np) Each judge ranks their top ten selections, with the first choice receiving ten points, the second choice receiving nine, etc. [...]the judges may find themselves reading upward of seventy books in a given year.

In the 1990s and 2000s, three Finnish comics magazines were established for comics made by women. Drawing from a multidisciplinary framework of studies on feminism, gender and humour, this article argues that the magazines used the comics form to discuss feminist issues and to disrupt essentialist conceptions and expectations about gender. The common denominator for the magazines was the use of humour as a tool, although humoristic strategies and understandings of gender varied. This article gives an overview of the development of Finnish feminist comics by situating the magazines within the discussion of women’s comics that was ongoing in Finland in the early 1990s and 2000s, and by reflecting on the magazines’ impact on present-day feminist comics in Finland.