Explore the vast range of titles available.

How online humor influences politics and culture in Latin America This volume is the first to provide a comprehensive Latin American perspective on the role of humor in the Spanish- and Portuguese-language internet, highlighting how the production and circulation of online humor influence the region's relation to democracy and civil society and the production of meaning in everyday life. Several case studies consider memes, including discussions of political cartoons in Mexico and imagery that portrays the mismanagement of natural disasters in Puerto Rico. Essays on Brazil examine how memes are shared on WhatsApp by Jair Bolsonaro supporters and how the Instagram account Barbie Fascionista offers memes as political commentary. Other case studies consider video content, including the sketches of Argentinian comedian Guillermo Aquino, the short-form material of Chilean vlogger Germán Garmendia, and a satirical YouTube column created by journalists in Colombia. Contributors also offer new methodologies for studying the laughable on social media, including a model for analyzing fake Twitter accounts. Internet, Humor, and Nation in Latin America demonstrates that internet humor can generate novel means of public interaction with the political and cultural spheres and create greater expectations of governmental accountability and democratic participation. This volume shows the importance of paying serious attention to humorous digital content as part of contemporary culture. Contributors: Eva Paulina Bueno | Juan Poblete | Alberto Centeno-Pulido | Damián Fraticelli | Juan Carlos Rodríguez | Viktor Chagas | Paul Alonso | Ulisses Sawczuk da Silva | Héctor Fernández L'Hoeste | Alejandra Nallely Collado Campos | R. Sánchez-Rivera | Mélodine Sommier | Fábio Marques de Souza A volume in the series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, edited by Héctor Fernández L'Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodríguez Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Since slavery, African and African American humor has baffled, intrigued, angered, and entertained the masses. Rolling centers Blackness in comedy, especially on television, and observing that it is often relegated to biopics, slave narratives, and the comedic. But like W. E. B. DuBois's ideas about double consciousness and Racquel Gates's extension of his theories, we know that Blackness resonates for Black viewers in ways often entirely different than for white viewers. Contributors to this volume cover a range of cases representing African American humor across film, television, digital media, and stand-up as Black comic personas try to work within, outside, and around culture, tilling for content. Essays engage with the complex industrial interplay of Blackness, white audiences, and comedy; satire and humor on media platforms; and the production of Blackness within comedy through personal stories and interviews of Black production crew and writers for television comedy. Rolling illuminates the inner workings of Blackness and comedy in media discourse.

This is an updated edition of Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke, published in 2006.Using a combination of interview materials, survey data, and historical materials, it explores the relationship between humor and gender, age, social class, and national differences in the Netherlands and the United States.

In times of peace as well as conflict, humor has served Algerians as a tool of both unification and division. Humor has also assisted Algerians of various backgrounds and ideological leanings with engaging critically in power struggles throughout the country's contemporary history. By analyzing comedic discourse in various forms (including plays, jokes, and cartoons), Humor and Power in Algeria, 1920 to 2021 demonstrates the globally informed and creative ways that civilians have made sense of moments of victory and loss through humor. Using oral interviews and media archives in Arabic, French, and Tamazight, Elizabeth M. Perego expands on theoretical debates about humor as a tool of resistance and explores the importance of humor as an instrument of war, peace, and social memory, as well as a source for retracing volatile, contested pasts.   Humor and Power in Algeria, 1920 to 2021 reveals how Algerians have harnessed humor to express competing visions for unity in a divided colonial society, to channel and process emotions surrounding a brutal war of decolonization and the forging of a new nation, and to demonstrate resilience in the face of a terrifying civil conflict.

This delightful, thought-provoking book tackles head-on the assumption that laughter and humour are necessarily good in themselves. The author proposes a social theory that places humour central to social life. Billig argues that all cultures use ridicule as a disciplinary means to uphold norms of conduct and conventions of meaning.

Humor styles are important in facilitating social relationships. Following humor styles theory, this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study is the first to use “one-liner” humor to investigate the neural correlates involved in appreciating humor styles that differ in terms of target (self or other) and motivation (benign or detrimental). Interestingly, we observed greater activation in response to humor that facilitates relationships with others (self-defeating and affiliative humor) than to humor that enhances the self (self-enhancing and aggressive humor). Self-defeating humor may play an important role in Chinese culture in facilitating social relationships at one’s own expense. Psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis revealed temporal pole (TP)-frontal functional connectivity underlying the appreciation of self-directed humor, and temporo-parietal junction (TPJ)-frontal connectivity underlying the appreciation of other-directed humor. Amygdala-frontal coupling was observed during the appreciation of detrimental humor, while nucleus accumbens (NAc)-temporal coupling and midbrain-frontal coupling appear to play a role in the affective experience of amusement in response to benign humor. This study contributes to our understanding of the neural correlates of appreciating different humor styles, including humor that facilitates social relationships.

Despite popular opinions of the 'dark Middle Ages' and a 'gloomy early modern age,' many people laughed, smiled, giggled, chuckled, entertained and ridiculed each other. This volume demonstrates how important laughter had been at times and how diverse the situations proved to be in which people laughed, and this from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. The contributions examine a wide gamut of significant cases of laughter in literary texts, historical documents, and art works where laughter determined the relationship among people. In fact, laughter emerges as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon reflecting divine joy, bitter hatred and contempt, satirical perspectives and parodic intentions. In some examples protagonists laughed out of sheer happiness and delight, in others because they felt anxiety and insecurity. It is much more difficult to detect premodern sculptures of laughing figures, but they also existed. Laughter reflected a variety of concerns, interests, and intentions, and the collective approach in this volume to laughter in the past opens many new windows to the history of mentality, social and religious conditions, gender relationships, and power structures.