Key Note Speakers

In this paper I will discuss three related concepts: the widely used idea of humorous frame (in the Goffmanian sense), the idea of context (broadly construed, see Tsakona 2020; Attardo 2020), and the mechanisms that allow us to determine which frame is currently active, i.e., “is this humor?”. I will start out by pointing out that most treatments of the idea of humorous frame are vague, at best. For example, laughter does not co-occur exclusively with humor and yet the presence of humor is assumed to “mark” or “signal” or “acknowledge” humor (e.g., Coates, 2007). The correct question should be, what is the difference between laughter that accompanies humor and laughter that does not? I will then differentiate between “framing,” “keying,” “footing,” and “bracketing” all concepts used by Goffman in relation to humor and used more or less interchangeably in the literature. Finally, I will argue that the metaphor of “negotiating” the humorous frame should be replaced, at least in some instances, with the concept of “soft assembly” which fits better the facts, because it does not assume that interactants deliberately communicate nor that they reach an agreement.

The lineage of humour theory from Plato to Kant is familiar. My argument however, is that this is a genealogical myth, a creature of academic politics, advertising and legitimating a new field of university study and its concerns. Such promotional pedigrees are common in academia. In this case, there is a specific mechanism: the treatment of laughter as an expression of humour. This allows a prestigious pedigree to reinforce the commonly asserted nostrum that humour is a universal. If we do not project a universal awareness of humour from its localised ubiquity, then we can ask afresh when and why was a concept of it first developed. The general shape of the narrative will be familiar but needs placing in the context of laughter being taken as an expression of aggression, despite its recognised physiological benefits. Freed from popular humoral theory, the word humour first became an occasional synonym for jest in the mid-seventeenth century; then by the early eighteenth, it is sometimes used as a covering term for a variable range of more specific phenomena, such as jesting, facetiousness, occasionally satire, and often wit. This process was the creation of a rough semantic field that, with augmented content, is now in use. A sense of humour only comes in the nineteenth century, a consequence of an extension of the meaning of sense to mean faculty, so becoming of interest in the emerging discipline of psychology. It is also only from the nineteenth century that humour becomes a loan word in many other languages, sometimes with altered meaning. Politics may also help explain why the invention of humour, as we now understand it, was a contingent English language phenomenon. Seventeenth-century England was notoriously violent and insecure. The assumed aggression of laughter was seen as part of the problem. Humour, came to sanction certain sorts of laughter as safe, just as there were places in which it might be contained as acceptable. I suggest, then, a duality of political explanation at odds with the mythology of humour studies: academic politics helps account for a spurious tradition of humour theory, while the conceptualisation of humour became an answer to political insecurity exacerbated by the aggression thought inherent in laughter. If this argument is along the right lines, the implications for the routine affirmation that humour is a universal should be obvious.

Love on the Spectrum is an Australian reality series that follows a number of young adults on the autism spectrum, as they search for love and go on dates with others who also are on the spectrum. The show ran for two seasons, in 2019 and 2021, and was recently also made in a US version. The series was generally well-reviewed both by people who themselves are on the spectrum and by neurotypical viewers. Much of the charm of the series is that it evokes laughter, frequently at the seriousness of the people it portrays. My talk will explore how the series invites viewers to find the protagonists’ funnily serious behavior seriously funny. I will compare the laughter raised during Love on the Spectrum with laughter encouraged by British comedian Ricky Gervais’s 2012-2014 series Derek, which is about a character whom many viewers identified as being on the autism spectrum. I will discuss similarities between Love on the Spectrum and Derek but will conclude by explaining how the two series invite laughter based on very different premises.

Visual Satire, as a distinct & precise subset of humour, has always involved the satirist punching up instead of kicking down, in order to better afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. But how is the satirist to speak truth to power by laughing at it when the Power - in the guise of “Populism” - expropriates Satire’s weapons of offence to bolster its own power through mocking the “woke” & any minority in sight, claiming to be defending “Free Expression”. In short, when the best way to spot a Nazi is because they keep whining about “Freedom”, can Satire stay true to itself while remaining both offensive & effective? Fully illustrated overview from Hogarth & Gillray, via the Nazis, to Trump, Johnson, Erdogan & the rest of the mob.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways of using the word “funny” in English. The first, which relates to situations that puzzle but do not amuse, is “funny peculiar,” as when we find our car keys in the fridge or questionable charges on our phone bill. This is the sense to which Isaac Asimov alludes in his observation that “The most important words in science are not ‘Eureka’ but ‘that’s funny.’” The second relates to the sense of humour, to amusing situations that make us laugh, often because they have been deliberately engineered by others to do precisely that. It turns out that computers excel at the first sense of “funny,” both at fostering a puzzling sense of the peculiar in their users and at recognizing user behaviours that are statistically out of the ordinary, but stumble rather badly on the second. The fact that we use “funny” to describe these very different kinds of experience suggests that both share a common grounding in the incongruous, but a formal and/or algorithmic means of converting “funny peculiar” into “funny ha-ha” has proven stubbornly elusive to humour theorists and computationalists alike. The gulf between the two is most easily bridged in the case of the pun – the form of humour on which machines have shown the most success to date – since pun-words themselves serve as a shallow bridge between multiple words and senses. But machines still find it acutely difficult to look beyond the pun, to see intention in the peculiarities of others or to imbue their own creations with comical intent. However, just as one person’s funny peculiar is another’s funny ha-ha, machines can mine the large grey area between the two in ways that make their efforts at humour more than accidental if still less than entirely knowing and deliberate. This talk will explore some of the ways in which a machine can leverage its sense of the “funny peculiar” to foster a sense of “funny ha-ha” in human audiences. I will look at different formal strategies for framing the peculiar as the funny, as in the automated generation of stories, and outline a data-driven, social application of these ideas to show how an imperfect machine sense of humour might achieve useful results at scale while still struggling to tell the amusing from the unusual.