Perspective Shifting: Humour and Comedy in Games

Applications of Fuzzy Sets Theory, 2007

Journal of Literary Theory, 2009

Pragmatics of Internet Humour (Palgrave Macmillan), 2023

This book provides a first thorough analysis of internet humour from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective, covering a wide range of discourses that are pervasive online and focusing especially on messaging interactions, social networking sites and memes. Its chapters describe the inferential strategies implemented to turn online coded discourses into meaningful interpretations, which in turn can be devised and manipulated for the sake of humour. Furthermore, and apart from the typical object of pragmatic research (humorous discourses), the book emphasises the importance of the interfaces’ design and of the qualities of the users engaged in humorous interactions (called contextual constraints), additionally highlighting the parallel significance of the various effects, shaped as feelings and emotions, that stem from humorous communication on the internet. In sum, the book delivers a rich and detailed account of humorous internet discourses through dissecting their affordances as a medium, tracking the users’ intentions, and predicting the audiences’ interpretive strategies, with the goal of helping the reader obtain a better understanding of internet humour and its role in today’s online interactions.

Computer Games and Digital Cultures. …, 2002

This paper maps out the construction of non-narrative rhetorical meaning in short computer games. Setting off from the recent emergence of short satirical computer games on the World Wide Web, it observes that at least some computer games do have potentials as a medium of artistic expression; that regardless of the possible narrative powers of computer games. Drawing on Leonard Feinberg's categories of satire and George Lakoff's theory of metaphor, the article describes the basic rhetorical mechanisms of satire and association in computer games and suggests that satire and especially allegorical association in this context appear as two sides of a common theme: the call for immortality and the mastery of computer games.

The Dynamics of Interactional Humor. Creating and Negotiating Humor in Everyday Encounters, 2018

In this chapter, the term (non-)intended non-propositional effect is proposed and applied to the kind of feeling, emotion, impression, etc. that Internet humorous texts generate in the user beyond the proposition-centered humor, and which may not be tightly connected to the act of communication. These effects may be intended as part of the effects of the discourse being interpreted, but the main interest of this Chapter lies in those non-propositional effects which are non-intended, and hence not part of humorous communication proper, but nevertheless leak from humorous communication. These non-propositional, non-humorous and non-intended effects may provide reward to the users at different levels and add to the eventual relevance (or even constitute the main relevance) of Internet-based humorous texts.

We aim to identify and control unintentional humor occurring in human-computer interaction, and recreate it intentionally. In this research we focus on text prediction systems, a type of interactive programs employed in mobile phones, search engines, and word processors. More specifically, we identified two design principles, inspired by humor and emotion theories, and implemented them in a proof-of-concept tool simulating a specific type of text prediction.

2018

Humor is an essential part of storytelling, but it has not been studied in the field of interactive emergent narrative. We begin with an overview of various theories of humor and use them to examine examples of humor within the digital media field. This juxtaposition aims to bring together concepts from both fields in order to find a feasible direction. We hope to contribute a framework of humor that can be used in the near future for an interactive emergent narrative project. Our conceptualization of humor frames it in terms of "pleasant surprises" which enable players and other emergent AI actors to stretch the boundaries between plot and discourse.

In this thesis, I examine some of the ways in which humour is created in comic novels. I combine concepts from cognitive stylistics and psychology to address the question: ‘How does the construction of narrative worlds contribute to the creation of humour in narratives?’ I suggest that the narrative world can be designed to enhance the humour of particular elements which appear in it by encouraging a playful interpretation of those elements. I call the narrative worlds which are constructed to elicit an overall experience of humour humorous worlds and outline some of the techniques which writers use to build them, focusing on three aspects: Disrupted Schemata. In the first chapter, I discuss the elements which are used to build humorous worlds. I outline the ways in which representations of settings, objects, characters and situations which make up humorous worlds can be manipulated to achieve an amusing effect. I demonstrate some of the applications of schema theory in the stylistics of humorous texts, including Cook’s schema disruption and schema refreshment (1994), Gibbs’ soft-assembling of schemata (2003) and Schank and Abelson’s notion of scripts thrown off normal course (1977). I link those to McGhee’s concept of fantasy-assimilation (1972). Repetition and Variation. I then outline some of the ways in which the disrupted elements are combined. I write about repetition and variation, which in humorous narratives operates in two ways (conceptual/stylistic) and on two levels (local/extended). I discuss the cognitive mechanisms involved in them (by drawing on, for example, Emmott’s 1997 contextual frame theory) and hypothesise about their amusing effect by basing my work on classic research in psychology (Berlyne 1972, Suls 1972). Humorous Mode. Finally, I discuss the devices which mark humorous worlds as humorous. I point out that comic narratives need to be labelled as humorous discourse and that the humorous cueing/keying in novels is less explicit than that in jokes. I apply Triezenberg’s model of humour enhancers (2004) to humorous extracts, analyse narrative strategies in the opening paragraphs of a number of humorous novels and suggest some ways in which a manipulation of distance (e.g. Leech and Short 2007) between the writer and the reader can be seen as a humorous cueing strategy. I argue that while creating humour in narratives requires a skilful stylistic manipulation on the part of the writer, making sense of it demands a considerable cognitive effort from the reader. Through a range of examples from nine humorous novels (by authors including Heller, Fielding, Pratchett, Amis, Roth and Vonnegut) and relevant secondary literature, I illustrate how a cognitive stylistic analysis of humour in narratives has the potential to offer some hypotheses not only about reading comprehension, but also about the pleasure of reading.

HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research, 2023

This article presents a schema describing the 'humor transaction,' that is, the processes by which what is generally called humor is created, communicated, experienced, responded to and used. It describes in three stages the rich creative process shared between a humorist and an audience. This starts with the perception and/or formation of an amusing stimulus by a humorist and passes in a second stage to its communication by the humorist to others and their processing of the stimulus. The third stage captures the range of experiences and responses by the recipient/s, including personal consequences and possible re-use of the humor (which creates further functions and consequences). Although experiencing and using humor are both holistic processes, dependent on synchronization of social behaviors by humorist and recipient, the schema simplifies in order to summarize the general outline of a typical shared humorous 'transaction' while allowing for complex detail within each stage. It offers a framework within which scholars and practitioners can locate their different foci of research and application. It aims to assist in developing a shared vocabulary of concepts and terminology to foster exchange across the many disciplines involved in humor research. It provides a linked glossary of relevant terms designed to facilitate interdisciplinary exchange in studying humor.

Studies in Linguistics, Culture and FLT, 2022

Humour is a complex and dynamic phenomenon prevalent in social interaction in various settings, such as mundane talk and institutional contexts. It has been a focus of interest in social interaction research for decades. To date, scholars have sought to gain insights regarding what counts as humorous and why we find certain utterances funny (e.g., Carroll, 2014; Bell & Pomerantz, 2016). As such, scholars from various fields ranging from philosophy, sociology, psychology, pragmatics, and linguistics, to name a few, have adopted different approaches in the examination of humour. One of the new perspectives that offers unique insights into humour scholarship is Conversation Analysis (CA) methodology. CA is a method and a research field in itself deriving from ethnomethodology, and it provides valuable opportunities for researchers to investigate humour in interaction. Thus, the main aim of this study is to present Conversation Analysis as a candidate methodology to be used for analysing humour in interaction. It also provides a critical discussion of how CA approaches ‘humour’.