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Registration \/ abstracts open: November 1, 2017<\/strong>. In 2018, humour researchers and practitioners will gather in Tallinn, Estonia, to discuss humour from its basic definitions to innovative research and everything in between. Bringing together a variety of scholars, students and creative practitioners, ISHS Tallinn 2018 focuses on the broad theme of \u201cHumour: positively (?) transforming\u201d – its creative aspect and contextual nature.<\/p>\n On its 30th anniversary, the 2018 International Humour Studies Conference calls for proposals of papers, posters, special panels (90-180 min), workshops (90 min) and other academic formats (including panels of flash presentations, 5-7 min each) related to humour research or the applications of humour research in the arts, humanities, and sciences. The suggested topic areas could cover, although are not limited to:<\/p>\n Abstracts of up to 350 words should be submitted by March 31, 2018<\/strong>. All<\/strong><\/span> prospective conference participants are requested to fill in the registration form. Acceptance notifications for abstracts will be sent out on a rolling basis within 1-2 weeks of submitting.<\/p>\n Graduate students can apply for the following awards, sending the applications and all relevant material to ishsconference2018(at)gmail.com<\/strong> (see the PDFs for more information):<\/p>\n The deadline for Graduate Student Award applications is March 31, 2018<\/strong>. The list of previous years’ award recipients is available here<\/a>.<\/p>\n In addition, as a way to encourage student participation, there will be student prizes (100 EUR) available for the three best abstracts submitted via our registration form before February 1, 2018<\/b>, and selected by the conference scientific panel.<\/p>\n ISHS accepts both individual papers and contributions to our selection of panels. Please click the panel title to read the abstract.<\/p>\n The panel is dedicated to Professor Christie Davies, an esteemed and influential\u00a0humour scholar, as a tribute to his contribution to\u00a0humour studies. Laughter is long recognized as a powerful social force. Comedy and laughter are generally evaluated as sites of negotiation, through which societies are constructed.<\/p>\n Figures like clown and stand-up comedian, who are intrinsically connected to laughter, are often seen as marginal and even anarchist social commentators. Mikhail Bakhtin \u0301s concept of carnivalesque and Judith Butler`s concept of subversive laughter have served as bases for discussions of social change through comedy. In many academic works, laughter has been regarded as a mechanism of exclusion or inclusion as well as either affirmative or subversive with respect to its approach to gender, race, class and to the other power structures in a given society.<\/p>\n Although there is a dominant narrative on comedy in terms of its link to social change, there is little research on its reception. Why is there such a scarcity of scholarship on the reception of comedy? How do audiences experience comedy and laughter? Do the conventional methods of humour theory help in understanding these experiences? Do audiences experience laughter as a bonding activity? Does the laughter response vary according to different stimuli? Is it possible to pinpoint a subversive moment during a comedy performance? Who laughs at what and why? What are the contextual aspects that are at work? What are fruitful methodologies to study the reception of comedy and the politics of laughter in comedy performances?<\/p>\n The panel “Asking the Audiences: Laughter in Performance” strives to discuss such questions, which have been long discarded probably due to the complexities involved.<\/div> Humor is often considered a form of expression that crosses boundaries and questions rules. However, even situations that rely on flouting rules are always limited in some way – and these limitations may be the key to the effects of humor found in these situations. In this panel, we aim to outline how humor is shaped by social, cultural and philosophical constraints and possibilities. For instance, what kind of impact does the idea of political correctness have on humor? Could politically correct humor actually be better, or is politically incorrect humor always funnier? What does \u201cbetter\u201d mean \u2013 can we have a perfect sense of humor (e.g. genetically manipulated sense of humor, or flawless joke algorithms)? What happens when certain social limitations are removed: is humor in dystopian societies different from our current ways of having fun? When a zombie apocalypse happens, what does this overwhelming change in the living situations mean for the sense(s) of humor of the survivors? Can there be a thoroughly humorless society?<\/p>\n As the topic is broad, we welcome presentations on a wide range of subjects related to the central theme of the session. Humor and its limitations can be approached, for instance, from the perspective of anthropology, cultural research, literature, and philosophy, as well as from, say, artificial intelligence research and biology. <\/div> The place of humour in literature is more central than first appears. From ancient to contemporary literature, from prose to poetry, we could argue that it is almost impossible to examine a literary text without a least being aware of its humorous potentialities. Yet, not only is humour oftentimes neglected in literary studies (in favour of what is sometimes called the serious, inappropriately set in an opposition to humour), but the literary specificities of humour are often overlooked within the field of humo(u)r studies.<\/p>\n The aim of this literary subsection is to showcase the breadth and the complexity of current research on literary humour, and to facilitate dialogues between scholars who approach humour through a wide variety of perspectives. The subsection will bring together researchers who work on the place of humour in literary texts written in any language, from any historical period, whether their research pertains to humorous literary genres, or to humorous components within literary genres not traditionally considered humorous. Presentations will be grouped into three to five thematic panels. The subdivision in themes rather than in national literatures or historical periods will emphasize the common research questions, methods and arguments currently at the core of the work of literary scholars of humour.<\/div> An increase in the number of tourism publications focusing on humour sees an exploration in new theoretical and conceptual ideas. The importance of these studies suggests that employing humour at tourism attractions facilitates positive memorable tourists\u2019 experiences and is good for the success of tourism businesses. Humour has also been shown beneficial in portraying the distinctiveness of tourism attractions. For example, a study on humour at English tourist attractions indicated that humour was used to portray a sense of Englishness through accents, word use, and a fast speaking pace.<\/p>\n The discussion will be based on the following questions: The panel aims to bring together contributions that offer novel insights into the interface between humor and intertextuality. Intertextuality is crucial for humor in that it consists of the body of background knowledge that humor producers can draw on to create their intended effects. More specifically, humor intertextually draws on other texts, recycling shared cultural knowledge and applying it in novel situations as well as in novel media and humor genres. We are particularly interested in how humor shifts targets: from traditional ones to more recent ones, and how intertextuality recontextualizes traditional forms of humor into new ones. Another dimension of intertextuality that is significant for the present discussion it its ability to multiply the targets of humor: besides the person, ideas, acts, institutions denigrated through humor, intertextual allusions highlight the differences between those \u2018in the know\u2019 and those \u2018out of the know\u2019, thus rendering the latter potential targets as well.<\/p>\n It therefore seems that both humor and intertextuality are powerful mechanisms for constructing group boundaries and articulating ingroup exclusivity. In this sense, this panel proposal aims to attract papers with not only a descriptive orientation, but also a critical one, offering explanations of the humorous phenomena within the broader contexts of the interlocutors\u2019 social and cultural practices and in view of the dominant ideological presuppositions attested and negotiated therein. We wish to place particular emphasis on the ideological presuppositions behind the texts and the targets that are exploited in establishing intertextual links across humorous (and perhaps non humorous) texts. We thus aim to show how alignment and consensus between humor producers and recipients are (more or less tacitly) constructed in diverse communicative environments and genres, from political discourse to online social media.<\/div> Eccentrically performed manslaughter and impressively staged immorality are the content of many macabre clown plays popular throughout the 19th century, especially the pantomimes of the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre des Funambules and the fin de si\u00e8cle acrobatics of the group Hanlon Lees. In these performances (dead) bodies were used as weapons, mutilated and dismembered, practices which, according to Baudelaire, are the apotheosis of comedy. Baudelaire recounts the humour of a guillotined corpse whose head rolls noisily up to the prompt box presenting a bleeding spinal disc, a frazzled vertebra, and all the details of freshly chopped butcher\u2019s meat ready for the display window.Similar examples of such grotesquery feature, for instance, is a dentist curing a patient by means of a grenade fixed to his tooth; the massacre of victims of a shipwreck instead of their anticipated rescue; the killing of a pregnant cat, exploding in a rain of kittens; and a scandalising widower who chases his wife\u2019s mourners away wielding a garden hose, attempts to rape a display dummy, and finally instigates a cataclysmic inferno. This type of literary pantomime plot is fundamental to clown narratives of the 20th century. The panel \u201cSchlock Horror and Pillow Punches\u201d will explore the relationships between violence, evil and dumb laughter, clowns and other grotesque circus creatures in order to discover how \u2018Circus Humour\u2019 might be defined.<\/p>\n This panel will be open to other contributors who would express their interest in joining it upon registering. <\/div> A crisis, a disaster or a rise of political oppression often leads to massive circulations of jokes. A number of theories discuss a question \u2013 why it happens. The first is the theory of sublimation [Dundes, Banc 1986] which suggests that political jokes give a way to emotions which cannot be expressed directly. Another theory sees jokes as a mode of psychological defense \u2013 a view which was expressed in a number of works on \u201cgallows\u2019 humour\u201d [Obrdlik 1942; Moser-Rath 1972\/3]. The next theory is taking a step further arguing that humour is not only an outlet for emotions but rather a form of symbolic resistance, since it supports hope for change and solidarization of a group [Scott 1985; 1990, Stokker 1996; 1997]. Elliott Oring and his followers contest these theories \u2013 especially Dundes\u2019s one – in an approach that can be named a \u201ctheory of substitution\u201d. It presumes that joking is neither a fact of resistance nor sublimation of aggression but rather a substitution of a real political act [Oring 2004] which allows to create a controlled symbolic reality and include the trusted ones into it. The problem of the interaction of humour and protest is still widely discussed and actual, be it studies of the Soviet past, or the present situation on Cuba or in Russia.<\/p>\n The proposed panel will discuss the methodology of research of political humour – from jokes told face to face, to jokes which circulate through social media, to humourous placards on political rallies. The panel welcomes submissions and reflections on the problem of humour in\/and\/or protest around the world, both from historical perspective or based on contemporary observations. <\/div> (See our poster here<\/a>!)<\/p>\n This panel solicits submissions on the implementation of humor detection and generation systems in artificial intelligence environments. Humor as a universal and ubiquitously used human ability has proven to be among the hardest to simulate in these environments. But progress is continuous and should be reported on at the most important international conference on humor. The main field contributing the humor and AI is natural language processing, aka. computational linguistics, where currently deep learning methods are de rigueur. But these are more successful at visual processing than symbolic systems, which are the basis of humor. Simpler tasks, like template-based joke generation and rule-based or machine-learned joke detection, are seeing more recent advances. Beyond these narrower approaches, any researcher in artificial intelligence and humor from any field should feel welcome to this panel.<\/div> Gendered humor is still a very hot topic in our western world, yet one reason for the lack of a real academic confrontation on its social and political mechanisms resides in the very difficult challenge of defining humor. Specifically, despite a convincing semantic linguistic theory of humour introduced by Raskin (1985) and later developed by Attardo (1994; 2001), the cultural mechanisms underlying some jokes laughing about gender, including queer relationships and\/or non hegemonic masculinity representations, for instance, are still an unexplored topic. The aim of this panel is to investigate the social function of humor produced about gender and sexuality, in both verbal and semiotic forms. The leading idea is to ignite a academic discussion on the ways through which humor succeeds in constantly strengthening and\/or re-interpreting, but also dismantling, the social dimension of language. Since humour may also work to signify the recurring upsetting of pre-established social beliefs through the systematic threatening of the familiar, the normative, and what is universally deemed as socially acceptable or \u2018normal\u2019, this call intends to look at any form of humorous self- and\/or other-representation of gendered identities. In particular, we seek to encourage a discussion on the way gendered humor may also work to support and reinforce in-group representations, by mocking typically stereotyped portrayals of gender variant people who laugh at and with themselves.<\/p>\n The panel invites papers on all aspects of linguistics, including (but not limited to) the following topics:<\/p>\n <\/div>
\nDeadline for early registration: February 15, 2018<\/strong>.
\nDeadline for abstract submissions: March 31, 2018<\/strong>.<\/p>\nCall for papers finished on March 31<\/h2>\n
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Graduate student awards<\/h2>\n
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Panels<\/h2>\n
\n\u2630 Christie Davies Panel \u25bc<\/h3>
Conveners: Giselinde Kuipers (University of Amsterdam), Delia Chiaro (University of Bologna), Jessica Milner Davis (University of Sydney), W\u0142adys\u0142aw Ch\u0142opicki (Jagiellonian University), Moira Marsh (Indiana University), Liisi Laineste (Estonian Literary Museum)<\/i><\/p>\n
\nWe invite proposals for papers that reflect on Christie’s wide and extensive contributions to\u00a0humour studies, including, but not limited to, ethnic jokes, comparative analyses of\u00a0humour and its relation to society, taboo\u00a0humour, jokes and their targets. The best paper submitted for this panel and written by doctoral or master-level students, or PhD holders who received their degree no earlier than 31 March 2016 will receive the Christie Davies\u00a0Award which will be presented at the panel.<\/div>
\n\u2630 Asking the Audiences: Laughter in Performance \u25bc<\/h3>
Conveners: Neslihan Arol (University of Arts Berlin), Tim Miles (Liverpool John Moores University), Ian Wilkie (University of Salford)<\/i><\/p>\n
\n\u2630 Humor and (the Lack of) Limitations: From Post-apocalyptic Ridicule to Perfect Sense of Humor \u25bc<\/h3>
Conveners: Jarno Hietalahti (University of Jyv\u00e4skyl\u00e4), Susanne Yl\u00f6nen (University of Jyv\u00e4skyl\u00e4), Marianna Keisalo (Aarhus University), Maria Laakso (University of Tampere)<\/i><\/p>\n
\n\u2630 Humour and Literature \u25bc<\/h3>
Conveners: Roni Cohen (Tel-Aviv University), Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard (University of Ottawa)<\/i><\/p>\n
\n\u2630 Tourism and Humour \u25bc<\/h3>
Conveners: Anja Pabel (Central Queensland University), Maja Turn\u0161ek Han\u010di\u010d (University of Maribor), Tatjana Zupan\u010di\u010d (University of Maribor)<\/i><\/p>\n
\n– In what ways does humour contribute to enhancing tourist experiences?
\n– How do tourism industry personnel learn how to produce and co-create humour?
\n– What are the best approaches to recording humorous interactions in field-based studies?<\/div>
\n\u2630 Humor and Intertextuality: Looking for Humor in-between Texts and Targets \u25bc<\/h3>
Conveners: Villy Tsakona (Democritus University of Thrace), Jan Chovanec (Masaryk University, Brno)<\/i><\/p>\n
\n\u2630 Humour and Violence - Schlock Horror, Pillow Punches and the Circus \u25bc<\/h3>
Convener: Anna-Sophie J\u00fcrgens (Australian National University)<\/i><\/p>\n
\n\u2630 Humour in\/and\/or protest \u25bc<\/h3>
Conveners: Alexandra Arkhipova (Russian State University for the Humanities), Daria Radchenko (Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration)<\/i><\/p>\n
\n\u2630 Humor and Artificial Intelligence \u25bc<\/h3>
Conveners: Kiki Hempelmann (Texas A&M University-Commerce), Julia M. Rayz (Purdue University), Tristan Miller (Technische Universit\u00e4t Darmstadt), Max Petrenko (NTENT.com), Tony Veale (University College Dublin)<\/i><\/p>\n
\n\u2630 Humor, Gender and Sexuality \u25bc<\/h3>
Conveners: Delia Chiaro (University of Bologna at Forl\u00ec), Giuseppe Balirano (University of Naples L\u2019Orientale)<\/i><\/p>\n\n
\n<\/div>\nFees<\/h2>\n