The Importance of Not Being Earnest
The feeling behind laughter and humor
Author
The thesis of this book is that neither laughter nor humor can be understood apart from the feeling that underlies them. This feeling is a mental state in which people exclude some situation from their knowledge of how the world really is, thereby inhibiting seriousness where seriousness would be counterproductive. Laughter is viewed as an expression of this feeling, and humor as a set of devices designed to trigger it because it is so pleasant and distracting. Beginning with phonetic analyses of laughter, the book examines ways in which the feeling behind the laughter is elicited by both humorous and nonhumorous situations. It discusses properties of this feeling that justify its inclusion in the repertoire of human emotions. Against this background it illustrates the creation of humor in several folklore genres and across several cultures. Finally, it reconciles this understanding with various already familiar ways of explaining humor and laughter.
[Consciousness & Emotion Book Series, 3] 2007. xiii, 167 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
-
Preface | pp. xi–xii
-
Symbols Used in Transcribing Laughter | p. xiii
-
Introduction | pp. 1–13
-
Part One: How we laugh
-
The essential ingredients of laughter | pp. 17–23
-
Varieties of laughter | pp. 25–40
-
Laughing while speaking | pp. 41–49
-
Beyond the vocal tract | pp. 51–58
-
Part Two: Why we laugh
-
The feeling of nonseriousness | pp. 61–71
-
Nonseriousness without humor | pp. 73–87
-
Unplanned humor | pp. 89–97
-
Planned humor in oral traditions | pp. 99–116
-
Planned humor in writing | pp. 117–125
-
Humor in other cultures | pp. 127–134
-
Part Three: Pulling things together
-
Recapitulation | pp. 137–138
-
Reconciliation with other studies | pp. 139–155
-
Coda | pp. 157–158
-
-
Index | pp. 165–167
“This thought-provoking book leaves me convinced of the importance of the emotional component of humor and the courage of a rare scholar. An important re-appraisal of the field as a whole, a book which is a pleasure to read, written with bright clarity of thought and many gems of insight.This book is not just – or even principally – about the linguistics of humor, but about how linguistic (and other) devices relate to the experience of non-seriousness. Chafe’s book raises profound issues by its ambitious scope and careful reflection on factual knowledge. Chafe laments, “People in the western world have been pondering and writing about laughter and humor for well over two thousand years” (p.139), but his survey is a testament to the years of reflection and breadth of scholarship that he brings to bear on his subject.”
Jessica Millner Davis, in Humor, International Journal of Humor Research
“This is a very important, ground-breaking book on humor from a linguistic perspective. It differs from other research on humor by linguists in two main ways: first, in the attention it pays to the precise description of laughter, and second in its attempt to set out a complete theory of laughter and humor, including their place in human evolution and consciousness, rather than simply to account for humorous texts.
Perhaps the most ingratiating aspect of the book is Chafe's personable writing style and his open-minded attitude toward his topic and materials, indeed toward the whole enterprise of linguistics and scientific inquiry.
”
Neal Norrick, Saarland University,
in Language Vol.85.1 (2009)
“This book returns the author to a field he was first involved with before humour studies was yet recognized as an area of study. The result of the revisitation is significant for all humour scholars, whether linguists or not: it is an important re-appraisal of the field of humour studies as a whole.
The book brings to fruition reflections concerning the important place of laughter in human communication which have clearly been incubating in Chafe's thought since the 1970s. There are several reasons to be grateful for so long a gestation. It may well have been necessary to achieve the book's bright clarity of thought in a field which remains somewhat inchoate. Further, although the book is packed with intelligent and probing discussion, it is easy to read and deceptively short (at 167 pages), but still long enough to allow Chafe to integrate perspectives from the wide-ranging individual studies he has previously published, dealing with verbal punning, laughter, and also the ontological purposes of the behaviours we associate with humour and laughter, where he probed their evolutionary rationale in a Lorenzian fashion.[1] Lastly, the long wait has allowed the author, after his retirement (from University of California system, both at Berkeley and Santa Barbara) but from a newly liberated position as both Emeritus and Research Professor, to incorporate his most recent interests in consciousness, emotion and communication, and the phonetics of laughter.
The resulting volume is a delight to read and could only have been offered by a scholar who is willing, confidently but respectfully, to cross many disciplinary boundaries. There is no doubt it will be a stimulus to further research and debate.
”
Jessica Milner Davis in Humor, International Journal of Humor Research
“I love this book. It will open a new branch of research (and a much needed one). The field owes Chafe a great debt.”
Salvatore Attardo, Editor Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
“Though brief and specialized, this book offers considerable information, and the presentation is conversational and accessible.”
P.L. Derks, emeritus, College of William and Mary, in Choice, Vol. 45 No. 3 (2007)
Cited by
Cited by 77 other publications
Attardo, Salvatore
2008. Semantics and Pragmatics of Humor. Language and Linguistics Compass 2:6 ► pp. 1203 ff. 
Attardo, Salvatore
2015. Humor and Laughter. In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ► pp. 168 ff.
Audissino, Emilio
2023. From Dionysia to Hollywood: An Introduction to Comedy’s Long (and Bumpy) Road. In The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema, ► pp. 3 ff.
Bergman Blix, Stina & Åsa Wettergren
2018. Humour in the Swedish Court: Managing Emotions, Status and Power. In Judges, Judging and Humour, ► pp. 179 ff.
Bollepalli, Bajibabu, Jerome Urbain, Tuomo Raitio, Joakim Gustafson & Huseyin Cakmak
2014. 2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), ► pp. 255 ff.
Bortoluzzi, Maria & Elena Semino
2016. Face attack in Italian politics. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 4:2 ► pp. 178 ff.
Brunner, Marie-Louise & Stefan Diemer
2018. “Okay … so … nice to meet you? {smiles}”. In The Construction of Discourse as Verbal Interaction [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 296], ► pp. 171 ff.
Brunner, Marie-Louise & Stefan Diemer
2018. “You are struggling forwards, and you don’t know, and then you … you do code-switching…” – Code-switching in ELF Skype conversations. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 7:1 ► pp. 59 ff.
Brunner, Marie-Louise, Stefan Diemer & Selina Schmidt
2016. “It’s always different when you look something from the inside”. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 2:2 ► pp. 323 ff.
Brône, Geert & Seana Coulson
2010. Processing Deliberate Ambiguity in Newspaper Headlines: Double Grounding. Discourse Processes 47:3 ► pp. 212 ff.
Chafe, Wallace
2011. Review of Raskin (2008): The Primer of Humor Research. Pragmatics & Cognition 19:2 ► pp. 357 ff.
Chiaro, Delia
2023. Linguistic Creativity and Humor in Context. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context, ► pp. 353 ff.
Couder, Olivier
2016. Towards a cognitive stylistics of the absurd: Joanna Gavins’Reading the Absurd(2013). Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 25:1 ► pp. 72 ff.
Couder, Olivier
2017. What’s the Catch? The Nexus of Absurdist Humour, Incongruity, and Characterisation in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Neophilologus 101:3 ► pp. 495 ff.
Couder, Olivier
2019. Problem solved? Absurdist humour and incongruity-resolution. Journal of Literary Semantics 48:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Davis, Jessica Milner & Jennifer Hofmann
2023. The humor transaction schema: a conceptual framework for researching the nature and effects of humor. HUMOR 36:2 ► pp. 323 ff.
Deppermann, Arnulf
2021. Social Actions. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 69 ff.
Diemer, Stefan, Marie-Louise Brunner & Selina Schmidt
2016. Compiling computer-mediated spoken language corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 21:3 ► pp. 348 ff.
Diffrient, David Scott
2014. The unbearable lightness of Hong Sang-soo'sHaHaHa: awkward humor, nervous laughter, and self-critique in contemporary Korean comedy. New Review of Film and Television Studies 12:1 ► pp. 37 ff.
Ding, Yu, Jing Huang & Catherine Pelachaud
2017. Audio-Driven Laughter Behavior Controller. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing 8:4 ► pp. 546 ff.
Dionigi, Alberto & Carla Canestrari
2018. The role of laughter in cognitive-behavioral therapy: Case studies. Discourse Studies 20:3 ► pp. 323 ff.
Fernández Polo, Francisco Javier
2014. Native and Non-Native Speaker Interpersonal Skills at Conferences: Managing Self-Mentions and Humour. In Occupying Niches: Interculturality, Cross-culturality and Aculturality in Academic Research [Second Language Learning and Teaching, ], ► pp. 163 ff.
Forman, Ross
2011. Humorous Language Play in a Thai EFL Classroom. Applied Linguistics 32:5 ► pp. 541 ff.
Gallez, Emmanuelle & Anne Reynders
2015. Court interpreting and classical rhetoric. Interpreting. International Journal of Research and Practice in Interpreting 17:1 ► pp. 64 ff.
Gironzetti, Elisa, Salvatore Attardo & Lucy Pickering
2016. Smiling, gaze, and humor in conversation. In Metapragmatics of Humor [IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature, 14], ► pp. 235 ff.
Gironzetti, Elisa, Christian F. Hempelmann, Adel Aldawsari, Sarvenaz Balali, Władysław Chłopicki, Hilal Ergül, Meichan Huang, Liisi Laineste, Shigehito Menjo & Ksenia Shilikhina
2023. Semantic components of laughter behavior: a lexical field study of 14 translations of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. HUMOR 36:1 ► pp. 95 ff.
Goddard, Cliff & Kerry Mullan
2020. Explicating verbs for “laughing with other people” in French and English (and why it matters for humour studies)
. HUMOR 33:1 ► pp. 55 ff.
Hull, Rachel, Sümeyra Tosun & Jyotsna Vaid
2017. What's so funny? Modelling incongruity in humour production. Cognition and Emotion 31:3 ► pp. 484 ff.
Jokinen, Kristiina & Junpei Zhong
2020. 2020 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), ► pp. 3845 ff.
Jongste, Henri de
2018. Mental models, humorous texts and humour evaluation. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 16:1 ► pp. 97 ff.
Karakowsky, Len, Mark Podolsky & A. R. Elangovan
2020. Signaling trustworthiness: The effect of leader humor on feedback-seeking behavior. The Journal of Social Psychology 160:2 ► pp. 170 ff.
Kaspar, Kai, Anna Jurisch & Maren Schneider
2016. Embodied Cognition and Humor: The Impact of Weight Sensations on Humor Experience and the Moderating Role of Gender. Current Psychology 35:3 ► pp. 377 ff.
Kotthoff, Helga
2018. Humor in der Pragmatik. In Handbuch Pragmatik, ► pp. 302 ff.
Kozintsev, Alexander
2009. Stalin Jokes and Humor Theory. Russian Journal of Communication 2:3-4 ► pp. 199 ff.
Ladegaard, Hans J.
2013. Laughing at Adversity. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 32:4 ► pp. 390 ff.
Malcolm, Karen
2015. Communication linguistics revised as a theory of humor. <i>WORD</i> 61:4 ► pp. 310 ff.
MATSUMOTO, YOSHIKO
2009. Dealing with life changes: humour in painful self-disclosures by elderly Japanese women. Ageing and Society 29:6 ► pp. 929 ff.
Matsumoto, Yoshiko
2011. Painful to playful: Quotidian frames in the conversational discourse of older Japanese women. Language in Society 40:5 ► pp. 591 ff.
Mazzocconi, Chiara
2022. Laughter Meaning Construction and Use in Development: Children and Spoken Dialogue Systems. In HCI International 2022 - Late Breaking Papers. Multimodality in Advanced Interaction Environments [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 13519], ► pp. 113 ff.
Milner Davis, Jessica
2020. Bergson’s Theory of the Comic and Its Applicability to Sixteenth-Century Japanese Comedy. In The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology, ► pp. 109 ff.
Mitchell, Robert & Kristi Sinkhorn
2014. Why Do People Laugh during Dog–Human Play Interactions?. Anthrozoös 27:2 ► pp. 235 ff.
Morreall, John
2020. It’s a Funny Thing, Humor. The Philosophy of Humor Yearbook 1:1 ► pp. 33 ff.
Myers, Greg & Sofia Lampropoulou
2016. Laughter, non-seriousness and transitions in social research interview transcripts. Qualitative Research 16:1 ► pp. 78 ff.
Orlov, David
2021. Origins of Bosnian humor and its role during the siege of Sarajevo. The European Journal of Humour Research 9:4 ► pp. 173 ff.
OTANI, NAOKI
2021. <i>Thought-based Linguistics: How Languages Turn Thoughts into Sounds</i>. ENGLISH LINGUISTICS 37:2 ► pp. 247 ff.
Palmieri, Giacinto
2017. Oral self-translation of stand-up comedy and its (mental) text: a theoretical model. HUMOR 30:2 ► pp. 193 ff.
Rehbein, Jochen
2012. Intercultural Communication. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics,
Roach Anleu, Sharyn & Jessica Milner Davis
2018. Thinking About Judges, Judging and Humour: The Intersection of Opposites. In Judges, Judging and Humour, ► pp. 1 ff.
Rączaszek-Leonardi, Joanna & Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau
2018. Language as a part of action: multidimensional time-scale integration of language and cognition. Psychology of Language and Communication 22:1 ► pp. 281 ff.
Skrendo, Andrzej
2022. Kwestia śmiechu – rozważania o Różewiczu. Wielogłos :2 (52) ► pp. 1 ff.
Steinert, Steffen & Joachim Lipski
2018. Who is Afraid of Commitment? On the Relation of Scientific Evidence and Conceptual Theory. Erkenntnis 83:3 ► pp. 477 ff.
Stone, Katherine
2019. The Right (Way) to Represent: The Emotional Politics of Remembering Mass Rape in Germany After 1945. Violence Against Women 25:13 ► pp. 1522 ff.
Sutcliffe, W. Dean
2019. Instrumental Music in an Age of Sociability,
Szatrowski, Polly
2022. How is laughter used to create and reinforce food attitudes in Japanese Dairy Taster Brunch conversations. Journal of Japanese Linguistics 38:1 ► pp. 5 ff.
Takanashi, Hiroko
2020. Chapter 11. Playful naming in playful framing. In Bonding through Context [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 314], ► pp. 239 ff.
Takanashi, Hiroko
2022. Language reproduction and coordinated agency through resonant play. East Asian Pragmatics 7:3 ► pp. 395 ff.
Takanashi, Hiroko
2023. The utterance-finaltari siteconstruction in interaction: a general extender as a play stance marker. Journal of Japanese Linguistics 39:1 ► pp. 81 ff.
Tao, Hongyin
2022. Multimodal amusement resonance as a conversation interactional device. East Asian Pragmatics 7:3 ► pp. 333 ff.
Urbain, Jerome, Huseyin Cakmak, Aurelie Charlier, Maxime Denti, Thierry Dutoit & Stephane Dupont
2014. Arousal-Driven Synthesis of Laughter. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing 8:2 ► pp. 273 ff.
Urbain, Jerome, Huseyin Cakmak & Thierry Dutoit
2013. 2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ► pp. 7835 ff.
Urbain, Jerome, Huseyin Cakmak & Thierry Dutoit
2013. 2013 Humaine Association Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, ► pp. 153 ff.
Urbain, Jérôme & Thierry Dutoit
2011. A Phonetic Analysis of Natural Laughter, for Use in Automatic Laughter Processing Systems. In Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6974], ► pp. 397 ff.
Vandaele, Jeroen
2012. Narrative Humor (II): Exit Perspective. Poetics Today 33:1 ► pp. 59 ff.
Viana, Amadeu
2017. The Unfolding of Language as Hysteron Proteron: Heterochrony and Extended Connectivity. Biosemiotics 10:3 ► pp. 379 ff.
Warner-Garcia, Shawn
2015. Laughing when nothing’s funny. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 157 ff.
Xu, Kaibin, Junpei Zhong & Kristiina Jokinen
2021. 2021 IEEE 4th International Conference on Information Systems and Computer Aided Education (ICISCAE), ► pp. 211 ff.
Yuan, Ai
2021. Laughter in early China: The Zhuangzi and beyond. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 84:2 ► pp. 321 ff.
Zawiszová, Halina
2018. On ´doing friendship´ in and through talk: Exploring conversational interactions of Japanese young people,
Zeigler-Hill, Virgil, Avi Besser & Stephanie E. Jett
2013. Laughing at the Looking Glass: Does Humor Style Serve as an Interpersonal Signal?. Evolutionary Psychology 11:1 ► pp. 201 ff.
[no author supplied]
2009. Bibliography. In Comic Relief, ► pp. 160 ff.
[no author supplied]
[no author supplied]
[no author supplied]
[no author supplied]
[no author supplied]
[no author supplied]
2021. Fundamentals of Sociopragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 13 ff.
[no author supplied]
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
Subjects
Communication Studies
Consciousness Research
Psychology
Main BIC Subject
JMT: States of consciousness
Main BISAC Subject
PSY013000: PSYCHOLOGY / Emotions