The articles that make up this special issue of the journal have been chosen for their focus on a particular aspect of verbal humour across a number of different languages-cultures, a relatively recent but rapidly growing area of research in the field of humour studies. While some of the articles deal with terminological aspects of humour, others are concerned with the acquisition of humour. What all the articles have in common, however, is a contrastive approachto their examination of verbal humour across languages-cultures. The whole issue highlights the linguistically and culturally specific nature of humour, whether this be the way we talk about performing certain humour events in different languages-cultures (Chang & Haugh), how humour terms can be interpreted differently in and across languages-cultures and how we might address this (Goddard, Waters), or how we acquire and express humour in our first and second languages (Vincent-Durroux, Vincent-Durroux et al., Del Ré et al.). The authors employ various theoretical frameworks, methodologies and corpora to examine a number of languages and cultures: Oral Deaf, French, English, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Taiwanese Chinese.