Humor in the European public sphere as an expression of freedom of speech

The increasing polarization in European nations and in European politics as well as debates on the limits of freedom of expression have been the stimuli to develop a project entitled “Humor in the European public sphere: Fostering societal debate about contested expression in a globalizing world”, which was funded in 2021 by the consortium of major European universities, including Catholic University of Leuven, University of Bologna and the Jagiellonian University of Krakow. As part of the project, the international team of researchers from across the European Union have presented how humor (largely visual) has been used in public by politicians, journalists and other members of the public in different European countries, frequently causing or responding to what has been called humorous controversies or scandals. On the website humorinpublic.eu, 24 short contributions are presented in an attempt to explain the humor across the borders of language and culture in a way that they will be understandable and interesting not just for scholars but also for the general public. Specifically, each contribution is divided into three sections (1) what do we see? (the content that perhaps would not all be noticed by readers from outside the culture) (2) what public issue is addressed?, and (3) what does humor do? Each contribution is also tagged with three kinds of keywords – (1) humor form/genre, (2) humor mechanisms, and (3) themes. The website also comprises a glossary with the key terms in humor studies, including humor mechanisms, explained to the interested readers in relatively simple terms. The website is set to develop and turn into a major vehicle of commenting on the growing number of humor scandals across Europe, although due to increasing globalization, it does not avoid references to global controversies either. Its general aim is to foster an understanding of the multifarious nature of humor

Academic event report : 15th International Pragmatics Conference (IPra2017), 16-21 July 2017, Belfast, Northern Ireland

Academic event report on 15th International Pragmatics Conference (IPra2017), 16-21 July 2017, Belfast, Northern Irelan

Translation of menus : labour of Sisyphos, squaring the circle or marrying water and fire?

As a regular customer of restaurants both in my native Poland as in other countries (particularly in the US), I have always wondered why restaurant menus are so difficult to comprehend for a cultural outsider. In fact, this tendency is systematic and has to do with what Venuti (1995) has described as a necessary foreignization of texts in translation and what other translation scholars referred to as inherent untranslatability of certain cultural texts. Still, subjective factors, such as lack of skills or experience on the part of the translator, should not be underestimated either. The question mark in the title thus results from my initial inability to determine whether translating menus is bound to fail, at least to some degree, due to objective problems or whether an expert and experienced translator should always be able to overcome the cultural barrier and generate an acceptable translation. The article concludes by stressing the lack of appreciation of translation as a skill in Polish society as well as the international nature and diversity of Polish food tradition and its apparent class divide

Conventional expletives as indicators of emotion, impoliteness and amusement in Polish spoken discourse

In my study, I trace the four major conventional expletives (vulgarisms) indicating impoliteness and/or rudeness in Polish, i.e. kurwa (kurde), pierdolić (pieprzyć)/pizda, chuj, and jebać, as they are used in the context of contemporary spoken Polish. All of them in their original or present use are semantically related to sexual activity, and marginally to farting. Metaphorically, many of them denote talking nonsense or irritation of the speaker with what other people say. Their origin is not always certain; some come from Old Polish or Protoslavic, while some seem to have the Proto-Indoeuropean stem (yebh), and some are considered to have come from Russian (jebać, chuj, pizda). Naturally, such expressions are largely context-dependent, as some of them cannot easily be considered impolite due to their highly conventional use in some social groups of “mindless” users. A great deal of research has focused on these expressions since they are so prevalent in conversational Polish, and a number of their functions have been identified. In this study, I draw data mainly from tailor-made corpora of student spoken Polish collected in Kraków and Krosno between 2015 and 2017. In addition to this, the data come from the spoken corpus of Polish where they are tagged for age, sex, and education of speakers. Some of the examples of expletives have a humorous value and I am interested in the contextual factors influencing the humorous rather than serious interpretation of the expletive use, regardless of the intention of the speakers

Sophisticated humor against COVID-19 : the Polish case

The analysis undertaken in the article focuses on a group of memes selected from the database which drew on culture-specific references. Specifically, they embrace the memories of socialist times and call on references to comic films and easily recognized characters in order to bring out the re-discovered absurdity of the current COVID-19 situation. This material seems ideal to revisit Raskin’s early notion of sophistication, which was broadly argued to derive from intertextuality as well complexity of references that function as sources of humor. In all the examples discussed we can observe the intertextual and metatextual elements, multiple levels and shifts in points of view and attitudes as well as the mutual relations of verbal to visual within the meme cycles. In order to identify specific mechanisms of sophisticated humor, we attempt to identify the visual or verbal triggers of overlap of the two worlds in question, and discuss comic mechanisms of sophistication, including attributions of desire, belief and intention (purpose) to characters or the narrator as commentators on events or situations

When vulgar becomes humorous : the case study of Idi...

The aim of the paper is to deal with the contextual and intertex tual humor and its relations to bona-fide-mode of communication, and to analyse the process of a serious, vulgar message turning humorous and starting to function in humorous texts of different genres as a result of its creative transformation and recontextualisation. The Discourse Theo ry of Humor (Tsakona 2020) and its analytical foci, which are factors for humor quality and success: 1. Sociocultural assumptions, 2. Genre, 3. Text (Tsakona 2020: 129), are used in the article to analyse the political humor instances produced during the Russian-Ukrainian war on the example of the “idi na hui” phrase. The sentence containing the phrase, “Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй” (Russian warship, go fuck yourself), was orig inally used on 24 February 2022 during the Russian attack on Snake Island in Ukraine’s territorial waters by the border guard Roman Hrybov, who addressed the Russian missile cruiser Moskva in this way. The phrase be came a winged word, and together with its derivatives gained popularity as a sign of protest during anti-war demonstrations all over the world. The phrase became a part of popular culture as it subsequently appeared in dif ferent humorous genres – memes, jokes, cartoons – as well as in non-hu morous ones (e.g. songs). When the ship, cursed in this way, was eventu ally sunk by the Ukrainian missile, the situation was immediately used as an opportunity to create more humorous material. The paper presents the case study offering the detailed analysis of selected humorous instances that arose as a result of these media event