Internet Memes, Memory, and Orders of Repackaging

The present study explores the construction of humor in internet memes along two dimensions. The external dimension is concerned with humor in internet memes as opposed to verbal humor on the one hand and as opposed to humor in comics and caricatures on the other. The perceptive differences, stemming from the workings of the human memory, and the medium are posited as the two main differentiating factors. On the internal dimension, we explore manifestations of humor in light of the communicative situation and taxonomic relations at both the intermedial and intramedial levels of internet memes, taking as an example a family of You Wouldn’t Get It image macros. Our analysis employs elements of intertextuality theory and the notion of orders of indexicality. The study aims to contribute to the growing theoretical and methodological framework for multifactorial analyses of internet memes.

The Reservations of the Funny: Ethics of Studying Funny Communication

Studying the funny trends within historically marginalized populations has historically been used as a means of making them seem nonthreatening to dominant cultures. Scholars, furthermore, have often applied dominant-culture contexts toward reading minority artifacts without taking the time to understand the premises for other cultures’ funny enthymemes (Epp 2010; Price 1994). This paper proposes two solutions to the dilemma of recognizing the importance of representing marginalized populations’ humor in the scholarly canon but also studying those funny artifacts with a mind toward ethics, using Native American humor as a representative case study.

An Answer to a Question that Cannot Be Answered: A Pragmatist Approach to Viktor Frankl’s and Primo Levi’s Theoretical Perspectives on Humor

This article offers a pragmatist approach to concentration camp humor, in particular, to Viktor Frankl’s and Primo Levi’s conceptualizations of humor. They both show how humor does not vanish even in the worst imaginable circumstances. Despite this similarity, it will be argued that their intellectual positions on humor differ significantly. The main difference between the two authors is that according to Frankl, humor is elevating in the middle of suffering, and according to Levi, humor expresses the absurdity of the idea of concentration camps, but this is not necessarily a noble reaction. Through a critical synthesis based on pragmatist philosophy, it will be claimed that humor in concentration camps expresses the human condition in the entirely twisted situation. This phenomenon cannot be understood without considering forms of life, how drastic the changes from the past were, and what people expected from the future, if anything.

The Laughing Philosopher: The Affectionate Laughter of Agnes Heller

This paper is a critical interpretation of the role of laughter in the work of Agnes Heller. Following the distinction between innate affect and culturally conditioned emotion, Heller argues that laughter is an affect that comes as the expressive reaction to the hiatus between the social and the natural. As such, laughter is ubiquitous and yet remains ultimately undefinable, because it signifies the unbridgeable gap between the two worlds that we inhabit at the same time. Laughter thus sonorously presents our human condition as expressible yet not graspable according to a single theory of laughter (superiority, relief, incongruity, and ambivalence, as defined by D. H. Monro), or any combination thereof. Paraphrasing Immanuel Kant, laughter is ultimately the instinct of reason that liberates us from the illusion that a resolution between the two conflicting constituents of our existence is ultimately possible.