Humour in Intercultural Communication

Humour is a slippery beast. It can bring people together, break the ice, and increase empathy, but it can equally mark division, cause offence, trigger aggression. Humour often implies the transgression of a (linguistic, social, cultural etc.) norm, thus revealing culturally determined assumptions about the Other. How does this work? In this Crossing Borders course we will explore these diverse forms and functions of humour by means of intercultural and linguistic perspectives. This will allow us to analyse a range of cases, including humour as a marker of social, ethnic or religious identity, as a pragmatic or discursive phenomenon, or as a tradition with historical roots.  

To understand how the uses and perceptions of humour vary across cultures, students will study humour in its different manifestations (carnivalesque, irony, parody, etc.) from a variety of perspectives, ranging from intercultural communication to literary studies, and from media studies, (post)colonial studies, anthropology, imagology, to discourse analysis and linguistics. Students will review the uses and perceptions of humour in media coverage of topical issues, advertisements and commercials, as well as in (historical) literature, film, comedies, podcasts, comics, cartoons, graphic novels, websites, and other mediums.