Introduction

The cognitive ability to process kinesic stimuli is nonverbal. Sensorimotor concepts are predictive and operate primarily outside of language. Human beings are able to perform a precise gesture without knowing how to account for it verbally. In literature, verbal artists work with the connections afforded in their language between sensorimotor and verbal concepts. In turn, the act of reading their texts taps into readers’ kinesic intelligence and their ability to connect a verbal concept of movement to a sensorial and motor concept. When writers play with such connections, kinesic humor in literature is liable to be experienced. In such instances, shifts in rhythm, tonicity, and kinesthetic intensity are paramount within readers’ perceptual simulations. While perceptual simulations are the prime trigger of an experience of humor, they generally remain pre-reflective. They can, however, become a focus of reflective attention. The introduction to Kinesic Humor provides a theory for this claim, and substantiates it with preliminary literary examples.

Humor in literature

This chapter considers applications of the linguistics of humor to literary texts. It considers in particular applications of the Semantic-Script Theory of Humor (SSTH) and the General theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), under two approaches: the expansionist approach, which applies the SSTH as is to larger texts, and the revisionist approach, which introduces a set of other tools for the analysis of longer texts, among which is the distinction between punch lines and jab lines. Other approaches are also considered including narratological, stylistic, and register humor.

Black Humor on the Film Screen: From Folk to Popular Culture

The paper is dealing with the complex phenomenon of black humor. Starting from different definitions about its origin, the author questions its folklore origin in Greek antiquity. Through the prism of the theories of Olga Freidneberg and Michael Bakhtin, parody and/or carneval appear as a worldview contrary and at the same time parallel to the serious, official, hierarchical order. Exactly this image of the world, and conceptualization of death on its grounds, lead in ancient Greece to the appearance of the theatre and comedy, that is regarded to be the predecessor of black film comedies. Pointing out the intertwinement of laughter and death, as well as the existence of black humor in the Greek antiquity, the author also deals with interesting connection between film black comedies and Serbian performative ritual games with motives of death and the dead. Such motives and the atmosphere that they provoke are easily recognized in the Serbian black comedies. As an example, i.e. a case study is taken the film Marathon Family. Apart from that, the paper offers an insight into the theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of black humor in literature and film, which opens the space to trace two more intertwined paths of influence on the mentioned black comedies. One path is literary and goes back to comedies by Branislav Nušić - The bereaved family and The deceased, while the other leads to the whole genre of films with the dark humour that has developed since the 1960s in Europe and the USA. In spite of the undoubtable influences, the short insight into the subgenres of dark humour in the mentioned films reveals the specificity of the black humor in the Serbian cinematography that might be related to folk humoristic games with the motive of death.

American Humor in Literature and Politics

The lights dim. The students stir nervously, not sure of what to expect of the strobe light and the background music from "Thriller." The student course guide had recommended American Humor in Literature and Politics, but no one had been able to locate a living survivor to provide a personal testimony. Two middle-aged men of spacious girths enter the room and begin calling the roll. One looks like he might be a Democrat. The other one doesn't. As they alternate calling student names, crack terrible puns, and climb in and out of fright wigs and false noses, it begins to dawn on the class why no Ishmael has stepped forward to tell the story of American Humor.