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    Have You Read the World's Funniest Joke Book? The Frog Jokebooks as Interaction Strategy
    (2015-10) Marsh, Moira
    For three decades, David Miller, a sometime homeless street person and full time local celebrity known only as "Frog" has been peddling his Jokebooks in Eugene Oregon. Today his oeuvre consists of 88 booklets filled with riddle jokes, narrative jokes, original cartoons, purloined cartoons, and other hilarities. Despite a serious (sic) effort by the city fathers to stop him by enforcing anti-peddling laws, Frog is still a fixture on the Eugene street scene. This paper will attempt a content analysis of the joke books, which I view as latter-day broadsides.
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    Bunga-Bunga on the Dreadnought: Hoax, Race, and Messages
    (2017) Marsh, Moira
    The 1910 Dreadnought hoax was famous in its day and continues to be well-known today, in large part because it involved both the young Virginia Woolf and the celebrated prankster Horace DeVere Cole. Currently, we see the affair as a ludic blow against authority, or as an anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchy stunt. In 1910, however, the joke was as much about race as it was about authority. Far from being anti-colonialist, the hoax was originally read as reasserting contemporary attitudes about race and empire.
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    The Dreadnought and the Rhetoric of Unlaughter
    (2016) Marsh, Moira
    This paper examines the metadiscourse of the 1910 Dreadnought hoax, one of the most notorious practical jokes of the twentieth century. “Unlaughter” refers to those moments when supportive laughter would normally be expected but does not occur. I argue that the leader of the hoaxers courted unlaughter from some sources because to him it confirmed that the joke was a success. In other words, unlaughter is not always a sign of failure, and a successful joke may be one in which unlaughter is not avoided, but actively provoked and managed.
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    All Jokes Are Bad If They Are Any Good
    (2014-02-24) Marsh, Moira
    Does anything go in humor? My answer is, yes, potentially, anything goes. Does that mean there are no limits in humor? Not at all. Humor depends upon boundaries—if there were no limits, there would be no humor. I contend that humor consists in the artful and playful transgression of boundaries, and I’m going to illustrate this contention by looking at practical jokes.
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    Of Rugby, Beer, and Ballet: The Depiction of Manhood in a New Zealand Folk Drama
    (2013-03-29) Smith, Moira
    For the last century, New Zealand university students have celebrated graduation with popular and satirical variety shows. For many years, every show included a male ballet. Once very well-known and loved, the male ballet is now rarely performed. Former members are sometimes embarrassed about their participation in a tradition that is now decried as sexist. I will use scripts, recordings, and oral history to provide a glimpse into the meanings of the male ballet. I will examine whether the decline of the ballet is due to enlightened anti-sexist thinking, or merely embarrassment at a tradition that appears unsophisticated by contemporary standards.
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    Foiled Again: The Playful Ethics and Aesthetics of Jokes
    (2012-07-10) Marsh, Moira
    In this paper I will explore the reception of jokes. I will use practical jokes as examples but my intent is to make claims about the reception of verbal jokes as well. I contend that joke reception arises from the interplay of three essential characteristics of jokes, namely their nature as aesthetic objects; their transgressive nature, and their playful essence. Jokes are artistic; jokes are bad if they are any good, and jokes belong to the realm of play.
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    The Art of the Practical Joke
    (2009-10-24) Smith, Moira
    Elliott Oring once stated that some jokes are beautiful— a statement that at first blush seems either absurd or revolutionary. But if it seems revolutionary to apply aesthetic approaches to verbal jokes, practical jokes are even more low class. Nevertheless, practical jokes, too, can be beautiful, and people regularly evaluate them in terms that go beyond questions of amusement or appropriateness. Aesthetics and personal style are also at work. Style in practical joking is not simply the product of personality and circumstance, but is the result of conscious aesthetic choices by the joker. I will introduce a case study of two practical jokers I have met, comparing their different practical joke styles and the role that these jokes play in their lives.
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    Joking Toweard Transcendence
    (2009-06-16) Smith, Moira
    Jokes are not just about being funny or arousing pleasure. Beneath the humor frame’s cloak of non seriousness, some serious and far-reaching epistemological work is going on. In his Redeeming Laughter, Peter Berger argues that the experience of the comic is the perception that “man is in a state of comic discrepancy with respect to the order of the universe.” Jokes step beyond the logical habits by which we normally order our experience and our perception of reality. The experience can be both transcendent and unsettling. This paper will explore this claim with reference to some practical jokes. In this genre, the humorous mode is not an armchair enjoyment but a visceral experience—not only for the butts of the jokes, but sometimes also for the tricksters. The perpetrators of jokes may also be disturbed by the epistemological implications of their activities. This last claim will be supported with results from interviews with the journalists who ran an April Fools’ Day spoof on the radio in 2008. This practical joke, and other media spoofs like it, was an applied exercise in the built-in incongruities of the journalistic role—between reporting the truth and constructing it.
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    He Who Laughs: A Social Interactionist Theory of the Humor Audience
    (2007-06) Smith, Moira
    Humor demands an immediate audience response, but both the initiating move and the response take place in a context where each party is aware that they are being observed (and their actions judged) by the other. Further, “laughter” is too simple a term to describe the variety and nuance of responses available to humor audience. Finally, I suggest that audience actions are informed by a folk theory of humor, according to which responses to humor are authentic indicators of a person’s personality and moral character.
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    Laughter: Nature or Culture?
    (2008-07-31) Smith, Moira
    Research into the acoustics of laughter shows that it is extremely variable (e.g. Chafe 2007; Ruch and Ekman 2001). However, I am aware of no experimental research into laughter that takes a cross-cultural comparative approach. Anthropologists, for their part, have studied humor rarely (Apte 1985) and actual laughter even less. Nevertheless, there are some ethnographic descriptions of laughter from non-Western cultures that support the existence of culturally-influenced laughter styles. I will illustrate this contention with reference to some ethnographic accounts of laughter and to video clips of Samoan laughter. The paucity of evidence for cultural styles of laughter may be due to contemporary beliefs about the universality and spontaneity of laughter. Assuming that laughter is prior to culture, we do not expect cross-cultural variations and so do not look for them. Since culture is not passed on in the genes, the existence of culturally-patterned forms of laughter suggests that laughter is modulated more often than we tend to think. Much effort has gone into attempts to detect “whether laughter is faked or felt” (Ruch and Ekman 2001), much of it assuming that only spontaneous laughter is genuine and that all controlled laughter is fake. Genuine laughter is important to humor research because it appears to be the only non-obtrusive measure we have of the inner state associated with humor. Culturally-patterned laughter draws attention to the middle ground of genuine laughter that is consciously moderated—that is, laughter that lies between nature and culture.