Fostering the funny: A case study of undergraduate women in collegiate comedy troupes

During a global pandemic, another pandemic of loneliness impacted undergraduate college students and influenced the way members of the 18-25-year-old population lived and learned throughout a time of intentional distancing. Additionally, the insurgence of loneliness impacts members of the 18-25 age group in startling rates. This qualitative case study explored how undergraduate women who participate in comedy troupes fostered community while living and learning during a global pandemic known as COVID-19 between the spring of 2020 and the fall of 2021. The research added to the body of knowledge on how comedy and levity can enhance wellness and how humor can be brought into various aspects of life from work to play. This study explored how undergraduate students living in a time of heightened loneliness infused humor in their relationships with one another. The study explored the relationship dynamics built by women-identified comedians and focused on how the participants developed community by using humor, comedy, and levity as the pillars of their interactions. Lastly, this study is rooted in better understanding how higher education student affairs practitioners can better support collegiate comedians invested in their relationships with one another. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Loneliness, academic self-efficacy, and student engagement in the online learning environment: the role of humor in learning

This study investigated the impact of loneliness on academic self-efficacy (ASE) and student engagement in the context of remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, as a boundary condition, we examined the role of intermediate ASE in the relationship between loneliness, student engagement, and perceived humor in learning. A total of 367 undergraduate students from six universities in Indonesia completed an online questionnaire. Data were analyzed using Macro Process version 4 to test the moderating mediation model hypothesis. As expected, the study results show that loneliness is negatively related to ASE and student engagement. ASE is proven to affect student engagement positively;concurrently, it plays an intermediate role in the link between loneliness and student engagement. Finally, humor had a significant moderating effect on learning in the tested model. This study contributes to the existing literature on loneliness and student engagement by uncovering the intermediate role of ASE. Drawing on the social cognitive theory (SCT) and instructional humor processing theory (IHTP), we explored how perceived humor in learning moderates the relationships between loneliness, ASE, and student engagement. © 2024, Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education. All rights reserved.

I'm out of breath from laughing! I think? A dataset of COVID-19 Humor and its toxic variants

Humor is a cognitive construct that predominantly evokes the feeling of mirth. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the situations that arouse out of the pandemic were so incongruous to the world we knew that even factual statements often had a humorous reaction. In this paper, we present a dataset of 2510 samples hand-annotated with labels such as humor style, type, theme, target and stereotypes formed or exploited while creating the humor in addition to 909 memes. Our dataset comprises Reddit posts, comments, Onion news headlines, real news headlines, and tweets. We evaluate the task of humor detection and maladaptive humor detection on state-of-the-art models namely RoBERTa and GPT-3. The finetuned models trained on our dataset show significant gains over zero-shot models including GPT-3 when detecting humor. Even though GPT-3 is good at generating meaningful explanations, we observed that it fails to detect maladaptive humor due to the absence of overt targets and profanities. We believe that the presented dataset will be helpful in designing computational methods for topical humor processing as it provides a unique sample set to study the theory of incongruity in a post-pandemic world. The data is available to research community at https://github.com/smritae01/Covid19-Humor. © 2023 ACM.

What kind of internet memes do you like? People's preference for the memes expressing the positivity, humor, aggression emotions

Although various internet memes (IMs) were disseminated and popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic, the degree to which people appreciate them is unclear. In this study, people's appreciation of three kinds of typical IMs, which respectively conveyed the humorous (H-IM), encouraging (E-IM), and aggressive (A-IM) feelings towards the pandemic and the consequences it brought about, along with one objective description (OD) serving as the control condition, were compared. The results showed that the E-IMs and H-IMs were significantly more appreciated and loved than the A-IMs, thus supporting the prediction of positive psychology and humor regulation of negative emotion but failing to support the theory of psychology catharsis that emphasizes the need of making aggression to release tense and angry feelings caused by the pandemic. The results also showed that creativity played a mediating role for the positivity component in E-IMs and the humor component in H-IMs when predicting their fondness ratings. For the H-IMs, creativity could even fully mediate the impact of humor for exerting regulation effects on negative emotions evoked by the pandemic-related affairs such as home quarantine. This result revealed the creative nature of the IMs and showed that IMs are a kind of insightful cognitive restructuring that people make as a creative adaption to unfavorably changed situations caused by the pandemic.

What's So Funny About COVID-19? How Some Comic Strip Artists Have Approached or Avoided a Sensitive Subject

Newspaper comic strip artists in the "funny pages” have approached the subject of the COVID-19 pandemic in a number of ways. There was a delayed reaction to the pandemic because of the significant lead times preceding when the strip appeared in the paper. Some artists chose never to address the pandemic;other strips are "classic” in that they had appeared previously before the pandemic (e.g., Classic Peanuts, For Better or Worse) or were firmly grounded in a different time period (e.g., Prince Valiant) and would not be expected to broach the subject. A variety of aspects of the pandemic were fodder for the strips and panels such as: shortages and rationing, quarantine behavior, hand washing and mask wearing, escapism, family togetherness and its opposite, loneliness, social distancing, virtual meetings and telecommuting. Some of these subjects are exaggerated in an attempt to highlight their humorous, even ludicrous, aspects. Others are especially poignant and pay tribute to health care workers, delivery persons, grocery store employees, teachers, and other unsung heroes helping people get through the worst of the pandemic. Special attention is paid to the themes discussed in the following three comics: Dr. Rex Morgan, MD, Frank and Ernest, and Pearls Before Swine. Thirty-seven comic strips and panels appearing in the daily and Sunday editions of two different Kentucky newspapers to which the author subscribes;they form the basis for the study. These nationally syndicated strips were analyzed from the time of the first stay at home order in mid-March 2020 until the end of February 2021. This examination is exploratory in nature. Trends in the number of cartoons addressing aspects of COVID-19 are analyzed, but more importantly an attempt is made to interpret the themes of the comic strips or panels. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Trans Comedy as Trans Care

Malatino compares two billboards, one declaring "Trans lives are sacred," found in Detroit in July 2019, and one stating "Trans people deserve health care, support, justice, safety, love," stationed near the border of Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms in November 2018 (2020, 25–26 and 30–31). (Nothing works for staving off isolation, illness, and routine workplace discrimination like stabbing your friends dressed as a neon cartoon alien with funky accessories, am I right?) Play, laughter, and jokes—collective endeavors, done with others, whether real or imaginary, present or distant (Freud 1905, Bergson 1912)—are key to trans care via media2. Playing together, via media, including the comedy of our own making, on the other hand, can take on a form of care, and we in turn keep each other alive. The newest iteration of the decades-long irony wherein cis/straight people reveal themselves as relying on the very healthcare they would deny trans and queer folks but with a new toxic twist, a spoof image of the cover of trans theorist Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkies with Rogan photoshopped on the cover was soon circulating through the trans internet.

Dancing Plague: Archives of Celebration and Care in Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane's Secret Pastures

Following the cancellation of influential contemporary choreographer Bill T. Jones's highly anticipated return to the stage in spring 2020, Jones reflected that COVID-19 was his "second plague." In referencing the AIDS epidemic that upended his career and personal life, Jones located methods of enduring not in the "unprecedented" present, but in the past. This essay considers the irreverent and buoyant Secret Pastures (1984), a work that reemerged as streaming media during the pandemic, as part of Jones's AIDS repertory. I describe how Secret Pastures' artistic and social archives, and the collaboration and friendship among Jones, Arnie Zane, Keith Haring, Peter Gordon, and Willi Smith documented therein, contain crucial practices of queer survival, particularly that of "alongsidedness." The essay argues that contexts for endurance can be found in the allegedly frivolous, glamorous, playful, humorous, and excessive aesthetics of Secret Pastures as much as they can be identified in, and more typically are ascribed to, more formalist, austere, and tonally serious works like D-Man in the Waters (1989) and Still/Here (1994). Modeling a toolkit of perseverance and flourishing, Secret Pastures reorients popular and academic views of minoritarian, particularly Black, and queer art and life as structured through trauma and scarcity. Secret Pastures shows how the onstage performance serves as a context for offstage friendships. Amid the ongoing hostilities of government abandonment, homophobia, white supremacy, and viral attack, art-making functions as a laboratory for modes of relationality that can endure.

„Korona neexistuje!": Humor ako komunikačná stratégia v čase krízy

The study provides an ethnographic probe into the lives of the members of the PCR test team during the pandemic of COVID-19. The aim is to show the use of humour as a communication strategy in times of crisis from the perspective of symbolic anthropology and ethnography of communication, especially theories of danger and joke. The approach of state health institutions have often failed to meet the needs of society, affecting patients' access to information, the treatment of diseases or the identification of positive patients. Humour helped to prevent the conflicts, signalled forgiveness and influenced attitudes towards adherence to the rules. We focus on interpersonal and interactional aspects of communication, social identification of the respondents, as well as the influence of political culture. Coping strategies are followed through: (1) representations of dirt and the boundaries of the body, (2) the recontextualization of the statements and acts, (3) the boundaries of the joke in relation to feelings of safety, and (4) the subversive effect of humour and flirtation in a time of the disciplining of bodies. The study demonstrates how laughter bridges the gap resulting from the conflicting informational inputs. The recontextualisation of the teams' motto: Corona does not exist! is interpreted in its socio-pragmatic dimension.

Memefying Crises in Romania and Japan: A Global Phenomenon Bearing Local Value

When faced with unexpected, traumatic events, such as crises, which can trigger fear and anxiety, people react differently. Depending on the type of crisis and on how affected they are by it, people can run in fear (flight), become numb, irresponsive (freeze), please other people (fawn), or stay put and deal with it one way or another (fight). In such cases, humour, irony and sarcasm appear to be a good strategy. As such, Internet memes are an example of a fight reaction that people have to crises, in which they resort to humorous, ironic, sarcastic texts / videos to deal with such unpredictable events that affect the world that they are familiar with, which become highly contagious (transmissible) on the Internet. By carrying out a qualitative analysis of a corpus of Internet memes from Japan and Romania retrieved from Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, which appeared in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and by looking at Geert Hofstede's and Edward T. Hall's cultural dimensions, the purpose of this article is to prove that Internet memes-though they are seen as a global phenomenon-bear some local value and transmit ideas, feelings, and beliefs specific to a culture.

News

This section offers gastrointestinal nursing-related news briefs as of April 2023 including constipation, bloating and diarrhoea in long Covid-19, role of urine test in reducing surveillance for bowel cancer, and information on the Great British Poo Taboo.

We Are (Not) the Virus: Competing Online Discourses of Human-Environment Interaction in the Era of COVID-19

Previous research has found that social media may be a particularly influential means of circulating ideologies about climate justice. In this article, we analyze social media discourses of universal human responsibility for pollution and ecosystem destruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, epitomized by the viral hashtag #WeAreTheVirus. We then examine three types of counterdiscourses that oppose misinformation and false universalization of human responsibility. These counterdiscourses include: (1) metadiscourses of ecofascism and racial injustice, (2) counterslogans that ascribe responsibility to systemic injustice rather than individual humans (e.g. "Capitalism is the virus,” "The system is the virus”), and (3) memes that parody the #WeAreTheVirus discourses (as in the sarcastic phrase "Nature is healing, we are the virus”). We demonstrate that the former two nonparodic counterdiscourses emerged in part in the comments of #WeAreTheVirus Tweets, while the parodic memes emerged in separate Tweets, which were a site of shared humor rather than controversy. We further demonstrate that, while both #WeAreTheVirus discourses and counterdiscourses have occurred relatively rarely since their period of virality and have broadened to a range of domains outside of human-environment interaction, counterdiscourses have nevertheless had a wide-ranging impact, increasing metadiscourses of ecofascism and permeating material landscapes through graffiti and signage.

Identifying Empathic Opportunities During Care Planning Discussions with Chinese Patients with Advanced Cancer and Their Caregivers (Sch434)

Outcomes: 1. Describe unique barriers that Chinese North American patients with advanced cancer face in expressing emotions and discussing future planning. 2. Identify empathic opportunities (ie, topics associated with emotional expression) during care planning discussions with Chinese North American patients. Introduction: Recognizing emotions in intercultural contexts represents a core competency in palliative care. Yet, a paucity of literature describes the types, patterns, and contexts of patient-expressed emotions during high-stakes conversations with patients from linguistically marginalized communities. We sought to address this gap by analyzing the emotional content during care planning conversations with Chinese patients with advanced cancer and their caregivers. Method(s): We conducted a secondary analysis of 22 semistructured interviews of Chinese patients (n=20) with metastatic cancer and their caregivers (n=8) recruited at one American comprehensive cancer centre. Informed by the Empathic Communication Coding System and existing literature, we conducted template analysis to code the transcripts for patients' and caregivers' expressed emotions. We also thematically analyzed the patterns and contexts in which emotions arose. Result(s): Participants were middle-aged (55.6+/-13.5 years), born in China (89.3%), 60.7% female, 85.7% partnered/married, and 89.3% college educated. Most of the interviews were conducted with patients alone (72.7%). Happiness was the most prevalent emotion (62%) followed by gratitude (43%), fear (43%), sadness (38%), anger (14%), surprise (14%), and humour (5%). When a caregiver was present, the interviews trended toward lower frequency of emotional expression. Regarding intensity, only one instance (anger) was categorized as most severe. Regarding context, emotions were only expressed in discussions about the past or present. Specifically, participants expressed positive emotions when discussing clinician attributes, symptom relief, and immigration to North America. Participants expressed negative emotions when discussing burdensome symptoms, diagnostic journey, the COVID-19 pandemic, and experiences with linguistic or cultural discordance. Discussion(s): Emotional expression during high-stakes care planning conversations with Chinese patients and caregivers may be infrequent and grounded in social, topical, and temporal context. Future work is necessary to understand how clinicians could best respond to distressing emotions during naturally occurring palliative care conversations with Chinese patients and their caregivers.Copyright © 2023

The Impact of Leader Humor on Employee Creativity during the COVID-19 Period: The Roles of Perceived Workload and Occupational Coping Self-Efficacy.

Based on the relief theory and similarity attraction theory, this study investigates the influence of leader humor on employee creativity through the mediate impact of employees' perceived workload, occupational coping self-efficacy, and employee similarity perception with a leader as a potential moderator. The data were collected through an online survey that included matched questionnaire data from 351 employees and their direct leaders in China. This study used SPSS 26 software and Mplus 7.0 software to analyze the data and found that (1) leader humor has a significant positive impact on employees' creativity; (2) employees' perceived workload and occupational coping self-efficacy mediated the positive relationship between leader humor and employee creativity; (3) similarity perception negatively moderated the influence of leader humor on perceived workload, and it also positively moderated the influence of leader humor on occupational coping self-efficacy. In addition to corroborating and expanding on previous findings regarding the relationship between leader humor and employee creativity during the COVID-19 period, the aforementioned conclusions also derive management implications for fostering employee creativity and reducing employee workload from the perspective of leader humor.

Laughing while Black: Resistance, coping and the use of humor as a pandemic pastime among Blacks

For centuries Africans were captured and brought to America in bondage and forced to forge a new culture. The development of a Black culture gave rise to humor as a coping mechanism against the oppressive state they found themselves in. For centuries, humor became a way to protest their conditions by creating various humorous styles that infused social political commentary on oppression as a sign of defiance, while also providing hope for the hopeless. This commentary seeks to introduce leisure scholars to how Black Twitter (Sharma, 2013) users' expressions of humor during the COVID-19 pandemic serve as a form of resistance to injustices and inequalities, while simultaneously adopting coping strategies to reclaim power and control in order to speak their truth all while cultivating individual and collective identity in/through leisure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Humor in the age of coronavirus: A recapitulation and a call to action

This article discusses the special issue of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research. This special issue reflects numerous opportunities presented by the pandemic for research spanning different cultures, outcomes, and disciplines/methodologies. The studies presented in this special issue include populations and material from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Poland, Belarus, Australia, and Israel. These articles examine humor in the form of memes, late-night comedy, and other media messages. In addition to instances of humor, the role of sense of humor was also discussed. The humor was discussed in various disciplines such as psychology, linguistics, communication studies, and folklore, and employs the many methods that accompany those disciplines. Currently, the research team is working to make this enormous data set available to interested researchers to explore the wealth of research questions, new and old, that can be addressed with this unprecedented global exchange of humor. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Humor styles predict emotional and behavioral responses to COVID-19

A correlational study (n = 180 adults) in the United States tested the hypothesis that self-directed humor styles predict emotional responses to COVID-19, specifically stress and hopelessness, and in turn predict engagement in protective behaviors. Results from a sequential mediation analysis supported our hypotheses. First, to the extent that people have a self-enhancing humor style they perceived less stress and hopelessness associated with COVID-19 and as a result reported engaging in more protective behaviors. Second, people higher in self-defeating humor style showed the opposite pattern;they perceived more stress and hopelessness due to COVID-19 and thus reported engaging in less protective behaviors. Implications for theory and application are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

The ethics of news media reporting on coronavirus humor

This essay explores the news media's portrayal of humor during the early phase of COVID-19-related lockdowns. Examining a collection of online news articles reveals the media tended to frame the issue as an ethical one (e.g., "is it okay to laugh at the coronavirus?"). After reviewing work on humor ethics, a qualitative content analysis of 20 news media articles is presented. Three issues from the news stories are identified, allowing comparison of the media's claims against the ethical principles articulated. The essay concludes with a consideration of how news media's coverage of humor fits within a broader pandemic narrative. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Washing the great unwashed: a history of British public hand hygiene

British and European public attitudes towards hand hygiene have evolved over time. Early examples of soap-like products date from Babylon around 5000 years ago, later probably passing along the silk route to Europe. A mixture of fats boiled with ashes were found in clay cylinders. In the fourth century BC, Hippocrates propagated ancient Chinese and Greek theories that epidemics spread via noxious 'miasma' particles. In the Roman Empire, Galen advocated health by balancing four humours (blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm). The Romans brought public bathhouses to Britain after invading in 55BC adding a social aspect to cleanliness, also bringing fresh water in aqueducts. Emily Cockayne's book Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England documents daily life in England from 1600 to 1770. Diarist Samuel Pepys reportedly rubbed himself 'clean' using a cloth. King Louis XIV of France reportedly took two baths during his reign, the first during his recovery from a convulsive episode. In the Middle Ages, 'cleanliness' focused on keeping up appearances. It was believed that white linen garments absorbed the body's impurities and cleaned the skin. People wore visible starched white collars and cuffs, to signal cleanliness and social superiority. British public attitudes changed during the nineteenth century, driven by discoveries showing a relationship between hygiene and health. Bulwer- Lytton disparagingly referred to the 'great unwashed' lower classes in his 1830 novel Paul Clifford. However, in 1837, Buckingham Palace did not have a bathroom. Bathing was mostly inaccessible, labourers would usually bath in sweat and were cleaned only on admission to hospitals or poor houses. In 1845, English dermatologist Sir Erasmus Wilson published a lay handbook called Healthy Skin. This was wildly popular and disseminated the health benefits of sanitation and clean skin. Public washhouses proliferated. By the 1920s handwashing was common practice in Western countries. Soap manufactures Lever Brothers launched a 'clean hands' campaign advising children to wash their hands 'before breakfast, before dinner and after school'. After the Second World War, bathrooms became widespread and home plumbing made village washhouses redundant and unappealing. Handwashing practices among healthcare workers have remained low, averaging 39%. Hand hygiene was at the forefront in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. The public were advised to wash their hands frequently, for at least 20 s each time. Will this be a landmark in handwashing history.

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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)