Programme

Willibald Ruch

Lecture title: Facts and Myth in the Psychology of Humor

Abstract: There are waves in modern psychological humor research but there are also classics. The newcomer to humor research has to work through piles of literature of different quality. There are some preconceptions from lay psychology that needs to be examinesd with scientific scrutiny. For example, are smiling and laughter qualitatively or quantitatively different, how many forms of “humor” are there, is it right that you either have a sense of humor or not have it and this is innate and can not be changed, Is humor an ability, a mood or temperament, virtue or world view etc. I will discuss some solid developments over the decades but also say where in my view we got stuck.

Biography: Willibald Ruch is Professor Emeritus at the University of Zurich. His research in the psychology of humor included personality perspective and assessment. Among the research topics were humor appreciation and personality, smiling and laughter, state and trait cheerfulness, a classification of comic styles, the fear of being laughed at, humor as a character strengths, humor instruments and online and face to face humor training. He attended his first humor conference in 1984 in Tel Aviv and started the International Summer School on Humour and Laughter in 2001. Willibald served twice as ISHS president, and in 2026 he received the lifetime achievement award by ISHS. He published several books and about 400 articles and chapters and works on editorial boards of journals and book series.

Joonas Koivukoski

Lecture title: Introduction to Political Humour Research

Abstract: Humour is deeply embedded in modern political information cycles and discursive power struggles. This lecture provides an overview of how media and communication scholars analyse political humour within contemporary media environments. Through a mix of theoretical frameworks, peer discussion, and an empirical case study, students will explore the primary functions of political humour in public culture.

Biography: Joonas Koivukoski (PhD) is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Helsinki, specializing in emerging forms of journalism and political communication. His 2022 dissertation examined political humour in the hybrid media environment, focusing on online advocacy and the intersections of satire and journalism. Building on this foundation, he recently co-authored research on humour-related scandals in Europe. His current work investigates war journalism, alongside forthcoming projects exploring political podcast audiences and the social stratification of comedy tastes.

Moira Marsh

Lecture title: Folkloristic Approaches to Ritual Humor and Everyday Humor

Abstract: To be added

Biography: Moira Marsh (PhD) is a folklorist and humor scholar, the author of Practically Joking (2015), the first serious book-length study of the genre. Most of her research concerns the audience reception of humor and especially on the phenomenon of unlaughter, and she has published several articles on various aspects of these topics. She is a well-known jackalope wrangler and the current President of the International Society for Humor Studies.

Kiki Hempelmann

Lecture title: Just Linguistics of Humor

Abstract: To be added

Jessica Milner Davies

Lecture title: Researching humour and laughter: considering cultural context

Abstract: Like other forms of human behaviour, the sharing, uses and indeed comprehension of humour are deeply affected by cultural norms and expectations. In any society, over time conventions develop about when, where, about what and with whom one should indulge in humour. Although it is not really accurate to do so, the results are often described as constituting “a national sense of humour”. However, the extent to which any individual shares such “national” norms is also a matter of personal and aesthetic preference (see Kuipers 2015 on highbrow, lowbrow and middle-brow “tastes in humour”). Thus both within and across cultures, there are marked differences affecting humour and humour research. Normally a slow process, the evolution of humour norms can also be rapid, driven for example by the high-speed exchanges of the internet society. Not all social strata adapt at the same speed. Contemporary humour is often therefore a bone of contention, cross-culturally and more narrowly. This lecture will explore such variables and how they should be taken into account in researching humour, its usage and its personal and social impacts. Both Western and Asian cultures will provide illustrations for discussion.

Biography: Jessica Milner Davis PhD FRSN is an honorary research associate at The University of Sydney, Australia and at the Centre for Comedy Studies Research at Brunel University, London. She is a member of Clare Hall, Cambridge and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales. Twice president of the International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS), she coordinates the Australasian Humour Studies Network and received the 2018 ISHS Lifetime Achievement Award for her interdisciplinary research. Her many publications focus on farce, satire and, more recently, cross-cultural studies of humour in European and Asian cultures. Her latest book is Humour in Asian Cultures (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2022).

Kay Brauer

Lecture title: Individual differences in dealing with ridicule and being laughed at: Gelotophobia, gelotophilia, and katagelasticism

Abstract: To be added

Biography: Dr. Kay Brauer is a post-doc at Prof. René Proyer’s lab the Department of Psychology at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. His research interests include dispositions toward ridicule and being laughed at, adult playfulness, and the Impostor Phenomenon. He has a particular interest in studying personality traits in social relationships.

Salvatore Attardo

Lecture title: Discursive Performance of Humor

Abstract: This workshop presents an overview of the studies on humor performance a.k.a., humor in discourse. We will review studies that address multimodal performance ranging from prosody, facial and other gestures, in a variety of contexts and settings, from dialogic to polylogal environments. We will also address multimodal textual studies (e.g., videos, memes, etc.) and multimodal critical discourse analysis. Key takeaways include how to conduct sound research and analyses in these contexts.

Biography: Salvatore Attardo, PhD (Purdue, 1991), is professor of Linguistics at East Texas A&M University. His books include Linguistic Theories of Humor, (DeGruyter, 1994), Humorous Texts, (DeGruyter, 2001), The Linguistics of Humor, an introduction (Oxford UP; 2020), Pragmatics and its applications to TESOL and SLA, (Wiley, 2021, with Lucy Pickering,), Eye Tracking in Linguistics (Bloomsbury, 2023, with Lucy Pickering,), and Humor 2.0: How the Internet changed Humor (Anthem, 2023). He edited HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research (2002-2011), the Encyclopedia of Humor Studies (Sage, 2014) and the Handbook of Language and Humor (Routledge, 2017). He is currently the editor of the Routledge Advances in Language and Humor book series. His latest book is Academic Writing Demystified: Publish and Thrive (Cambridge University Press, 2026, with Hilal Ergul, Elisa Gironzetti, and Heather Gerónimo).

Samuel W. Stull

Lecture title: Seriously Considering Humor as a Therapeutic Support for Addiction Recovery

Abstract: Humor interventions can increase happiness and reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety, yet humor's potential to support addiction recovery remains largely unexamined. I propose this is a missed opportunity, outlining that humor aligns with processes central to recovery: cognitive (e.g., psychological flexibility), reward (e.g., non-substance reward), and social (e.g., peer support, stigma reduction). Humor-based interventions could take many forms (e.g., cognitive reframing, digital comedy content) and be delivered in different contexts (e.g., mobile app, group therapy).
As an example of a mobile app context, I present the Humor and Addiction Recovery (HA!) app, which our research team is developing as a possible therapeutic support for recovery. I will also touch on key areas of needed research and challenges: heterogeneity in comedy preferences, individual differences (e.g., anhedonia, gelotophobia), and dynamic aspects of humor across recovery.

Biography: Dr. Samuel Stull is a Research Scientist at the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health at Dartmouth College. His program of research examines the role of positive mood states and enjoyable events in supporting addiction recovery on a daily basis, with a particular focus on how digital interventions can be designed to leverage these processes to improve outcomes. He is particularly interested in positive processes that may have a novel therapeutic role to support recovery (e.g., humor, curiosity). For example, his team is developing the Humor and Addiction recovery (HA!) mobile app to augment support in early recovery.

Sonja Heintz

Lecture title: Measuring the sense of humour

Abstract: When people are asked about their sense of humour, most will claim to have a really good sense of humour. But is this subjective claim also found when we actually observe people’s behaviour? Early humour research used jokes and cartoons and asked people to rate their understanding and appreciation and to write funny punchlines. In the 1990s, questionnaire-based approaches have become more popular, and are now the pre-dominant way to assess the sense of humour. Nowadays hundreds of humour measures exist, and researchers and practitioners alike are spoilt for choice as to which measure they should choose. This talk will give a brief historical overview as well as psychometric foundations (i.e. what makes a measure good or bad) and then present different ways of measuring the sense of humour for different research and applied contexts.

Biography: Dr Sonja Heintz is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Plymouth. Her main research interests are personality, humour (individual differences and measurement) and positive psychology (character strengths and well-being). She is a member of the Advisory Board of the International Humour Summer School.

Beer Prakken

Lecture title: Studying far-right humor: play, affect and ethnography

Abstract: To be added

Biography: As an interdisciplinary researcher, I am interested in the role of positive emotions and affect (especially humor and playfulness) in political mobilization and extremism. My research methods include philosophical conceptualizing, hermeneutics, ethnography, interviews, and qualitative data analysis. I hold a PhD degree in Philosophy from the University of Groningen. Moreover, I was a visiting doctoral student at Utrecht University and at the Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS) at Yale University, where I became a Pre-Doctoral Fellow soon after.

Delia Chiaro

Lecture title: Joking Globally: Lingua Franca, Culture, and the Mechanics of Humour Translation

Abstract: This lesson explores the complex challenge of translating humor, emphasizing that the barriers are not merely linguistic, but deeply rooted in specific cultural frameworks. In today's globalized world, where English serves as a lingua franca, Anglo-centric humor dominates mainstream media. However, non-native speakers often lack the cultural context required to fully grasp it. This ubiquity creates a bias, making translation essential for non-English languages to gain visibility on the world stage. While traditional research has viewed humor translation through a literary lens—focusing on equivalence and translatability, the expansion of humor into the public sphere has made it a crucial topic for media studies, advertising, digital humanities, and computer-mediated communication. Ultimately, teaching a robot to comprehend, generate, and translate context-dependent humor remains one of the most formidable frontiers in artificial intelligence.

Biography: Delia Chiaro is Professor Emerita at the University of Bologna and a leading humour scholar. She has published numerous books, over 100 articles and chapters, and regularly speaks at global conferences. Recent works include Playing with Food: Language, Humor and Disgust (with Debra Aarons, Routledge, 2026) and Comedy in Political Language: How Politicians Use Humour(Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026) and guest editing the 2025 special issue of the Journal of Audiovisual Translation. Delia has served as President of the International Society of Humor Studies (2016–17), and has organized three ISHS conferences (2002, 2022 and 2027) and three EU funded summer schools (Humour and Translation 2003, Humour and Gender 2004 and Humour and Conversation, 2005). Delia sits on the editorial boards of HUMOR International Journal of Humor Research; the European Journal of Humour Research and RISU Rivista Italiana di Studi sull’Umorismo and is affiliated with Brunel University's Centre for Comedy Studies Research. She is currently actively involved in setting up GRISU Gruppo di Ricerca Italiano di Studi sull'Umorismo.

René Proyer

Lecture title: To be announced

Abstract: To be added

Julia Rayz

Lecture title: From Computational Humor to Generative AI

Abstract: In the early 1990s, computational humor was motivated in part by the idea that humor is an AI-complete problem: if we could model the processes required for a computer to understand and produce humor, we could learn something about human cognition. As the field moved toward statistical and machine-learning approaches, performance improved, but those improvements did not necessarily contribute to our understanding of how humor works. Large language models represent another major leap in computational performance, but also an opportunity to reconsider that connection. Their linguistic competence and access to background knowledge allow them to analyze, explain, and generate humor in ways earlier systems could not. Yet much current research continues to evaluate models against humor datasets while making little use of humor scholarship. This lecture traces this trajectory and considers how theories of humor can help us understand and guide how LLMs reason about humor.

Ori Amir

Lecture title: The Fly Beats the Elephant in the Room: A Brain Imaging and Eye-Tracking Study of Humor Creativity

Abstract: Experienced comedians appear to create jokes by letting the cartoon suggest the idea, rather than by hunting for one. In a brain-imaging study, professional and amateur comedians and people with no comedy experience wrote captions for cartoons, sometimes aiming to be funny and sometimes not. Writing a funny caption drew on two kinds of brain systems: one involved in deliberate search and evaluation, and one in the temporal lobes that stores and links visual and verbal associations. Experience shifted the balance. Less experienced writers relied more on the search system. Professionals relied more on the association system, as if the funny link arrived with less eLortful steering. Stronger early activity in those association regions also predicted funnier captions. An eye-tracking study of the same task separates two ways of “paying attention.” Everyone looked more at the obvious oddity in the picture, “the elephant in the room,” than at ordinary regions, but comedians did so less often, and looking longer at that oddity did not make the caption funnier. What did track both expertise and funniness was attention to visually conspicuous details, such as strong contrast in brightness, color, or edges. A computer model of this kind of visual pop-out accounted for about 86% of where people looked. The fly beats the elephant. Together the studies suggest that funnier captions tend to come from spontaneous, stimulus-driven associations rather than from a deliberate search for ideas.

Biography: Ori Amir is an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science at the University of Chicago. A cognitive neuroscientist, he studies how the brain creates and understands humor, and how computational methods and AI can illuminate and replicate the creative processes behind it. His research combines neuroimaging with computational modeling to examine humor, creativity, visual perception, and moral cognition, and has appeared in journals including Nature Human Behavior and Cerebral Cortex. He received his PhD from the University of Southern California and previously taught at Pomona College. He was also a stand-up comedian.