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2003, Positive Living Newsletter
From: Wong, P. T. P. (2003, April). Humor and laughter in wartime. Positive Living Newsletter. https://www.meaning.ca/article/humor-and-laughter-in-wartime/
East European Journalof Psycholinguistics, 2023
The aim of the study is to identify Ukrainian social media audiences' preferences for humor styles to maintain/enhance their psychological resilience in different periods of wartime. Discourse analysis developed in the framework of social constructionism was used for collecting and analyzing data. We argue that 1) the preferences in humor styles is directly influenced not only by contextual factors and the duration of the stressor, but by the audience's psycho-emotional state and its intentions; 2) aggressive humor style is especially in demand in the period of adaptation to the traumatic event, but the audience can use its various forms depending on their effectiveness for a particular purpose. Thus, black humor is productive for emotional venting of negative emotion of anger and reducing of emotional distress; disparagement humor is effective for formation of collective identity and increasing of optimism; 3) self-enhancing humor style can serve as a sign of positive shifts in the process of adaptation to a psychologically traumatic situation, and restoration of the population's psychological stability; 4) self-defeating humor style is actualized in wartime as a form of adaptive humor, since it promotes a sense of community (belonging to a group) and identification through the experience of a shared stressful situation; and also positively correlates with self-esteem as a result of an individual's demonstration of his/her ability to maintain selfcontrol and to keep calm and carry on when faced with stressful situations.
Histories of Laughter and Laughter in History: HistoRisus, 2016
"When one envisages war, World War I in particular, one may associate with it such ideas as those of death, destruction, wounds and the annihilation of human beings. Yet, while war might be rarely considered as a merry event, it appears that humour, albeit often dark and self-deriding, was not necessarily absent even during one of the bloodiest conflicts in history. This chapter is an attempt to examine and reconsider the perception of World War I through discussing the theme of humour as a feature of vital importance to soldiers stationed in the trenches, based on selected examples from self-styled trench journals, songs and jokes. Although the theme of World War I humour still requires further research, this chapter endeavours to argue that it was indeed an essential and often determining part of a survival strategy that made service on the front lines at least endurable. It is even possible to observe a link between the development of humour in the trenches (with the humorous attitude often acting as a coping strategy) and the notion of humour as a tension relieving defence mechanism – a fact examples discussed in this chapter support and reinforce. While often sombre and mocking, the sense of humour developed in the trenches was probably one of the reasons why soldiers were able to handle the horrors of the war, further exemplifying humour’s role as a strategy fortifying endurance."
In Germany, the years of the Great War were a time for laughter. If we take a look at the production and consumption of goods that were designed to make people laugh – humour commodities – we get the impression that until November 1918 many Germans were eager to pay for papers, plays, or performances that promised a chance for laughter. By distinguishing and at the same time parallelising laughter provoked by conventional comic material and laughter about topics related to the war experience, I wish to promote a broadened view on the question of humour in wartime. One can subsume these findings under two different perspectives, a semiotic perspective and one which I call selfreferential. By semiotic I mean all the functions following from the semantic potential of funny texts.The paper contrasts this analytic perspective with a different reading; it is based on the assumption that generally humorous communication and laughter are used in everyday life for attaining goals that are partially or even to a great extent independent of the concrete semantics of the texts. One might call it a symbolic and selfreferential use of humour insofar as it aims above all at generating socio-emotional effects in the persons or the groups who laugh. To put it simpler: Laughing can be an end in itself, and it can serve as a means for mood management irrespective of its cause. The paper draws on analytical proposals by Mary Douglas, Max Weber, Anton Zijderveld, Willibald Ruch and others to elaborate on the idea of laughing in and at war as a selfreferential praxis.
The research on which this article is based, attempts to portray the role and function of humor during the period of the Holocaust and to examine what types of humor were used by the Jews in the Holocaust. The interviews were conducted as semi-open ethnographic interviews with 55 Israeli Jewish Holocaust survivors (31 women and 24 men), who were in their teens or twenties during the Holocaust and were imprisoned in ghettos, concentration camps and/or work camps and experienced or used humor. The main question in all interviews was: “Can you tell about humor during the Holocaust?” Humor was defined as “anything that made you laugh or smile.” Results yielded that humor during the Holocaust served primarily as a defense mechanism.
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