Salvatore Attardo is a full professor at Texas A&M University–Commerce [1] and was the editor-in-chief of Humor , the journal for the International Society for Humor Studies from 2002 to 2011. [2] He studied at Purdue University under Victor Raskin and extended Raskin's script-based semantic theory of humor (SSTH) into the general theory of verbal humor (GTVH). He publishes in the field of humor in literature and is considered to be one of the top authorities in the area. He is also the author of Humor 2.0: How the Internet Changed Humor published by Anthem Press in 2023.
He was born March 14, 1962, in Anderlecht, Belgium, to an Italian State Railways employee and a Belgian mother, living thereafter in Como, Italy, until adulthood. He has been a permanent resident of the United States since 1991. He has one daughter, Gaia, born in 1994. Attardo is a native speaker of Italian and French. He has served on the thesis and dissertation committees for other humor scholars, including Christian F. Hempelmann and Katrina Triezenberg.
As a teenager, Attardo attended a High School specializing in Humanities (Liceo Ginnasio Statale Alessando Volta, Como) where along with fellow students he published a satirical magazine on the school life, its teachers and principal, called "Giravolta." In these early days, he was known by the nickname of "Pidou."
A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition:
A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry.
A punch line concludes a joke; it is intended to make people laugh. It is the third and final part of the typical joke structure. It follows the introductory framing of the joke and the narrative which sets up for the punch line.
Hans Henrich Hock is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Sanskrit at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Victor Raskin is a distinguished professor of linguistics at Purdue University. He is the author of Semantic Mechanisms of Humor and Ontological Semantics and founding editor of Humor, the journal for the International Society for Humor Studies.
Although humor is a phenomenon experienced by most humans, its exact cause is a topic of heavy debate. There are many theories of humor which attempt to explain what it is, what social functions it serves, and what would be considered humorous. Although various classical theories of humor and laughter may be found, in contemporary academic literature, three theories of humor appear repeatedly: relief theory, superiority theory, and incongruity theory. These theories are used as building blocks for the rest of the theories. Among current humor researchers, there has yet to be a consensus about which of these three theories of humor is most viable. Some proponents of each theory originally claimed that theirs, and theirs alone, explained all cases of humor. However, they now acknowledge that although each theory generally covers its area of focus, many instances of humor can be explained by more than one theory. Similarly, one view holds that theories have a combinative effect; Jeroen Vandaele claims that incongruity and superiority theories describe complementary mechanisms that together create humor.
Sandra Annear Thompson is an American linguist specializing in discourse analysis, typology, and interactional linguistics. She is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She has published numerous books, her research has appeared in many linguistics journals, and she serves on the editorial board of several prominent linguistics journals.
Masahiko Minami is a linguistics professor at San Francisco State University where he specializes in Japanese language and cross-cultural studies. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Japanese Linguistics and associate editor of Narrative Inquiry. He is also coordinator for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test for Northern California. In addition, he served as president of the Foreign Language Association of Northern California (FLANC) and President of the Northern California Japanese Teachers’ Association (NCJTA).
Jennifer Sandra Cole is a professor of linguistics and Director of the Prosody and Speech Dynamics Lab at Northwestern University. Her research uses experimental and computational methods to study the sound structure of language. She was the founding General Editor of Laboratory Phonology (2009–2015) and a founding member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.
Irmengard Rauch is a linguist and semiotician.
Laurel J. Brinton is an American-born Canadian linguist.
Karin Aijmer is a Swedish linguist whose research focuses on topics in pragmatics and discourse, including ways of expressing epistemic modality/evidentiality, pragmatic markers, conversational routines and other fixed phrases. She uses corpus-based methods involving both monolingual and multilingual corpora of English and Swedish for data. She received her PhD in English Linguistics from Stockholm University in 1972. She has been an associate professor in the Department of English at Oslo University and at Lund University and is now professor emerita in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Gothenburg.
Betty J. Birner is an American linguist. Her research focuses on pragmatics and discourse analysis, particularly the identification of the types of contexts appropriate for sentences with marked word order.
Ellen Broselow is an experimental linguist specializing in second language acquisition and phonology. Since 1983, she has been on the faculty of SUNY Stony Brook University, where she has held the position of Professor of Linguistics since 1993.
Deborah Sue Schiffrin was an American linguist who researched areas of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, producing seminal work on the topic of English discourse markers.
Felix Ameka is a linguist working on the intersection of grammar, meaning and culture. His empirical specialisation is on West-African languages. He is currently professor of Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Vitality at Leiden University and teaches in the departments of Linguistics, African Languages and cultures, and African Studies. In recognition of his pioneering work on cross-cultural semantics and his long-standing research ties with Australian universities, he was elected as a Corresponding Fellow to the Australian Academy of Humanities in 2019.
Ekkehard König is a German linguist and Professor Emeritus at the Free University of Berlin, specializing in linguistic typology, semantics, and the linguistics of English.
Susan M. Fitzmaurice is a British linguist. Since 2006, she has been professor and chair of English linguistics at the University of Sheffield as well as vice-president and head of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She works on the historical linguistics of English, specialising in historical pragmatics, socio-linguistics and computational linguistics. From 2020 until 2024, she served as president of the Philological Society.
Alexander Thomas Bergs is a German linguist and professor of English linguistics at the University of Osnabrück.
Ashwini Deo is a linguist who specializes in semantics, pragmatics, and language variation and change, with an empirical focus on the Indo-Aryan languages. She is currently Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin.