Offensive humour: Theoretical and practical challenges

Elder, Chi-Hé, Kapogianni, Eleni and Baxter-Webb, Ibi (2025) Offensive humour: Theoretical and practical challenges. Pragmatics & Cognition, 32 (1). pp. 1-7. ISSN 0929-0907

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Abstract

In this special issue, we view ‘offensive humour’ as a purposefully broad, catch-all category that includes teasing, sarcasm, put downs and jocular insults (e.g., Dynel & Sinkeviciute 2021). While both ‘offence’ and ‘humour’ are notoriously difficult to define, across the papers in this collection we find the common threads that identify offensive humour are (a) a speaker’s (assumed) intent to amuse, and (b) recipients’ judgements or reactions to the humour as offensive. Crucially, offensive humour typically focuses on attempts to produce amusement through a seemingly faux negative attitude towards some target but without claimed malicious intent, differentiating offensive humour from insults proper, which purposefully — or at least overtly — seek to offend (cf. Dynel & Poppi 2020).

Item Type:	Article
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Media, Language and Communication Studies
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	23 Oct 2025 15:31
Last Modified:	23 Oct 2025 15:31
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/100752
DOI:	10.1075/pc.00048.eld

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