1This volume, co-edited by Shaeda Isani and Michel Van der Yeught, is essential reading for scholars with an interest in the role of interpersonal relations in shaping group identity and the dynamics of specialized communities. Stemming from the work initiated within one of the symposia held as part of the 15th ESSE Congress convened online from Lyon in August 2020, this project offers highly valuable insights into the study of humor “in and across disciplines” (p. xviii). Its inception was prompted by the observation that scant attention had been devoted to the examination of humor in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) at the time. Remarkably, while several research papers published in ASp do indeed touch upon humor as a lever in facilitating pedagogical approaches or incorporate humor as one of the relevant elements in specialized discourse analysis, few explicitly operate on the premise that humor constitutes a key component of the functioning of specialized communities. In conjunction with the volume’s co-editors, we posit that humor serves as a vital cohesive force in the discursive component of these communities’ operations, particularly in the analysis of the insider/outsider gatekeeping functions of professional communities. The eleven chapters in this volume are firmly situated within the encompassing framework of humor studies, providing contributions that intersect humor studies, linguistics and the analysis of specialized varieties of English (Resche 2013). As elucidated in the introduction, these contributions also shed light on the three primary theoretical approaches within humor studies, namely incongruity-resolution theory, which centers on “the ‘cognitive shift’ triggered by an encounter between the expected and the unexpected whether linguistic, cultural or situational and its subsequent cognitive resolution” (p. viii), superiority theory, of particular relevance in addressing power dynamics and workplace authoritarian humor, as it “gains particular relevance here in view of the omnipresence of hierarchy in organisational cultures” (p. ix), and the relief/release theory, which “fulfils the psychosocial function of releasing psychological tensions” (p. xi).
2The volume is divided into six parts. The first part, entitled “Court Jesters”, focuses on the legal professions, and brings together two papers. In “Legal Language through Humour: I Wish You a (Reasonably) Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year (Twelve (12) Months from the Date Hereof)”, Miguel Àngel Campos-Pardillos examines the relationship between humor and law within the context of English for Legal Purposes (ELP). The paper reinforces the hypothesis that humor can serve as a useful and efficient tool, purportedly enhancing students’ attention, involvement and creating a motivating learning environment. This research, aimed at fostering students’ awareness of professional culture and how legal professions are perceived across different national areas, was conducted during online classes taught during the initial COVID-19 lockdown and relies on a data-driven approach (Boulton 2016). It underscores the ease with which humor-based material can be collected, insofar as ELP is concerned given the widespread online availability of jokes, stories, anecdotes and “legislation of unusual nature” (p. 15), prompting an exercise centered on what the author describes as “legal myths” (p. 19). By directing students’ attention to a corpus of jokes, the ESP practitioner can make them aware of and challenge professional stereotypes and (mis)representations (Isani 2005). Finally, this approach facilitates the introduction of the notion of Plain English, as many jokes are based on the confusing nature of legalese.
3Shaeda Isani’s chapter, “‘He’s not. I am. You do.’: Bench and Bar Power Dynamics in Curial Humor of Common Law Cultures,” seeks to analyze the mechanisms of verbal humor in curial exchanges between the Bench and the Bar. This is accomplished through the comprehensive examination of a corpus comprising extracts from common UK, US and Australian courtroom litigation, as well as video and audio recordings pertaining to SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the US) debates, which include humor-related moves in Justice’s questions and comments. This aspect of judicial humor has received comparatively less scholarly attention than its written counterpart. Within this context, humor reveals instances of both empathy and bullying. The appropriateness of humor here is debatable, given the stakes for all parties involved, although it is arguable that humor could potentially alleviate the stress of the litigation process, via the use of puns for example, as an illustration of the incongruity/resolution theory. However, some troubling cases suggest that humor can perpetuate discrimination against women (p. 47) and the LGBTQ+ community (p. 46). Furthermore, the analysis clearly reveals a power imbalance when humor is used to implement a rapport managing function, as Justices “monopolise humorous interventions” (p. 42) and laughter is often perceived as the sole appropriate reaction to a senior professional’s jokes, notwithstanding the quality of said jokes.
4The two papers featured in the second part of this volume (“Humor in Uniform”) both examine humor’s role as a defense mechanism tool by elucidating the “cathartic properties of humor” (p. 65), aimed at mitigating anxiety-inducing circumstances generated by the daily operations of high-risk professions. Three distinct sets of data are taken into consideration in Audrey Cartron’s “Study of the Psycho-Social Functions of Humour in English for Police Purposes”: a literature review of humor within police studies, interviews conducted with British and American police officers, extracts from interrogation transcripts and police dictionaries, glossaries and memoirs. While humorous comments are occasionally used as tools for political advocacy in support of law-enforcement agendas, they consistently constitute integral components of police workplace culture, as it appears, for instance, in the adoption of informal, humorous acronyms (p. 75) or the specific role played by shared jokes as unifiers, or again the insider/outsider paradigm at work through professional rites of passage and collective memory building processes. The study reveals how humor operates at both individual and institutional levels, serving as a marker of socio-professional identity in the police force (p. 64). These findings parallel similar conclusions drawn from the analysis of the concept of specialists’ ethos in the blogs of French police officers (Connan et al. 2015).
5“US Military Humour as a Specialised Social and Linguistic Register” adds a stone to our knowledge of English for Military Purposes through research spanning almost two decades by Anthony Saber. The chapter focuses on humor aiming to “regulate […] relationships, build cohesion and develop a sense of belonging” (p. 95) within the military. The author delineates a fourfold typology of military humor, based on factors such as its origin, target and intended function, encompassing civilian humor pertaining to the military (e.g., barracks humor as portrayed in television shows and movies), civilian and military humor about the armed forces (e.g., to boost morale or for propaganda purposes), self-derogatory military humor (e.g., jokes about military food and lifestyle), and humor unique to the distinct subcultures within various military services. This framework allows the author to articulate the psychosocial functions of humor, including its role in helping group members cope with the demanding nature of their professions (e.g., gallows humor, often embedded in military jargon, p. 104), and in shaping and reinforcing group identity. Some instances of military humor may challenge established norms, group identities and hierarchies, particularly within contexts marked by inter-service rivalries or critiques of higher chains of command. Consequently, military humor can be transgressive, as it often reproduces negative racial, ethnic and gender stereotypes. Singularly, the fact that the top hierarchy accepts, condones and even adopts the extremely transgressive codes of military humor as a means of fostering cohesion and operational effectiveness may, in itself, be seen as a specialized element of this discourse.
6The third section of the volume, titled “Bankers, Brokers and Jokers”, delves into the role of humor within financial and economic contexts. In Laurence Harris’s piece, “My Word is My CDO-squared: Bankspeak Humour in the Governor of the Bank of England’s Mansion House Speeches”, an analysis is conducted on her corpus comprising seventy-four speeches delivered by Governors of the Bank of England (BoE) between 1946 to 2019. These speeches represent a fixed institutional genre with distinct aims, including enforcing trust in the monetary system (p. 135) by emphasizing the BoE’s goals of “performance, stability and independence” (p. 146). Following the famous definition of economics as the dismal science given by Thomas Carlyle, the reader might expect rather boring statements in such speeches, even though the genre itself and the cultural context—humor being supposedly an inherent element of British identity— suggest that the orator is expected to pepper their speeches with jokes, puns and paradoxical references. The study examines the forms and functions of humor, notably the release, incongruity and insider/outsider components of the general theory of humor (Attardo 2020). The extracts from the corpus illustrate a specific manifestation of oral humor, obviously echoing the typical humor expected of the public school white male British elite, marked by self-depreciation, understatement and cruelty (p. 136), coupled with references to classics and British literature, thus raising the question of whether such culturally embedded humor is accessible to the global secondary and tertiary audiences of the Governor of the BoE’s speeches.
7Michel Van der Yeught’s contribution, whose title is “Deciphering Insider/Outsider Humour in Specialized Languages: The Intentional Approach”, focuses on the mechanism of insider/outsider contrast-generated humor by pointing to the position of the linguistic insider, revealing asymmetry of information. The author suggests a theoretical framework to analyze the mechanisms of insider/outsider humor as a key element of an expert community’s specialization, based on his “intentional approach” (Van der Yeught 2016) to the specialized varieties of English. Two examples from British stock operators’ joking culture are used to show how linguistic insiders’ humor stems from the encyclopedic knowledge of each specialized community. As Harris and Van der Yeught have shown, economics can in fact provide a wonderful platform for humor, which also appears in the writings of economists. Margaret Ray (1991), for example, has focused on humor in the economic literature of the 1970s and 1980s and Erwin Dekker and Paul Teule (2012) on the “economics-made-fun” genre. We can also refer here to Paul Krugman’s 1998 recollection of how the Capitol baby-sitting co-op fell into a recession or the famous observation John Maynard Keynes made a hundred years ago: “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again” (Keynes 1923, Ch. 3).
- 1 <https://improbable.com/>
8Section 4 explores the realm of “Lab and Tech Humour”. Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) academic disciplines have historically operated within a framework characterized by the “publish-or-perish” imperative, where universities engage in intense competition for funding, and the visibility of research is paramount. This prompts questions regarding the efficacy of bringing humor into play to enhance the publication, readership and citation rates of scientific papers, as exemplified by the renowned Ig Nobel prizes. Ig Nobel prizes, awarded by the satirical platform Improbable research1, “are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative —and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology”. Thus, the question arises: Should STEM academics resort to humor when writing and titling their submissions to prestigious journals? Andy W. K. Yeung provides insight into this question through his examination of citations and social media metrics associated with all winning papers from the 2011–2020 period and concludes that “[t]hough originally intended to be satirical, Ig Nobel prize-winning articles were indeed impactful” (Yeung 2022, 98).
9In Chapter 7, entitled “Humour in Scientific Academic Discourse”, Larissa Manerko addresses a related inquiry from a different perspective. Her study of verbal and visual elements of scientific communication in various STEM fields through a multimodal analysis of humor draws upon cognitive terminology studies, which “‘presuppose the characterisation of conceptualisation and knowledge structure to whatever degree of precision and detail is necessary’ for the description of specialised linguistic and semiotic elements (Langacker 1991, 35)” (p. 174). Manerko analyzes a corpus comprising diverse manifestations of different genres, i.e., titles, embedded comic strips and graphical abstracts in scientific papers. Her conclusions underscore the nuanced appropriateness and subjective nature of humor, which may, for obvious linguistic and cultural reasons, be partly lost on highly internationalized readerships.
10Silvia Molina-Plaza adopts a similar methodological approach in her paper entitled “Funny Tales from the Sea: A Multimodal and Cognitive Approach to Humour in the Marine Engineering Context”. She deals with humor within the distinctive multicultural and multilingual professional milieu of marine engineering, where English as a lingua franca (ELF) serves for professional as well as social interaction. This context, often characterized by specific working conditions in confined environments such as ships or oil rigs, offers a breeding ground for affiliative humor, which leverages the insider/outsider dynamics to reinforce group cohesion. The author’s analysis of the interplay between color and text within a corpus gathering t-shirt jokes, cartoons and image macro memes about marine engineering self-representation highlights the critical role of the target audience, as the addressees have to interpret multimodal information for the joke to be effective. As the professional practice of marine engineers shares common patterns with the practice of military professionals in that they also work in “a total institution” (p. 91), the chapter’s findings resonate with Saber’s chapter on the armed forces.
11The first chapter of section 5, which tackles “Pedagogy and Stand-Up Comedy”, is authored by Katia Peruzzo and is entitled “‘Who Says Talking about Depression isn’t Fun?’ Exploring Targets of Humour in TED Talks on Mental Disorders”. It provides an innovative exploration of a traditionally taboo subject, which holds significant potential for research in ESP and EAP. The chapter questions the insider/outsider paradigm by examining the roles of the knowledgeable patient and lay expert, as conceptualized by medical sociologists (Prior 2003). TED talks, which represent a multimodal online science popularization genre, require scientists to make complex research findings accessible to a general audience, often through the use of humor and personal storytelling. In this context, the chapter interrogates the impact of status inversion in eight TED talks delivered by “experiential experts” on mental disorders. The fact that the speakers offer their illness up as an object of humor and laughter may be seen as a form of empowerment. The author investigates the key role of incongruity- and relief-based humor to facilitate knowledge dissemination in the context of a peculiar setting where humor is not spontaneous, as these talks are carefully planned speech events. A total of fifty-six humor-inducing units are considered, and the analysis centers on the specific targets of humor. The fact that these talks are given by former patients generates more balanced speaker/audience communication, where a narrative style rooted in pathos, personal experience, and informal register fosters proximity and connection.
12The second paper in this section, “Analysing Humour across Discourse Domains and Genres for ESP: A Corpus-assisted Analysis”, written by Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli, also draws on a multimodal corpus of ninety speech transcripts of free online academic lectures considered as valuable teaching resources for EAP classes due to their instructional and/or informative purposes. Using the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo and Raskin 1991) as its theoretical framework, this chapter examines the semantic and pragmatic manifestations of conversational humor across various disciplines (business and economics, law, health and medicine, science and technology political science and tourism). It seeks to assess the extent to which humor is used in these three distinct specialized genres to identify potential disciplinary differences. The detailed analysis of the forty-one instances of humor, encompassing disparagement of others, incongruity, self-deprecation, word play, anecdotes, teasing, black humor, laughter and humor mismatch, was conducted to identify humorous segments (including, but not limited to, episodes of laughter, as it is astutely noted: “we know that humour does not always result in laughter and laughter can occur for reasons other than humour […]” p. 255) and show a “certain degree of mismatch between the speaker’s expression of humour and the audience’s reaction” (p. 257). The paper highlights the fact that humor is more closely associated with the popularizing nature of a given genre, being more prevalent in TED talks (where it serves as a conventional marker of “edutainment”), than with the academic discipline involved.
13The final section of the book, “Marketing Fifty Shades of Nails”, consists of a single chapter authored by Isabel Espinosa-Zaragoza, titled “‘Green Come True’: Paronymic Colour Name Games in Marketing Nail Varnish”. In this chapter, the author examines the use of color names in the marketing strategies of cosmetic brands, with a focus on the American brand OPI. Situated within the specialized fields of advertising and marketing, this study can be categorized as a study in ELF, as specific color names contribute to the company’s global marketing strategy, which aims to promote product differentiation in a highly competitive market. We note that the complex hallmark punning in English (the brand does not translate) is often lost on the consumers of the global OPI market but nevertheless plays an important role in the catch-retain-recall objective which underlies all advertising. A key element of this differentiation is the renaming of the product as “lacquer” rather than the conventional “nail polish” and “nail varnish”, in alignment with the brand’s image, which is “related to the consumer’s perception and assortment of beliefs regarding a particular brand” (Nandan 2005 quoted on p. 278). OPI has sought to differentiate its products by crafting a distinctive brand identity that combines both visual and verbal features. In particular, the brand’s verbal identity requires customers to engage in cognitive effort in order to fully appreciate the humor embedded in product names. This is central to the overall brand identity strategy given the predominant role of online beauty influencers. It is in this context that the author provides an in-depth analysis of thirty-seven examples of OPI’s humorous product labels emphasizing the frequent use of puns based on paronymy, including homophony, polysemy or hyponymy.
14In conclusion, we can only recommend delving into this volume, as the use of humor in specialized discourse offers a valuable, original and insightful approach for grasping the specificities of professional and disciplinary specialized cultures through the analysis of humor’s cognitive, social and psycho-affective functions. Humor, as a fundamental and essential feature of certain professional communities, particularly those operating under stressful working conditions, can also be examined through diachronic studies: an example of this lies in the ongoing debate regarding the heritage classification of traditional pornographic murals in medical residents’ rest rooms in French hospitals. Additionally, this work provides new perspectives on the way we analyze gatekeeping processes at work in discourse, with the examples of the military, the police, and the judiciary, including Supreme Court Justices. Furthermore, the book explores issues of power and legitimacy, demonstrating how humor serves as a powerful tool in advertising whether nail polish or academic papers!
15A minor critique may lie in the limited range of professional varieties of English addressed. However, this critique may actually highlight the need for a second volume, maybe with a greater emphasis on cross-analyzing national and professional stereotypes, or by exploring new avenues of humor studies in the use of profession-based fiction (FASP) for EAP teaching and learning. Indeed, by focusing on the value of adopting the angle of humor in specialized discourse and culture when designing our EAP courses, we may fulfill our duty, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, of showing our students that humor is not the first gift to perish in a foreign tongue.