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Deaf Humor and Sign Language Humor - Coggle Diagram
Deaf Humor and Sign Language Humor
What is Humor For?
Humor provides pleasure, fun, and laughter.
Creates a bond between the jokester and audience that is socially and intellectually satisfying for everyone.
Can help people relax and make light of difficult situations but is also useful for social control, ridiculing behavior that is socially disproved of, in the hope that it will change their behavior.
Conceptual humor often draws on the idea of ‘the in group’ and ‘the out group’.
In deaf and sign language humor ‘us’ often means deaf people.
International Deaf Humor
Jokes generally spread around the world rapidly, but perhaps the specific nature of deaf humor allows it to spread especially rapidly around deaf communities because it draws on the shared experiences of deaf people anywhere.
Deaf humor spreads internationally through personal contact or the internet.
Humor often has specific national characteristics but a joke told in one sign language can be adapted and naturalized for each country and represented in each national sign language, so that the origins of the joke are harder to determine.
What Makes Deaf People Laugh?
Deaf humor is driven by the dominant visual experience of deaf people.
Deaf people draw upon humor traditions in the wider society, too, because there is plenty of visual humor that makes deaf people and hearing people laugh together.
Deaf and hearing people often find the same concepts funny, and may jokes translate well from a signed to a spoken language, and vice versa.
However, conceptual jokes often draw on cultural references that may not be easily accessible to people from different cultures.
Taboo
Humor often allows a space for discussion of otherwise taboo topics and there are plenty of examples in deaf humor of dirty jokes, racist, sexist, and homophobic jokes, or those mocking disabled people or other deaf people who are different from the deaf person signing the humor.
There are many jokes in which hearing people as a group are the butt of the humor and these can be controversial.
Sign Language Humor
Although conceptual humor can show considerable linguistic creativity, in sign language humor, the impact comes especially from the linguistic form so that if it is phrased in any other way, the humor is lost.
There are several ways in which sign language humor can be delivered, including changing the internal sign structure, meta linguistic play on signs, exaggerated facial expressions, manipulation of speed and size of signing, and anthropomorphism.
Bilingual Humor
Most signers have bilingual skills and they can draw on spoken languages for bilingual humor.
It is also fun and satisfying to play with two languages at the same time.
Fingerspelling is used to represent written words, so signers who use it are, by definition, referring to another language.
As well as playing with the form of written words, signers can make bilingual puns using loan translation.
The manual alphabet can be a source of bilingual humor in several ways.
These can be riddles, requiring the audience to guess the spoken language word from the sign, but can also be made openly so everyone can share the humor.
Linguistic humor in sign language only makes sense in its visual modality, so it is lost in translation into spoken language.