Taiwanese and Polish Humor

Download or read book Taiwanese and Polish Humor written by Li-Chi Lee Chen and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-23 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there a specifically ‘Taiwanese’ or ‘Polish’ humor? Do people from Taiwan and Poland share the same sense of humor? How is humor related to politics, religion and the LGBT community? These questions represent the starting point of investigation of this book. Some of the central issues explored here include: (1) how Taiwanese and Polish friends use various discourse strategies to construct humor; and (2) how different types of humor are employed on television variety shows to attract laughter. This book also provides an explanation of the prevalence of wúlítóu ‘nonsense’ in the Taiwanese society and how Polish ‘directness’ is reflected in humor. To understand how humor is culturally shaped and how it contributes to a talk-in-interaction, the three methodological approaches of conversation analysis, multimodal discourse analysis and interactional linguistics are adopted and combined here. This book will be of interest to both linguists and non-linguists who are interested in the social and cultural construction of humor.