Why So Serious?: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Humour and Play in Satirical Discourse

Satire blends verbal irony, humor, and parody into a subtle critique, usually aimed towards a social or political wrong. Satirical language and media have been studied by a wide range of academic disciplines, including literary studies, media and cultural studies, mass communications, and various linguistic approaches (corpus, psycholinguistic, and computational). This broad interest in satire has led to divergent definitions and understandings of satire. The goal of this book is to wrangle these different empirical and theoretical perspectives into one place. Rather than arguing wholly for or against any one approach, this book highlights the ways in which these approaches complement each other and contribute to a greater understanding into the nature of satire. In doing so, an argument is advanced that satirical discourse can also be viewed as a various forms of play, which may serve as a useful criterion along which to discuss disciplinary variation associated with satire. In all, this book highlights the scholarly benefits of taking a serious look at the playful side of satire.

Stephen Skalicky, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.