A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Lecture - The Linguistics of Humour
3rd September 2026, 13:30
09/03/2026 13:30
09/03/2026 00:00
Europe/London
A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Lecture - The Linguistics of Humour
Speaker: Martin Edwardes Humans are strange animals We are not the only animals to laugh; chimpanzees and bonobos also relieve their tensions with a panting mechanism (which is all that laughing really is) However, humans use laughter in ways that indicate that we find a lot more things funny than the other apes do; and a lot of that extra humour comes from our other great communicative invention, language This talk looks at linguistic humour, finding it to be more complex that being funny, but less complex than being informative Why do humans seek out ways of being funny? Why do we celebrate humour and humorous people?And why do we treat verbal humour as a structured system with its own forms and traditions?After this lecture you will understand a bit more about being funny, and hopefully you'll have some ideas about why we humans find verbal humour so entertaining (talk starts at 2pm)
Speaker: Martin Edwardes
Humans are strange animals. We are not the only animals to laugh; chimpanzees and bonobos also relieve their tensions with a panting mechanism (which is all that laughing really is).
However, humans use laughter in ways that indicate that we find a lot more things funny than the other apes do; and a lot of that extra humour comes from our other great communicative invention, language.
This talk looks at linguistic humour, finding it to be more complex that being funny, but less complex than being informative.
Why do humans seek out ways of being funny?
- Why do we celebrate humour and humorous people?
- And why do we treat verbal humour as a structured system with its own forms and traditions?
- After this lecture you will understand a bit more about being funny, and hopefully you'll have some ideas about why we humans find verbal humour so entertaining.
(talk starts at 2pm)
