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CELSA - Humour in Europe

CELSA Research Fund project

In today’s media-saturated European societies, humour often takes centre stage in social conflicts. Humour and satire are widely recognised as a key manifestation of the freedom of speech. At the same time, humorous expression is increasingly disputed, condemned, and even censored. This project aimed to study the relation between humour and social conflict: first, to explore how humorous communication expresses protest, persuasion, cohesion or aversion; and second, to research how and when humorous communication is met with indignation or retaliation. To do this, we have conducted an analysis of humour in public controversies, which allowed us to understand how the humorous “mode” contributes to or alleviates public conflicts, as well as affects the public understanding of such conflicts. 

Project description

CELSA Alliance project "Humour and Conflict in the Public Sphere: An interdisciplinary analysis of humour controversies and contested freedoms in contemporary Europe" focused on humour triggered by controversial events in Estonia, Belarus, Poland, and Belgium in 2022–2024. The researchers in partner institutions of Catholic University of Leuven, the University of Tartu and the Jagiellonian University identified 9 events that provoked humour in the public spheres of these countries. Most of the events provoked humour in single countries, but one event - Wagner group rebellion - triggered humorous expressions across three of the countries, namely, Estonia, Belarus and Poland. The material was collected in six  languages (Belarusian, Dutch, English, Estonian, Polish, Russian).
The interdisciplinary project team collected 50 humorous items per event (550 items in total) and coded them according to several categories:
  • genre/s;
  • medium (verbal/visual/both); 
  • communication style (direct/indirect; overstatement/understatement); 
  • rhetorical format;
  • humour mechanisms (humorous stereotype, sexual innuendo, status reversal or challenging, transgression, grotesque, juxtaposition of text and image, parody, caricature, ambiguity, exaggeration, irony, recontextualization, word play).
They have also selected 25 most commented items out of 50 per event and coded the comments to those items in terms of their: 
  • humorousness (humorous, non-humorous, unlaughter, unclear);
  • assessment of humorous items (positive, negative, neutral, unclear);
  • format (verbal, emoticons, images, gifs, combination);
  • presence/absence of meta-comments and meta-linguistic comments.

Practical information

A multiple choice Qualtrics survey  was used to code the data on the humour scandals that have been collected.
The results of the project are available online in the form of a database.
Project Funder: Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds, Program: CELSA Research Fund Project code: 3H220340, Reference: CELSA/22/007
This project has prepared the ground for HUMLIT,  a more extensive study of the role of humour in the public sphere across Europe, which brings together scholars from a range of European nations into a larger consortium.