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Article published In: ‘Only joking’: Negotiating offensive humour in interaction
Edited by Chi-Hé Elder, Eleni Kapogianni and Ibi Baxter-Webb
[Pragmatics & Cognition 32:1] 2025
► pp. 208–232

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“We could shoot him…”

Interpretations of offensive humour

ORCiD logo with link | University of Gothenburg
 | University of Gothenburg
 | University of Gothenburg
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Gothenburg.

Published online: 26 September 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.24028.how
Abstract
In everyday dialogue, people often say things that may be or are taken as offensive by their hearers. Whether or not these utterances are actually taken as offensive is highly context sensitive. Particularly important are social aspects such as the personae of the speaker and audience. Different groups of listeners have access to — and indeed embrace — different background assumptions and entertain different attitudes with regard to these. We consider such assumptions to be Aristotelian topoi and a set of topoi significant for a particular group in a particular context to be a topoplex. In this paper we present three real world examples of supposedly humorous and potentially offensive utterances. Our analysis is compatible with an established theory of dialogue semantics which formalises topoi as mechanisms for common sense reasoning that arise from specific interactional experiences.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background and related work
    • 2.1Reasoning in interaction
    • 2.2Social context and topoi
    • 2.3Offensive humour
  • 3.Topoi-based analysis
    • 3.1We could shoot him
    • 3.2Alla mina kamrater
    • 3.3Helg seger!
  • 4.Future steps
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (54)
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