‘Only joking’: Negotiating offensive humour in interaction
Edited by Chi-Hé Elder, Eleni Kapogianni and Ibi Baxter-Webb
Special issue of Pragmatics & Cognition 32:1 (2025) v, 260 pp.
Chi-Hé Elder
List of John Benjamins publications in which Chi-Hé Elder is involved.
Title
2026 Fragile men and fishy arguments: Attributing and disputing offence in online interaction Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict: Online-First Articles | Article
What happens when someone tells you that you are offended, even though you do not feel offended yourself? Contested attributions of offence provide an interesting testing ground for how one’s feelings of offence can diverge from how offence is displayed in interaction. In this paper, we consider… read more
2025 “I never said that”: Negotiating misunderstandings in police interviews Pragmatics and Society 16:2, pp. 174–200 | Article
Police interviewers in England and Wales engage in the practice of investigative interviewing that is based on obtaining neutral, institutionally accepted account from suspects. This involves a process not only of eliciting information from suspects, but also of managing the interview by… read more
2025 Offensive humour: Theoretical and practical challenges ‘Only joking’: Negotiating offensive humour in interaction, Elder, Chi-Hé, Eleni Kapogianni and Ibi Baxter-Webb (eds.), pp. 1–7 | Introduction
2025 The joke and the joker: Ascribing accountability for offensive humour in stand-up comedy ‘Only joking’: Negotiating offensive humour in interaction, Elder, Chi-Hé, Eleni Kapogianni and Ibi Baxter-Webb (eds.), pp. 39–68 | Article
The ongoing and divisive discourse regarding the use of offensive humour in stand-up comedy is taking place both off-stage and on-stage: comedians use jokes that target sensitive characteristics ostensibly to show that no topic is ‘off limits’, while also taking a stance against those who argue… read more