‘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.
Eleni Kapogianni
List of John Benjamins publications in which Eleni Kapogianni 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 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
2022 A delicate balance: Irony in the negotiation of refusals Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 10:2, pp. 288–314 | Article
This paper examines the factors that influence the outcome of exchanges containing refusals, focusing specifically on the role of irony. For this purpose, we analyse spontaneous conversations in English (SPICE-Ireland Corpus and Spoken BNC) within a discursive framework (Eelen 2001; Mills 2003;… read more
2016 The ironist’s intentions: Communicative priority and manifestness New Theoretical Insights into Untruthfulness, Dynel, Marta (ed.), pp. 150–173 | Article
This paper examines the ironic speaker’s intentions, drawing distinctions on the basis of two criteria: communicative priority (primary — secondary communicative intentions) and manifestness (overt — subtle — mixed — covert). It is argued that these provide useful insights into the widely… read more
2011 Irony via “surrealism” The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains, Dynel, Marta (ed.), pp. 51–68 | Article
The aim of this paper is to support the general hypothesis that irony is a non-unified phenomenon comprising different devices with different semantic/pragmatic/cognitive characteristics. The arguments presented here stand on the boundary between semantics, cognitivism and pragmatics, focusing on… read more