Sociolinguistics of humor

Abstract

This chapter concludes the discussion of the performance of humor by addressing the variationist approaches to the sociolinguistics of humor. Among the topics discussed are humor and gender, social class, age, and the uses of dialects associated with humor. The chapter also considers the universality of humor, which is attested in all human societies, and the social constructionist views of humor as setting up an alternate “reality” in which the rules of normal social interaction are suspended.