ACADEMIC RESOURCES ON HUMOR IN THAI

Resources in this section curated by: Johanna Lyon, Cathy Lee, Tung Tuaynak, Jermayne Tuckta, and Ken Ezaki Ronquillo

Forman, Ross. (2011). Humorous Language Play in a Thai EFL Classroom. Applied Linguistics. 32. 541-565. 10.1093/applin/amr022. 

The relationship between creativity, play, and language learning has been of increasing interest over the past decade, but the role of humour itself in SLL remains significantly under-explored. The present study examines humorous language play initiated by a bilingual EFL teacher and taken up by his post-beginner students in a Thai university setting. A framework of verbal art is adopted in order to locate this use of humour in relation to both language play and to creativity more broadly. Textual analysis draws upon the psychological notion of incongruity, as well as upon Bakhtin’s ‘carnival’. 

The verbal humour observed in this class is identified as having two foci: linguistic, relating to word-play, and discursive, relating to social positioning. For students, benefits to learning are recorded in affective, sociocultural and linguistic dimensions. In consideration of the teacher’s role, it is suggested that the capacity of humour to ‘unsettle’ requires careful handling.

Jaroenkitboworn, Kandaporn. (2015). Failed L2 Humor: A Case Study of EFL Thai Learners. 10.13140/RG.2.1.3468.9764.   

This research explored how EFL Thai learners failed to comprehend and appreciate English jokes. Participants in this study were 16 undergraduate Thai students. They were required to read 22 English jokes and reported their understanding and appreciation of each joke. After they finished the reading test, each student answered a questionnaire and then he or she was interviewed to answer some more open-ended questions and also to clarify some of his or her unclear answers in the questionnaire. The study results showed that there were three types of relations between comprehension and appreciation of the jokes which concern their failed humor. These are (1) incomprehension and no appreciation, (2) incomplete comprehension but appreciation, and (3) complete comprehension but no appreciation. Their failures can be classified into 4 types: failure to understand linguistic ambiguity, failure to understand socioculture, failure to process the joke text in the same way as the native do, and failure to join in the non-bona fide mode which is a mode of communication that differs from the normal mode that people are supposed to commit themselves to the truth. More importantly, the students in this study also revealed in the interview several interesting viewpoints toward English native cultures. 

This study is potentially relevant to our topic since jokes could be effective in helping the students learn at ease. The classroom at times appears to be learnable when comprehensible humors are incorporated properly. However, if the jokes are addressed in the class, and the students do not understand the pragmatic meaning because of the factors mentioned, it might cause confusion and hinder the students’ learning. To read this study, teachers and learners will be aware of the possible factors that might affect the L2 humor failure, and they can hopefully improve the more suitable materials for L2 pragmatic learning. 

Wangsomchok, Chantima. (2016). A Linguistic Strategies to Express Humor in Thai Context. International Journal of Social Science and Humanity. 6. 462-465. 10.7763/IJSSH.2016.V6.691. 

The main purpose of this research is to explore the ways that humor is expressed, taking into account linguistic strategies used. Speech act categorization, cooperative principle and implicatures are the frameworks applied in this research. The source of data for analysis is five Thai situation comedies. From a speech-act theoretical perspective, the findings demonstrate that there are six categories of humor-related speech acts: expressing condescension, boasting, blaming, threatening, satire and teasing. These strategies, on the whole, indicate that humor in Thai situation comedies is closely associated with an emotion of superiority and aggression created by the speaker. 

The study also shows that humor can be carried out by non-observance of the cooperative principle in two ways: violating a maxim and flouting a maxim. In the first case, the maxim was found to have been flouted and revealed instances of conversational implicatures. In the second case, furthermore, conversational implicature was generated, but as a result of maxim violation. What is peculiar to the findings of the study is that humor can be brought about by a speaker intentionally telling a lie to confuse the hearer or audience. Later, when the speaker reveals that he/she him/herself is held responsible for a maxim violation, laughter and thus humor ensue. Aside from this, there is only one example of humor-related conventional implicatures found.