Open research questions in Humor Studies and Applications

What the literature leaves open

• Future research could explore the impact of specific cartoons on public perception, and examine the role of humour and satire in promoting safety culture within organisations. The findings reveal a significant level of concern among cartoonists regarding the prioritisation of occupational safety by authorised institutions, with a large majority believing that current efforts are insufficient.

  Humour and hazard · 2026 · DOI

• Future research is recommended to expand the scope by analyzing puns from multiple platforms or comparing different types of media (e. First, it is limited to a single Instagram account, which may not represent the broader usage of puns Elsa Ramadhana, Kismullah Abdul Muthalib and Yunisrina Qismullah Yusuf 163 across other social media platforms.

  A Study of Pun Types and Their Functions in Humorous Posts in Instagram · 2026 · DOI

• The greatest strength of the research was the continuous interdisciplinary dialogue and the exposure of researchers' interpretations to researcher triangulation. Another strength was the children’s perspectives of the original studies and the researchers' ability to understand humour as part of children's normal communication and life. One of the researchers (TS) has studied the humour of young children and brought trustworthiness to the interpretation of the material with her expertise. The contribution of one researcher (JK) was fully focused on researcher triangulation and allowed the data 260 L. Ortju et al.: Humour in studies with children Qualitative Studies 11(1), pp. 238-269 ©2026 and interpretations to be critically examined by an outsider to the data. By triangulation, we were able to find broader perspectives in our analysis and findings (Rothbauer et al., 2018; Carter et al., 2014). Given that the original data were not produced with this study in mind, there were some challenges in the secondary analysis and researcher triangulation. Transcriptions tended to focus on verbal communication, so sometimes it was difficult to ascertain whether something was intended as humour, as it was not possible to ask this from the research participants. In these cases, the researcher of the original study returned to check the situation from the raw data, where possible. It is unfortunate that the research permissions did not allow raw data to be shared with the other authors; however, we have shown that even in this limited way it is possible to reuse research data whilst upholding research integrity. Reusing and creatively combining existing data sets was also a strength, because it shows that humorous exchanges are quite common when using participatory methods with children, and we were able to study exchanges that naturally arose in authentic research situations. The variety of the research settings, methods and ages of the participants selected for this study was a strength, as it shows that humour can be used effectively in many different types of studies with children. The broad age range of the participants can be seen as both enriching as well as a challenge. Especially with very young children, we had many discussions about the difference between humour, fun and enjoyment, as not all situations that are fun and enjoyable contain humour.

  Humour in studies with children and its effects on the child-perspective research process · 2026 · DOI

• Both studies had a couple of notable limitations. Firstly, laughter samples were evoked in different contextual settings. Friend laughter was clipped from unstructured conversations between close friends (Farley et al., 2013); stranger laughter was sourced from conversa- tions between individuals who discussed amusing content with a partition between them (Wood, 2020); and posed laughter was emitted in response to simulating a vocalization in response to an amusing situation (Kamiloğlu et al., 2021a). The creation of a large database using a standardized protocol to elicit spontaneous and volitional laughter would be of great benefit to laughter scholars. In addition, we did not control for laugh duration, independence of ratings (with more than one laugh selected from some participants) and gender-balance in Study 1. Study 2 afforded us the opportunity to redress these limitations. In Study 2, due to time and resource constraints, we relied upon perceived contagiousness rather than behavioral contagiousness, yet this approach presented us with an opportunity to examine the association between perceived and actual laughter contagion, which revealed interesting insights. Furthermore, due to the goals of the research, we opted to emphasize behavioral laughter contagion as opposed to smiling, which has been studied in previous work (De Weck et al., 2022; Platow et al., 2005). Finally, the use of a binary classification approach (capturing the presence or absence of contagious laughter in response to each laugh) is potentially less sensitive than assessing duration or number of voice frames per laugh, but Murphy et al. (2025) recently demonstrated strong convergent validity among different thin slice coding metrics such as duration and frequency, providing support for our approach. Importantly, laughter contagion is not a purely automatic process. Laughter contagious- ness is moderated by a variety of factors, including ingroup/outgroup status, liking, moti- vation to affiliate, and context (Kurtz & Algoe, 2015; Mauersberger et al., 2022; Platow et al., 2005; Reed & Castro, 2021). Recent neurological and theoretical innovations call 1 3Journal of Nonverbal Behavior (2026) 50:87–114 110 for exploring these moderators with more rigorous methodological approaches. It would be fruitful to develop a more ecologically valid approach for evoking laughter, potentially asking respondents to recount emotion-eliciting stories of different valence and function. Ideally, this would allow researchers to control for sociality (i.e., having participants tell stories with or without the presence of others), and manipulate context (e,g., “tell a story in which you felt connected to others” or “tell a story in which you derived pleasure from the misfortune of others”). Gaps in the laughter literature present other clear avenues for future research.

  Laughter Contagion Varies by Laughter Type and Perceived Authenticity · 2026 · DOI

• Findings contribute to still under-investigated research of humor in gesture-speech incongruity in vocabulary explanation, particularly for beginning ESL learners and have practical implications for language teachers regarding implementing humor in vocabulary explanations.

  Humor in gesture-speech incongruity when explaining vocabulary · 2026 · DOI

• We suggest that perceived similarity increases laughter, but that laughter does not increase perceived similarity (at least in our highly specific conversational context). However, the present data are correlational, so future work will need to manipulate both perceived simi- larity and conversational laughter. Furthermore, it is possible that the null effect of laughter on post-conversation perceived similarity comes from a lack of statistical power or is spe- cific to the present, admittedly unusual, laboratory conversation context. The study design had several other limitations. Conversation partners were in separate booths to isolate their audio streams. The booths were designed to more closely mimic physical in-person conversation than traditional video conferencing platforms, as cameras were positioned to make participants feel as though they were making eye contact with their partners. Face-to-face interactions increase positive affect and feelings of social con- nection more than video-mediated interactions (Liang et al., 2024), so perhaps more of our dyads would have laughed and achieved greater feelings of similarity if they had interacted face-to-face. Future work should rule out potential confounds built into the friends and strangers conditions (e.g., strangers began the session with an icebreaker conversation but friends did not). Future work should also control for how long friends have known each other to separate the subjective feeling of being similar to another person—which can arise quickly based on superficial features—from the knowledge of similarity based on extensive shared history and social influence. Note, however, that other work found an association between shared laughter and perceived similarity even when controlling for friendship duration (Kurtz & Algoe, 2017). Future work should also measure perceived similarity after each Journal of Nonverbal Behavior (2026) 50:59–851 3 80 conversation (similarities and differences) rather than once at the end to examine whether the conversations temporarily shifted perceptions of similarity. Finally, future work should also see whether the present and related findings (e.g., Wood et al., 2022) generalize to non- college samples. College students from the same university have some inherent baseline similarity and shared identity. Studying other populations is also imperative because cul- tures vary in the frequency and function of conversational laughter (Bryant & Bainbridge, 2022; Ramírez-Esparza et al., 2019). The function and meaning of laughter likely varies across conversational contexts (e.g., Wang et al., 2016). We gave participants conversation prompts that led many participants to discuss potentially norm-violating topics: at least among strangers, it is uncommon and perhaps impolite to categorize another person in the service of identifying similarities and differences.

  Laughter Indicates Perceived Similarity Among Friends and Strangers · 2026 · DOI

• We presented SemioMeme, a multi-layer knowledge graph and dataset resource for internet meme analysis. The re- source comprises (1) a Meta Layer RDF knowledge graph encoding cultural relationships between meme concepts, people, events, sites, and subcultures; (2) a Corpus Layer linking over 500,000 meme instances to semantic context; and (3) FAISS indices enabling visual and textual similarity search with explicit bridges to symbolic representations. This architecture supports analyses such as tracing cul- tural associations that emerge through proximity rather than direct connection, identifying where meme format and meaning diverge, and combining semantic constraints with perceptual similarity search to make large-scale retrieval tractable for specific research questions. The complete re- source, including source data, construction pipelines and fine-tuned retrieval models, is publicly available to support reproducibility and extension. Future work includes integration with complementary re- sources like IMKG to expand corpus coverage, or incor- porating additional sources beyond KYM such as harmful meme datasets matched via similarity retrieval. Addition- ally, SemioMeme could be extended to include visual en- tity detection alongside OCR entity extraction, to identify 2929 occurring characters, symbols and objects within meme in- stances. Visual entity detection would link instances directly to Meta Layer context, enabling symbol propagation analy- sis. We omit this currently as accurate detection at scale re- mains cost-prohibitive but plan this as an extension as open methods mature.

  SemioMeme: A Symbolic–Subsymbolic Knowledge Graph Dataset for Multimodal Meme Analysis · 2026 · DOI

• Its strength lies in the fact that the Meme Breaker concept could be examined not merely at the level of abstract civilizational theory or general organizational theory, but in relation to concrete workplace communication processes. Third, the measurability of emotional selection pressure needs to be examined. In addition, while this study indicates the broad scope of the Meme Breaker concept, its actual analytical object was limited to a localized workplace environment.

  Meme Breaker: A Theory of Actors Who Reorganize Emotional Selection Pressures and Transform Local Cultures · 2026 · DOI

• The mechanism by which humour performs cognitive reappraisal to reduce perceived social danger and boost self-efficacy in emotionally charged scenarios (public speaking, presentations) is theoretically proposed but not empirically tested with direct measurement of self-esteem changes or anxiety reduction in students using humour.

  Lived experiences of humour as a coping strategy in higher education · 2026 · DOI

• The paper proposes implementing humour-based therapies and humor-infused peer support programs in universities but lacks specification of intervention protocols, outcome measurement tools, or empirical validation of how humour-based journaling and student-led meme sharing groups actually affect student mental health outcomes.

  Lived experiences of humour as a coping strategy in higher education · 2026 · DOI

• While the study found that digital media platforms enable humour-based stress normalization through 'laughing through the pain,' there is no systematic evaluation of how different digital contexts (meme-sharing groups, anonymous platforms, public social media) differentially impact the effectiveness of humour as a social buffering and resilience mechanism.

  Lived experiences of humour as a coping strategy in higher education · 2026 · DOI

• The paper distinguishes between aggressive, self-defeating, and affiliative humour styles in relation to their adaptive versus maladaptive outcomes, but lacks comparative empirical analysis between humour and alternative coping strategies (cognitive reappraisal, social support, mindfulness) in the higher education context.

  Lived experiences of humour as a coping strategy in higher education · 2026 · DOI

• Research was conducted with a small sample of undergraduates from a single metropolitan area, limiting generalizability; future studies must examine humour as a coping mechanism across varying student demographics (socioeconomic status, cultural backgrounds, academic disciplines, year levels) to determine contextual variations in humour effectiveness.

  Lived experiences of humour as a coping strategy in higher education · 2026 · DOI

• The study identified that humour may function as emotional repression when used excessively, yet lacks longitudinal data on the long-term psychological impacts of humour-based coping in university students, particularly regarding cumulative effects on mental health when humour is used chronically to mask emotional expressions.

  Lived experiences of humour as a coping strategy in higher education · 2026 · DOI

• What is a Muslim joke? While Jewish humour is a common topic for Western researchers (Davies, 1991), Muslim humour is underexplored in the Western academic field.

  On power and prejudice · 2025 · DOI

• The utilization of humor in foreign language classrooms has demonstrated positive impacts in terms of memory retention, information processing performance, and students’ positive perception of their teachers While numerous studies have explored humor in education, there's a gap in understanding the differences in humor usage between educators and students within the same classroom context.

  Bridging the Gap: Examining Humor Dynamics Between Secondary School Educators and Students · 2024 · DOI

• Thus, if the political nature of humour involves incongruity between conceptualisation and experience, abstract and sensory/objective, sanctity and profanity, dignity and baseness, acts that ironically enact these incongruities as existing in and between state-discourse and practice are deeply political acts and need to be studied as such.

  Laughing at the state: state violence and satirical acts of citizenship in the Afro-Brazilian diaspora · 2024 · DOI

• We mean, rather, to highlight dimensions of the meme that remain elusive, illegible, unspoken, and recondite, aspects of the meme that can only be accessed aesthetically, that require a critical aesthetic frame in order to come into view and disclose the significance of the meme’s characteristic modes of operation.

  Meme Aesthetics · 2024 · DOI

• This review offers some explanations for those conflicting findings, focusing on the methods and theoretical approaches used in those studies, and suggests a dynamic theoretical approach researchers in this area can take to get a better understanding of the impact of humor on acquiring information from comedic news messages.

  Funny You Mention It: A Synthesis of Published Research on Learning from Comedic Versus Serious News · 2022 · DOI

• However, the relationship between laughter’s affect and the comic remains a complicated one for researchers, with some maintaining that the two should be studied separately (Emmerson 2019, Parvulescu 2010).

  Affect philosophy meets incongruity: about transformative potentials in comic laughter · 2020 · DOI

• The study demonstrates different types of cultural conceptualisations (Sharifian 2017a, 2017b) that the interlocutors draw upon, such as cultural categories, cultural metaphors, and cultural schemas to create humour, and we argue that the General Theory of Verbal Humour does not account for culturally-constructed verbal humour.

  Towards a comprehensive theory of culturally constructed humour · 2020 · DOI

• The turn-by-turn analysis of the data shows how the teacher’s use of L1 as a source of humour resulted in smoothness in the interaction and helped in avoiding communication breaking down as a result of the students’ insufficient knowledge of the target language (L2) knowledge.

  The use of L1 as a Source of Humour to Facilitate Interaction in EFL Classrooms · 2018 · DOI

• Given the different effects of adaptive and maladaptive humor on social interactions especially on workplaces, contradictory findings of sensation seeking for forming new relationships, and salespersons' tendency for being demanded and suitable for more sales, it is important to investigate how sensation seeking and social desirability along with background characteristics predict humor styles.

  The Relationship of Sensation Seeking and Social Desirability With Humor Styles Among Iranian Salespersons · 2018 · DOI

• Although there are many countries in the world where children receive the performance of clowns during their hospital stay, yet few studies have been devoted to make a deep analysis of the effectiveness of hospital clowns interventions in the adaptation to hospitalization and in the acceptance of the disease.

  Uso del humor como método de intervención terapéutica. En menores afectados por procesos oncológicos · 2017 · DOI

• Specifically, the learning opportunities that racial comedic media offer in multicultural and anti-racist coursework is a particularly under-studied area, while research in this vein has great potential to positively affect pedagogies both within and beyond courses on critical multicultural education.

  "It's Okay to Laugh, Right?": Toward a Pedagogy of Racial Comedy in Multicultural Education. · 2015

Most-cited papers in Humor Studies and Applications

• Humor, laughter, and physical health: Methodological issues and research findings. · Psychological Bulletin · 2001 · 358 citations
• Humor in Advertising · Journal of Marketing · 1973 · 352 citations
• Identifying Global and Culture-Specific Dimensions of Humor in Advertising: A Multinational Analysis · Journal of Marketing · 1993 · 276 citations
• Elucidating the bonds of workplace humor: A relational process model · Human Relations · 2008 · 257 citations
• Registered Replication Report · Perspectives on Psychological Science · 2016 · 257 citations
• Humour as emotion regulation: The differential consequences of negative versus positive humour · Cognition & Emotion · 2011 · 219 citations
• The Effects of Incongruity, Surprise and Positive Moderators on Perceived Humor in Television Advertising · Journal of Advertising · 2000 · 208 citations
• The relationship between student perceptions of instructor humor and students’ reports of learning · Communication Education · 1999 · 167 citations
• When Does Humor Enhance or Inhibit Ad Responses? - The Moderating Role Of The Need For Humor · Journal of Advertising · 2003 · 134 citations
• Exploring the effect of humor in robot failure · Annals of Tourism Research · 2022 · 120 citations

Most recent work

• Statistically significant chuckles: who is using humour at scientific conferences? · Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences · 2026
• Laughter Indicates Perceived Similarity Among Friends and Strangers · Journal of Nonverbal Behavior · 2026
• Laughter Contagion Varies by Laughter Type and Perceived Authenticity · Journal of Nonverbal Behavior · 2026
• Humour in the Nazi camps: a defence against dehumanisation · European Journal of Humour Research · 2026
• Disciplinary Literacies Need More Joy: Shenanigans and the Aesthetics of Humor in a Playful Literary Community · Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy · 2026
• Sparking Innovation Through Humor: A Meta-Analysis of Leader Humor, Creativity Versus Innovative Behavior, and Contextual Contingencies · Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies · 2026
• Lived experiences of humour as a coping strategy in higher education · Muallim Journal of Social Science and Humanities · 2026
• Meme Breaker: A Theory of Actors Who Reorganize Emotional Selection Pressures and Transform Local Cultures · 2026
• Humour as a practice of everyday peace or division: an analysis of internet memes in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina · Peacebuilding · 2026
• Humor at work: examining frontline service employees · Management Decision · 2026

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