Pre-Conference
Download the pre-conference schedule.All events are scheduled in Central Time (CST/CDT, UTC/GMT -6; the same time zone as Dallas, TX, for reference).
The Zoom link(s) for these sessions and workshops will be provided below shortly before the dates. You will also receive them via the email address you used when registering for the conference.
9:00 am - 10:30 am
In this workshop the General Theory of Verbal Humor, introduced by Attardo and Raskin (1991) is introduced in a step-by-step format, that assumes no prior knowledge. The various Knowledge Resources are explained, along with the more general scope and aims of the theory. Some attention will also be dedicated to recent developments of the GTVH (such as multimodality) and to applications outside of a strict linguistic domain (e.g., memes). The workshop is suitable for beginning and intermediate learners.
10:30 am - 12:00 pm
This session is reserved for new presenters who want to practice sharing their slides and testing their equipment.
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
The purpose of this workshop is to show how to leverage the GTVH in empirical research. The workshop will provide an overview of the research process from data collection to publication and review best practices throughout the process. The target audience are PhD students and other scholars wanting to understand how to best use the GTVH to conduct empirical research. Topics covered will include 1) Gathering data that are relevant to your research question; 2) Formatting your data for computer processing; 3) Identifying humor through triangulation; 4) The GTVH’s Knowledge Resources (KRs): coding each KR, establishing factors. 5) Similarity evaluation using the GTVH. 6) Inter-rater reliability measures: Cohen’s/Fleiss’ Kappa, Krippendorf’s Alpha, and their implementation in R. 7) Writing up your study and getting it published. 8) Pre-registering your study; is it worth it?
While the orientation of the workshop is more toward quantitative and mixed methods, it will be useful also for qualitative research. A minimum of knowledge of the GTVH is assumed (beginners are encouraged to attend both workshops).
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
This session is reserved for new presenters who want to practice sharing their slides and testing their equipment.
9:00 am - 10:30 am
The Joke-like Incongruity Gathering System (JIGS) is a tool meant to operationalize the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH). It combines a user-friendly interface with a set of tags borrowed from Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo’s Knowledge Resources (KR) and a handbook that provides strict instructions for annotating joke-like incongruities in texts. During this workshop, participants will learn how to install and run the JIGS on their computers, and how to use it on texts in order to tag segments and gather quantitative data. The JIGS was developed by Anne-Sophie Bories, Nils Couturier, and Petr Plechác during the Swiss National Foundation-funded project « Le Rire des vers / Mining the Comic verse ».
10:30 am - 12:00 pm
Humor is a tool of subversion. Comedy makes it possible to take distance from what is named; it make possible to speak, represent, and present from a critical standpoint. Laughter works as a tension reliever, as a distorted reflection of reality, where in the very deformation of its figures, recognition—and therefore reflection—is possible. It also functions as an active mechanism that uses conventions while simultaneously dismantling them. Throughout history, comedy has played a main social role, especially in times of change and conflict. Its ability to analyze and comment reality has been its greatest strength—and also the reason it has often been judged. Comedy has been banish to a secondary or lesser place within cultural, academic, and power spheres. The fear provoked by comedy’s disruptive potential has led to a desire for control over those who use it and to the denigration of artistic practices associated with the genre. Today’s performing arts scene includes key figures who use comedic resources in their work and have gained recognition, acceptance, and connection with contemporary audiences. However, an invisible but persistent cloud of judgment still hangs over these practices. Therefore, this proposal encourages reflection, analysis, and practical engagement that highlights comedy’s qualities and sociocultural benefits, offering an alternative view.
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
In this PowerPoint-driven workshop, filled with anecdotes, videos, and practical illustrations, we will explore the theoretical underpinnings, rationale, and application of the conscious and purposeful use of humor to facilitate health and wellness. The presentation will include a model that provides a solid rationale and guide for the use of humor. We “know” humor is great medicine, but do you understand what makes it great medicine? Can you explain what humor actually does to promote health and wellness? Most humor professionals are aware of the physiological benefits of laughter, which include stress reduction, pain reduction, lowered blood pressure, an increase in specific antibodies, and some other changes. However, these changes are fleeting and may or may not result in long-term benefits. In addition to the physical experience of laughter there are psychological benefits of humor that are often overlooked, these include: “mirth” (the emotional experience of humor); “wit” (the cognitive experience of humor); and “relational fusion” (the social experience of humor). We will examine both the physical and psychological impacts of each of these healing aspects of humor.
1:30 pm - 3:00 pm
The construction of assessments for humor requires systematic methodological procedures consistent with established standards in test development. This workshop offers a technical overview of the main considerations involved in designing and validating such instruments and serves as a concise methodological primer for researchers and students. Standard psychometric validation procedures will be explained and demonstrated with concrete examples. Reliability will be examined at multiple levels, including internal consistency (from alpha to omega coefficients) and interrater agreement for scoring components that involve qualitative judgment. Validity will be addressed in two principal forms. Content validity will be developed through theoretically guided item specifications, drawing for example on the General Theory of Verbal Humor. Construct validity will be evaluated against established measures in humor research as well as pragmatic and linguistic assessment. As part of construct validation, test dimensionality will be explored through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Measures of discriminatory power will also be introduced, using contingency tables and receiver operating characteristic analyses to illustrate the sensitivity of a test to humor related difficulties within the broader field of pragmatic disorders. Examples from published studies, including the Phonological and Mental Jokes test and instruments within the APACS family of pragmatic batteries, will be used to highlight methodological choices and common challenges in humor test development. Practical aspects such as coding structures, scoring procedures, and basic analytical workflows will be demonstrated using R. Only minimal prior experience with R is assumed, and all psychometric concepts will be accessible to participants without a coding background.
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
This workshop explores the strange cultural gravity of cringe—a sensation both repellent and irresistible and examines why it has become one of the defining emotional experiences of contemporary media. From TikTok duet-stitches to YouTube reaction channels, cringe content has evolved into a massively consumed genre that blends humor, discomfort, empathy, and social judgment. But beneath the laughter and secondhand embarrassment lies a complex set of psychological, cultural, and evolutionary mechanisms that deserve deeper scholarly attention. Workshop participants will investigate parasocial cringe within digital platforms, analyzing how creators and audiences negotiate vulnerability, authenticity, and performative failure. Papers might explore why viewers form quasi-intimate relationships with creators whose awkwardness becomes central to their appeal, or how cringe operates as a ritual of digital spectatorship. Other contributions may examine the evolutionary roots of embarrassment and laughter, considering how cringe responses once functioned as survival tools in early social groups—signals of norm enforcement, prosociality, and emotional intelligence. Another thread will analyze cringe as a form of social bonding. Despite its discomfort, cringe humor often strengthens group identity, providing a shared language for navigating awkwardness, vulnerability, and social risk. This workshop welcomes work that connects these phenomena to broader questions of humor theory, digital ethnography, and affect studies. By centering the psychological, cultural, and technological dimensions of cringe, this workshop aims to illuminate why we recoil, why we laugh, and why we keep watching. In a media ecosystem that thrives on vulnerability and spectacle, cringe is more than a feeling—it’s a cultural force.
4:30 pm - 6:00 pm
NEUROpsychological GESture (NEUROGES) System is a comprehensive coding system for nonverbal behaviors based on fine-grained behavioral units. It enables a systematic investigation of the relationship between nonverbal behavior and cognitive, emotional, and interactive processes. So far, NEUROGES has been primarily applied in neuropsychology, psychodiagnostics, and therapist-patient interaction. It is increasingly used in studies of dance, sports performance, emotion self-regulation, and cross-cultural behavioral variations. NEUROGES is also a useful coding tool for humor research. It can be applied to examine gestural patterns in humorous communication, such as personality-related differences in gesture use during humor production, gestural features when participants reenact fictional characters or previous experiences, and trunk and head movements that stand-up comedians employ to organize conceptual space during performance. Such analyses contribute to a more fine-grained understanding of the multimodal dimension of humor. NEUROGES is convenient to use, because it allows flexible adaptation to diverse research designs, because the coding algorithms enable researchers to select specific body parts and categories. Having obtained NEUROGES certification in 2024, I plan to apply it to an empirical study of gestures in Chinese stand-up comedy. In this workshop, I will briefly introduce the NEUROGES system, offering an outline of its three modules and seven basic categories. Next, I will present a seven-second video segment as a sample unit to demonstrate how these modules and categories can be applied to the fine-grained annotation of hand gestures. Subsequently, I will discuss how to apply coding algorithms to empirical humor studies. Finally, I will address the limitations of NEUROGES system and conclude with an overview of the remote training process.