Coming soon

This is just a brief heads up to THE VAD - What is THE VAD? You'll find out soon, stay tuned and keep checking the site.

Yes, this is not wholly unrelated to humour, it just seems that way because the site's not fully up and running yet.

In the interim, I'll tell you a joke:

What do you do when you see a space man?
Park in it, dude!

Kibology

Thanks to Russ for his comment on the previous post, I have added this new parody religion to the 'Links' section. It contains some quite bizzar humour.

Particularly interesting, I find, is that '[t]he faux religion aspect faded ... and the newsgroup became oriented to the sense of humor of Kibo and his followers' (thanks Wiki). I find it interesting that sense of humour is the defining element here.

I wonder if this is because all 'faux religions' are based on humour, or is this saying something more about charismatic people and their followers? Perhaps even Jesus' sense of humour is what kept him on the radar back in the day?

On second thought, other religious figure heads such as the Pope and Osama Bin Laden aren't exactly a laugh a minute. But then there's Father Bob, so I guess it all evens out....

Verbal vs Referential Humour

I include here for your consumption my recent (and slightly revised) 'PS' to a linguist friend:

PS. One of the main things that all/most humour theories seem to agree on is that there are two types of humour: 'Verbal' (humorous because of the language used) and 'Referential' (humorous because of the content) (there can also be humour which has both verbal and humorous aspects). This is particularly relevant to a cross linguistic study as some theorists suggest that the only way to distinguish between verbal and referential is to see whether the humour ('funniness') withstands translation (for instance puns, which are very language specific, rarely withstand translation; but a man slipping on a banana peel is considered universally hilarious).