European Journal of

As the title implies, the volume aims to chart the points of contact between humour and the modern media. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first collection of essays concentrating on the interface between media discourse and humour studies. In the introduction, titled “Humour, language and the media”, the editors underline a number of research questions central to the history of humour studies and they briefly describe the two main approaches around which the research of the language of humour has spun: on the one hand, the structurally-oriented approach; on the other, the pragmatically-oriented one. The volume is divided into three parts and includes both core references in the field and up-to-date references. Part I, titled Responses to Mass Media Humour across the Disciplines, includes three papers and favours an interdisciplinary perspective, probing various approaches to humour in different contexts. The three papers included in Part I draw on written discourse data: forwarded emails, academic literature, Internet mailing lists. First, Particia Andrew’s contribution, titled “Laughter is the best medicine: Τhe construction of old age in ageist humour”, focuses on the identification of recurrent categories and cultural discourses used i