No Laughing Matter: Boundaries of Gender Based Humour in the classroom

As personified in jokers, fools and clowns, humour is an integral part of human history [44]. Humour can lighten what might otherwise be dull, tense or tedious situations. Common definitions of humour emphasize "amusement" and "laughter," implying some form of benign diversion. But recent research suggests that jokes are not "events" that are funny--or harmful--as such. Rather, joking entails a dynamic process where the characteristics of the joke teller and the audience interact with the embedded meaning of the joke. It is the interactions among these factors which determine whether efforts to be funny are acceptable or not [26,40,42]. The present study employs a power-based approach to examine how situational factors affect the degree of acceptability of gender-based humour in classroom settings