Vol. 13 No. 1 (2025): Tasting funny? A (cook)book on humour and taste. Special issue edited by Anne-Sophie Bories and Nils Couturier
Tasting funny? A (cook)book on humour and taste. Special issue edited by Anne-Sophie Bories and Nils Couturier

This special issue, at the intersection of Humour studies, Literary and Cultural Studies, focuses on the themes of food and taste. Several of the articles gathered here pay particular attention to the meanings of bad taste as a socio-political device, and to those of food-related disgust as an element of humour. These questions were previously explored during an international conference on humour and taste at the University of Basel. The diverse contributions brought together in this issue examine some of the many aspects of taste-related humour, from cannibalism to coprophagy, and from satire to irony.

Editorial

Anne-Sophie Bories, Nils Couturier
1-6
Humour and taste: tasting funny?
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Articles

Elisa Kriza
7-19
Eating sh*t in Russia: food (in)security and authoritarianism in Soviet satires
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Sophie Quirk, Tom Sharkey
20-31
Humour at the Crab Museum: funniness, ethics and political activism
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Thomas C. Messerli
32-44
Comedians and their personae: a look at contemporary streamed stand-up comedy specials
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Ewelina Pepiak
45-57
Different tastes? Islam, métissage and food constraints in French multicultural comedies
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Jonathan Ervine
58-67
Humour and global food: Uncle Roger and Big Zuu’s visions of culinary hybridity
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Nils Couturier, Anne-Sophie Bories
68-90
A thug’s grub: food and drink as status in Renaud’s songs
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Adam James Smith
91-103
“It just tastes better than other meat…”: satire and cannibalism after Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (1729)
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Bruno Dupont, Lison Jousten
104-115
Slaughtering, skinning, stripping: cannibal humour in Heiner Müller’s work
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Emma Sullivan
116-125
Sex comedy: the new vulva and dick jokes
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Jérôme Laubner
126-136
Culinary humour in early 17th century pornographic poetry
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Jinghan Jiao
137-148
Using vulgar jokes as a weapon: the power of bad taste in Ali Wong’s stand-up comedy
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Richard Hibbitt
149-161
Regusted with life: the therapeutic value of humour in J.-K. Huysmans’s À rebours [Against Nature]
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Hélène Dubail
162-171
The Irish stew according to Jerome K. Jerome: a recipe for kitsch
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