Offensive humour: Theoretical and practical challenges

In this special issue, we view ‘offensive humour’ as a purposefully broad, catch-all category that includes teasing, sarcasm, put downs and jocular insults (e.g., Dynel & Sinkeviciute 2021). While both ‘offence’ and ‘humour’ are notoriously difficult to define, across the papers in this collection we find the common threads that identify offensive humour are (a) a speaker’s (assumed) intent to amuse, and (b) recipients’ judgements or reactions to the humour as offensive. Crucially, offensive humour typically focuses on attempts to produce amusement through a seemingly faux negative attitude towards some target but without claimed malicious intent, differentiating offensive humour from insults proper, which purposefully — or at least overtly — seek to offend (cf. Dynel & Poppi 2020).