I recently had the privilege of presenting a paper at the 2024 conference of the International Society of Humor Studies. It was during that meeting that I had the idea of interviewing leading experts in humor and laughter for this blog series. My first invitation was graciously accepted by Dr. Salvatore Attardo, Director of the Linguistics Graduate Program at the University of Texas-Commerce and, from 2001-2011, editor-in-chief of the society’s research journal, HUMOR. With Victor Raskin, he developed the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) and is considered by many to be a legend in his field.

Here’s a summary.

Attardo: I have had a long-standing interest in humor going back to my high school years in Italy. I created and wrote for a satirical magazine that was quite popular with my fellow students and some of the faculty. Later, I found myself contemplating what exactly it was that made our pieces so well received.

Being the nerd that I am, I ended up in the library and found the work of scholars such as Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, and it was then that I realized humor was an established scientific discipline in its own right. I’ve been fascinated ever since.

Attardo: In linguistics, we use the concepts of competence and performance. Competence is the knowledge you have about something. You know, for........

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