Research project The conditioned laughter
This dissertation project by Martina Wiksten examines girls' humor practices and friendly negotiations around humor and its boundaries. The study is based on ethnographic material collected through fieldwork at a youth center, focus group interviews, and analyses of humorous clips on social media.
The starting point is the conversations and interactions that arise in friendship groups when humor is used to process current news, popular culture references, or shared experiences and identity positions. For example, discussions that begin with global events such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine can turn into jokes about sexual availability or religious and ideological affiliation. Even everyday situations, such as a discussion about self-scanning at the grocery store, become arenas where questions of authenticity, credibility, and humor are interwoven.
The project shows how identity is not a given starting point but is activated and reshaped in the act of joking itself. By mobilising multiple identity categories, participants can build on humour, negotiate relationships and establish closeness. At the same time, humour can challenge the consensus of friendship, especially when disagreement arises.
A central theme is to analyze what happens in the participants' conversations about and through humor, and to problematize notions of girls' humor as solely subversive. By considering humor in interaction, ambivalences, contradictions, and nuances are highlighted, making it possible to understand humor both as a resource for intimacy and as a potential source of conflict.
Project description
The project examines how girls use humor in friendships and how humor is negotiated as both a resource and a boundary in social interactions. The study is based on ethnographic material from fieldwork at a youth center, focus group interviews, and analyses of humor on social media. The aim is to analyze how humor contributes to creating intimacy, belonging, and identity, but also how it can generate disagreement and conflict. The project aims to nuance the image of girls' humor by highlighting the ambivalences and contradictions that arise in interaction. By studying humor in conversation, the project contributes to a deeper understanding of young people's cultural expressions and challenges simplified notions of humor as unambiguously subversive.
Project members
Project managers
Martina Wiksten
Doktorand
