Playing with Food: Language, Humor, and Disgust

Playing with Food: Language, Humor, and Disgust is the first book to explore the interplay of food, humor, and disgust in multimodal media.

Chiaro and Aarons note that, whenever food and comedy intersect, disgust is rarely far behind. Grounded in the theoretical framework of Carnival, the authors analyze the affective, cognitive, and corporeal responses to food, highlighting the central role of humor both in the way we talk about food and in our perception of the body and disgust. Through a rich array of texts, from everyday language and literature to video, advertising, music, politics, and beyond, this book advances a comprehensive examination of the wider notion of taste.

With diverse, detailed case studies and an accessible, lively style, Playing with Food is an invaluable resource for students and researchers of Linguistics, Humor Studies, Food Studies, Psychology, Media Studies, Social Anthropology, and related fields.

Delia Chiaro is Professor Emerita at the University of Bologna, Italy. She writes on Humor and Translation and has authored studies on how wordplay is translated in diverse media. Her books include The Language of Jokes (Routledge, 1992) and The Language of Jokes in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2017).

Debra Aarons is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She writes on Humor and Language and has coauthored, along with Marc Mierowsky, a series of articles in Comedy Studies about standup. She is the author of Jokes and the Linguistic Mind (Routledge, 2012).