This paper contributes a discursive perspective on how academics employ self-deprecating humour and laughter to talk about and construct the struggles they faced in academia. Underpinned by ethnomethodological approaches to studying spoken interactions, the paper argues that just as utterances accomplish social actions, academic struggles are…

Generation Z (Gen Z) represents something of a quintessence for the broken promises that now seem to make up the promise of higher education. But if despair indicates the dark side of generational malaise around things like civic engagement, community, and student learning, the dark humor that has emerged out of these generations points to modes…

Psychoanalytic theory predicts that humor preference is a derivative of unresolved childhood conflicts. Analyzed students' (N=104) Rorschach protocols to yield measures of preoedipal fixation. Students ranked jokes from most to least funny. Results showed that the ranking of jokes was a function of the fixation measures for women only. (Author/RC)