Visual Humor In Deaf Culture

Holcomb (2013) referred to the final category in Deaf Culture humor as Visual humor. According to Holcomb (2013), visual humor “… takes advantage of the graphic visual properties of American Sign Language to make humorous stories even funnier.” (p.165). Visual humor relies on exaggerated facial expressions, descriptions, or mocking impersonations of one’s manner of communication style (Holcomb, 2013). An example of this can be found in a Youtube Video called “ASL Storytelling: The Deaf Hulk” by Youtuber Letsgofly08 (2010). In this video, the signer tells a story about a Deaf middle school student who is bullied by students and teachers alike because of his Deafness. At one point the signer impersonates the Deaf student’s hearing English

In an interpreter starts to run on autopilot and tunes out, they may miss important cues that the presenter is trying to express in order to be funny. In this case, it would leave less time for the interpreter to mentally prepare for reproducing the humor in the other language. Some main cues to be looking out for are smiling, laughter, or a pause in which the presenter is expecting a reaction from the audience (Hoicka & Akhtar, 2012). Elena Hoicka and Nameera Akhtar (2012) conducted an experiment that focused on how parents with young children could tell if they child was kidding around by how often the children actually portrayed the cues. The cues mentioned by the parents were smiling, laughing, and the child looking up at them to gauge their reaction. Hoicka and Nameera (2012) found that children were more likely to laugh and look up at their parents as they were joking than they were to smiling as they watched for their parents’ reaction. However, both of these cues occurred more frequently than when children laughed or smiled without looking at their parents. The data supports the idea that laughter is a more common indicator of the production of humor when compared to smiling. It also suggests that people will systematically look to another person’s face to determine if their attempt at humor was successful or not. When interpreters hear the presenter laugh, they are safe to assume humor is somehow involved. If it is possible for interpreters to see the presenter’s face while telling the joke, the interpreter can be on the lookout for the presenter watching for a reaction (Hoicka & Akhtar,