Comedy Show at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College
Thursday, April 24, 7–8:30 pm
Featuring Ally Weinhold, Angie Stroud, and Beck Krefting
Sponsored by the Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies
Critical humor studies is a framework for critically analyzing how humor shapes and structures society; it roots humor in a broader social context, social relations, and social issues, and examines the impact of humor beyond the field of entertainment and western cultures. As an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary field of inquiry, critical humor studies aims to examine the various ways humor functions within and against overlapping and intersecting structures of power and inequality. It is a framework for interrogating how jokes, comedy, satire, and everyday forms of humor can reinforce existing hierarchies, create them anew, and/or try to contest or subvert them.
As we take a more critical approach to the study of humor, our belief is that critical humor studies is an intervention that fosters social justice and cultural transformation, employing critical theory, antiracist frameworks, class analysis, storytelling, decolonial perspectives, and feminist theory and praxis to challenge institutional and structural inequalities where it is possible, all the while amplifying the voices of those most marginalized.
We know that our commitment to critical studies of humor and structures of power requires that we remain engaged, and one way of remaining engaged is attending to the seemingly mundane; those practices which are typically seen as innocuous like laughter and pleasure, to understand the deep connections between humor and power, and how that connection resonates all over the world.
This two-day conference will serve as the inaugural meeting of the Critical Humor Studies Association. “Critical Humor Studies in Times of Crisis: Aesthetics, Approaches, and Applications” will be held at Pomona College and as a hybrid in-person and live streamed event, from April 25-26, 2025.
We will be joined for keynote discussions by four renowned critical humor scholars:
Bambi Haggins (Department of Film and Media Studies, UC Irvine)
Cynthia Willett (Department of Philosophy, Emory University)
Danielle Fuentes Morgan (Department of English, Santa Clara)
Luvell Anderson (Department of Philosophy, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana)
Full conference schedule coming soon on https://criticalhumorstudies.org/conferences/
