#AcaWriMo accountability post 8 (Nov. 10).
In "Communicating Death with Humor: Humor Types and Functions in Death Over Dinner Conversations," Andrea Lampert South, Jessica Elton, and Alison M. Lietzenmayer analyze a corpus of conversations about #death, #grief and end of life issues among friends and family members using the #DeathOverDinner framework.

They find that in their same, humor gets used in variety of ways to cohere the community at the table (855, 858) and to manage the emotions of the participants. Notably, they discuss that "The use of humor allowed participants to help themselves or others save face [...], to have reprieve from serious conversation topics [...], to help participants indicate support for others [...], to help participants minimize or cope with uncomfortable situations [...], and to communicate honesty, especially when the honesty was uncomfortable (gallows humor)" (857-8).

They note that much of the existing research into death and humor has looked at humor in deathbed or grief after death situations (851-2), but this research suggests that humor also has a role to play in the kind of #thantocultural change that Kinney was talking about in the article I read yesterday. The Death Over Dinner model encourages people to talk to friends and family about death and end of life issues, and these researchers suggest that more study about the role that humor can play here would be fruitful.

This article appeared in /Death Studies/ (2020) 851-860
https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2020.1716883