Sarah Balkin and Marc Mierowsky: <i>Comedy and Controversy: Scripting Public Speech</i>

Things can change quickly.A few months ago, I had a conversation with a fellow humor scholar, and we observed that the omnipresence of humor scandals in the public sphere seems to be waning again already.Between 2017 and 2023, not a week could go by without something jocular turning into a public controversy, whether it be an "ironic" remark by a right wing politician, or a "bad" joke made during the Academy Award ceremony.This was true all over the western hemisphere, from the US to Estonia.But in the last year, and especially since the horrendous second term of Donald Trump's presidency started, there seems to be too much at stake in the realm of seriousness for journalists and their audiences to be really bothered by acts of comedy.When the world around us is changing at such a high speed, it is difficult for academia to keep pace.Within the field of humor and comedy studies, the focus on scandals still feels quite novel, even if the scholarly awareness of humor's potential for controversy dates back at least to the 2005-06 Mohammed Cartoon Crisis.It takes time to set-up collaborative research projects and get them funded.As a result, the transnational study of humor scandals is just getting started, for example via two European projects.