In order to laugh about something you perceive, you must first possess knowledge. What spectators laughed about in a 17th-century staging of Amphitryon differs from what people find funny about Anakin and Padme-memes on social media today: Directly or indirectly, audiences access culturally specific knowledge, for example, of social practices, aesthetic conventions, current political debates or simply their own experience of the world. Such knowledge is often implicit and difficult to articulate. The special issue thus sets out to explore two interconnected questions: How does comedy depend on ‘comic literacies’, i.e., historically and culturally variable knowledge formations? And how can research access and theorise this implicit knowledge involved in comedy?

Like other studies in literacy (media, social, visual, etc.), we understand comic literacies as culturally and socially situated discourses and practices that produce, process, transform and contest meaning in a variety of different comedic contexts. In this sense, comic literacies can be understood as shared yet unevenly distributed repertoires of knowledge that allow performers and audiences to perceive and mobilise something as comic in historically specific ways. Existing norms and hierarchies may be reinforced or destabilised in the process, sometimes both at the same time. Diverting from the normative underpinnings of cultural literacy as an (institutionalised) investment in a shared cultural knowledge, critical literacies have emerged as a form of discourse analysis which interrogates dominant ideologies. Taking our cue from this strand of inquiry, we explore how comic literacies rely on tacit knowledge that probes, or even pokes fun at, the tenets of Western rationalism with its focus on mind over matter, speech over body or logic over affect. Our outlook here is not pedagogical; we are not concerned with how individuals gain this literacy or what enables them to read a satire ‘correctly.’ Rather, we employ the notion of comic literacies to conceptually approach how comedy is situated. We differentiate between the comic as a mode of perception and the comedic as the practices of production and representation, seeking to describe how comic literacies emerge at this intersection.

Three areas appear crucial to this endeavour: Comic literacies can be observed when studying comedy’s materialities, its arrangements and its affects. Regarding the first area of investigation, the special issue asks how comic literacies are connected to, and indeed depend on, the materiality of human or non-human bodies and things. If comedy aims to defamiliarize what we have come to expect from a body or object when we encounter it in the everyday, comedic artefacts must evoke cognitive mappings of the world. Comfortable epistemological boundaries between inert and mobile objects, fragments and the whole, or adequacy and excess collide when, for example, a transformation from body to object is reflected upon in self-aware practices on stage, such as masking and defacing. The second area of inquiry turns to practices of arrangement in comedic dramaturgy, choreography, oratory, etc. which involve the positioning and coordinating of words, bodies, things, actions or sounds in space and time. Films, for instance, compose visual axes and use well-placed cuts to create sight gags that irritate our habitual and thus learned modes of perception. Crowd work in stand-up comedy, in turn, involves comic timing, i.e., the tacit knowledge of when to wait for laughter, when to move the repartee forward with a provocative question or when to throw in a witty comment that constructs a tipping point, releasing tension and laughter. Both raise the question of how practices of arrangement are embedded in and activated by comic literacies and how this implicit knowledge might change alongside cultural shifts and media developments. Finally, the special issue is interested in the evolving relationship between comic literacies and affect. Comedy produces bodily reactions, most commonly laughter, occasionally cringe, often shock and surprise. These seemingly visceral responses to comedy can be understood as affects which rely on tacit cultural knowledge. Affect often emerges within specific social situations – digital comment cultures, live performance settings or the shared space of a cinema auditorium – in which comic literacies are collectively negotiated. Fairly or unfairly, comedy has often been understood as a genre that makes its audiences feel safe. But which comedic and cultural practices undergird or challenge this safety and how do they interact with comic literacies?

We invite discussions of historically and culturally situated comedic artefacts and practices throughout the ages that explore the theoretical parameters of comic literacies through a social, economic, political, ethical, media, and/or aesthetic lens. Submissions that approach comic literacies comparatively or genealogically as well as empirical case studies using qualitative methods are also encouraged.

We suggest that authors choose whether to focus more on materialities, arrangements or affects to explore comic literacies. Topics and questions might include but are not limited to:

• How do specific comedic artefacts or practices produce, mediate or negotiate comic literacies within their historically and culturally distinct contexts?
• How do comedic materialities, arrangements or affects shape, probe and/or defamiliarize tacit knowledge, respectively?
• How might the comedic negotiation of established knowledge depend on specific media settings, genre conventions or audiences?
• What would a methodology of comic literacies look like that takes audiences’ access to, processing of and affective responses to comedy’s tacit knowledge into account?
• Finally, how can we theorise the relation between a comedic artefact or practice and shared knowledge, (Western) systems of knowledge production and epistemological uncertainty – including situations in which shared knowledge fails?

Please submit proposals (250-300 words) to aileen.behrendt@uni-potsdam.de by end of July 2026. Selected proposals will be invited to prepare articles of 6000-8000 words which will be due on 31st of January 2027 and will be peer reviewed. Articles will be published on-line as they are accepted.

The articles will be published as a special issue of the journal Comedy Studies in early/mid 2028. The special issue is edited by Aileen Behrendt (University of Potsdam), Karin Peters (University of Bonn) and Roxanne Phillips (KWI Essen). For more information please click here: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/comic-literacies/