Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This essay offers an overview of recent scholarship on British humor, satire, comedy, and laughter in the long 18th century. It focuses on scholarship that asks what provoked laughter in the 18th century, how the ethics and morals of laughter were gauged and contested, and what the political and social effects of laughter were, particularly in the context of cultural change and political crisis. Studies of laughter and humor demonstrate that 18th‐century British culture was, in many ways, not characterized by codes of politeness and sociability. Satiric laughter proved a potent but unpredictable political instrument, particularly in cases of anti‐religious humor, as likely to undermine or exceed humor's political objectives as it was to realize them. Laughter also generated new publics that wrested moral authority from traditional seats of power. Humor's effects were as multitudinous as the formal and rhetorical techniques it employed to generate feeling in readers and audiences, and the field has benefitted from a variety of methodologies and critical frameworks to explore its complex cultural and political functions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".