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“Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.” That was how The Onion famously announced Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008.
Rather than a feel-good story trumpeting the historic occasion, the satirical publication sarcastically detailed the economic and political mess Obama would inherit (and be expected to mop up) from his first day in office. It was an unexpected and cheeky inversion of the day’s events played for laughs that also highlighted the sobering reality the nation still faced with when the momentary celebration was over. Implicit, too, was the worry that the ascendancy of an African-American man to a previously unattainable position of global power might turn out to be a hollow victory.
Despite being the lingua franca of the Internet, sarcasm isn’t known as a sophisticated form of wit or a conversational style that wins friends. From the Greek and Latin for “to tear flesh,” sarcasm has been called “hostility disguised as humor,” the contempt-laden speech favored by smart alecks and mean girls that’s best to avoid.
But new research by Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School, Adam Galinsky, the Vikram S. Pandit Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, and Li Huang of INSEAD, the European business school, finds that sarcasm is far more nuanced, and actually offers some important, overlooked psychological and organizational benefits.
“To create or decode sarcasm, both the expressers and recipients of sarcasm need to overcome the contradiction (i.e., psychological distance) between the literal and actual meanings of the sarcastic expressions. This is a process that activates and is facilitated by abstraction, which in turn promotes creative thinking,” said Gino via email.
Read more here. (Harvard University)
Rather than a feel-good story trumpeting the historic occasion, the satirical publication sarcastically detailed the economic and political mess Obama would inherit (and be expected to mop up) from his first day in office. It was an unexpected and cheeky inversion of the day’s events played for laughs that also highlighted the sobering reality the nation still faced with when the momentary celebration was over. Implicit, too, was the worry that the ascendancy of an African-American man to a previously unattainable position of global power might turn out to be a hollow victory.
Despite being the lingua franca of the Internet, sarcasm isn’t known as a sophisticated form of wit or a conversational style that wins friends. From the Greek and Latin for “to tear flesh,” sarcasm has been called “hostility disguised as humor,” the contempt-laden speech favored by smart alecks and mean girls that’s best to avoid.
But new research by Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School, Adam Galinsky, the Vikram S. Pandit Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, and Li Huang of INSEAD, the European business school, finds that sarcasm is far more nuanced, and actually offers some important, overlooked psychological and organizational benefits.
“To create or decode sarcasm, both the expressers and recipients of sarcasm need to overcome the contradiction (i.e., psychological distance) between the literal and actual meanings of the sarcastic expressions. This is a process that activates and is facilitated by abstraction, which in turn promotes creative thinking,” said Gino via email.
Read more here. (Harvard University)
