Textual humor is enormously diverse and computational studies need to account for this range, including intentionally bad humor. In this paper, we curate and analyze a novel corpus of sentences from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest to better understand "bad" humor in English. Standard humor detection models perform poorly on our corpus, and an analysis of literary devices finds that these sentences combine features common in existing humor datasets (e.g., puns, irony) with metaphor, metafiction and simile. LLMs prompted to synthesize contest-style sentences imitate the form but exaggerate the effect by over-using certain literary devices, and including far more novel adjective-noun bigrams than human writers. Data, code and analysis are available at https://github.com/venkatasg/bulwer-lytton

Arabic Rhetoric is the field of Arabic linguistics which governs the art and science of conveying a message with greater beauty, impact and persuasiveness. The field is as ancient as the Arabic language itself and is found extensively in classical and contemporary Arabic poetry, free verse and prose. In practical terms, it is the intelligent use of word order, figurative speech and linguistic embellishments to enhance message delivery. Despite the volumes that have been written about it and the high status accorded to it, there is no way to objectively know whether a speaker or writer has used Arabic rhetoric in a given text, to what extent, and why. There is no objective way to compare the use of Arabic rhetoric across genres, authors or epochs. It is impossible to know which of pre-Islamic poetry, Andalucian Arabic poetry, or modern literary genres are richer in Arabic rhetoric. The aim of the current study was to devise a way to measure the density of the literary devices which constitute Arabic rhetoric in a given text, as a proxy marker for Arabic rhetoric itself. A comprehensive list of 84 of the commonest literary devices and their definitions was compiled. A system of identifying literary devices in texts was constructed. A method of calculating the density of literary devices based on the morpheme count of the text was utilised. Four electronic tools and an analogue tool were created to support the calculation of an Arabic text's rhetorical literary device density, including a website and online calculator. Additionally, a technique of reporting the distribution of literary devices used across the three sub-domains of Arabic rhetoric was created. The output of this project is a working tool which can accurately report the density of Arabic rhetoric in any Arabic text or speech.

Memes have emerged as a powerful form of communication, integrating visual and textual elements to convey humor, satire, and cultural messages. Existing research has focused primarily on aspects such as emotion classification, meme generation, propagation, interpretation, figurative language, and sociolinguistics, but has often overlooked deeper meme comprehension and meme-text retrieval. To address these gaps, this study introduces ClassicMemes-50-templates (CM50), a large-scale dataset consisting of over 33,000 memes, centered around 50 popular meme templates. We also present an automated knowledge-grounded annotation pipeline leveraging large vision-language models to produce high-quality image captions, meme captions, and literary device labels overcoming the labor intensive demands of manual annotation. Additionally, we propose a meme-text retrieval CLIP model (mtrCLIP) that utilizes cross-modal embedding to enhance meme analysis, significantly improving retrieval performance. Our contributions include:(1) a novel dataset for large-scale meme study, (2) a scalable meme annotation framework, and (3) a fine-tuned CLIP for meme-text retrieval, all aimed at advancing the understanding and analysis of memes at scale.

In the ring, there is no care. There is spit and blood, blows and sweat, round upon round of violence, but there is no care there. One day … One day, in the near future, they will learn the art of unboxing. At the end of the match, after the crowds have departed and the stands lay bare, they will begin: they will take off each other's gloves, unwrap each other's broken hands, and tend to them; and they will take a cool, damp cloth, and take turns squeezing drops of water into each other's mouths, or wiping away the blood, or pressing that cloth against each other's swollen eyes; and they will run fingers along each other's bodies, tracing the bruises they themselves left with their fists, the cracked ribs, the split lip; and they will hear each sharp, pained inhalation, each moan -- they will see every wince -- and they will mutter reassurances; and they will look deeply into each other's eyes, or eye, or if both eyes are too swollen to see, they will caress the face of the other; and they will feed dates to each other, and oranges, and apricots, and offer fresh milk, and water, to the other to drink; and they will talk about the fight, their strategies, how each blow felt, and they will compliment each other's strengths, and offer advice for their weaknesses, and they will talk about what compels them to fight; and if one of them is knocked out, the other will take them and cradle them, until consciousness is regained. They will tend to each other and care for each other until they both can walk away.