Arthur Asa Berger

Biographic Data

ID586672
NAMEArthur Asa Berger
GIVEN NAMESArthur Asa
FAMILY NAMEBerger
SIGNATUREBERGER A A
AFFILIATIONSSan Francisco State University
ORCID0000-0002-8164-7265
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS82
TOTAL CITATIONS624
AUTHOR COUNT81
EDITOR COUNT1
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1966
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX6

  • Fear frames: Mapping AI anxiety in Persian social media discourse

    Open AccessArthur Asa Berger, Ehsan ShahghasemiARTICLEAI & Society2026

  • All Ads Are Narratives

    Open AccessArthur Asa BergerARTICLEMedia Biznes Kultura2022

    This inquiry starts with a quotation from Michel de Certeau about the amount of time people spend with narratives. We proceed to demonstrate that narratives in advertisements have a syntagmatic or sequential structure and move from one event to another over time. In addition, people watching these narratives perform paradigmatic interpretations of the characters and events in these narratives. Demonstrating the importance of narratives in people’…

  • Culture codes and semiotics

    Arthur Asa BergerARTICLEChinese Semiotic Studies2021

    This paper argues that culture can be understood as a collection of codes that people learn as they grow up in a particular society and that these codes have certain attributes that explain their power. I suggest that codes must be coherent, be concrete, be clear, have continuity, and be communicated. I conclude with a discussion of national codes in comedy and offer the example of Japan, where people have different humor codes than in America

  • Sociological Analysis

    Arthur Asa BergerCHAPTERMedia Analysis Techniques2019

  • Media Analysis Techniques

    Arthur Asa BergerBOOKMedia Analysis Techniques2019Cited by: 44

    PART I. TECHNIQUES OF INTERPRETATION 1. Semiotic Analysis A Brief History of the Subject The Problem of Meaning Social Aspects of Semiotics: The Individual and Society Saussure on the Science of Semiology Signs Forms of Signs Signs and Advertising Material Culture Objects and Identity Signs and Truth Activities and Performances Music and Sound Effects Facial Expressions as Signs Hyperreality Language and Speaking Connotation and Denotation The Sy…

  • Brands and Cultural Analysis

    Arthur Asa BergerBOOKBrands and Cultural Analysis2019

  • Cultural Perspectives on Millennials

    Open AccessArthur Asa BergerBOOKCultural Perspectives on…2018

    "This book provides a cultural studies analysis of Millennials and their impact on American culture and society. Beginning with an introduction that touches upon which part of the population is described as Millennial, the book also explores the Millennial psyche, marketing to Millennials, Millennials'purchasing preferences, gender and sexuality among Millennials, and Millennials and their relation to postmodernism, among other things. Cultural P…

  • Perspectives on Everyday Life: A Cross Disciplinary Cultural Analysis

    Arthur Asa BergerBOOKPerspectives on Everyday Life2018

  • The Messages of Mirth: Humor and Communication Theory

    Arthur Asa BergerCHAPTERBlind Men and Elephants2017

    Most of the humor we are exposed to is based on language— spoken by joke tellers and standup comedians, actors and actresses in plays and films, or characters in cartoons and comic strips. The chapter discusses the problem raised by the "reader-response" theorists, described author&s;s orientation as a multidisciplinary one, and sketched out how individuals, from a number of different disciplines, might analyze a joke. It deals with humor from a …

  • The Politics of Laughter: A Cultural Theory of Humor Preferences (with Aaron Wildavsky)

    Arthur Asa BergerCHAPTERBlind Men and Elephants2017

    From a cultural theory perspective we can extend Hobbes&s;s notion of humor involving a sudden recognition of some kind of eminency in ourselves relative to others and say we may find this eminency not only in our persons but in our cultures. This chapter discusses the dominant theories of humor. The theory that is most widely held suggests that humor is based on incongruity, on some kind of a difference between what people expect and what they g…

  • The Rhetoric of Laughter: The Techniques Used in Humor

    Arthur Asa BergerCHAPTERBlind Men and Elephants2017

    Technically speaking, rhetoric is the art of persuasion, though contemporary rhetoricians often use the term much more broadly. Aristotle defined the term rather narrowly in his book the Rhetoric. Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. Rhetoric, for Aristotle, is a metadiscipline, one that can be used to analyze how people persuade others regardless of subject matter or content. Rh…

  • After the Laughter: A Concluding Note

    Arthur Asa BergerCHAPTERBlind Men and Elephants2017

    This chapter offers some interesting and useful insights about the way people in various disciplines and adherents of various methodologies make sense of humor. Humor is involved in our relationships and studies have shown that men and women look for a sense of humor in their partners. Humor plays a big role in the mass media, where situation comedies are one of the most significant broadcast genres and comedies are a major genre in our films. Hu…

  • The Structure of Laughter: Semiotics and Humor

    Arthur Asa BergerCHAPTERBlind Men and Elephants2017

    Semiotics, the science of signs, has some interesting insights to offer about humor. This chapter discusses some of the more important semiotic concepts and uses them to analyze humorous texts. It considers such things as the structure of jokes, the relation of humor to code violations, and the various kinds of parody that exist. A sign, the semioticians tell us, is anything that can be used to stand for or substitute for something else. What sem…

  • On Mind and Mirth: Psychology and Humor

    Arthur Asa BergerCHAPTERBlind Men and Elephants2017

    This chapter is devoted to a good deal of attention to the theories of Sigmund Freud, whose book Jokes and Their Refotions to the Unconscious is a landmark study of humor. It deals with work by other psychologists and psychiatrists on humor; it is a subject that has fascinated them and attracted a good deal of interest in terms of what humor is, how it works, and how it might be used for therapeutic purposes. The chapter discusses a related cogni…

  • From Carnival to Comedy: Literary Theory and Humor

    Arthur Asa BergerCHAPTERBlind Men and Elephants2017

    Many literary and subliterary works are humorous or have a substantial amount of humor in them. We have, for example, humorous novels, humorous plays (comedies), humorous poetry, humorous comic strips, and humorous greeting cards. It deals with everything from medieval carnivals to the nature of comedy and what it is that makes characters "humorous." To a certain degree, a post Renaissance view of laughter has been the one that has dominated our …

  • Mirrors on Mirth: Making Sense of Humor

    Arthur Asa BergerCHAPTERBlind Men and Elephants2017

    This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about the different ways people from a variety of fields and disciplines try to make sense of humor. Blind Men and Elephants is not meant to be a humorous book, per se, though it does have a good deal of humor in it. It utilizes the following approaches, techniques, disciplines, meta-disciplines, areas: literary theory, rhetor…

  • The Problem of Laughter: Philosophical Approaches to Humor

    Arthur Asa BergerCHAPTERBlind Men and Elephants2017

    From Aristotle&s;s time to the present, philosophers have been interested in what humor is and have devoted a considerable amount of attention to the subject. This chapter deals with speculations about the nature of humor and why people laugh. It focuses on an important philosophical theory of humor, that of the great French philosopher Bergson, who elaborated his theory in his book Le Rire or Laughter . Thomas Hobbes&s;s theory, which argues tha…

  • Seeing Laughter: Visual Aspects of Humor

    Arthur Asa BergerCHAPTERBlind Men and Elephants2017

    Because so much humor is verbal—jokes told by our friends, routines by stand-up comics, gags in situation comedies, and so on—we tend to forget that visual phenomena are frequently used to generate humor, often in conjunction with written or spoken humor. In most cartoons the humor is created by the gag line, but it has to fit in with the "look" of the characters in the cartoon. This cartoon shows the power of visual phenomena to generate humor. …

  • The Functions of Laughter: Sociological Aspects of Humor

    Arthur Asa BergerCHAPTERBlind Men and Elephants2017

    When we look at humor from a sociological point of view we run into a big problem, for, it can be argued, there is no such thing as sociology, per se. Sociology has largely become a repository of discontent, a gathering of individuals who have special agendas, from gay and lesbian rights to liberation theology. But this has accelerated the decomposition process. For example, humor may be thought of as a functional alternative to physical violence…

  • The Strategy of Desire

    Ernest Dichter, Arthur Asa BergerBOOKStrategy of Desire2017

    Ernest Dichter is famous as one of the founding fathers of motivational research. In applying the social sciences to a variety of problems, Dichter emphasized new approaches to problem solving, advertising, politics, and selling, and issues of social significance such as urban renewal, productivity, and drug addiction. As an author and corporate adviser, he used psychoanalytic theory and depth interviewing to uncover unconsciously held attitudes …

  • Blind Men and Elephants: Perspectives on Humor

    Arthur Asa BergerBOOKBlind Men and Elephants2017Cited by: 95

    In Blind Men and Elephants, Arthur Asa Berger uses case histories to show how scholars from different disciplines and scholarly domains have tried to describe and understand humor. He reveals not only the many approaches that are available to study humor, but also the many perspectives toward humor that characterize each discipline. Each case history sheds light on a particular aspect of humor, making the combination of approaches of considerable…

  • Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy

    R Michels, Seymour Martin Lipset et al.BOOKPolitical Parties2017Cited by: 368

    The principle of self-government through political parties, the cornerstone of democracy, has come to be regarded as a solution to the problem of nationality. This is because the principle of nationality entails the acceptance of the idea of popular government. The importance of the principle of nationality is undeniable, and most of the national questions of Western Europe might be solved in accordance with this principle. Matters are complicate…

  • Video Games: A Popular Culture Phenomenon

    Arthur Asa BergerBOOKVideo Games2017

    From their inception, video games quickly became a major new arena of popular entertainment. Beginning with very primitive games, they quickly evolved into interactive animated works, many of which now approach film in terms of their visual excitement. But there are important differences, as Arthur Asa Berger makes clear in this important new work. Films are purely to be viewed, but video involves the player, moving from empathy to immersion, fro…

  • Cultural Theorist's Book of Quotations

    Arthur Asa BergerBOOKCultural Theorist's Book of…2017

  • Great Globe Itself: A Preface to World Affairs

    Arthur Asa BergerBOOKGreat Globe Itself2017