Playing with Food: Language, Humor, and Disgust

By Debra Aarons and Delia Chiaro

Playing with Food: Language, Humor, and Disgust is the first book to explore the interplay of food, humour, and disgust in multimodal media.

Chiaro and Aarons note that, whenever food and comedy intersect, disgust is rarely far behind. Grounded in the theoretical framework of Carnival, the authors analyse the affective, cognitive, and corporeal responses to food, highlighting the central role of humor both in the way we talk about food and in our perception of the body and disgust. Through a rich array of texts, from everyday language and literature to video, advertising, music, politics, and beyond, this book advances a comprehensive examination of the wider notion of taste.

With diverse, detailed case studies and an accessible, lively style, Playing with Food is an invaluable resource for students and researchers of Linguistics, Humour Studies, Food Studies, Psychology, Media Studies, Social Anthropology, and related fields.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0367708450
• ISBN13: 9780367708450
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 154 Pages
• Weight: 0.99 lbs.