Jan Matejko iconic painting features Stańczyk, jester of King Sigismund the Old of Poland's court, at a ball. He sits in despair as laughter occurs around him, having reading the news that Poland has lost Smolensk to the Grand Duchy of Moscow in war. Stańczyk's reflects on this loss, while the court continues their party. 

The University of California, Santa Barbara’s Graduate Center for Literary Research (GCLR) is pleased to announce our annual graduate student conference,“Humor, Comedy, and Play in Times of Crisis.” Our 2026 program invites you to reflect on the humor in your research—and lives—as graduate students. We ask scholars working within comic traditions, philosophies of humor, studies of play, and beyond, to join us in interrogating the stakes of laughing in these times of crisis. Works on games, play, humor, levity in media or culture are accepted, as well as projects that practice comedic or playful approaches to research.

These topics represent the ingrained performances of morality that shape both everyday and academic life as we balance socialized behavior with comedic instinct. The tensions of Academia—the barrage of critical symposiums on existential issues, the weight of global and local tragedies, and the looming threats to academic autonomy and funding—create daily moral dilemmas.

These dilemmas point to the fundamental paradox of comedy and despair at the heart of humor studies. The discourse around humor in crisis is rife with tension—the form, function, and effect of humor debated through dualities: comedy or tragedy, individual or communal, reinforcing or revolutionary. Intermedial explorations of comedy as a genre, form, and device range in diversity but find themselves regularly placed in opposition to tragedy: from the early theories of Aristotle on drama, to the work of Holocaust scholars like Lawrence Langer and Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi that analyze the ability and limits of comedy in depicting atrocity. Theorizing on the psychological and social functions of humor in reaction to hardship is manifold. Compare expressions of humor as private psychological responses to tension or trauma (as Freud and Viktor Frankl argue, respectively) with Bakhtin’s socio-historical description of communal laughter, which ritually inverts and preserves power systems. These ambivalent definitions challenge the supposed polarity of comedy and crisis. Scholars of ethics and politics ask—and answer in fierce contention—when is it effective or responsible to use levity as a revolutionary, literary, or academic strategy? 

This conference invites graduate students to submit papers on topics including, but not limited to:

• Comedy across genres: tragicomedy, dramedy, satire, parody 

• Comedic archetypes and tropes

• Play studies and humor studies 

• Absurdist, black, or dark humor

• Humor or comedy in historiography

• The Carnivalesque or class-conscious humor

• Psychology of trauma play

• Games, Video Games, and Play 

• Ethics of Humor

• Comedic approaches to research

• Play in research

• Meme and online culture

Proposals from enrolled graduate students in any discipline will be considered. To apply, submit an abstract (300 words for a 15-minute presentation) and CV to complit-gclr@ucsb.edu by May 15th, 2026. Successful submissions will be notified of their acceptance in the following days. If you have any questions or concerns, Please feel free to contact complit-gclr@ucsb.edu