A mouthful of mirth

Chapter 1 provides an extensive overview of humor and food encompassing several multimodal textual genres. The question of why food is so crucial in describing our ways of being in the world is addressed, as is the question of why food is funny and can at the same time be disgusting. The chapter begins with Bakhtin and a discussion of the Carnivalesque, focusing on the idea that Carnival provides a freedom that subverts the ordinary course of expectations, characters, and events. Carnival provides a flexible framework for looking at food, humor, and disgust, particularly in its subversive aspects.