Laughing Matters: Humor, Free Speech and Hate Speech at the European Court of Human Rights

Abstract This article conducts an interdisciplinary analysis of a corpus consisting ten cases from the European Court Human Rights. The selected range 2004 to 2022 and engage with nexus between hate speech humorous expression, spanning across various forms humor (from political satire disaster jokes) different media verbal jokes cartoons). Building on insights linguistics, semiotics literary theory, we discuss how ECtHR deals interpretive challenges posed by humor, particular attention following key aspects: (1) rhetorical/semiotic mechanisms underlying contested verbal, visual or multimodal texts; (2) dialogue expression previous texts means allusion, commentary parody; (3) role played broad contextual factors, including conventions given genre as well specific socio-political circumstances in which is produced circulated; (4) possible outcomes process, namely manners disparagement may relate each other disputed expression; (5) ways courts can reconstruct actual presumed reception ambiguous joke cartoon within audience. In addition highlighting number recurring issues occasional inconsistencies corpus, this contribution aims demonstrate humanities-based research set basis for more consistent methodical approach court, special but not exclusive regard jurisprudence.