Andrew Bricker
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Andrew Bricker is Associate Professor of English Literature in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University in Belgium and a Senior Fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. He serves as Principal Investigator for DELIAH: Democratic Literacy and Humour, which is funded by the Horizon Europe Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. He is the author of Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670-1792 (Oxford University Press, 2022); and, with Eric Smith, of We the Raptors: Thirty Players, Thirty Stories, Thirty Years (Simon & Schuster, 2025).
Andrew Bricker joins the Paris IAS in September-October 2025 for a group research stay as part of the CAT collaborative program, in collaboration with the researchers Vicky Breemen, Alberto Godioli, Ana Pedrazzini et Tjeerd Royaards.
Research topics
Satire; humor ; law ; literature.
Cartoons in Court: Towards a Forensic Analysis of Visual Humor
Due to its inherent ambiguity and elusiveness, humor can make it particularly difficult to draw a line between lawful and unlawful expression. This is particularly evident in the case of cartoons or other comparable forms of predominantly visual humor (such as memes), whose high degree of implicitness and condensation generates specific interpretive challenges. How can judges deal with the ambiguity of visual humor, i.e. the fact that the same cartoon or meme can be interpreted in different ways by different people? And to what extent can the author/cartoonist be considered responsible for different reasonable interpretations?
This collaborative project, ‘Cartoons in Court,’ aims to answer these questions by working organically on the following interconnected areas: interdisciplinary analysis of court decisions concerning cartoons and other forms of visual humour (particularly in cases of defamation or incitement to hatred); the study, using a corpus, of different forms of ambiguity in cartoons; a historical perspective on controversies related to cartoons; interviews with cartoonists and legal professionals, while working closely with stakeholders such as Cartoonists Rights, Cartooning for Peace and other organisations defending freedom of expression.
Key publications
Brigitte Adriaensen, Andrew Bricker, Alberto Godioli, Ted Laros. “Humor and the Law: Laughter as Critique/The Limits of Laughter.” Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities, 21.2 : 163 – 174, 2025.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/17438721231177647
Andrew Bricker. “‘Every Common Reader’: Satire, Libel Law and the Emergence of Objective Interpretive Procedures”. In British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ed. Melissa Ganz. Cambridge University Press, 2025.
Andrew Bricker. Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670–1792. Oxford University Press, 2022.
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