Alberto Godioli
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Alberto Godioli is Associate Professor at the University of Groningen. His research focuses on humor and free speech jurisprudence from an interdisciplinary perspective, and he is principal investigator of a five-year project on this topic (Humor in Court, NWO Vidi grant, 2022-2027). In 2022 he founded ForHum: Forum for Humor and the Law – a global platform for lawyers, humor scholars, practitioners, and anyone interested in humor, freedom of expression and related legal matters. In dialogue with experts from UNESCO, the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, the European Court of Human Rights and ARTICLE 19 among others, Alberto has coordinated the publication of a toolkit for the judiciary titled What’s in a Joke? Assessing Humor in Free Speech Jurisprudence and Content Moderation (ForHum / Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, 2025). His other publications on the subject include the report Humor and Free Speech: A Comparative Analysis of Global Case Law (with Jennifer Young; Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, 2023) and the special issue Humor and the Law: The Difficulty of Judging Jests (co-edited with Brigitte Adriaensen, Andrew Bricker and Ted Laros, HUMOR, 2022).
Alberto Godioli 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, Andrew Bricker, Ana Pedrazzini and Tjeerd Royaards.
Sujets de recherche
Humor; Free Speech Jurisprudence.
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
Alberto Godioli, Sabine Jacques, Jennifer Young, Ariadna Matamoros Fernandez. What's in a Joke? Assessing Humor in Free Speech Jurisprudence. Forum for Humor and the Law / Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, 2025.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15383543
Alberto Godioli. "Joking Against Humanity? Dark Humor and (De)familiarization". In Nilgun Bayraktar, Alberto Godioli (eds), E(n)stranged: Rethinking Defamiliarization in Literature and Visual Culture, 127-148. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-60859-9_6
Alberto Godioli, Jennifer Young. Humor and Free Speech: A Comparative Analysis of Global Case Law. Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, Special Collection, 2023.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8105760
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