Cultural dimensions and characteristics reflected in Hungarian TED talks

The present paper is aimed at exploring humour and cultural aspects in TED talks recorded at Hungarian independent TEDx standard events. Applying Speck’s (1991) humour taxonomy, a corpus of 30 Hungarian language talks have been classified based on Barry & Graca’s (2018) humour typology groups and further examined by descriptive statistical indicators. Results show that cultural and other national features are reflected in the talks and are appreciated by the audience. Incongruity and disparagement appeared to be a safe comic device to create laughter in highly individualist and masculine cultures; however, relief-based humour is riskier in high uncertainty avoiding countries, as the message may be interpreted differently than expected.