Salvatore Attardo

Who is Salvatore Attardo?

Salvatore Attardo is a full professor at Texas A&M University–Commerce and the editor-in-chief of Humor, the journal for the International Society of Humor Research. He studied at Purdue University under Victor Raskin and extended Raskin's script-based semantic theory of humor into the general theory of verbal humor. He publishes in the field of humor in literature and is considered to be one of the top authorities in the area.

He was born March 14, 1962, in Anderlecht, Belgium, to an Italian State Railways employee and a Belgian mother, living thereafter in Como, Italy, until adulthood. He has been a permanent resident of the United States since 1991. He has one daughter, Gaia, born in 1994. Attardo is a native speaker of Italian and French. He has served on the thesis and dissertation committees for other humor scholars, including Christian F. Hempelmann and Katrina Triezenberg.