Narrative Inquiry - Online First

Contributing to recent work on reflexivity and metapragmatics in stand-up comedy as well as recent studies of offensive humor, this article places narratives at the center of inquiry, by focusing on four popular anglophone stand-up comedians’ performed stories about audiences that were offended by their humor. While revealing a range of different narrative types, the analysis of stories told by both “safe” and “edgy” comedians alike illustrates recurring themes such as: the ahistorical construction of offense-taking in response to comedy material as a recent phenomenon, portrayals of offended audience members as humorless, and the attribution of responsibility to mass media as well as bloggers and social media users, who are represented as fomenting exaggerated reactions of audience outrage. Through these performed narratives, all four comedians embed reflections on reception to their own work within their sets.

This study examines how migrants’ narrative form changes over time when the host society is treated as an external object of evaluation. Two interview waves with five West African migrants in Southern Italy (2018; 2023–2024) are analyzed across three domains: Economic–Political, Socio–Cultural, and Environmental–Geographical. Paired comparisons are reported only where within-speaker narratives were comparable across waves. Using the crafting-styles framework, the analysis shows a shift from more stable, closure-oriented tellings in 2018 to more reversal-driven, deconstructive tellings in 2023–2024. This form drift tracks changes in evaluation, agency attribution, and the narratability of the host society as a setting for future planning. Methodologically, the study shows how narrative selection and crafting-style patterns support parsimonious longitudinal comparison and strengthen within-case temporal inference beyond content-focused readings, while also clarifying how coherence and closure become harder to sustain under prolonged institutional contact and precarity.

This paper investigates instances of narrativised health advice exchanges between Nigerian doctors and laypersons on X/Twitter, Naija. Based on 144 story tweets, the analysis focuses on how advice exchanges manifest as acts of narrative identity positioning. With Bamberg’s (1997) three-level model of positioning, interactional pragmatics, and membership categorisation analysis, the study examines the emergence and co-construction of tale-world, interactional, and ideological dimensions of identity in the context of health communication. The findings reveal that advice-giving interactions, as acts of identity positioning, manifest as cautionary tales, the evaluated biographical selves of storytellers, the management of institutional roles, and as a concession to oppositional pressures, acquiescence to, or mostly resistance to, hegemonic subject positions. The paper concludes that health advice-giving practices should be understood as discursive sites where power and identity are negotiated. Therefore, practitioners should aim to co-construct advice interactions that minimise asymmetry and foster collaborative meaning-making rather than reproducing hierarchical relations.