Internet Pragmatics - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2021

This paper deploys the tools of relevance theory to establish a common pragmatic mechanism operating in humorous texts (stand-up comedy, jokes, sketches) themed on the omnipresence of the Internet and social media in human life. It is postulated that this mechanism resides in incongruity between shared cultural assumptions expressing high esteem for rational actions and informative communication, and private assumptions endorsed by internet application users, who find phatic communication pleasurable. It is claimed that incongruity so understood is not a central but additional pragmatic mechanism in various humorous genres, and it tends not to be resolved, as tension between these two sets of assumptions lingers on.

This study adheres to critical humor studies investigating how humor targeting the migrant ‘Other’ may reproduce social inequalities in the form of racist stereotypes. We examine two datasets of online migrant-targeting jokes from two different time periods in Greece. Our first collection of jokes comes from the period 1990–2010, i.e., when Greece, enjoying financial prosperity, received mostly Albanian migrants, while the second one comes from 2014 onwards, i.e., when Greece, facing a severe financial crisis, received mostly Muslim migrants. Our analysis shows that the local sociopolitical context plays a significant role in shaping the ways migrants are humorously represented and targeted: the incongruities identified in the first dataset are different from those of the second. In both cases, however, migrant-targeting jokes seem to reinforce national homogenization by circulating racist stereotypes for migrants in a light-hearted manner and by naturalizing the latter’s marginalization and/or assimilation.

WhatsApp groups have become a popular way of communication among relatives, colleagues, friends and acquaintances regardless of different backgrounds, such as culture, education or age. When conveyed in digital settings, humour is usually evoked through multimodal elements that can modify the illocutionary force of the text or send complete hilarious messages that sparkle conversations. This paper seeks to analyse the expression of humour in a WhatsApp group made up of users over 65, a cohort that has not yet attracted considerable attention from research in the field. This is part of a broader research project that aims to investigate communicative exchanges in WhatsApp groups from a cross-generational perspective.

Emojis are little pictographs commonly added to electronic messages on several social media platforms. Besides being considered as a way to express emotions in electronically-mediated communication (EMC), similarly to ASCII emoticons, emojis are strictly involved in the performance of humour in everyday digital conversation. Drawing on a corpus of casual Whats­App dyadic chats, this paper analyses the contribution of emojis to humour in conversation. Results show that these pictographs not only help to signal the opening and closing of the play frame, but also to respond to humour, graphically reproducing laughter. For these purposes, the most common emojis employed by Whats­App users are the popular yellow smiling and laughing faces. Nevertheless, other pictographs are also involved in electronic humour, as less common emojis can be used in playful ways by themselves.

The present study stems from previous work on self-presentation in Whats­App users’ profile status. However, its main goal is to gauge other users’ reactions to Whats­App “humorous” statuses. In other words, do other users find statuses intended as humorous “funny”? To this purpose, the methodological approach adopted is both quantitative and qualitative. For the quantitative stage, a survey was carried out where participants were presented with eight statuses intended (as reported by their creators) to be humorous. These eight statuses represented both male and female Whats­App users (four each) as well as different strategies to construct humour (e.g., intertextuality, wordplay, absurdity). After piloting the survey, it was launched online, and 142 participants carried it out. Findings show that humour does not always lead to the desired effect and can indeed trigger negative evaluations and/or perplexity on other interlocutors. As a result, the user’s intended self-presentation as a witty, funny individual fails to hit its target and may contribute to other users’ negative perception of their persona.

In previous research (Yus 2016, 2017), a classification of jokes was proposed depending on how the humorous incongruity-resolution strategy was achieved. Twelve cases were isolated resulting from the combination of several parameters: (1) a differentiation between discourse-based incongruities and frame-based incongruities; (2) the location of the incongruity-triggering element (setup or punchline); and (3) three types of resolution: discourse-, frame- and implication-based. This paper proposes a similar taxonomy of incongruity-resolution patterns for a specific type of internet discourse: the image macro meme. The resulting seven-case taxonomy inherits some of the features of that were proposed for verbal jokes, albeit exhibiting the extent to which the image plays a specific role in the successful meme-centred humorous strategy.

In this paper we examine the order of processing of multimodal tweets (text + image). Using an eye tracker, we collected a sample of 36 participants reading 25 humorous tweets. Our conclusions show that the processing of multimodal humorous tweets is in line with the processing of other multimodal texts. The participants were significantly more likely to start from the image, followed by the caption. Other elements, such as the tweet’s “author” (the user name) or elements outside the tweet’s frame, attracted significantly less and later attention. The participants spent significantly more time gazing at the caption, before moving on to another area. The longer the participants spent looking at the tweet, the less predictable their gaze direction became.