Interactional humour in YouTube comments section: The construction of joking threads
| Autoři | |
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| Rok publikování | 2024 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Přiložené soubory | |
| Popis | When investigating online humour, researchers tend to focus mostly on memes and audiovisual material (e.g. video clips) as well as on informal interactions among various group members in the social media where humour seems to be a pervasive strategy (Tsakona 2020). Less often is humour investigated in social media or platforms where it is not commonly attested (Vásquez 2019). In this context, our study explores the humorous interaction occurring in a YouTube comments section. The data examined here consist of the online reactions to and discussions of a YouTube video clip produced by a popular atheist activist after the burning of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France (April 2019), and commenting on the jokes generated after the burning, in particular their limits and ‘in/appropriateness’. More specifically, we investigate (1) what kinds of humour online commentators employ to recontextualise the public event in question; and (b) how such interactional humour is jointly constructed by them in YouTube comments section. Two sociopragmatic dimensions of the analysis of humour are taken into account: the macro-perspective including the social norms, cultural contexts and ideological frameworks relevant to the processing of humour; and the micro-perspective, namely the actual realisation of humour in a specific communicative situation (Tsakona & Chovanec to appear). The analysis reveals that both disaster and religious humour emerge from the same public event, even though these kinds of humour do not have salient similarities. In the present case, they both allow speakers to momentarily defy social norms and conventions about what can/not be said in public. Disaster humour enables speakers to laugh at events which are more often than not perceived and represented as tragic and disastrous, while religious humour enables them to ridicule religions including their prominent figures, doctrines, practices, values, etc. Furthermore, the joking threads constructed by commentators in the data examined appear to consist of an initial attempt at humour, which is usually followed not only by similar (and sometimes antagonistic) attempts, but also by several metapragmatic comments (after Culpeper & Haugh 2014: 239–240, 252–253) more often than not positively evaluating the preceding humour. Even when such comments are negative, the joking thread appears to continue as long as there are some interactants who express their disagreement with such negative comments and offer positive metapragmatic comments of their own in return. |
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