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Article published In:
Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict
Vol. 8:1 (2020) ► pp.57–87

Arcana imperii [*] *

The power of humorous retorts to insults on Twitter

ORCID logo | University of Łódź, Poland
ORCID logo | University of Łódź, Poland | Sechenov University, Russia
This paper reports the findings of a study on the mechanics of insult-retort adjacency pairs in Twitter interactions. The analysis concerns primarily the humorous retorts made by the pornographic entrepreneur Stormy Daniels, who has been pelted with politically-loaded misogynist insults, many of which qualify as slut-shaming. These acts of verbal aggression are the result of her involvement in a legal dispute with President Donald Trump and his former attorney. Based on a carefully collected corpus of public exchanges of tweets, our qualitative analysis achieves a few goals. First, it brings to focus a previously ignored function of witty and creative humour, including the self-deprecating variety, as a powerful rhetorical strategy that helps address insults with dignity and that displays the speaker’s intellectual superiority over the attacker and a good sense of humour, as evidenced by multiple users’ positive metapragmatic evaluations of Stormy Daniels’s retorts. Second, these findings carry vital practical implications for handling misogynist comments, including slut-shaming, online. Third, this study offers new insights into the workings of insults and retorts thereto, not only in multi-party interactions on social media, specifically on Twitter, but also through traditional channels of communication.
Keywords: creative humour, insult, misogyny, self-deprecating humour, slut-shaming, superiority, Twitter, witty retort
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Insult-reply adjacency pairs
  • 3.Setting the scene
  • 4.Methodology: Data collection and annotation
  • 5.Data analysis
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusions and final comments
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 25 October 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00031.dyn
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