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Article published In:
Language and Dialogue
Vol. 9:2 (2019) ► pp.217–235

Dialogical strategies in replies to offensive humour

| University of Macerata (Italy)
| University of Lleida (Spain)

The aim of this paper is to determine whether humour can be used as a discursive strategy to reply to offensive humour about natural disasters and what purpose it serves. A corpus of 431 replies to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons concerning the earthquake in central Italy in August 2016 was analysed. Depending on the target of the humour in these replies, they were used to agree, disagree or deflect away from the offensive and aggressive content of the cartoons. The results show that humour can be used as a discursive strategy to respond to offensive humour. Moreover, an analysis of the corpus revealed that humorous replies were used mainly to agree rather than disagree with the cartoons.

Keywords: offensive humour, disaster humour, dialogical strategies, mode adoption, computer mediated communication
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Offence and ridicule
    • 2.1Humour as a two-sided pragmatic event
    • 2.2Humorous reactions
    • 2.3Identifying the targets
  • 3.The Charlie Hebdo cartoons on the earthquake and the reactions to them
    • 3.1Humorous or not humorous?
  • 4.Data and methods
    • 4.1Setting the corpus
    • 4.2Tagging the corpus
    • 4.3Analysis of the tagged data
  • 5.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00039.can
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