“The girl is on fire!”
Interactional humour in YouTube comments on the Notre Dame
disaster
The article deals with online interactional humour in user
comments on YouTube. Drawing on an extensive dataset of verbal
reactions to a video discussing the (in)appropriateness of joking
about the 2019 burning of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, the
analysis traces how online commenters recontextualise
the disaster and how they jointly produce humorous interaction on a
sensitive topic. The analysis focuses on the emergence of joking threads, which consist of jokes
shared by the commenters and additional (non-)humorous metapragmatic
comments that develop the interaction in various directions. The
data reveal that commenters cooperatively engage in a rich range of humour-related practices on a socially sensitive
topic, which oscillate between disaster humour and religious
humour.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Setting the field: Interactional humour, disasters, and religion
- 2.1Interactional humour
- 2.2Disaster humour
- 2.3Religious humour
- 3.Material
- 3.1YouTube commenting and humour
- 3.2The data of the study
- 4.Data analysis
- 4.1Disaster humour joking thread
- 4.2Religious humour joking thread
- 5.Discussion and conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
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Humorous Genres and Modes in Greek Political Discourse. In
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