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The Pragmatics of Humour in Interactive Contexts
Edited by Esther Linares Bernabéu
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 335] 2023
► pp. 87–107

“The girl is on fire!”

Interactional humour in YouTube comments on the Notre Dame disaster

| Masaryk University, Brno
| National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

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.

Keywords: interactional humour, disaster humour, religious humour, YouTube, jokes, joking thread, online discourse
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
  • References
Published online: 24 May 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.335.04cho
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