Publications

Publication details [#50847]

Gerhardt, Cornelia. 2009. Multimodal and intertextual humor in the media reception situation: The case of watching football on TV. In Norrick, Neal R. and Delia Chiaro, eds. Humor in Interaction. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 182). John Benjamins. pp. 79–98.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins

Annotation

Based on natural data from media reception, the talk of television viewers watching football matches is analysed with regards to humor. Remarks on television are often greeted by (shared) laugher of the fans. However, laughter as such does not necessarily indicate humor. Instead, the celebrating fans also often laugh after goals. Principally, the fans appropriate the media text humorously either by multimodally referring to the pictures on the screen or by intertextually hinging their talk on the televised language. Formally, second person pronouns or sequences co-constructed with the sports announcers are used. Functionally, humor marks the activity as leisure. It helps the viewers negotiate world-views serving as contextualisation cue in the interpretation of the media text.