Publications

Publication details [#60001]

Moalla, Asma. 2015. Incongruity in the generation and perception of humor on Facebook in the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution. Journal of Pragmatics 75 : 44–52.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
Elsevier

Annotation

This article explores how humor use is enforced and anchored in the incongruity inherent in Tunisians’ psychological and social experiences. The data cover 195 jokes posted on Facebook in the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution and two hours of recorded discussions of 60 Tunisian students. It was found that humor was produced by simultaneously activating six script opposition classes. Taking revenge, conveying liberation and relief, and implicit criticism were related to incongruity humor generation. Humor was also found to be a concurrent process of identification and differentiation where positive evaluative language was linked to the in-group coherence and relational identity, and negative evaluative language was linked to the out-of-group effect of humor differentiation.