A Rhetoric of Visual Humor on Facebook

A decade ago, Susan C. Herring (2004) urged scholars to study discoursal patterns of computer-mediated communications and not simply their microlinguistic features. This chapter contributes to the literature by examining the rhetoric of visual humor on Facebook. The purpose of the study is two-fold: (a) to develop a conceptual framework for understanding uses of humor on Facebook, and (b) to show that humorous texts on this social networking site are argumentative in focus. Using ideas from Aristotelian rhetoric, Barthian semiotics, and Saidian discourse analysis, the work contends that Facebook visual humor tends to perform four main functions. They can be gubernatorial, institutional, cultural, or grotesque, and often ridicule societal problems in either overt or covert ways. The findings are useful for developing a conceptual framework for studying the complexities of human culture in digital spaces.

Speaking in the Free Marketplace of Ideas

This chapter applies the mechanisms of conversational humour to interactional processes in blogs. With blogs giving room for uninhibited personal and interactional publishing which create virtual communities through written contributions that can best be regarded as conversations or “blogversations,” blogs are veritable sites for the investigation of conversational humour. Drawing its data from Linda Ikeji's Blog, the chapter investigates how the blog author creates humorous keys to induce humorous turns from her readers and how the readers respond to and sustain the humour. The chapter also examines how readers undermine the seriousness of posts lacking keyed humour by generating humour against author's expectation. As humour occurs from both author's and readers' ends, it is established that conversational humour is a collaborative effort that strengthens social bonds and acts as a tool for sustaining entertainment and for motivating blog users to visit, to speak, to hear, and to be heard again.

More Than a Joking Matter

This chapter discusses how humor is generated in Oga at the Top series (OATT), a puppet political satire program featuring prominent actors on the Nigerian political scene. The question of how multimodal phenomena in humor bearing texts combine to create a humorous political commentary has not been addressed within the Nigerian context. This chapter therefore explores how different semiotic resources are combined to create humor in OATT. From the 25 videos selected from Season One, the humor creation mechanisms in OATT were found to include caricature of national leaders, re-interpretation of contemporary happenings, musical parody, script opposition in conversation, inter-texuality and physical violence. Though the stated function of the series was to exploit the Nigerian political climate for humor, the analysis shows that the audience has appropriated the videos for their own ends based on the functions they felt they could serve. The chapter concludes with the significance of the online distribution of the videos.

Negotiation of Wit in Facebook Humour

This chapter unpacks the humorous contents of selected Facebook-based Akpos jokes which have received inadequate attention in the scholarship with respect to wit negotiation which mostly indexes the jokes. Six out of fifteen sampled jokes have been analysed with the theoretic aid of Istvan Kecskes' Socio-Cognitive Approach (SCA), aspects of the common ground theory, aspects of conversation analysis and elements of selected humour theories. The analysis shows three forms of wit negotiation: negotiation of mis-oriented twists, negotiation of dis-preference and negotiation of un-designed twists. In the respective cases, the talk initiating speakers have their logic flawed by recipient speakers, usually Akpos, and consequently get outsmarted; earlier sequentially dispreferred social choices are re-negotiated as preferred options in the light of new discursive realities; and the interactive designs or expectations of talk initiating participants receive undersigned or unexpected sequential responses in symmetrical or asymmetrical relationships. The paper argues that the joke characters' situationally adaptive orientation to apriori or emergent common ground and intention demonstrates the Akpos jokes' recontextualisation of particular Nigerian social and cultural experiences through the characters' socio-cognitive designs in the mediated encounters. It concludes that while these designs offer the relaxant effects jokes are naturally meant to yield, their negotiation mechanisms provide resources for the application of Kecskes' SCA in Facebook humour and produce sarcasm with a wing of moral lessons.

Pragmatics of Humour in a Nigerian University's Departmental Chat Rooms

This chapter develops an elaborated Pragmatic Act Model (ePAM) and applies it to humorous interactions in students' text chats in a Nigerian university. The model draws insights from Giora's Graded Salience Hypothesis (GSH), Mey's Pragmatic Act theory and incorporates current issues in pragmatic theorising such as the dialectics between a priori and co-constructed, emergent intention. The data for the study is got from three departmental chat room interactions in Federal University of Technology, Akure. Four humour types are analysed: canned jokes, punning/wordplay, question and answer jokes, and hyperbole/overstatement. Similarly, five pragmatic acts are performed in the identified humour types, namely, satirising, eliciting laughter, electioneering, teasing and overstating. In each of the humour types, the pragmatic mechanism drawn upon to comprehend the joke and to perform the pragmatic acts is indicated. Overall, the chapter argues that the effective appreciation of any humour act would require a pragmatically and culturally enriched context.

Communicative Content of Selected Visual Construction of Humour on Facebook

This paper socio-critically analyses some visual constructions of humour on Facebook. Based on 17 visual data, gathered through the method of extensive Internet Ethnography, the paper indicates that members of the Facebook networking site are informal misogelasts, who through the methods of digital cloning, image cropping and digital impersonation, generate or appropriate visual materials and post such to generate social/communicational humour. Using insights from Visual Social Semiotics proposed by Hodge and Kress (1988) and Critical Social Semiotics espoused by Caldas-Couthard, Carmen Rosa and Van Leeuwen Theo (2003), analyses reveal that constructed visual humour incorporates and interrogates such social phenomena as religion, education, morals, love, health and politics. The paper concludes that Facebook is not just a site for meeting new faces and interacting with them but also a medium for obtaining information on these social phenomena and how they are represented in the minds of individuals.

Searching for Humor in Dehumanization

During the last two decades, to varying degrees, some American sitcom writers have depicted Nazism and the Holocaust humorously. This sort of activity is visible on such shows as South Park, Family Guy, and Robot Chicken. Many of the writers associated with these comedies are of Jewish heritage; but the joking has stirred only limited controversy. This chapter examines the messaging, delivery, and impact in Holocaust humor. It answers questions such as: What are American comedy writers signaling with these absurd stories? How does their comedic employment contribute to a wider process of misremembering distorting, or diluting known Holocaust accounts? It also analyzes how computer-mediated communications—website like Hulu and Youtube—have transferred these false accounts beyond American audiences.

Stand-Up Comedy and Addressivity

This chapter highlights the linguistic value of addressivity in two Youtube downloads of Joan Rivers' stand-up comic performance, Live at the Apollo. Despite the devotion of the six articles of Comedy Studies 2(2) to analyses of the data, very little was said about the linguistic content and identity of the performance. Despite the givenness of a performer's deployment of linguistic resources in any kind of stage performance, the salience of some of the stand-up comedy-specific linguistic forms—repetition, disfluencies, formulaicity, paralanguage, timing, parenthetical expressions, figurative language, direct audience address—is foregrounded in Rivers' performance. These forms are located within and interpreted with Bakhtin's notion of ‘addressivity'. It is argued that her elaborate audience interaction and thematic preoccupation with social, biographical and autobiographical issues are one macro act of addressivity, foregrounding the complex intersection of speaker (comedian), listener (present audience) and third person/superaddressee (non-present audience/previous discourses).

“Can I Get in on the Joke, Too?”

This chapter explores the ramifications of having race-based “dirty laundry” aired through humor, without necessarily being dirty jokes. Not only is the United States of America reputed to be a “free country,” but also there are few restrictions on Internet participation outside of obvious legal infractions. Thus, while repulsive in their worst form or in poor taste in their naive form, racist jokes are not regulated on the Internet. Nor is expressing or espousing racism online in and of itself illegal. Currently our legal system is designed to respond or react to manifestations of racist thought when acted out against another in the physical realm (e.g., denying another a job based upon their race or inflicting bodily harm when motivated by racial animus). While we presume that most would not want to entertain destructive thoughts, people are free to hold, share and emote racist ideas in cyberspace. Thus, with the ever-expanding role of the Internet in many of our lives, it is important to interrogate whether such publicly broadcast in-group humor will desensitize other members of other races outside of the joke. This chapter will tease out the implications of the continued sharing online of racial humor, with those both in and outside of the original joke.

Contextual Beliefs and Pragmatic Strategies in Online Humour

The social media in Nigeria provides an avenue where cultural practices are produced and consumed. One of such practices is joking. Specifically, a genre of jokes found in Nigeria social media space is Akpos jokes. The goal of this chapter is to explore the contextual beliefs in Akpos jokes and the pragmatic strategies employed by the writers of Akpos jokes. Akpos jokes are narratives about an imaginary character named Akpos. The study benefited from contextual belief theory (Odebunmi, 2006) while the data comprised jokes randomly picked from a blog and Facebook pages where Akpos jokes are published. The study revealed that the writer(s) of the Akpos jokes manipulate contextual beliefs like shared knowledge of language and shared knowledge of situations and events in Nigeria in order to generate humour. The writers also employ Implicature and stereotyping of the character of Akpos for humorous effects.