"The girl is on fire!" : Interactional humour in YouTube comments on the Notre Dame disaster

Authors

CHOVANEC Jan TSAKONA Villy

Year of publication 2023
Type Chapter of a book
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Attached files
Description 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.
Related projects:

You are running an old browser version. We recommend updating your browser to its latest version.