Jan Chovanec is Professor of English linguistics at Masaryk University in Brno, the Czech Republic, specializing in discourse analysis and socio-pragmatics. He has done research on the discursive processes of othering, e.g. in relation to the presentation of the ethnic minorities in online reader comments. He is the author of Pragmatics of Tense and Time in News (2014), The Discourse of Online Sportscasting (2018) and co-editor of a number of publications, including Representing the Other in European Media Discourses (2017), The Dynamics of Interactional Humour (2018) and Analyzing Digital Discourses: Between Convergence and Controversy (2021). He serves on the editorial board of the journals Internet Pragmatics, Discourse, Context & Media and Journal of Pragmatics.

ABSTRACT

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the research of humour in diverse communicative contexts, marking a clear shift of focus from the referential or cognitive properties of language to the interpersonal dimension of communication, as well as to language play and creativity (Vásquez 2019). The talk provides an overview of the traditional approaches to the study of humour, and argues for the need to adopt an explicit socio-pragmatic perspective (e.g. Tsakona and Chovanec 2018) in order to explain some of the forms and functions of this phenomenon in modern mediated contexts. On the theoretical level, the talk raises some of the key concepts for understanding humour in the digital sphere and their implications, including context collapse, networked practices of production and reception, multimodality and remediation, which are all applicable to both public and social media. The arguments are supported by presenting several case studies in order to illustrate the textual flows of (humorous) content across media and the emergence of humour – both intended and unintended – in the public/social media nexus.

References

Tsakona. V. & J. Chovanec (2018) The dynamics of interactional humor: Creating and negotiating humor in everyday encounters. John Benjamins.

Vásquez, C. (2019). Language, creativity and humor online. Routledge.