Tracing the trajectories of contemporary online joking

Statement of the problem

Humor is based on something that is evaluated as incongruous and unexpected in a certain sociocultural context. Humorists point to aspects of social reality that deviate from their expectations and are perceived and entextualized as such (on incongruity as the basis of humor, see [Raskin 1985; Attardo 2001]; on humor as a way of perceiving and representing reality, see among others [Mulkay 1988]). It therefore seems that different sociocultural communities create and enjoy different kinds of humor and laugh at different topics and aspects of social reality (see among others [Bremmer, Roodenburg 1997; Bell 2009: 246–249; Tsakona 2020].

Before the dawn of the digital age, jokes were mostly created and circulated orally in informal, face-to-face interactions among people who shared common experiences and sociocultural backgrounds. Such oral humorous texts often alluded to, and reproduced, widely held beliefs and stereotypes concerning social affairs (e. g. political events) and groups (e. g. ethnic groups, women). Thus, jokes allowed speakers to negotiate common values and stances towards the events or groups referred to and eventually to create consensus among them, at least when texts intended as humorous were accepted as such and not rejected. In this sense, Davies [Davies 2011: 248] was right to suggest that jokes work like a “thermometer” conveying information about the sociopolitical system generating them.

Widely circulating jokes may at some point be documented and collected in archives or edited volumes, and it is at that stage that their thematic similarities become salient and turn into a criterion for the classification into the so-called joke c ycles. Joke cycles constitute folk taxonomies of jokes that were initially circulated orally and became written when their producers, collectors, and eventually researchers attempted to maintain them, thus further contributing to their dissemination. A joke cycle may eventually die out when people lost interest in developing it (on joke cycles, see [Attardo 2001: 68–78, Jorgensen 2017]; on joke cycles eventually dying out, see [Tsakona 2018b]).

In the digital age, and with speakers’ increasing access to online media and networks, jokes are mostly created and disseminated in written discourse and/or through visual means. Oral jokes are gradually replaced by written jokes and memes, which refer to current social affairs and reproduce speakers’ perspectives and evaluations of them, often drawing on widespread views and stereotypes. Memes, in particular, have become perhaps the most typical and popular online humorous genre and employ “script and sound, static pictures and moving images” to convey playful messages [Shifman 2007: 190]. They are considered to be prototypical instances of contemporary internet culture enhancing speaker involvement and everyday creativity, and used for the representation and dissemination of complex ideas and values, often in an unconventional manner [Shifman 2014; Wiggins, Bowers 2015]. In general, it seems that contemporary online jokes (including memes) often emerge from specific events that become well known to the public through the media, thus presupposing humorists’ and recipients’ familiarity with such events and the respective media representations [Tsakona 2015; 2018; 2018b; 2020; El Khachab 2016; Vásquez 2019].

Given the above, the written/visual and online character of contemporary jokes allows us to trace, document, and analyze the processes of their production and dissemination much more easily. While oral jokes of the past traveled from mouth to mouth and their different versions and routes may be lost forever for contemporary scholars, current jokes and their trajectories are frequently more accessible and may offer us useful information concerning the processes of their creation and spreading, since traces of such processes can be found in the social media and other online sources.

The present study will try to describe how online jokes are nowadays generated from events announced in the media. A key concept for this description will be that of intertextuality [Kristeva 1980; Bakhtin 1986; Fairclough 1992; Allen 2000], as I will investigate how humorists rely on media texts to create humorous ones, thus establishing intertextual links between different genres. Such links are part of intertextual chains, namely “relatively settled transformational relationships between texts” [Fairclough 1992: 132]. The present study will investigate the humor produced online concerning a specific media event that took place at the beginning of 2019 in Greece and attracted the attention of Greek social media participants for a couple of days.

History of the issue

The multiple ways different utterances/texts may be connected with each other are extensively described in Bakhtin [Bakhtin 1986: 68–99], who underscores the fact that intertextuality infiltrates everything we say or write: our utterances/texts respond to previous utterances/texts; they reflect, recontextualize, or even re–accentuate them via implicit or explicit references. We could therefore perceive discourse as a network of interrelated texts influencing the form and/or content of one another. In this process, the role of the addressee is equally important with that of the text producer: they take each other into consideration when shaping their utterances/texts or interpretations. They make specific assumptions concerning each other’s available background knowledge that needs (and is expected) to be activated to process discourse. In this sense, communication is based on the intertextual links both the producer and the addressee can trace between the text at hand and pre–existing or upcoming ones. In other words, interpreting a text presupposes the recognition and understanding of implicit or explicit intertextual references. Given that such references may or may not be accessible to all recipients, intertextuality can bring recipients closer or tear them apart, thus organizing people into communities (on intertextuality, see also [Fairclough 1992: 101–136; Allen 2000; Duff 2004: 237–239; Mazurek-Przybylska 2016: 81–83]).

Another important effect of intertextuality is the creation of intertextual chains [Fairclough 1992: 130–133]. By recontextualizing formal or content elements from one text/genre to another, speakers establish traceable connections between texts/genres, and such connections may be repeated in time and across contexts. Intertextual chains are thus created which consist of “series of types of texts which are transformationally related to each other in the sense that each member of the series is transformed into one or more of the others in regular and predictable ways” and “for strategic purposes” [Fairclough 1992: 130, 133].

Humor appears to be closely related to intertextuality in various ways. First of all, the mere concepts of incongruity/script opposition used to describe the core of humor [Raskin 1985; Attardo 1994; 2001] (see previous section) rely on intertextuality. When interpreting humorous texts, recipients evoke specific scripts, namely previous experiences and knowledge of the world (including, and/or included in, previous texts) to make sense of the humorous material at hand. Such previous intertextual experience and knowledge become the benchmark against which the second, incongruous script of interpretation creating the humorous effect surfaces. In other words, incongruity or script opposition cannot actually be established without reference to previous (con)texts, which are considered as expected, conventional, or normal in some sense. It is therefore suggested that “intertextuality lies at the heart of humor” [Attardo 2001: 71], as it helps determine what is incompatible or incongruous in a given (con)text.

It should also be noted that this intertextual dimension of humor is directly related to the fact that different sociocultural communities exploit different scripts or background knowledge to create humor, thus resulting in more or less significant differences in humor. It is not uncommon for different sociocultural communities not to share the same scripts or not to evoke the same background information for humorous purposes, and this may lead to misunderstandings or failure of humor, especially when it travels from one culture to another (e. g. through translation). In other words, in humorous communication, speakers are expected to be able to make the same intertextual connections for humor to be understood or successful [Bell 2015; Tsakona 2020] (see also previous section).

In this context, the notion of intertextuality has been exploited to account for joke similarity, thus becoming a criterion for classifying jokes. Jokes are more often than not based on recurring themes, settings, targets, stereotypes, public events and figures, as well as on common generic features, which enable individuals to make sense of them and to create more of them. On the basis of such common traits, jokes are classified in joke cycles (e. g. blonde, ethnic, or sexual jokes) [Attardo 2001; Jorgensen 2017].

In the present study, I will explore three different aspects of the synergy between humor and intertextuality:

1. Online jokes recontextualize news reports on specific events that are announced through the media.
2. Online jokes recontextualize other pre–existing texts that initially seem irrelevant to the main events referred to, but become relevant during the process of humor creation.
3. Online jokes are subsequently cast in different forms, thus becoming a different genre. The practice of “redoing” or recreating digital texts by other means is particularly common among social media users and significantly contributes to the online spreading of cultural artefacts such as memes [Shifman 2014; Laineste, Voolaid 2016].

Given the above, the following analysis intends to demonstrate how speakers’ practices of humorously commenting on media events and disseminating such humor end up establishing intertextual chains involving different genres. It will therefore be shown how intertextuality plays a significant role in the creation and spreading of contemporary online jokes.

Description of the research methodology

The present case study is based on a joke cycle collected from the 6^th until the 8^th of January 2019. The data include online posts from the social media (mostly Facebook and Twitter) referring to the following series of events. On the night of January 4th, 2019, due to unusually heavy snowfall, the Macedonia airport of Thessaloniki, Greece was closed for several hours: no flights departed and incoming flights were directed to other airports or canceled. A Ryanair flight from London to Thessaloniki ended landing in Timişoara, Romania, a city which, we can quite safely assume, is not famous among Greeks (including the Greek passengers of the flight), unless they have travelled to Romania before or are familiar with Romanian history and culture. It should be noted here that, even though Romania and Greece are both Balkan countries, they are not neighboring ones: they are separated by Bulgaria, North Macedonia, and Serbia. Timişoara is approximately 800 kms north from Thessaloniki, if one crosses the above–mentioned countries. Given that all other flights not permitted to land in Thessaloniki landed in Greek airports, the Timoşoara airport was not an obvious or expected choice for the Greek audience and passengers.

According to media reports, flight passengers were faced with an unexpected situation in an unknown territory. They started communicating with the air company and with Greek media to get help and find a way back home. A few of them booked expensive flights back to Greece through other destinations (e. g. Munich, Germany), 88 of them accepted Ryanair’s offer to return to Thessaloniki by bus, while the rest 89 of them declined the offer. Eventually, on January 5^th, the Greek government was forced to hire an airplane to bring the remaining passengers back from Timişoara.

Social media participants immediately decided to express their sympathetic and critical perspectives through their accounts in both serious and humorous tones. In expressing their sympathy, they mostly accused Ryanair of inadmissible practices and wrong decisions. What was framed as the company’s unreliability and low quality services was related to the low fares usually charged to passengers. Greek social media users also criticized the Greek government for using state money (to hire the extra plane) for the benefit of a private, low prestige company. Others attacked the passengers and the media for exaggerated reactions to the events.

Here I will focus on the humorous posts referring to these events so as to explore the interplay between intertextuality and humor. A joke cycle of 134 humorous posts was collected including verbal jokes and memes. Most of them were collected through the hashtags #Τιμισοάρα, #Τιμισοαρα (meaning ‘Timişoara’ in Greek) and a few from #Ryanair as well as from online newspaper articles which specifically reported on the humorous social media reactions to the Timişoara events. In what follows, an intertextual analysis will be performed: “the intertextual analysis identifies genres and discourses that the text draws upon, and the ways they are articulated together” [Fairclough 2000: 170]. Thus, I will try to show how humor and intertextual chains are simultaneously created.

Analysis of the material

As already mentioned, the data analysis concentrates on three aspects of the interplay between intertextuality and humor:

1) how online jokes emerge out of news reports on specific events;

2) how online jokes allude to texts initially irrelevant to the main events referred to, but becoming relevant through humor creation;

3) how online verbal jokes are cast in different forms, thus becoming a different genre.

All the humorous texts of this joke cycle explicitly or implicitly refer to the reported events concerning the flight that landed in Timişoara instead of Thessaloniki. The examples discussed here are translated into English by the author for the purposes of this study; unconventional spelling was maintained in the Greek original texts, but not reproduced in the English translations. Useful contextual or implicit information has been added by the author in square brackets. The data have also been anonymized for ethical reasons. The following examples illustrate that the change of destination is framed as incongruous, thus becoming the core of humor: