Between aggression and vindication: irony, parody, and satire in comments on the Facebook page of the Mexican president

Abstract

This exploratory and qualitative work, focused on the relationship between humour, irony, parody, and satire in the digital medium, performs a discursive analysis of approximately two hundred comments derived from the Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto's Facebook output on the occasion of Valentine's Day (February 14, 2018). As it is usual in discourse analysis (DA), the main theoretical-methodological framework of the present work, the study of political DA, is studied from within an interdisciplinary framework: the data collected is interpreted through concepts from disciplines such as the daily argumentation theory, communication studies and media semiotics, and the French DA study of irony and polyphony. Starting from the parody and the characterization of the enunciating "voices", the work discusses the definition of echo-irony as "insincerity" and highlights the discursive complexity of Internet users' comments, political as a result of its controversial nature (according to Amossy's definition of controversy): through satire, they create a counter-discourse opposed to the official discourse of love and friendship, and employ various forms of polarization and linguistic aggression to ridicule the president. Humour, then, acquires a claim value, linked to the desire of a different order, manifested in the irruption of popular ways of saying and humorous forms, such as the Mexican "albur".