Quid rides?: Targets and referents of RoastMe insults

Abstract

This article offers a qualitative and quantitative socio-cultural examination of RoastMe, a peculiar humorous practice deployed on Reddit and reposted on various social media. First, RoastMe is characterized from the emic (user) perspective and conceptualized in the light of humor theory (superiority and incongruity approaches). RoastMe consists in some users’ posting pictures of themselves with a view to being roasted, i. e. pelted with jocular insults, by other online community members. Albeit a type of disparagement humor, RoastMe is an innocuous humorous activity enclosed within a humorous frame; it is a form of affiliative humor based on users’ unbounded creativity. Second, this paper reports the findings of a quantitative study on the predominant types of targets/roastees depending on their (lack of) salient features, as well as the source and nature of the jocularly disparaged referents in roasting comments, i. e. the central features that roasters make harmless fun of most often, relative to the different categories of roastees. Roasting (v.) – To humorously mock or humiliate someone with a well-timed joke, diss or comeback. (…) Hone your roasting skills, meet other roasters, and get yourself roasted! Everybody needs to laugh at themselves! And other people, of course! (https://www.reddit.com/r/RoastMe/)

Laughter through tears: Unprofessional review comments as humor on the ShitMyReviewersSay Twitter account

“…It is the latter that are the actual butt subject to disparagement. In this sense, the act of sharing chunks of review reports on ShitMyReviewersSay may be considered the epitome of disparagement humor, which is amenable to analysis with reference to the superiority theory of humor (for an overview see e.g., Dynel 2013a; Dynel and Poppi 2020b;Ferguson and Ford 2008;Martin and Ford 2018). In a nutshell, the type of humor at hand stems from the feeling of superiority based on the recognition of the target's infirmities, foibles, or weaknesses.…”

Ad libidinem: Forms of female sexualisation in RoastMe humour

“…The referents of insults most typically coincide with the salient features of roastees (their looks or artefacts on display) or other recognised characteristics manifest in roastees’ pictures or self-descriptions. On the other hand, less frequently, roasters attribute to roastees features that cannot be rationally verified based on the evidence at hand (Dynel and Poppi, 2020a). This recognised feature vs attributed feature dimension is pertinent also to RoastMe jibes addressing the issues of sexuality, which may be – as this study aims to show – the jocularly disparaged referents or background components of creative jibes.…”

“…A roast is a humour-oriented interaction in which one or more individuals is/are subjected to ritual insults , i.e. benevolent humorously disparaging jibes , produced by roasters for the sake of collective humour experience, including the roastee’s (see Dynel and Poppi, 2019, 2020a). Even though these jibes purport to be aggressive, they are inherently free from spite and genuine aggression and are not intended to cause offence.…”

“…Even though these jibes purport to be aggressive, they are inherently free from spite and genuine aggression and are not intended to cause offence. The traditional roast has given rise to the RoastMe practice on social media (see Dynel and Poppi, 2019, 2020a).…”

“…Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 1992; Lave and Wenger, 1991). As the notion of the community of practice presupposes, its members are oriented to their joint enterprise, which is the sharing of autotelic humour (humour for its own sake), the practice in which they are willingly engaged both as roasters and roastees, and so no one is (supposed to be) offended (see Dynel and Poppi, 2020a). This is why the many members of the RoastMe community of practice operating on the relevant subreddit need to be cognisant of the underlying rules and follow them, monitored by moderators and one another so that any posts that do not respect the rules are deleted.…”