Revisiting intertextuality and humour: fresh perspectives on a classic topic

Tsakona, Villy; Chovanec, Ján

doi:10.7592/ejhr2020.8.3.tsakona

Cited by 32 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 50 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This is how intertextuality is employed in this paper, in line with previous humour studies (e.g. Norrick, 1989; Tsakona, 2018 ; for a recent overview, see Tsakona and Chovanec, 2020), also those about memes (e.g. Dynel and Poppi, 2020; Milner, 2016; Wiggins, 2019).…”

Section: Voice Intertextuality Echo and (Online) Humoursupporting

confidence: 63%

COVID-19 memes going viral: On the multiple multimodal voices behind face masks

Dynel

2020

Discourse & Society

109

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Advancing the concept of multimodal voicing as a tool for describing user-generated online humour, this paper reports a study on humorous COVID-19 mask memes. The corpus is drawn from four popular social media platforms and examined through a multimodal discourse analytic lens. The dominant memetic trends are elucidated and shown to rely programmatically on nested (multimodal) voices, whether compatible or divergent, as is the case with the dissociative echoing of individuals wearing peculiar masks or the dissociative parodic echoing of their collective voice. The theoretical thrust of this analysis is that, as some memes are (re)posted across social media (sometimes going viral), the previous voice(s) – of the meme subject/author/poster – can be re-purposed (e.g. ridiculed) or unwittingly distorted. Overall, this investigation offers new theoretical and methodological implications for the study of memes: it indicates the usefulness of the notions of multimodal voicing, intertextuality and echoing as research apparatus; and it brings to light the epistemological ambiguity in lay and academic understandings of memes, the voices behind which cannot always be categorically known.

show abstract

Section: Voice Intertextuality Echo and (Online) Humoursupporting

confidence: 63%

COVID-19 memes going viral: On the multiple multimodal voices behind face masks

Dynel

2020

Discourse & Society

109

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A socio-psychological understanding of the term "creativity" concerns the human ability to generate new behaviors and utterances based on the combination of patterning and innovative transformations of previously encountered ideas (Vygotsky, 1967(Vygotsky, /2004). These are manifest for instance in intertextual references (see Tsakona & Chovanec, 2020), which are used in new contexts (cf. McLovin in Figure 5a) and in innovative combinations (e.g., Hitler's ID in Figure 1a, following the Fabricated Scam interpretation).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

You Don’t Fool Me: On Scams, Scambaiting, Deception, and Epistemological Ambiguity at R/scambait on Reddit

Dynel

Ross

2021

Social Media + Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

With a focus on the online phenomena of scamming and scambaiting, this article explores users’ communicative activities on Reddit’s r/scambait subreddit. Drawing on a representative corpus viewed through grounded theory, we establish the basic categories of posts and then unpack those further to reveal the deceptive practices being undertaken by both scammers and scambaiters, as well as Redditors’ untruthfulness in their fabricated posts. The analysis reveals that the r/scambait subreddit exists as a site of humorous entertainment arising from various forms of deception. Scammers’ deceptive strategies are depicted as amusingly naïve and inefficient, while scambaiters’ deceptive messages targeted at scammers demonstrate great creativity and wittiness. In both cases, scammer-victims are disparaged for being immensely gullible or downright stupid; and Redditors earn online plaudits for submitting the most upvoted posts. Our significant finding is that posts such as those at r/scambait should never be taken at face value due to their inherent epistemological ambiguity, to which the users choose to remain oblivious or indifferent. Furthermore, on a general plane, this study indicates a potential shift in the emic understanding of the concept of “scambaiting” from a punitive measure and an educational instrument to a creative practice geared toward posters’ kudos and users’ joint humorous experience through “baitertainment” and “scamusement.”

show abstract

“…a political speech)" (Tsakona and Chovanec 2020: 2), this paper examines namely the humorous aspects of the selected memes to observe the affiliation tactics behind its use. Tsakona and Chovanec (2020) illustrate this further and give insight into how sharing of memes with humorous elements may permeate the proximity between the poster and the audience.…”

Section: Academic Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Censorship Crisis

Hallová

2023

Tertium

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The following research studies the use of memes on the social platform Twitter with regards to celebrity representation. Specifically, it analyzes two memetic posts by Elon Musk and the representation tactics behind them, using elements of multimodal analysis and critical discourse analysis. Subsequently, the study looks at the reception of these posts via comparative content analysis with custom classification to determine how successful the tactics behind these posts are and whether there is any evidence observable in the reception regarding censorship on Twitter after its purchase by Elon Musk. The comparative study comes in a form of quantitative analysis of the first 150 responses to each of the two posts. The study does not only demonstrate instances of attempts at diminishing the distance which the inherent power of a celebrity personage on social media creates, but also how successful these attempts are and whether they manage to distract the audience from the personage in question and their power over them.

show abstract

Revisiting intertextuality and humour: fresh perspectives on a classic topic

Cited by 32 publications

References 50 publications

COVID-19 memes going viral: On the multiple multimodal voices behind face masks

COVID-19 memes going viral: On the multiple multimodal voices behind face masks

You Don’t Fool Me: On Scams, Scambaiting, Deception, and Epistemological Ambiguity at R/scambait on Reddit

Censorship Crisis

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About