“Did you hear the crunch sound?”: Humor and metapragmatic stereotypes in the Greek Master Chef contest

Abstract

The present study investigates the humorous representation of a Greek dialect and its speakers in a corpus of 107 memes. More specifically, we explore how an instance of involuntary humor targeting a dialect speaker-candidate in the Greek version of the well-known cooking contest Master Chef generated several humorous memes ridiculing the candidate for his ‘inappropriate’ language use. The goal of our analysis is to bring to the surface humorists' metapragmatic stereotypes, namely their internalized models of how language should (not) be used. To attain this, we use the Discourse Theory of Humor placing particular emphasis on the contextual parameters affecting the production and interpretation of humorous discourse. The analysis reveals that humor is employed as a metapragmatic comment on the ‘proper’ use of the dialect. More specifically, it stigmatizes its use in public, formal contexts, where standard Greek or specialized registers are expected to appear. Thus, dialect speakers are negatively portrayed as unable to speak or understand standard Greek, the culinary register, English, or to recognize popular brand names, and eventually as unable to adjust themselves to communicative settings such as prestigious cooking contests.