Abstract
AbstractThis 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/)
Highlights
Over the last two decades, humor studies have drawn copious amounts of data from Computer-Mediated Communication in order to examine chosen forms of online humor or to illustrate the universal workings of humor based on publicly available examples
This paper addresses a novel form of multimodal humor facilitated by Web 2.0, namely the interactional practice called RoastMe, which involves users’ hurling creative jocular insults at other users who have voluntarily submitted their pictures for roasting
Apart from conceptualizing RoastMe from an emic perspective against the backdrop of relevant humor theory, this article reports the findings of a quantitative study that gives a socio-cultural account of the types of roastees, i. e. targets, participating in the RoastMe practice and the categories of specific jocularly disparaged features, i. e. referents, of humorous insults to which targets are subjected by roasters
Summary
Over the last two decades, humor studies have drawn copious amounts of data from Computer-Mediated Communication in order to examine chosen forms of online humor or to illustrate the universal workings of humor based on publicly available examples. Some part of the former strand of research, which considers the specificity of online humor, has investigated joint construction of creative verbal and/or visual humor online The second goal is to elucidate and quantify the referents of roasting comments, and thereby to examine what roasters draw inspiration from and what roastee features they are apt to jocularly poke fun at most often relative to the different target types
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