Abstract
Humor, broadly defined, is an ever-present and ubiquitous model of social play involving laughter, joking, or teasing, that manifests in virtually all interpersonal relationships, imagined or perceived (Martin and Ford, 2018). For the past two decades, Internet humorous discourse, or humorous communication in the digital sphere, has emerged as an intriguing focus of contemporary multimodal discourse research, fueled by the constantly developing technology and its enormous impact on evolving people’s communicative demands. Pragmatics of Internet Humor, authored by the renowned pragmatist Francisco Yus, is a pioneering, thought-provoking, and perceptive monograph. Through the lens of cognitive pragmatics, specifically Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995), Yus seeks to offer a comprehensive explanation of what is at stake in the success or failure of generating humorous effects within diverse cyber contexts (p. 1).
The reviewed book consists of eight chapters. Chapter 1 lays the groundwork of the entire monograph by concisely defining cognitive pragmatics, with a special focus on Relevance Theory. Also, it explores the fundamental assertions which underpin a relevance-theoretic analysis of humor, outlining a set of parameters and necessary adjustments concerning online humorous interaction. Then Yus presents a convincing argument for employing the framework of Relevance Theory to investigate Internet-mediated humorous discourse. Furthermore, an overview of each subsequent chapter is provided, offering readers a glimpse into the book’s comprehensive scope.
As indicted by Relevance Theory, Humor, and Internet Communication, Chapter 2 systematically introduces Relevance Theory as the primary theoretical scaffolding and proceeds to corroborate this theory’s suitability in addressing humorous interaction in the cyberspace. Also, essential concepts pertaining to Relevance Theory are presented including context, Internet user’s intention, addressee’s inference and their request for relevance, as well as the differentiation between cognitive and communicative principles of relevance. Yus specifies the interpretive strategies for retrieving explicatures and implicatures, and further illustrates their application in online humorous communication. Notably, particular attention is given to the incongruity-resolution humorous strategy, given its strong alignment with the relevance-theoretical analysis of humor.
In Chapter 3 (Internet Humor), a comprehensive exploration of various facets of Internet-mediated humorous discourse is undertaken, encompassing its types, distinctiveness, and specific attributes. Initially, Yus showcases three types of online humorous discourse: replicated Internet humor, spontaneous Internet humor, and hybrid Internet humor. Then Yus focus narrows specially down to the spontaneous one, and considerable attention is devoted to reviewing the ongoing debate regarding whether face-to-face dyadic humor supersedes its Internet-mediated counterpart or vice versa. Additionally, broader discussions are conducted surrounding the specific constitutes of an Internet humorous discourse including verbal, visual, or multimodal qualities.
Chapter 4, titled Contextual Constraints on Internet Humor, mainly enumerates plentiful interface-related contextual constraints on interactions which occur via interfaces for messaging and on social networking sites. As for the Internet user-related constraints, such as personality, sex, ethnic origin, and nationality, an in-depth exploration of users’ personality traits is conducted. Furthermore, this chapter comprehensively examines the impact of sex on daily online humorous interactions and considers some context-dependent features like the task at hand or the user’s mood during online interactions.
Centering upon Humor in Messaging Interactions, Chapter 5 specifically focuses on interactions within the prevalent messaging application WhatsApp. To this end, Yus exemplifies some comments on humorous interactions and discusses the suitability of Relevance Theory for investigating them. Also, Yus highlights several benefits derived from online humorous interactions, along with five crucial factors for analyzing such humor: framing devices, reactions, sociocultural parameters, reasons, and genres. In particular, Yus opens Chapter 5 by analyzing the role of laugh particles and emojis when making humorous interactions on WhatsApp, then devotes a long section to studying turn-taking patterns in such interactions, and finally compares how humorous interactions develop on WhatsApp and WeChat.
Chapter 6 shifts to Humor Repositories and delves into the humor on social networking sites. Initially, Yus highlights the distinctiveness of these social networking sites in terms of collecting and disseminating humorous discourses. Additionally, he discusses the multiple formats and discursive modes employed by Internet users and categorizes such humor into several parameters. These involve humor generated by individual users, humor curated on specific platforms, corporate humor, humor created collectively by social groups of users known for their aptitude in comprehending and crafting particular types of humor, as well as humor derived from comments and interactions within comment sections. The specificity of these categories is often highlighted by their ability to understand and generate distinct forms of humor, and humor derived from commented posts and in-comment interactions.
Chapter 7 (Meme-mediated Humorous Communication) focuses on meme, one of the most prevalent multimodal discourses (p. 245). Firstly, this chapter introduces the characteristics of Internet memes, highlighting their reliance on both carriers and social context, their interactive and horizontal spread, as well as their mobility, storage, and reach, all of which depend on the web. Furthermore, the chapter delves into a comprehensive review of the meme’s history. Then, significant attention is dedicated to inquiring how text and image in humorous memes are interrelated. Additionally, considerable space is allotted to exploring the underlying reasons behind the retrieval of humorous effects via one of the six inferential strategies by which the meaningful contextualized humorous interpretations can be inferred from the literal verbal-visual discourse in memes (p. 260). Specifically, Yus proposes the incongruity-resolution humorous strategy and examines the adjustment of visual referents in memes for humorous effects. Concurrently, the analysis focuses on Covid-19 memes and their distinct humorous strategies, evaluating the evidence they provide regarding alternative purposes in the special circumstances of the pandemic and lockdown via comparing the ones compiled for commonly-used memes.
Chapter 8 entitled Beyond Humor: Relevant Affective Effects demonstrates that, apart from obtaining propositional interpretation, online humorous acts can generate non-propositional effects, such as feelings or emotions, in parallel or as a result. These effects may align with, and sometimes even surpass, the Internet user’s intention. Yet, they may not always be relevant to the audience. Then four groups of such effects are illustrated at different levels: personal, interactive, a medium-sized group, and a large-sized group. These effects include those triggered by an individual’s sense of identity, and the utilization of shared discursive conventions to establish group boundaries or emphasize the reciprocity of information, etc.
The most prominent merits of this book can be summarized in several aspects. First and foremost, Yus extends the scope of Relevance Theory beyond its conventional boundaries, such as face-to-face dyadic humorous communication (Yus, 2016) to its digital counterpart in cyberspace. This comprehensive and insightful research delves into the Internet-mediated humorous interaction by adopting the prominent framework of social pragmatic interaction-relevance theory. Yus systematically analyzes the formulation and manipulation of online coded discourses to retrieve humorous effects and demonstrates how the unavoidable cost-benefit mental heuristic, inherent to Relevance Theory, inevitably comes into play when making inferences and accessing context during online humorous interactions. Consequently, Yus not only pushes the humor research agenda further but also acknowledges online humor as a crucial category within cyberpragmatics (this term coined by Yus in 2011 pertains to the application of pragmatics to Internet interactions).
Moreover, this monograph details how the way that interfaces, such as app and website, are designed will impact the eventual humorous effect generated especially on social networking sites, on messaging apps, via memes, and on the contextual constraints, such as the qualities of Internet users engaged in online humorous interactions. Equally commendable is that it also highlights the parallel significance of the various effects derived from online humorous interaction, such as feelings and emotions. Thus, this book sheds light on the burgeoning area of research concerning pragmatic interactions in various cyber contexts.
Each chapter is well-organized as a whole and demonstrates a clear logical connection. Furthermore, abundant data, examples, and relevant images are original, applicable and pertinent, encompassing a wide range of prevalent online discourses, with a specific focus on messaging interactions, social networking sites, and memes.
Nevertheless, there is still some scope for Yus to further enhance his work. It will be advantageous to incorporate a concluding chapter that consolidates the key findings of the entire monograph, acknowledges any principal limitations encountered in prior chapters, and proposes some valuable insights for future research directions. Moreover, the inclusion of diagrams will be beneficial in visually illustrating the distinctions and similarities between face-to-face dyadic humorous interaction and its online counterparts. These diagrams can specifically outline the procedure and parameters involved in generating humorous effects, offering a clearer understanding of the subject.
These minor drawbacks aside, this book is genuinely thought-provoking, delivering an original and in-depth account of Internet-mediated humor and its significance in contemporary online interactions. It achieves this by dissecting their affordances as a medium, deciphering the Internet users’ intentions, and predicting the addressees’ interpretive strategies. In the digital era, where “new media” have become an indispensable part of many lives’ (Deumert, 2020: 363), this book powerfully demonstrates the sociological and, indeed, daily communicative significance of online humorous interaction. Therefore, this book will be intriguing to a wide range of readers ranging from researchers in Internet-mediated communication, post-graduate language majors, and cognitive pragmatics analysts, particularly those in cyberpragmatics.