Francisco Yus: Pragmatics of Internet Humor

In an interdisciplinary area of study such as humor research it is, of course, important to employ theoretical concepts and analytical tools developed within this area, but, in my view, it is equally, if not more, important to enrich these concepts and tools with others which originate in different yet adjacent areas. In his latest monograph, Francisco Yus attempts to familiarize us with concepts and tools from Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995), which belongs to the broader field of linguistic pragmatics, and to show how they could shed light on how humor works in communication.

In the “Introduction” of the book (Chapter 1), Yus clearly states its theoretical and historical origins: it ascribes to cognitive pragmatics, in particular, to Relevance Theory (henceforth RT), and simultaneously “brings together more than 20 years of research on internet-mediated communication from the perspective of cyberpragmatics” (p. 1, emphasis in the original). RT is exploited here to account for how people make sense of humorous discourse, thus highlighting potential differences between humorous and non-humorous communication. It is also programmatically stated that the contextual particularities of internet humor will be taken into consideration throughout the study. In online communication, new types of participants are involved, who create new types of (humorous) discourse in hybrid and/or collaborative ways. Their creations are disseminated through new interfaces and directed at new types of users who also actively contribute to the re/creation of humorous or other discourse and may eventually yield multiple interpretations out of a single text. The introductory chapter also offers an overview of the content of the subsequent chapters in a way that helps readers understand how each chapter relates to the author’s perspective as well as to each other.

Chapter 2 “Relevance Theory, humor and internet communication” is a pivotal part of the study because of its detailed presentation of the main concepts of RT. Based on the underdeterminacy thesis of pragmatics (after Yule 1996), according to which “all utterances communicate more information than the one literally coded in them” (p. 1), Yus walks us through such concepts as communicative and informative intentions, anticipatory and backwards inferencing, speakers’ search for relevance, the dynamic (vs. static) view of context and its significance for mutually manifest information (i.e. accessible to all interlocutors), and the intricate relationship between explicatures and implicatures. All this may sound complicated and perhaps slightly discouraging to those who are not familiar with cognitive pragmatics and RT, but such an impression would be deceptive: Yus provides detailed explanations and several enlightening examples to assist the reader in understanding the key concepts and how they relate to the analysis of humor. Then, he proceeds with the RT account for the well-known incongruity-resolution theory of humor, thus elaborating on frameworks and conceptual distinctions which come from his own extensive work on humor. The analytical tools discussed turn out to be most suitable and effective for detecting subtle, yet not trivial differences in the cognitive mechanisms of humor production and interpretation. As such, they enable meticulous and insightful analyses of humorous discourse.

In Chapter 3 titled “Internet humor,” the author defines how this term is employed throughout the study by distinguishing among replicated internet humor, spontaneous internet humor, and hybrid internet humor. The first category involves texts/genres which are initially produced and circulated offline and, at a later stage, are uploaded to be shared with larger audiences (e.g. joke repositories, standup comedy performances recorded in theaters). The second category is what Yus considers prototypical internet humor, as it includes texts/genres which are “either created on the Net or designed exclusively to be uploaded and interpreted online” (pp. 63–64), such as memes or humorous posts in the social media. The third category pertains to texts/genres which exhibit features from the two previous ones, such as humorous discussions on films uploaded, e.g., on YouTube. This chapter also provides a brief overview of research concerning the similarities and differences between online and offline humor, mostly stemming from the physical distance among interlocutors (and absence thereof), their a/synchronous interactions as well as the textual and/or visual affordances typical of each context.

In Chapter 4, Yus elaborates on the “Contextual constraints on internet humor” by introducing a distinction between interface-related constraints and user-related constraints. In the first case, he discusses how the design and interactional affordances of messaging applications and networks pose cognitive or other challenges to users. In the second case, the author refers to how social identities interfere with the production and interpretation of internet humor, focusing specifically on gender identities and sexist humor. The fact that internet users experience what Marwick and Boyd (2011) call context collapse, namely they “face a very heterogeneous audience […] (close friends, acquaintances, former students, relatives and so on), who may react to the humorous discourse in radically different ways” (p. 87), may have a both liberating and inhibiting effect when it comes to the dissemination of humor, whether discriminatory or not.

Chapter 5 “Humor in messaging interactions” begins with a short theoretical discussion about the pragmatic functions of such humor, and about how RT can contribute to this kind of research. Yus presents both a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of data collected from WhatsApp interactions. In the former, emphasis is placed on the diverse functions of transcribed laughter (e.g. hahahaha) and emojis when employed to signal a humorous framing, intention, and interpretation of digital exchanges among people who are more or less familiar with each other. The quantitative analysis is meant to address structural concerns, namely how interlocutors tend to initiate humorous exchanges. This approach brings to the surface patterns that interlocutors may follow to introduce humor in an ongoing interaction by using verbal resources, emojis, images, or videos. At the end of the chapter, a brief comparison between Spanish and Chinese data reminds us that such patterns should always be treated as culture-specific rather than universal, since they are dependent on local politeness norms and related habits.

In Chapter 6 on “Humor in social networking sites,” Yus talks about the variety of forms humor can take in the social media. Despite the fact that users cannot be sure about how their attempts at humor will be re/contextualized and interpreted in such environments (see context collapse above), it seems that the production and/or dissemination of humor is one of the main reasons people join and use the social media (p. 195). Their activities involve uploading humorous posts as single users, creating and sustaining archives and repositories including humorous texts (e.g. memes, tweets), participating in online groups/communities which produce and/or disseminate humorous texts as means for ingroup bonding and outgroup bounding, commenting on other users’ posts (whether humorous or not), and participating in polylogues, namely interactions exhibiting “a combination of, on the one hand, the orderly, turn-by-turn patterns typical of dyadic conversations and, on the other, ‘networked sequences’ consisting of adjacent and nonadjacent turns typical of asynchronous interaction” (Bou-Franch et al. 2012: 503; see p. 220). The author also discusses corporate humor in the social media meant to advertise products, enhance users’ engagement, and eventually increase profit. In this chapter, the author juxtaposes his own findings with examples from other scholars’ previous studies on relevant topics.

Chapter 7 titled “Meme-mediated humorous communication” is dedicated to what is perhaps the prototypical form of internet humor, namely internet memes, and hence it is a must-read for everybody doing research on them. Yus discusses a number of definitions of internet memes, their types, and the families or cycles they may belong to, and elaborates on the synergy between verbal and visual resources for their production. This synergy has a significant impact on how recipients process them to reach a (hopefully) humorous interpretation, mostly by making the interpretative process more complex and demanding for recipients. In the context of RT, diverse inferential strategies are presented, which enable users to resolve the incongruities memetic humor is based on. The last part of this chapter refers specifically to COVID-19 memes, which are examined as online users’ attempts at establishing common ground among them, sharing stances, feelings, and experiences, alleviating negative feelings (e.g. fear, anxiety, boredom), and maintaining contact via online channels in a time when people were mostly confined in their homes.

In the final chapter of the book (Chapter 8 “Beyond humor: Relevant affective effects”), Yus critically considers an important limitation of RT: the way it conceptualizes communication, concentrating mostly on the cognitive/informational content of discourse (i.e. propositions, propositional content) and leaving out the analysis of affect and identities (i.e. non-propositional information and effects), both being central to the investigation of humor. Despite the initial reluctance of relevance theorists to consider non-propositional information and effects, more recent approaches, as Yus explains, tend to expand the scope of RT to account for such aspects of communication as well. Elaborating on this, the author opens an extensive theoretical discussion of the different kinds of non-propositional effects humor may have, such as the construction of various social identities, the distinction between ingroup/outgroup members, the encouragement to participate in the social media, and the creation of common ground among participants. This chapter is structurally different from the preceding ones, as it includes neither many examples nor analyses and findings from the author’s previous publications. This, however, does not mean that Yus’ theoretical observations are not enlightening for those scholars who would like to focus on studying the non-propositional meanings and effects of internet humor in the future.

While prolific authors may sometimes assume that readers will be familiar with the full extent of their work, this is not the case with Yus, who uses the book format to bring his numerous studies on RT into a single, self-contained and coherent whole. The monograph format allows Yus to create a coherent narrative of his work on internet humor (so far) and to further elaborate on it, thus giving us access to his perspective of how RT could be combined with humor research. Yus brings together different research endeavors and underlines the connections among them in terms of research goals, methodologies, and more or less complementary findings. Hence, this monograph is most useful and informative. Furthermore, the fact that a monograph poses less strict length limits than articles or volume chapters allows Yus to provide us with many examples and detailed analyses clearly illustrating how he works and on which semiotic features his interpretations of the data are premised. Still, some subtle (and promising) distinctions introduced in the book, for example, among partial, sustained, transitional and deferred relevance (pp. 113–114) are unfortunately not explored in detail through data analysis. There is also much room for future research in the area of inferential strategies in parallel, or in comparison, with the logical mechanisms used to make sense of humor (Attardo et al. 2002). Such strategies could perhaps enrich the list of known logical mechanisms or even contribute to its restructuring.

The book ends without a chapter summarizing its content and recapitulating the author’s relevance-theoretic perspective on internet humor. Given Yus’ expertise in both RT and the analysis of internet humor, it would be most helpful for readers to become familiar with how he briefly outlines his own work and, most importantly perhaps, what he considers to be its limitations, further areas of inquiry, and less explored or even unexplored research questions available for younger scholars to address. This, of course, does not mean that such ideas and inspiration cannot be found throughout the book. In my view, the book is a must-read for scholars working in the linguistics of humor as well as for those interested in fine-grained, cognitively-oriented analyses of humorous discourse, in general. It is written in a reader-friendly manner, its argumentation and ideas are easy to follow, and it is full of useful references on the topics discussed. We are definitely looking forward to the author’s or other people’s work to further explore the research paths opened by it.