Seriously funny: The political work of humor on social media

Research shows a clear intersection between humor and political communication online as “big data” analyses demonstrate humorous content achieving disproportionate attention across social media platforms. What remains unclear is the degree to which politics are fodder for “silly” content production vis-à-vis humor as a serious political tool. To answer this question, we scraped Twitter data from two cases in which humor and politics converged during the 2016 US presidential election: Hillary Clinton referring to Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and Donald Trump calling Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” during a televised debate. Taking a “small data” approach, we find funny content enacting meaningful political work including expressions of opposition, political identification, and displays of civic support. Furthermore, comparing humor style between partisan cases shows the partial-but incomplete-breakdown of humor’s notoriously firm boundaries. Partisan patterns reveal that the meeting of humor and social media leave neither unchanged.

[1]  Melanie Grunwald,et al.  Convergence Culture Where Old And New Media Collide , 2016 .

[2]  Dayei Oh,et al.  The ambivalent Internet: mischief, oddity, and antagonism online , 2019, Information, Communication & Society.

[3]  J. Webber.  The Cultural Set Up of Comedy: Affective Politics in the United States Post 9/11 , 2013 .

[4]  L. Bode.  Political News in the News Feed: Learning Politics from Social Media , 2016 .

[5]  J. Best.  Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke , 2007 .

[6]  Richard Collins,et al.  Rawls, Fraser, redistribution, recognition and The World Summit on the Information Society , 2007 .

[7]  Jean Burgess,et al.  Vernacular Creativity, Cultural Participation and New Media Literacy: Photography and the Flickr Network , 2006 .

[8]  A. Chadwick,et al.  Dual Screening the Political: Media Events, Social Media, and Citizen Engagement , 2015 .

[9]  S. Timmermans,et al.  Theory Construction in Qualitative Research , 2012 .

[10]  G. Kuipers,et al.  The Divisive Power of Humour: Comedy, Taste and Symbolic Boundaries , 2013 .

[11]  R. Peterson,et al.  CHANGING HIGHBROW TASTE: FROM SNOB TO OMNIVORE* , 1996 .

[12]  J. Maritato.  Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era , 2011 .

[13]  Paul DiMaggio,et al.  Arts participation as cultural capital in the United States, 1982–2002: Signs of decline? , 2004 .

[14]  Dhavan V. Shah,et al.  Coproduction or cooptation? Real-time spin and social media response during the 2012 French and US presidential debates , 2016 .

[15]  Limor Shifman,et al.  “It Gets Better”: Internet memes and the construction of collective identity , 2016, New Media Soc..

[16]  R. Hariman.  Political Parody and Public Culture , 2008 .

[17]  John C. Meyer,et al.  Humor as a Double‐Edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in Communication , 2000 .

[18]  M. Featherstone.  Consumer Culture and Postmodernism , 1991 .

[19]  L. Shifman,et al.  Humor in the Age of Digital Reproduction : Continuity and Change in Internet-Based Comic Texts , 2007 .

[20]  S. Barnard.  ‘Tweet or be sacked’: Twitter and the new elements of journalistic practice , 2016 .

[21]  Jenny L. Davis,et al.  Theorizing Affordances: From Request to Refuse , 2016 .

[22]  R. Milner.  FCJ-156 Hacking the Social: Internet Memes, Identity Antagonism, and the Logic of Lulz. , 2013 .

[23]  Tony P. Love,et al.  #TheFappening: Virtual Manhood Acts in (Homo)Social Media , 2017 .

[24]  Summer Harlow,et al.  Social media and social movements: Facebook and an online Guatemalan justice movement that moved offline , 2012, New Media Soc..

[25]  F. Vis.  TWITTER AS A REPORTING TOOL FOR BREAKING NEWS , 2013 .

[26]  J. Hartley.  Silly citizenship , 2010 .

[27]  Laine Nooney,et al.  One Does Not Simply: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Internet Memes , 2014 .

[28]  S. Timmermans,et al.  Abductive Analysis: Theorizing Qualitative Research , 2014 .

[29]  Jason Wilson.  Playing with politics: Political fans and Twitter faking in post-broadcast democracy , 2011 .

[30]  Tim Highfield,et al.  News via Voldemort: Parody accounts in topical discussions on Twitter , 2016, New Media Soc..

[31]  A.M.J. Derks.  Post-broadcast democracy: How media choice increases inequality in political involvement and polarizes elections , 2009 .

[32]  E. Hargittai,et al.  THE PARTICIPATION DIVIDE: Content creation and sharing in the digital age1 , 2008 .

[33]  Molly Sauter.  Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest , 2017 .

[34]  Jody C. Baumgartner,et al.  The Daily Show Effect , 2006 .

[35]  R. Milner.  Pop Polyvocality: Internet Memes, Public Participation, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement , 2013 .

[36]  G. Kuipers.  Humor Styles and Symbolic Boundaries , 2009 .

[37]  M. Castells.  Communication Power: Mass Communication, Mass Self-Communication and Power Relationships in the Network Society , 2009, Media and Society.

[38]  Kate M. Miltner.  "There's no place for lulz on LOLCats": The role of genre, gender, and group identity in the interpretation and enjoyment of an Internet meme , 2014, First Monday.

[39]  Michèle Lamont,et al.  Cultivating differences : symbolic boundaries and the making of inequality , 1993 .

[40]  Jenny L. Davis,et al.  Women Who Stay: A Morality Work Perspective , 2018 .

[41]  Jody C. Baumgartner.  Humor on the Next Frontier , 2007 .

[42]  H. Nissenbaum.  A Contextual Approach to Privacy Online , 2011, Daedalus.

[43]  Limor Shifman,et al.  Only joking? Online humour in the 2005 UK general election , 2007 .

[44]  Caroline J. Tolbert,et al.  The mobile Internet and digital citizenship in African-American and Latino communities , 2017 .