9 More than laughter: Multimodal humour and the negotiation of ingroup identities in mobile instant messaging interactions

Abstract

One form of maintaining sociability and cohesion in mobile instant messaging (MIM) interactions is posting humorous content (Cruz-Moya and Sánchez-Moya 2021; Yus 2018, 2021). Online humour can be multimodal since smartphone users can easily publish verbal, auditory, and visual content. This chapter focuses on the production, negotiation, and response to humorous multimodal posts in a single WhatsApp group chat among sixteen men. Methods combine computer-mediated discourse analysis (Herring and Androutsopoulos 2015), digital conversation analysis (Giles et al. 2015), and the study of interactional humour (see Chovanec and Tsakona 2018). The analysis showed that humour in this chat was typically initiated by static images (i.e., photos, screenshots, or memes) or videos. Like other online contexts, such as Twitter and Instagram (Messerli and Yu 2018) or dyadic MIM chats (Sampietro 2021b), laughing emojis helped signal humour and show appreciation for it. Other emojis were used in a more playful manner, such as when repeating visually humorous discourse. Emojis were also a non-threatening way of bringing failed humour to an end. In addition to humorous memes, personal anecdotes and pictures of participants were elaborated upon in sustained humorous exchanges. Ageing and sex were common scripts for humour in the chat, and were used to negotiate in-group identity and reaffirm participants’ masculinity.