Keywords
incongruity
benign violation theory
online humour
How to Cite
Abstract
In this study, I investigated users’ appreciation of humour in the 361 posts published in 2018 on the subreddit r/wheredidthesodago, which is devoted to posting GIFs extracted from infomercials with funny captions. Specifically, I examined both formal and content-related features that might influence humour appreciation. The first feature I analysed was purely formal. I tested the correlation between post format—caption length, GIF duration and number of frames per second—and post score. The second feature I examined was post structure. Drawing upon the broader incongruity theory of humour, I tested the relationship between the success of a post and the presence (or absence) of an incongruous association between the GIF and the caption. The third feature I investigated was content-based, drawing on the Benign Violation Theory of McGraw and Warren (2010, 2014). I tested whether posts addressing taboo topics achieved higher scores than those that did not. While I found no correlation between the format of posts and their success, I found that posts featuring wholly incongruous GIF/caption pairings and posts broaching taboo topics tended to achieve higher scores. However, further analysis of semi-identical posts revealed that these tendencies did not always hold true. These findings suggest that incongruity and benign violation are important components of humour appreciation in the posts I analysed, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient for humour to succeed.
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