Laughing alone, together: local user-generated satirical responses to a global event

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a first systematic analysis and conceptualization of local comic responses to global events, as articulated by internet users. We probed the multifaceted interactions between the global-local and entertaining-disruptive dimensions of contemporary satire through a cross-linguistic analysis of reactions to Donald Trumps’ election. Using a combination of qualitative methods, we analyzed humorous messages in Arabic, Chinese, English, German, and Spanish (n = 321) on Twitter and Weibo during November 2016. We found that globally shared themes are mainly apolitical and entertaining, while glocal responses align with three ideal types, which we term inbound, transitional, and outbound satire. Each type of satire featured a distinct combination of protagonists, targets and humor mechanisms. In conclusion, we discuss how cross-national satire on social media problematizes the (already murky) distinction between entertaining and disruptive satire, why satire is uniquely equipped to domesticate global affairs through estrangement, and how our typology may be linked to bilateral relations between countries in the contemporary international arena.

KEYWORDS:

• Humor
• satire
• digital culture
• globalization
• localization
• Donald Trump

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the editors and reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments on this paper. We are also indebted to our colleagues Paul Frosh and Lillian Boxman-Shabtai for their advice and insight. Finally, we thank the excellent team of coders who took part in this research: Maria Dakwar, Tikvah Grunow, Alejandro Haber, Deborah Karrer, Margarita Ortega, Andrew Pico, Loren Marie Salkin, Shen Jian-Yu, Wang Yujue, and Sulafa Zidani.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Comedy, fail, fun, funny, haha, hahaha, hilarious, humor, joke, jokes, laugh, laughing, lol, meme, memes, picture, pictures.

2 Arabic – 992; German – 1717; Spanish – 9862; English – 32,338.

3 Number of variables in the first round of coding with Krippendorff's alpha values between 1 and 0.66: Chinese – 10; English – 10; German, 9; Spanish – 7; Arabic – 5.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Israel Science Foundation [grant number 1670/15].

Notes on contributors

Asaf Nissenbaum

Asaf Nissenbaum is a PhD student at the Department of Communication and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include digital culture, humor, cultural globalization, internet memes, and web-based identities. [email: [email protected]]

Limor Shifman

Limor Shifman is a Professor at the Department of Communication and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her studies focus on the intersection between popular culture and digital media. [email: [email protected]]