Keywords
humour negotiations
authentication
friendship
How to Cite
Abstract
This study explores the intricate dynamics of comedy reception and identity construction within a group of teenage girls. It examines how, by assessing internet comedians and their work, they are at the same time negotiating collective and local identities through shared culture within the frame of doing friendship. With a critical perspective on humour and an interactional approach to identity this study shows how group conversations, here about various comedians, can engage in processes of managing relationships and articulate stances. The findings underscore humour’s dual capacity to forge community ties and expose underlying social tensions, offering a nuanced understanding of the social functions of humour in youth peer groups.
References
Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University.
Anderson, L. (2015). Racist humor. Philosophy Compass, 10(8), 501–509.
Anderson, L. (2023). Why so serious? An inquiry on racist jokes. Journal of Social Philosophy, 54(3), 370–384.
Bell, N. (2015). We are not amused: Failed humor in interaction. De Gruyter Mouton.
Bijvoet, E., & Fraurud, K. (2016). What’s the target? A folk linguistic study of young Stockholmers’ constructions of linguistic norm and variation. Language Awareness, 25(1–2), 17–39.
Billig, M. (2005a). Comic racism and violence. In S. Lockyer & M. Pickering (Eds.), Beyond a joke: The limits of humour (pp. 24–44). Palgrave Macmillan.
Billig, M. (2005b). Laughter and ridicule: Towards a social critique of humour. SAGE.
Boxer, D., & Cortés-Conde, F. (1997). From bonding to biting: Conversational joking and identity display. Journal of Pragmatics, 27, 275–294.
Bucholtz, M. (1999). You da man: Narrating the racial other in the production of white masculinity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3(4), 443–460.
Bucholtz, M. (2003). Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentication of identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(3), 398.
Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’. Routledge.
Davies, C. (1990). Ethnic humor around the world: A comparative analysis. Indiana University Press.
Davies, C. (1998). Jokes and their relations to society. De Gruyter.
Davies, C. (2011). Jokes and targets. Indiana University Press.
Fine, G. A., & Soucey, M. de. (2005). Joking cultures: Humor themes as social regulation in group life. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 18(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1515/humr.2005.18.1.1
Friedman, S. (2014). Comedy and distinction: The cultural currency of a ‘good’ sense of humour. Routledge.
Gillota, D. (2013). Ethnic humor in multiethnic America. Rutgers University Press.
Goodwin, C. (1979). The interactive construction of a sentence in natural conversation. In G. Psathas (Ed.), Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology (pp. 97–121). Irvington Publishers.
Hale, A. (2018). “I get it, but it’s just not funny”: Why humour fails, after all is said and done. The European Journal of Humour Research, 6(1), 36–61. https://doi.org/10.7592/EJHR2018.6.1.hale
Hartmann, T., & Goldhoorn, C. (2011). Horton and Wohl revisited: Exploring viewers’ experience of parasocial interaction. Journal of Communication, 61(6), 1104–1121.
Howells, R. (2006). ‘Is it because I is black?’ Race, humour and the polysemiology of Ali G. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 26(2), 155–177.
Kein, K. (2015). Recovering our sense of humor: New directions in feminist humor studies. Feminist Studies, 41(3), 671.
Kotthoff, H. (2006). Gender and humor: The state of the art. Journal of Pragmatics, 38, 4–25.
Krefting, R. (2014). All joking aside. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kuipers, G. (2006). Television and taste hierarchy: The case of Dutch television comedy. Media, Culture & Society, 28(3), 359–378.
Lindström, J., & Karlsson, S. (2016). Tensions in the epistemic domain and claims of no-knowledge: A study of Swedish medical interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 106, 129–147.
Lockyer, S., & Pickering, M. (2001). Dear shit-shovellers: Humour, censure and the discourse of complaint. Discourse & Society, 12(5), 563–692.
Lockyer, S., & Pickering, M. (2005). The ambiguities of comic impersonation. In S. Lockyer & M. Pickering (Eds.), Beyond a joke: The limits of humour (pp. 180–197). Palgrave Macmillan.
Moss, J. L. (2016). Defining transcomedy: Humor, tricksterism, and postcolonial affect from Gerald Vizenor to Sacha Baron Cohen. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 19(5), 487–500.
Ochs, E. (1993). Indexing gender. In B. D. Miller (Ed.), Sex and gender hierarchies (pp. 146–169). Cambridge University Press.
Palmer, J. (1994). Taking humour seriously. Routledge.
Pérez, R. (2013). Learning to make racism funny in the ‘color-blind’ era: Stand-up comedy students, performance strategies, and the (re)production of racist jokes in public. Discourse & Society, 24(4), 478–503.
Potter, J. (1996). Representing reality: Discourse, rhetoric and social construction. Sage.
Rampton, B. (2019). Interactional sociolinguistics. In K. Tusting (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of linguistic ethnography (pp. 13–27). Routledge.
Sierra, S. (2016a). Intertextual media references as resources for managing frames, epistemics, and identity in conversation among friends [Ph.D. Dissertation, Georgetown University].
Sierra, S. (2016b). Playing out loud: Videogame references as resources in friend interaction for managing frames, epistemics, and group identity. Language in Society, 45(2), 217–245.
Sierra, S. (2019). Linguistic and ethnic media stereotypes in everyday talk: Humor and identity construction among friends. Journal of Pragmatics, 152, 186–199.
Stivers, T., Mondada, L., & Steensig, J. (2011). Knowledge, morality and affiliation in social interaction. In T. Stivers, L. Mondada & J. Steensig (Eds.), The morality of knowledge in conversation. Cambridge University Press.
Sundén, J., & Paasonen, S. (2020). Who’s laughing now?: Feminist tactics in social media. MIT Press.
Willett, C., & Willett, J. (2019). Uproarious: How feminists and other subversive comics speak truth. University of Minnesota Press.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2025 The European Journal of Humour Research