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The article deals with online interactional humour in user comments on YouTube. Drawing on an extensive dataset of verbal reactions to a video discussing the (in)appropriateness of joking about the 2019 burning of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, the analysis traces how online commenters recontextualise the disaster and how they jointly produce humorous interaction on a sensitive topic. The analysis focuses on the emergence of joking threads, which consist of jokes shared by the commenters and additional (non-)humorous metapragmatic comments that develop the interaction in various directions. The data reveal that commenters cooperatively engage in a rich range of humour-related practices on a socially sensitive topic, which oscillate between disaster humour and religious humour.

This paper gives a theoretical introduction to the pragmatic research on the communication of public humour in traditional and new media, notably on social media. It discusses some of the central problems relevant to humour research and media communication. It describes, among other things, how the technological affordances of traditional and new media affect the underlying participation frameworks and how audience involvement affects humour as an interactional process, in both unscripted and scripted (sometimes also fictional) mediatised discourses. This introductory article to the special issue on the creation and sharing of humour across the media also calls attention to the need for multimodal analysis of media humour, which ranges from memes to broadcasts and films, as well as to the processes of decontextualisation and recontextualisation, which are germane to the production and reception of humour in various traditional and new media contexts.

This paper explores imperfect communication in public broadcast media arising from a mismatch between a speaker’s communicative intention and the undesirable humorous effect of his/her utterances. Based on a case study of a sports media interview, it focuses on how the interviewee may violate the communicative norms governing the expected responses, and how such a violation, motivated by the desire to avoid personal accountability, generates unintended humour in the media reception framework. Adopting a socio-pragmatic approach, the paper explains how the viral success of a media interview and its humorous reception beyond the original participation framework can come to constitute a face threat for the speaker, whose professional integrity may be at stake due to public laughter and ridicule. The article identifies a specific type of a follow-up media interview that is meant as an attempt at post-factum impression management, its aim being to mitigate the face threat (and damage) caused by undesired forms of reception and unintended humorous consequences. The findings indicate that speakers not only demonstrate meta-pragmatic awareness but also engage in ‘defensive self-reflexivity’, which is an important element in one’s public self-presentation when seeking to rectify the failed seriousness of one’s prior media talk. The study contributes to our understanding of how unintended humour is discursively managed in follow-up verbal interactions in public broadcast media contexts.

This article explores prejudicial and racist discourse in reader comments in internet news discussion forums. Based on data from an online debate among Czech commenters on the mainstream iDnes.cz news site, it seeks to contribute to the existing critical linguistic approaches to discursive strategies of othering. Analysing user comments referencing a news article on a sensitive social topic, namely the complicated reception of Central European Roma immigrants in the UK, the paper focuses on three salient themes found in the data: (a) the re-education of the ethnic minority; (b) the users’ perception of the media as politically correct and siding with the outgroup; and (c) the outgroup’s negative stereotype associating it with criminality. The paper argues that the discourse on these topics simultaneously relies on and reinforces the negative stereotype of the ethnic group, while revealing a complicated relationship between three stakeholders: the ingroup, represented by the commenters; the outgroup, made up of members of the ethnic groups; and the media, as representatives of the authorities and the elites. The findings reveal how quasi-humorous comments that involve such stereotypical representations contribute to the normalization of everyday racism against ethnic outgroups.1

This article examines the issue of evasion in mediatized political interviews in the context of right-wing populist politics. As public figures, politicians are held accountable not only for their actions but also for their prior statements. Such ‘metalingual accountability’ applies to public contexts as well as utterances made in more private situations. Based on a case-study analysis of leaked conversations with a local populist politician and a subsequent follow-up media interview, the article identifies several metapragmatic strategies that are available to interviewees aiming to evade and deny utterances originally made in the backstage region. The findings indicate that equivocation and evasiveness arise from the politicians' need to mitigate the degree of face threat. This need is particularly acute where backstage honesty can lead to frontstage scandal, as in racist comments against certain ethnic groups, whereby the speaker's status as a publically acceptable politician is in danger.

This article provides a pragmatic interpretation of the effects of euphemistic lexical choices made in public discourse in reference to taboo topics. It contributes to the cognitive pragmatic theory of proximization by considering how euphemisms weaken the potentially negative effect of specific linguistic representations or – more broadly – conceptualizations of forbidden reality, on the recipients. Doing so, such expressions extend the discourse space between the unpleasant phenomenon and the recipients’ deictic centre. Focusing on the military euphemism blue-on-blue and its use in various media, the paper interprets this expression as a strategy of discursive distanciation from the unwelcome consequences of military action. The data indicate that distanciation involves several levels of grammatical and structural transformations that obliterate the potentially negative impact by veiling the congruent, i.e. the most direct, verbalization of the event with an increasingly complex series of semantically opaque realizations.

This paper contributes to our understanding of the inception of disaster humor by refuting the position of ‘technological determinism’ that is central for the theory of disaster jokes. This view, developed by Christie Davies, ties the emergence of this form of humor to the visual presentation of disaster events on television. The paper reports on the discovery of several contemporary instances of pre-television disaster humor on the topic of the sinking of the Titanic from 1912, thereby explicitly challenging the premise that prior to televised coverage, there were no disaster jokes. While the data come from a culture that was cognitively very distant from the disaster (and, thus, more likely to give rise to instantaneous disaster humor creation), the paper suggests that a modification to the original theory is possible, arguing that disaster humor can be interpreted as a reaction to the more general process of mediatization, whether televisual or exclusively verbal, which constructs a shared body of knowledge that people can draw upon as a resource when constructing humor. That is particularly the case with iconic disasters, such as the sinking of the Titanic, which can be seen symbolically as an epic fail of modernity rather than a mere tragic disaster.

The paper examines the process of visual othering in documentary photographs in print news stories. Adopting the perspective of multimodal critical discourse analysis, it demonstrates how a series of images can construct, in combination with the textual component in image captions, a coherent and self-contained narrative reflecting a shared stereotypical script. The articles argues that the traditional exploration of text-image relations in the press should be extended by considering the storytelling potential of sequenced images in view of the fact that such images can manifest subtle patterns of multimodal manipulation. The implications of this study are relevant for our understanding of the semiotic potential of sequenced images in news stories, as distinct from the genre of print or online picture galleries, and of how such storytelling contributes towards articulating discourses of prejudice.

Rapid grow of biogas stations numbers across the Europe could be seen in recent past. This is also associated with an increase in the absolute number of operational accidents. In the opinion of experts who deal with safety engineering in the field of bioenergy installations, the number of accidents on biogas stations is growing faster than energy production from these stations. The aim of this paper is to open a discussion about interpretation and uncertainty of quantitative accidents assessment. For this purpose, 208 accidents of biogas stations were collected across Europe from 2006 to 2016. These data were statistically analysed. An integral part of the work is also the calculation of event frequencies for selected scenarios, which in the future can facilitate the decision making of risk experts in similar installations. The work also addresses issues related to the reduction of the risk level in the biogas station operations.

This article investigates health and safety risks at a biogas station, in particular the activities in the condensation shaft. There were selected three scenarios in total, which can lead to a fatal accident during the maintenance and servicing of equipment located in the condensation shafts. These are the following scenarios: (1) the worker descends to the condensation shaft and in the subsequent service activities consumes oxygen contained in shaft, falls into unconsciousness and dies. (2) There is such a gas concentration in the condensate shaft that intoxication occurs (but even direct asphyxiation is possible—e.g., methane, carbon dioxide) thereafter subsequent death. (3) The worker suffers fatal injuries due to a fall from a height. The individual scenarios are discussed in the article, including whether and under what circumstances these may occur. To support the authors claims, measurements of selected gases concentrations were made in condensation shafts at eight biogas plants. The aim of this article is to highlight the risks that can be encountered when working in condensing shafts and how they can be prevented. © 2017 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog, 2017

This article investigates spontaneous humour-related phenomena in TV documentary, arguing that their presence helps to overcome the scripted nature of the genre. Focusing on the diegetic level of interaction between the presenter and other individuals present in the scene, the analysis traces how the interlocutors achieve mutual in-tune-ness that is necessary for setting up the play frame. It pays attention to several humour-related phenomena, including non-humorous laughter, joint joking and physical pranks. The findings indicate that while laughter can alleviate tension associated with face-threat or personal failure, other forms of humour emerge in the diegetic frame as part of the programme producers’ design to divert from the transactional mode of factual television to a more entertaining hybrid format based on a significant experiential component. As a result, TV viewers do not simply receive information but derive pleasure from the playful spontaneity performed for their benefit by the presenter and other interlocutors.

In this paper, I analyse how expertise is discursively negotiated in TV documentary programmes. While previous research has explored the relationship between the ‘lay’ and the ‘expert’ dimensions invarious public participation programmes, this paper focuses on a TV programme format that is based on the cooperative interaction between professionals who differ in the extent of their knowledge and experience. The paper notes that while expertise is unevenly distributed between the voiceover, the presenter and the expert, these parties complement each other in explaining complex phenomena for the benefit of the audience. Using data from the documentary series How Britain Worked, I argue that as long as the presenter possesses some technical expertise, he may be positioned as a semi-expert between the true expert and the lay audience, even when he simultaneously acts in other contexts as a novice acquiring the specialized expertise needed for his quest. Thus, rather than demonstrating his own knowledge and skills, the presenter mediates expertise for the benefit of the audience. The mediating role is attested by the presenter's frequent shifts of footing in and out of the conversational interaction with the true expert, who may end up assuming a background role of expert support.

This paper deals with the phenomenon of the ‘microphone gaffe’ in the context of sports broadcast talk. This peculiar communicative event is characterized by the public mediation of live talk to media audiences without the speakers being aware that they are actually on air. Adopting a general pragmatic perspective, this paper analyses the microphone gaffe in terms of its specific participation framework and discusses its humorous potential. It is argued that the key element underlying these communicative situations consists of the momentary non-acknowledgement of the media audiences by the speakers. The audience, repositioned as non-participants, actually find themselves in the role of the ‘eavesdropper’ on a private conversation. On the production side of the communicative scheme, the mistaken belief in enjoying this momentary ‘private’ speech event is accompanied by a shift of footing, where the commentators’ institutional identities become replaced with their non-public personas, evidenced by forms of backstage talk that contrasts with their frontstage performance. This paper proposes that in case of microphone gaffes, humorous effect arises from the various incongruities between the actual and the presumed footings, as well as from the subsequent recontextualizations that enclose the original communicative act within an additional communicative level. The aim of the paper is to propose and elaborate a general theoretical framework for the analysis of unintended humour in media discourse.

This book offers the first comprehensive linguistic analysis of live text commentary, one of the most innovative online genres of modern news media. The study focuses on written sports commentaries in online newspapers that enable partial real-time audience involvement in the media text. Adopting an approach from interactional pragmatics, the book identifies the genre’s characteristic micro-linguistic features as well as its unique narrative structure. Live text commentary is shown to be a hybrid and multimodal text format – an internally complex form of media communication that combines elements of live spoken broadcasting, blogging, informal conversation and online chat. It aims to inform as well as entertain the audience: by using humour, banter and real or staged dialogue it seeks to create a sense of community among its readers – sports fans. The book will be of interest to many scholars in linguistic pragmatics, discourse analysis and social sciences, as well as to all others interested in modern online genres, news media and sports discourse.

This book deals with the construction of diverse forms of humor in everyday oral, written, and mediatized interactions. It sheds light on the differences and, most importantly, the similarities in the production of interactional humor in face-to-face and various technology-mediated forms of communication, including scripted and non-scripted situations. The chapters analyze humor-related issues in such genres as spontaneous conversations, broadcast dialogues, storytelling, media blogs, bilingual conversations, stand-up comedy, TV documentaries, drama series, family sitcoms, Facebook posts, and internet memes. The individual authors trace how speakers collaboratively circulate, reconstruct, and (re)frame either personal or public accounts of reality, aiming –among other things– to produce and/or reproduce humor. Rather than being “finished” products with a “single” interpretation, humorous texts are thus approached as dynamic communicative events that give rise to diverse interpretations and meanings. The book draws on a variety of up-to-date approaches and methodologies, and will appeal to scholars in discourse analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics, ethnography of communication, and social semiotics.

This book deals with the construction of the ‘other’ in European media at a time when the recently expanded EU is facing new political, economic and social challenges. The aim of the book is to document the diverse discursive forms of othering, ranging from differentiation to discrimination, that are directed against various ‘other Europeans’ in both institutionalized media and such non-elite semi-public contexts as discussion forums and citizen blogs. Drawing on data from British, Polish, French, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish and Estonian contexts, the individual papers investigate how various social groupings – regions, nations, ethnicities, communities, cultures – are discursively constructed as ‘outsiders’ rather than ‘insiders’, as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’. While most of the papers are grounded in linguistics and critical discourse studies, the book will also appeal to numerous other social scientists interested in the interface between language, media and social issues.

This chapter explores the types of interactivity and interaction that occur in the modern media. Focusing on online news media, the chapter proposes a framework for an analysis of audience participation and involvement at various stages of the news production/reception process. The chapter outlines some of the current trends and future directions, e.g. as regards content customization, remediation and its "tsunami effect", dispreferred participation, etc.

The appearance of sports reporting was among the major developments of nineteenth-century journalism. While sports were only very exceptionally covered in the newspapers during the first half of the century, by the end of the Victorian era a diverse array of sports stories provided staple content for the pages of both broadsheet and popular papers. Dealing with the phenomenon of football match reports inThe Times, this article documents the early specimens of the novel genre from the 1860s and the 1870s, tracing some of the linguistic forms and structural features that characterise the early search for the discursive conventions of the new genre. By focusing on a popular topic in a serious newspaper, the analysis illustrates that the emergence of the popular topic of football in a serious daily newspaper was not only very gradual and tentative, but was also marked with substantial uncertainty about the macrostructural and microstructural composition of the reports.

The text discusses the position of local academic traditions in the modern context of global academic discourse dominated by the Anglo-American rhetorical style that represents the standard for modern international academic communication. After reviewing some of the central notions attached to the discipline of genre analysis of written academic discourse, the paper argues for an extension of the traditional research agenda by calling for a broad sociolinguistics of genre. It is suggested that sociological, ethnographic, cross-cultural, translatological, pedagogical and critical approaches may enrich the current understanding of written academic genres. They can do so by revealing some of the ideologies and implicit norms on which particular disciplines rely in the discursive production and reproduction of knowledge, as well as the textual practices present in the transformation, recontextualization, translation, editing, etc., that may affect the eventual form of the academic texts produced, in particular, by non-native scholars coming from other cultural and academic backgrounds than the dominant global English-language model.

The article is a critical review of a publication in which the author proposes a semantic-pragmatic theory of analysing humour in short comic narratives.