In the sprawling, chaotic, and often polarizing arena of online communication, humor functions as a powerful, dual-edged force, one capable of uniting and dividing, challenging and reinforcing, liberating and oppressing communicators (Meyer Reference Meyer2000). Villy Tsakona’s Exploring the sociopragmatics of online humor arrives as a timely and significant intervention, offering a comprehensive theoretical framework to dissect this complex phenomenon. As the twelfth volume in John Benjamins’ ‘Topics in humor research’ series, this monograph provides a finely grained, contextually sensitive examination of online humor, emphasizing its cultural specificity, discursive roles, and social consequences. Moving beyond decontextualized analyses of joke texts, Tsakona masterfully argues for a performative, context-saturated approach to humor, primarily through the lens of her innovative Discourse Theory of Humor (DTH). Rather than being a mere collection of case studies on internet memes and satirical posts, the book is a rigorous, theoretically grounded manifesto that reorients the field of humor studies toward the intricate interplay between text, genre, and sociocultural assumptions.
The volume comprises seven chapters, each exploring a distinct sociopragmatic dimension of online humor. This review forgoes a chapter-by-chapter summary to instead highlight three core themes structuring the monograph: the primacy of context, the development and application of the DTH, and the ideological power of humorous discourse.
The most pervasive and foundational theme is the centrality of context. Tsakona convincingly reconceptualizes humor not as a static textual product, but as a dynamic process of meaning negotiation embedded within sociocultural frames. She systematically refutes the idea of universal humor, demonstrating that its perception depends entirely on communicative setting, shared knowledge, and cultural norms. The context-dependent nature of humor is vividly illustrated by the case study of children reading Ancient Greek texts to therapy dogs (chapter 2). In this example, the event became a site of metapragmatic struggle, with participants’ interpretations dictated by their underlying sociocultural assumptions. While one segment of the audience found the humorous reframing of the event as ‘reading to dogs’ successful, as it aligned with their perception of the activity as absurd, the other segment deemed the same humor a failure, as it clashed with their serious, pedagogical understanding of the activity (53–64). This clear interpretive divide reinforces the book’s central theme that humor is a context-bound achievement, dynamically co-constructed between texts and recipients, rather than an intrinsic property of the text itself. Far from being a mere observational premise, this focus on context serves as the very engine of the book’s analytical power, demonstrating that a thick description of context is indispensable for any meaningful analysis of humor. Consequently, the work resonates with broader sociolinguistic research that emphasizes the role of language in constructing social life.
In response to the need for a robust analytical tool, Tsakona introduces her Discourse Theory of Humor (2019, 2020) in chapter 1 and applies it throughout the subsequent five chapters. The DTH synthesizes abstract, context-limited competence models, namely the Semantic Script Theory of Humor (Raskin Reference Raskin1985) and the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo Reference Attardo1994, Reference Attardo2001, Reference Attardo2020), with situated, performance-oriented approaches (e.g. Attardo Reference Attardo2020; Kuipers Reference Kuipers and Attardo2020). This integration allows the theory to systematically account for context in humorous discourse by organizing its myriad factors into three manageable analytical foci: sociocultural assumptions, genre, and text (33–35). Crucially, these foci are dynamically intertwined rather than hierarchical: sociocultural assumptions inform generic conventions, which guide textual and semiotic choices, while textual instantiations simultaneously reinforce or reshape generic expectations and sociocultural understandings (34–35). The model’s consistent application across diverse datasets demonstrates its versatility in addressing the book’s core questions—from explaining humor failure and metapragmatic commentary to unpacking ambiguity, identity construction, and the foundations of critical pedagogy.
The third major theme explores humor as a potent vehicle for ideology and social commentary. Tsakona masterfully dismantles the myth of humor as mere harmless fun, revealing its role in enforcing norms, building communities, and perpetuating social prejudice. This is powerfully articulated in her analysis of liquid racism (Weaver Reference Weaver2016), where ostensibly anti-racist satirical news pieces are shown to unconsciously harbor latent racist scripts (109–12). This ambiguity allows discriminatory ideologies to circulate under the protective veil of humor. Similarly, her examination of metapragmatic memes reveals humor as a key site for citizen sociolinguistics (Rymes & Leone Reference Rymes and Anna2014), where ordinary users actively debate and dictate norms of standard language use. This is evidenced in the debate over the translation and use of English loanwords into Greek, where internet memes were used primarily to resist top-down linguistic prescriptions (99). Through these analyses, the book compellingly argues that humor is a central, rather than marginal, discursive domain where social identities are forged and political battles are fought.
Methodologically, the book excels in its rigorous qualitative approach, adeptly combining detailed discourse analysis with a corpus-based methodology. Tsakona grounds her study in a carefully assembled and diverse corpus of authentic digital data, comprising such materials as memes, social media interactions, and satirical news articles, thereby capturing humor as it naturally circulates and evolves online. A particular strength is her commitment to transparency; the inclusion of original memes, screenshots, and meticulously translated examples with explanatory glosses does more than just engage the reader. It establishes a standard of reproducibility, allowing others to closely follow and critically assess her analytical trajectory.
Building on this methodological rigor, Tsakona does not merely propose the DTH as an abstract model but demonstrates its utility across rich case studies, positioning the book within humor studies’ shift toward authentic, situated discourse. Engaging with scholars like Attardo, Raskin, and Kuipers while carving its own niche, the DTH synthesizes myriad contextual factors into a coherent tripartite structure (i.e. analytical foci). Its strength lies in providing a clear analytical pathway from micro-level semiotic choices to macro-level sociocultural norms, consistently prioritizing the negotiated nature of humorous meaning, particularly its inherent ambiguity. Through this grounded, interdisciplinary approach, the model powerfully reveals ideological underpinnings and social functions of humor that remain obscured in less systematic analyses, establishing the DTH as both a theoretical advance and an essential resource for understanding humor as a dynamic social practice in the digital age.
While Tsakona’s application of the DTH is consistently thorough, her reliance on Greek data may limit its immediate generalizability. However, she anticipates this critique by providing extensive contextualization and translation, turning a potential weakness into a strength: the Greek case studies offer a nuanced understanding of how humor operates in a specific cultural-linguistic context, enriching the broader field. This very specificity, rather than detracting from the work, productively underscores the DTH’s foundational need for contextual grounding and opens several productive pathways for future research. The framework could be profitably deployed to analyze AI-generated humor, dynamic multimodal formats such as short-form videos, and hybrid offline-online contexts. Furthermore, the DTH’s structured analytical foci offer a promising foundation for computational applications aiming at large-scale discourse tracking, as well as for systematic cross-cultural comparisons that can test and refine the theory’s boundaries beyond the Greek context. Future studies could also explore how the DTH might be integrated with experimental designs to quantitatively test its predictions about humor perception across cultures.
In conclusion, Exploring the sociopragmatics of online humor is a seminal work that successfully reorients the study of humor toward a more contextualized, performance-oriented, and critically aware paradigm. It is not merely an application of theory to data but a profound theoretical and methodological contribution in its own right. The book is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the intersection of language, humor, and digital culture, as it will undoubtedly serve as a foundational text and a rich source of analytical inspiration for years to come. Its emphasis on the social life of language and discourse makes it particularly valuable for sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, while its theoretical innovations will resonate across communication studies, media studies, and cultural sociology.
