ABSTRACT
Chapter 3, the first of three chapters that present original analyses of digital texts, takes up the topic of creativity and humour in novelty Twitter accounts. Such accounts often target celebrities (e.g., Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Murray), while others project more unlikely, or improbable, identities (e.g., Tweets from God). In this chapter, I analyse tweets from many different types of novelty Twitter accounts. Some of these engage readers by presenting explicit forms of political humour, while others rely on multimodal resources to create humour. Much of this chapter is dedicated to showing how tweets from three novelty Twitter accounts exemplify the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossia, with examples used to illustrate and explain how authors of these non-serious Twitter accounts skilfully blend the voices of various personae (both real and imagined) in creating amusing storylines. Very often, these entertaining texts simultaneously provide critical social commentary. Chapter 3 concludes with a discussion of how authors of novelty tweets interweave current events and a broad range of other topics as they produce creative and humorous texts.
