ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors deal with the deontological discourse of Slovak internet social satire, using two case study microanalyses. The analysed articulations were published by one of the biggest and most well-received Slovak humorous online communities, Zomri. For this reason, the authors see them as relevant fragments of public discourse. The object of the first analysis is a fragment that satirises the situation of failing to fulfil campaign promises. In terms of form, it represents a polylogue initiated by a multimodal text, that is a text that uses various semiotic resources to evoke meaning. This particular fragment was central to our focus due to the main protagonist of the comically interpreted (utterances marked by uštipačnosť, a subtler sarcasm) proto-situation. In the analysis, the authors posed the question of what function aspects of nationality, being a traditional target of humour, fulfil in the recontextualisation of his statements. They were interested in the possible manifestation of correctness rules. The object of the second analysis is a fragment formulated in the genre of condolence. The fragment was of interest to us due to the uncommonness of this genre in terms of the focus of the website, as well as in terms of the prominent topic of utterance – the topic of death – which is a fundamental part of the human experience. The authors assumed that the producers of the given fragment would explicitly thematise the boundaries of humour and its taboo. The analysis of these fragments derives from the specific modes that were applied in the construction of meaning (semiotic analysis, tools from the toolkit of discourse analysis).
