ABSTRACT
Technology-mediated communication, particularly within popular social media sites, not only enables users to take up the role of broadcasters to produce accountable content for others, but also gives other users the opportunity to participate on more equal footing (Chovanec and Dynel, 2015; Draucker, 2015). Informed by an incongruity-based approach to humor as well as research on humor support strategies, this chapter analyzes specialized soccer humor channels on Twitter and Instagram and explores the multimodal construction of soccer-related humor on these sites as well as how that humor is responded to and supported in the recipients’ comments. In terms of humor construction in the original posts, the broadcasters use a variety of strategies, taking in pre-existing humor and constructing humor through various juxtapositions of visual and textual content. With regard to the responses, we found that commenters actively engage with original posters by signaling humor appreciation, recognition, or lack of comprehension in different ways. Commenters are also found to interact with each other—sometimes in direct relation to the topical humor of the original posts and at other times more independently. It is therefore worth noting that participants on these sites are also active agents enabled and encouraged to produce humorous content by themselves.
