The Epic Split: Intertextual Humour and YouTube Videos
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | The presentation considers the notion of humorous intent in user-created videos posted on YouTube in response to other videos. It is argued that much of the humour contained in such videos is intertextual and relies on background knowledge assumed to be shared by the recipients. The participant structure that describes the entire communicative event is complex in that it involves two distinct levels of production and two levels of reception. Typically, some original video (a prompt) inspires users to generate a number of responding videos that are further posted online. In this way, video-producing users adjust their original reception role (of the prompting video) to the production role (of the responding video). The humorous intent that is present in their creations is manifested in diverse ways (verbal, visual, structural) and it becomes meaningful to the recipients only when considered with respect to the prompting video. Inevitably, the recipients will detect incongruities between the user-created responding videos and the original prompt. Humorous intent thus relies on the recipients’ recognition of the allusions. Based on user-created videos inspired by the viral advertisement The Epic Split, the presentation shows that while some video responses (to what was originally a non-humorous commercial message) are obviously parodies of the original, many user-created videos are surprisingly creative and sophisticated in the way they construct humour for their recipients. |