Intertextual and multimodal humor in the media reception situation : the case of watching football on TV

Abstract

Based on natural data from media reception, the talk of television viewers watching football matches is analyzed with regard to humor. Remarks on television are often greeted by (shared) laughter of the fans. However, laughter as such does not necessarily indicate humor. Instead, the celebrating fans also often laugh after goals. Principally, the fans appropriate the media text humorously either by multimodally referring to the pictures on the screen or by intertextually hinging their talk on the televised language. Formally, second person pronouns or sequences co-constructed with the sports announcers are used. Functionally, humor marks the activity as leisure. It helps the viewers negotiate world-views serving as contextualization cue in the interpretation of the media text.