Dissecting the types and functions of religious humor in Nasreddin Hoja short-stories

Humor is a significant element in funny stories. This study aims to analyze the types and functions of humor in selected Nasreddin’s short stories from the book Nasreddin’s Funniest Stories (2011) by Yusup Priyasudiarja and Y. Sri Purwaningsih. By using the descriptive qualitative method, the study adopts textual analysis to examine the materials. Based on the analysis result, the types of humor applied in the stories are that joke, sarcasm, satire, replies to rhetorical question, clever replies, and double entendres. However, these writings lack some other typical types of spontaneous conversational humor used in short stories’ texts: puns and self-deprecation. Meanwhile, unintentional humor is also not found in the Nasreddin short stories because it is raised from the speaker’s misspellings, mispronunciations, errors in logic, and Freudian slips. Further reading shows that the underlying usage of humor in these stories is for social management: to control and mediate readers

"At Least the Pizzas You Make Are Hot": Norms, Values, and Abrasive Humor on the Subreddit r/RoastMe

We present a mixed methods study of the online forum r/RoastMe, a comedy-focused subreddit of the parent site reddit.com, wherein members post photos of themselves to be ridiculed by other members; the site generally encourages harsh and offensive forms of humor in these interpersonal exchanges. We conducted semi-structured interviews with sixteen participants (both "roasters" and "roastees") in the online forum to understand their motivations for participating, their experiences in the subreddit, and their perceptions of their and other members' participation. To complement our qualitative analyses, we also analyzed a RoastMe data set of over 9,000 image posts and 230,000 comments from June-August of 2017. From our interviews, we found that, like other deviant online communities, RoastMe relies on a specific set of norms. In RoastMe, roasters rely heavily on perspective-taking rather than dissociation from their targets, roastees highly value the often scathing assessments offered by users on RoastMe, and, despite the salience of norms that enhance feelings of safety, there is lingering concern among participants about the potential for emotional or psychological harm. Our quantitative analyses confirm many of the statements made in our qualitative interviews and provide further insights into the specific nature of interactions on the subreddit. Our study directs us toward different vantage points from which to design online community spaces that account for or leverage users' predilections for baiting behaviors, harsh judgments, and caustic humor

"And We Will Fight For Our Race!" A Measurement Study of Genetic Testing Conversations on Reddit and 4chan

Rapid progress in genomics has enabled a thriving market for “direct-to-consumer” genetic testing, whereby people have access to their genetic information without the involvement of a healthcare provider. Companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA, which provide affordable health, genealogy, and ancestry reports, have already tested tens of millions of customers. At the same time, alas, far-right groups have also taken an interest in genetic testing, using them to attack minorities and prove their genetic “purity.” However, the relation between genetic testing and online hate has not really been studied by the scientific community. To address this gap, we present a measurement study shedding light on how genetic testing is discussed on Web communities in Reddit and 4chan. We collect 1.3M comments posted over 27 months using a set of 280 keywords related to genetic testing. We then use Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Google’s Perspective API, Perceptual Hashing, and word embeddings to identify trends, themes, and topics of discussion. Our analysis shows that genetic testing is discussed frequently on Reddit and 4chan, and often includes highly toxic language expressed through hateful, racist, and misogynistic comments. In particular, on 4chan’s politically incorrect board (/pol/), content from genetic testing conversations involves several alt-right personalities and openly antisemitic memes. Finally, we find that genetic testing appears in a few unexpected contexts, and that users seem to build groups ranging from technology enthusiasts to communities using it to promote fringe political views

She’s Reddit: A source of statistically significant gendered interest information

Information about gender differences in interests is necessary to disentangle the effects of discrimination and choice when gender inequalities occur, such as in employment. This article assesses gender differences in interests within the popular social news and entertainment site Reddit. A method to detect terms that are statistically significantly used more by males or females in 181 million comments in 100 subreddits shows that gender affects both the selection of subreddits and activities within most of them. The method avoids the hidden gender biases of topic modelling for this task. Although the method reveals statistically significant gender differences in interests for topics that are extensively discussed on Reddit, it cannot give definitive causes, and imitation and sharing within the site mean that additional checking is needed to verify the results. Nevertheless, with care, Reddit can serve as a useful source of insights into gender differences in interests

“You’ve aged like milk on a radiator”: An investigation of verbal humour on r/RoastMe

This thesis aims to investigate the phenomenon of “roasting” on an internet forum called r/RoastMe. The analysis is based on politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Grice, 1975), impoliteness theory (Culpeper, 1996), The General Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo, 1994; Ruch, Attardo & Raskin, 1993), and computer-mediated communication (Thurlow, Lengel & Tomic, 2004; Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996). This thesis contributes to the existing pools of studies that have investigated other aspects of the r/RoastMe subreddit (Dynel, 2021; Dynel & Poppi, 2019; Kasunic & Kaufman, 2018; Poppi & Dynel, 2020). The aim of the study is to investigate how humour is created in the comments made on r/RoastMe by collecting 33 posts and 165 comments. This is done by adapting the General Theory of Verbal Humour to the format of the subreddit and applying it to an analysis of the comments on the page. Subcategories of the knowledge resources that belong to the General Theory of Verbal Humour are taken from the field of pragmatics, and from a pilot study. The key findings include that there are many knowledge resources that users draw on to create humour. One of the resources that is commonly used is the communicative context in which a roast is made. Other linguistic features (like word play) are rarely used. The roasts rely on the given information of the post to supply the “setup”, while the roasts form the punchline. This “setup” and “punchline” interaction demonstrates the highly dialogic nature of the forum. While “banter”, which involves teasing someone in a friendly manner, typically occurs between friends, the subreddit’s community seems to create a sense of closeness between users. Even though users may not know one another outside the forum, the fixed format of the subreddit and the shared practices among the users creates an arena where users are able to breach politeness conventions. It also appears that the roasts may be built in a certain order, similar to the hierarchy of Knowledge Resources (Ruch, Attardo & Raskin, 1993)

Analyzing the Privacy and Societal Challenges Stemming from the Rise of Personal Genomic Testing

Progress in genomics is enabling researchers to better understand the role of the genome in our health and well-being, stimulating hope for more effective and cost efficient healthcare. At the same time, the rapid cost drop of genome sequencing has enabled the emergence of a booming market for direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing. Nowadays, companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA provide affordable health, genealogy, and ancestry reports, and have already tested tens of millions of customers. How- ever, while this technology has the potential to transform society by improving people’s lives, it also harbors dangers as it prompts important privacy and societal concerns. In this thesis, we shed light on these issues using a mixed-methods approach. We start by conducting a technical investigation of the limitations on privacy-enhancing technologies used for testing, storing, and sharing genomic data. We rely on a structured methodology to contextualize and provide a critical analysis of the current state-of-the-art and we identify and discuss ten open problems faced by the community. We then focus on the societal aspects of DTC genetic testing by conducting two large-scale analyses of the genetic testing discourse focusing on both mainstream and fringe social networks, specifically, Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan. Our analyses show that DTC genetic testing is a popular topic of discussion on all platforms. However, these discussions often include highly toxic language expressed through hateful and racist comments and openly antisemitic rhetoric, often conveyed through memes. Overall, our findings highlight that the rise in popularity of this new technology is accompanied by several societal implications that are unlikely to be addressed by only one research field and rather require a multi-disciplinary approach