3
Constitutive Humor
Although easily recognized and intuitively experienced – the ultimate in “you know it when you see it” – humor is notoriously difficult to pin down. From irony to children's pranks to filthy limericks that have no business being told to children, humor encompasses a broad range of subjects, behaviors, and moods. And worse, the second you try to explain why something is funny, the joke almost always shrivels up, lumbers into the audience, and starts heckling you to be less boring. This chapter tempts that fate, and explores the ambivalent social worlds built through constitutive humor.
Focusing specifically on the fetishism, generativity, and magnetism of jokes about your dad, the art film The Room, and the glory of Satan (of course), the chapter argues that in both embodied and digitally mediated spaces, constitutive humor complicates assumptions about the inherent pro-sociality of togetherness and sharing. Humor may, of course, be highly social for members of the ingroup. And that's terrific, people laughing together is fun! But this same laughter can be destructive and alienating for members of the outgroup, who are unable to laugh, and in some cases may be the object of ingroup laughter. The tension between generative and destructive laughter is especially conspicuous online, where digital divergences hopelessly blur the lines between us and them. The affordances of modularity, modifiability, archivability, accessibility, as well as the social realities of Poe's Law and problematic amplification, further erode any clear-cut demarcation between pro-social and anti-social humor, which reveals that our laughter is more loaded, and potentially more harmful, than we might like to admit.
A few notes about your dad
There we were, sitting at the kitchenette table of Phillips' Phoenix, Arizona hotel room, finalizing a PowerPoint for our upcoming presentation “Weird to whom, obscene to whom? Folkloristics and the study of online ambivalence.” We were at the 2015 Association of Internet Researchers conference and were excited to present an overview of Chapter 1 of this book. Because the chapter – and book itself, if you haven't noticed – engages with strange and otherwise difficult-to-classify vernacular expression, we thought it would be appropriate, and also pretty funny, to present our findings using the weirdest, ugliest PowerPoint possible. We were talking about ambivalence, after all. And what better way to convey an argument about ambivalent folkloric expression than through ambivalent folkloric expression?
Possessing an anti-talent for absurdist creativity, Phillips had offered to assemble the presentation; this was the first time she'd walked Milner through her handiwork. And what a breathtaking effort it was. The slideshow theme of ugly gray eighties-looking checkerboard with weird science bubbles (atoms? planets?) was offset by tasteful bubble-gum pink shadowbox lettering – except, of course, for the few special slides that called for animated rainbow Comic Sans subject headers, the most aesthetically upsetting font combination that Phillips could think of. Slides were formatted asymmetrically, including words that spilled off the frame. There were glaring misspellings (Milner's first name became “Ryabn” on the introductory slide), and the whole thing featured precisely the kinds of ridiculous memetic images that pepper this book. It was perfect(ly bad). Confronted by Phillips' zest for life, Milner looked on half impressed and mostly horrified, occasionally pausing the slideshow to make blocking notes and editing suggestions.
Following two particularly absurd image-heavy slides – one featuring a trio of identical, graduated GIFs of martial arts star Jean-Claude van Damme dancing with a crowd on Venice Beach, and another boasting a collage of strange photoshops, including one of The X-Files' Fox Mulder staring blankly at a cat above the caption “hello are you a ufo” – the PowerPoint took a recursive turn. “Weird to whom, obscene to whom?” the subsequent slide asked, offset by a GIF of professional wrestler Hulk Hogan playing an electric guitar in front of an undulating American flag (Figure 4). “Your dad,” the image caption read, a message Phillips included to indicate that your father, more than likely, thinks this content is weird and obscene – a stand-in for the broader idea that members of the outgroup, who don't share the same assumptions or aesthetic expectations as members of the ingroup, will likely react negatively to, or at least furrow their brows at, the vernacular ambivalence of others. In this way, the image was meant to precipitate a discussion about the “both, on both sides” nature of ambivalence.
Milner, however, didn't pick up on anything close to any of that. On seeing the “your dad” caption beneath the Hulk Hogan GIF, he burst out laughing. “Your dad,” he repeated. Phillips didn't know what to say. This was the thesis of the chapter, what was so damn funny about that? Milner's laughter persisted. “It's like we're like, ‘that's your dad,’” he said, pointing at Hogan. He thought about the audience, and imagined how they'd react to this apparent non sequitur insult. The PowerPoint was already full of memes about murder ducks and Cookie Monsters screaming about sugar in their ass; now here was a random slander against somebody's father, universally personified by a balding, middle-aged former professional wrestler – one who had recently been publicly shamed for both a leaked sex tape and a racist tirade – shredding on a stars-and-stripes electric guitar. They wouldn't know what hit them. Phillips still had no idea why Milner was laughing, but his laughter made her laugh; usually she was the one doing the weird thing. After a good 20 seconds, Milner attempted to collect himself. “What if the next time we're walking around I'm like,” he nodded at a hypothetical, repellent stranger, “‘that's your dad.’ Wouldn't that be mean?” This scenario flashed across his eyes as Phillips looked on, baffled. Milner started laughing again.
Like much of the ambivalent humor we'll assess in this chapter, “your dad” wasn't an obvious or straightforward joke. There was no narrative (“Your dad walks into a bar …”), no punchline, and neither of us was trying to make the other laugh. But laugh we did, for reasons neither of us could have explained at the time. Nor did we have any reason to try and explain these reasons; humor is experiential, not dryly argumentative. The relationship between humor and argument is so amorphous that, as Alan Dundes (1987) notes, participants often have no idea what their humor means, even when they think something is hilarious. Humor as a whole also remains a mystery, even to top humor scholars. Elliott Oring, for example, flatly states: “I do not accept the notion that the motivations, techniques, and functions of humor are fully known and understood” (1992, i), a point he echoes over a decade later, stating that “the question of how and what jokes communicate remains unresolved” (2003, 39). After another decade and a half of research, theory, and handwringing, that cat remains firmly planted in the bag. As humor theorist Giselinde Kuipers explains, “Ever since Plato and Aristotle, people have asked themselves these questions but it is very difficult, if not impossible, to answer them conclusively and definitively” (2015, 8).
There are, of course, a number of theories one could draw from. Many focus on psychological motivations, most notably the claims that humor is a function of aggression (clustered as “superiority theories”), or that humor provides an emotional outlet allowing participants to express socially taboo thoughts and feelings (clustered as “release theories”). We are not going to make either of those claims, or any claim that posits what humor “really” means objectively. Rather, we're interested in the constitutive characteristics of humor: how it functions as a communicative tool to help build and sustain social worlds, across degrees of mediation. To do so, we will draw from incongruity theories of humor, which postulate that humor is predicated on the recognition of a clash between elements (Raskin 1985; Morreall 1989). But not a random clash; Oring (1992, 2003) notes that, to successfully facilitate a “humor response,” incongruity must be appropriate, that is, engage with and subvert the norms of a given sociocultural circumstance. The (ahem, false) assumption that Phillips was wedging a random slander against, I don't know, anybody's father into a professional PowerPoint presentation using a GIF of Hulk Hogan struck Milner as appropriately incongruous; it was exactly, perfectly, the wrong thing to be doing, given where we were and what we were trying to accomplish. At least it would have been, if that's what Phillips was actually trying to do.
By focusing squarely on the communicative elements of this moment, it is possible to see not just what social worlds were built through our laughter, but who was left out of the process. Speaking to the overall context of our hotel room exchange and subsequent presentation, we weren't saying random words or laughing indiscriminately. We were engaging with, and at times actively subverting, a whole host of cultural elements, from what constitutes a “good” academic PowerPoint to the various pop culture references contained in the slides themselves (a dancing Jean-Claude van Damme, The X-Files, Hulk Hogan, over-the-top patriotism, “your mom” jokes – of which “your dad” is a gendered inversion). These might have been in-jokes between Phillips and Milner, but like all comedic exchanges predicated on existing cultural logics and scripts, they were also inherently collective.
And not just collective, but ambivalent; not everyone was invited into our cozy laughing ingroup. Instead, we were speaking, pretty unapologetically, to our own specific interests and affinities as academics, mild iconoclasts, and friends. We were also hailing, as part of this us, audience members drawing from a similar cultural reservoir, and who furthermore were sympathetic to our broader argument about folkloric expression – as evidenced not just in the presentation topic, but the PowerPoint itself. This may have created a sense of community for the ingroup, but in so doing, it created at least the potential for an outgroup: those who weren't able to decode our flurry of memetic references, or who rejected our broader argument about vernacular creativity and folkloric expression, or who thought we were being too flippant (we were), and so on.
The following section will focus specifically on the ambivalent potential of constitutive humor, and how community formation, cultural exchange, and generally having a fun and funny time – presumably good things, pro-social things – can simultaneously serve to police community boundaries, encourage cultural myopia, and generally make outsiders miserable. A great party for some, in other words, also means a lonely night alone for others.
Fetishism, generativity, and magnetism (oh my)
The ambivalence of constitutive humor hinges most conspicuously on its fetishism: the process by which the full emotional, political, or cultural context of a given event or utterance is obscured, allowing participants to focus only on the amusing details. Just the incongruity; just the punchline. Phillips (2015) notes that this sense of the term is more akin to Karl Marx's (1867) “commodity fetish” than a religious or sexual fetish. For Marx, consumer goods are “made magic” by capitalism, rendering invisible all the labor conditions, systems of privilege and access, and environmental implications that underscore their production. Similarly, fetishized laughter is fundamentally myopic, allowing participants to focus just on the us who laugh, not on the them who do not, or how ingroup behaviors might personally impact the outgroup. For example, in her playful employment of the Hulk Hogan GIF, Phillips didn't think twice about how Hulk Hogan – legal name Terry Gene Bollea – might feel about being framed as anathema to intellectual pursuit, or, more broadly, about the people negatively impacted by his racist tirade or recently leaked sex tape – events that in Phillips' mind served mostly to ensure that more people in the audience would recognize the image. Had she stopped and considered these decidedly less amusing details, she likely would have chosen a different GIF.
Fetishism also, and simultaneously, cordons comedic expressions from expressions meant to be taken at face value. Or at least taken seriously. This fetishized play frame creates what folklorist Christie Davies (2008) describes as a “special world” subject to its own set of rules. Applying this frame to dogs' play, anthropologist Gregory Bateson notes that the “playful nip denotes the bite,” i.e. replicates all the behaviors of aggression, “but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite” (1972, 180), i.e. isn't interpreted as actual aggression. It is that which “would be denoted by the bite” – that is to say, the social, political, and interpersonal consequences and/or historical baggage of the utterance when removed from the play frame – that is fetishistically obscured. For example, the fact that Hulk Hogan is a person (if a fraught and complicated person, like most people), and not just a punchline saved to Phillips' hard drive.
Building on the fetishism of the play frame, and facilitating further ambivalence, is what Phillips (2015) describes as the generative and magnetic nature of constitutive humor. It is generative because it weaves an influx of new experiences, references, and often highly fetishized jokes into a collective us. One that, in turn, recontextualizes additional content, engenders subsequent laughter, and contributes to an even deeper sense of collective identity. And it is magnetic because these emerging worlds attract attention from within the group (cohering that us even more tightly), as well as externally to the group (drawing additional participants into the fold). Along with fetishism, generativity and magnetism are great for community formation. On the flip side, those who are not invited into the inner circle are cast as a them – further underscoring the fact that, while laughter builds social worlds, it also pushes out those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the world being built.
To demonstrate the depth of this ambivalence, we'll devote the remainder of this section to constitutive laughter – both embodied and digitally mediated – directed at the beloved cult classic film The Room. As we'll see, giddy engagement with The Room exemplifies fetishism, generativity, and magnetism. It also exemplifies how constitutive humor both coheres and cuts, making it difficult to tell where social behavior ends and anti-social behavior begins.
Like getting stabbed in the head
As Phillips (2013) notes, there is a vast corpus of media texts that inspire “so bad it's good” audience play, both online and off. But there are few fandoms more ambivalent, or more rabid, than those surrounding 2003's The Room: a film so consistently boffo, so perfectly bizarre, that it is widely regarded as the “Citizen Kane of bad movies” (McCulloch 2011). This film didn't reach such great heights on its own, however. Rather, its legacy is underscored by a network of participation, from Hollywood word of mouth to global screenings to a salacious behind-the-scenes tell-all book to satirical Amazon reviews to mashups on YouTube to GIF sets on Tumblr. In this hybrid participation, the constitutive and destructive powers of ambivalent humor are on full display.
The Room was produced, directed, written, and financed by international man of mystery (emphasis on the “mystery”; no one seems to know what country he's from, how old he is, or where he gets his considerable funding) Tommy Wiseau. Wiseau also starred in the film, despite the fact that his acting, according to a book written by The Room's co-star Greg Sestero (along with journalist Tom Bissell), is chaotically wrong, terrible, and reckless – and for that reason, “mesmerising” (2013, 41). Sestero – whose uneasy friendship with Wiseau predated The Room by several years – explains that Wiseau speaks with “an Eastern European accent that has been hit by a Parisian bus” (2), claims to be a vampire, and wears two belts simultaneously, one slung low below his waist (because it “keeps his ass up”). On the set of The Room, Wiseau was a paranoid, verbally abusive, incompetent petty tyrant whose acting was so consistently bad, and behavior so consistently bizarre, that his crew often struggled not to laugh, or cry, or shout curse words, or outright quit, depending on the moment in question.
In the film, Wiseau plays Johnny, a perfect gentleman and doting boyfriend to Lisa, a manipulative sex monster who initiates an affair with Johnny's best friend Mark. When Johnny learns of Lisa and Mark's betrayal, he goes berserk; after trashing his bedroom, (spoiler alert) he shoots himself in the head, and everybody learns their lesson. Supporting characters include Johnny and Lisa's underage, threesome-suggesting, sensual apple-eating apparently teenaged neighbor Denny, whom Johnny must save from a drug dealer named Chris-R; two of Lisa's friends who don't have any discernable backstory, other than the fact that they sometimes have sex on Lisa and Johnny's couch; and Lisa's mother, who midway through the film unceremoniously declares that she has breast cancer and never mentions it again.
Interspersed within the film's narrative are random games of pick-up football, nonsensical exterior shots, unexplained character replacements, recycled footage of the film's frequent and highly gratuitous sex scenes, and Johnny, in a fit of suicidal rage, grinding with tortured sensuality against one of Lisa's dresses. And if this fever-dream storytelling weren't enough, production details were similarly befuddling. For example, Wiseau chose, for no discernable reason, to simultaneously shoot the film with a 35mm camera and an HD camera, requiring him to hire two separate crews, and resulting in bizarre shifts in angles, lighting, and film quality. His set design was likewise nonsensical. For example, upon directing the set designer to buy multiple framed photographs for Johnny's apartment, Wiseau refused to replace the stock photos contained therein. Consequently, the oft-used apartment set is overrun with a preponderance of shots containing framed pictures of spoons.
Sestero calls the final product of Wiseau's creative labors a “perfectly literal comedy of errors” (1), but Wiseau, for his part, was thrilled with the results. As Sestero notes, The Room was a deeply serious, deeply personal film for Wiseau, one born of personal heartbreak and what he believed to be the beauty of redemption; Sestero also notes that, upon screening the film's rough cut for the first time, Wiseau was “beaming …He was filled with such joy and pride” (257). But unsurprisingly to everyone, except maybe Wiseau, the film was a commercial flop. It netted $1,800 in its first two-week limited release in Los Angeles, even after Wiseau rented a giant billboard advertising the film on Highland Avenue in Hollywood.
The Room would have faded into immediate obscurity, Sestero muses, had two film students not walked past a movie theatre creatively advertising the film during its initial two-week run. Beside the film's screening times, the theatre posted a sign that read “NO REFUNDS.” The sign also included a line from a recent review. “Watching this film is like getting stabbed in the head,” it promised. The film students were intrigued and decided to check it out. And then were equally horrified, bewildered, and delighted. The students promptly began telling all their Hollywood friends, who told their friends, as magnetism attracted new viewers to the ambivalent laughter. Soon, countless screening parties, complete with an emerging repertoire of collective participatory traditions, were sprouting up; it wasn't long before the film became, according to Sestero, “an L.A. in-joke” revered by the “cream of the Hollywood comedy community” (xv).
Like audiences of 1973's similarly classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which has been inspiring elaborate fan engagement for decades, contemporary audiences of The Room crowd midnight theatre screenings and campily pantomime the film's action with interactive callouts, often augmenting their parallel performances with costumes and props. Unlike Rocky Horror audiences, however, whose engagement is overwhelmingly celebratory, audiences of The Room are engaged in a decidedly more ambivalent performance, one that centers on excitedly highlighting the film's various editing, pacing, acting, and logical shortcomings through a panoply of participatory traditions.
As anyone who has attended The Room screenings knows, these traditions are taken quite seriously. Not only are there multiple screening guides available online (House of Qwesi 2009; Newman 2010), many participating theatres in the US and UK pass out rule sheets – or at the very least explain the basics – to newcomers. Fixed rituals include throwing hundreds of plastic spoons into the air whenever a framed photograph of a spoon appears on screen; screaming “HE'S MY BEST FRIEND!” any time Johnny refers to Mark as “his best friend,” which is constantly; and yelling “Focus! Unfocus!” whenever the shot jumps between 35mm and HD cameras. While most of the rituals can be performed from one's seat, a few require ambulatory action. During one scene late in the film, for example, Wiseau looks down, grins childishly, and waves at something on the ground near his left foot – apparently this something is the mark he kept missing as he tried to simultaneously learn his blocking and deliver his lines. Audience members exploit this moment by running down toward the front row, where they wait to wave back at Johnny.
Despite these conservative elements, each screening is a little different; the result, as Richard McCulloch (2011) notes, of an unpredictable interplay between the film itself, the venue, the broader geographic location, and the individuals who happen to be sitting in the audience that night. To test out McCulloch's last assertion, and also because she wanted to, Phillips attended two screenings in Atlanta, Georgia: one in October 2015 and another in April 2016. The latter was attended by Tommy Wiseau himself, live and in person. On both occasions, audience members engaged in all the expected tropes, but they also added their own dynamic twist to the proceedings – jokes and callouts Phillips later learned had evolved over the screening's several-year run at the Plaza Theatre. This included making exaggerated, rhythmic mouth sounds (“awmmmph” is the closest approximation text will allow) whenever any of the characters open-mouth kissed, collectively shrieking “CLOSE THE DOOR CLOSE THE FUCKING DOOR” whenever characters would enter Johnny and Lisa's apartment and then not close the fucking door, and syncing running commentary to Johnny's breakdown scene, wherein he violently disassembles the bedroom dresser ("One!" the audience shouted as Johnny yanks out one drawer; "Two!" they shouted as he pulls out another; “FUCK IT!” they shouted as he knocks the whole thing over).
Online play with The Room augments these and other embodied rituals. Through digitally mediated word of mouth, fans of The Room have cemented the film's ironic legacy. They have also produced, unsurprisingly, countless GIFs capturing and commenting on resonant moments from the film, as well as mashups intertwining those moments with pop culture texts like Star Wars, Sesame Street, and My Little Pony. Scene-by-scene breakdowns on YouTube are also common, as are romanticized fan creations on DeviantArt and photo captions mocking Wiseau's delivery on Know Your Meme (“YOO BETRAY ME EFFRIBODY BETRAY ME,” one captioned photo of a shouting Wiseau reads; “AHM FEDDAP WID DISS WUROLD”).
There are also scores of hyperbolically poetic Amazon reviews for The Room's DVD release, featuring narratives that give the Three Wolf Moon canon a run for its money (“The Room Reviews” 2009). “I now mark my life into two parts,” reviewer Jonah Falcon says, “life before and after The Room. After seeing The Room, things seem differently. Colors now have taste. Taste no longer exists.” A. Heil posits that “You will call off work the next day. You will find yourself living a life that cannot possibly be real. You will begin questioning metaphysical reality as you find yourself trapped in a void of hate and condemnation. Hate because you did not think of creating The Room first. Condemnation as you relive your past failures.” And Chance McClain says of Wiseau, “The forehead is a vast wasteland that serves no purpose other than providing a platform to which the hair-mess is stapled.”
Audiences of The Room across the globe – at midnight screenings and from the comfort of their own Amazon profiles – illustrate just how generative, magnetic, and fetishistic constitutive humor can be. The humor is generative because the years' worth of participatory play has created an evolving, and ever-expanding, performative repertoire. This, in turn, contributes to the overall sense of us sitting together in the theatre. It is magnetic because the resulting audience laughter has attracted additional jokes, sight gags, and callouts from existing audiences online and off and serves as a point of proselytization for potential future audiences. Most notably, however, this laughter is fetishistic; it stems from identifying with an us who laughs, and laughs uproariously, at a man's sincere cinematic efforts.
The fetishism of this laughter was particularly conspicuous during the April 2016 screening Phillips attended, the one featuring an appearance by Wiseau. As the audience filed into the theatre – Phillips estimates that there were around 200 attendees – everyone was ushered past a table piled high with The Room merchandise. Fans could choose between The Room DVDs, Tommy Wiseau underwear, Tommy Wiseau dogtags, signed headshots of Wiseau that had to have been taken 20 years earlier, and a Tommy Wiseau Eastern Orthodox blessing for the low low price of $40. Phillips couldn't afford not to buy a blessing from Tommy Wiseau, and now has a series of iPhone photos of him making the sign of the cross and draping dogtags around her neck.
After everyone had purchased their blessings and taken their seats – and after Wiseau shoutingly addressed a conspiracy theory that The Room didn't have a script, mumbled his way through a few audience questions, then forced everyone to watch the pilot for his yet-undistributed television sitcom The Neighbors – The Room finally began rolling. But something made this screening different from the one Phillips had attended a few months earlier in that same theatre. Maybe it was the fact that Wiseau's persona was every bit as disorienting in person. Maybe it was the added tension of knowing that the person you were laughing at in The Room was, literally, in the room. Whatever the reason, to a much greater, palpable extent than during her first screening, the audience was crackling with comedic energy the second the curtain raised. The callouts were so well rehearsed, the spoon-throwing so enthusiastic, the laughter so unbridled, that it had Phillips in stitches, at times even tears; it remains one of the most interesting, emotionally confusing, and funniest experiences of her life.
The constitutive dimensions of ambivalent humor helped make The Room a collective sensation. But as much as they build worlds around the film, as much as they create and sustain an us with whom Phillips, for one, felt surprisingly close by the time the film ended (“we've been through so much together!”), these dimensions are far from victimless. As convivial as the us might appear, it is predicated on a them. This is the flip side of generativity: identification through othering.
In the case of The Room, this othering centers on cinematic convention, proper English use and diction, and what it means, at a basic level, to behave like the humans do. By laughing at Wiseau and his film's perceived shortcomings, audiences are simultaneously gesturing toward existing cultural norms and logics – and implicitly framing as aberrant anything that fails to live up to those standards. The fact that The Room was initially embraced and amplified by people with a keen awareness of and investment in the markers of “good” cinema – film students and industry insiders – evidences this normative impulse. These are people whose entire livelihood is predicated on recognizing and upholding cinematic conventions. It is therefore unsurprising that the surrealism of The Room would prove so resonant for these audience members; given their own training and experience, Wiseau's aggressively unprofessional delivery could not be more appropriately incongruous with their own professional expectations.
Wiseau's artistic intent and life experiences and, more pressingly, how he might feel about this mockery are all left in the wake of fans' fetishistic participation. Whether through sloppily spelled photo captions or in-theatre chant-alongs, humorous play with Wiseau's persona yields a flattened caricature. Wiseau's identity has, in this way, been hijacked much like Antoine Dodson's in the wake of the “Bed Intruder” meme assessed last chapter. It certainly was during the April 2016 screening Phillips attended. Audience members were thrilled to be there, and thrilled to see Wiseau. But they expressed this enthusiasm through knowing winks and comic mugging, referring to him as “the great auteur” as they fought back laughter, and he just stood there, blinking. Wiseau was, throughout the night, and in fact every night, in every screening, the butt of a joke he may or may not even recognize – and may be crushed by if he does.
Wiseau isn't alone in this othering. In the context of The Room, even members of the laughing us are subject to policing. For instance, at the first screening Phillips attended, her gentleman companion – who before that weekend had never heard of The Room and in preparation had quickly scanned and apparently misread an online callout guide – started shouting the wrong things at the wrong times; more than a few heads turned to express reproach. Said gentleman companion got the message, and stopped talking (much to Phillips' relief; she was one of the people shooting side eyes). In the process, one more outsider was left in the wake of shared laughter.
The lesson of ambivalent engagement with The Room is that constitutive humor is not roundly, uniformly, or universally positive. It can also construct walls; assert restrictive, normative values; and fetishize those deemed to be other and, by extension, less than. The ethical stakes are relatively low when it comes to The Room, of course. Broader marginalizations, including the Auschwitz jokes described by Alan Dundes and Uli Linke (1987) and the memorial page trolling explored by Phillips (2015), amplify those stakes. In these cases, the constitutive nature of offensive or otherwise taboo jokes is easily deployed in the service of direct harassment, antagonization, and silencing. The bad side of the coin, without question. But even this point is subject to an ambivalent rejoinder. Because the same constitutive nature of these jokes can be harnessed to satirize the absurdity and intellectual feebleness of bigotry. Maybe constitutive humor does something else entirely; maybe it juggles more than one point of ambivalence at once.
Regardless, reproducing ambivalent humor – as an insider laughing, as a scholar analyzing, or as a mix of both – risks amplifying its ambivalence. We first addressed issues of amplification in Chapter 1, where we outlined Dundes and Linke's (1987) argument that all aspects of folkloric expression – even the most upsetting aspects – are worth collecting and analyzing. This position clashes with Meaghan Morris' ([1988] 2007) insistence that the amplification of popular content simply because it's something people are doing risks normalizing the most bigoted, ignorant, and overall harmful elements of populist expression. This same tension underscores constitutive humor, which, as we'll see below, becomes even more untenable in digitally mediated spaces.
The magical world of the mediated play frame
Regardless of era or degree of mediation, constitutive humor always carries ambivalence. Whether participants are populating a PowerPoint with opaque in-jokes or throwing spoons in the air at a cult movie screening, that which is social for one group can feel deeply anti-social for another – for example, those who don't get or don't like all those opaque in-jokes, or who go to the movies because they need a break from the kids, only to be thronged by hundreds of hipsters shouting at each other in broken English, then laughing. This section will consider this point of tension in digitally mediated spaces, exploring the continuities between ambivalent humor online and off, specifically its power to connect an us as it casts out a them.
Connecting the same old us
Although digitally mediated humor often precludes the full range of embodied paralinguistic cues – things like tone of voice, an encouraging smile, discouraging side eyes – participants fill in those blanks with tools like emojis, GIFs, and creative spelling, syntax, and grammar to communicate that “this is play” and furthermore that “I am one of you.” Collectives predicated on mediation and distance are thus held together by generative group laughter, just as they are in embodied spaces.
As it is so fundamental to group formation, and as digital environments present no insurmountable roadblocks to its development, it's no surprise that humor has long been integral to digitally mediated communities. In the early eighties, William Fox (1983) explored how jokes exchanged on a high school computer network facilitated connections between participants. Nancy K. Baym (1995) describes a similar process in her study of humor on a Usenet board dedicated to discussing television soap operas. In their study of computer-mediated communication in a college setting, Mike Hubler and Diana Bell (2003) demonstrate how shared sets of behavioral norms emerge through threads of constitutive laughter. Likewise, E. Gabriella Coleman (2013) describes the importance of humor to communities of software programmers, dating back to the earliest days of the open source software movement.
Fitting comfortably within this lineage, contemporary online collectives are also constituted through the world-building power of humor. Further, the formal characteristics and communicative functions of this humor are in many ways indistinguishable not just from earlier mediated iterations, but also from embodied humor more broadly. Kumamon (“Kumamon” 2016), cartoon mascot of the Kumamoto Prefecture in Japan, illustrates these connections. Well, not so much Kumamon himself, but rather the Satan worshiping, firestarting memetic derivative his likeness inspired in 2012, and which tore across a variety of social media platforms that same year (Figure 5). His big cute eyes appropriately incongruous with his apparent appetite for destruction, Kumamon resonated with the countless participants on 4chan, Reddit, and Tumblr who chose to create, circulate, and transform memetic iterations of the adorable villain.
The demonstrable fact that Kumamon did resonate doesn't explain why he resonated. Participants creating, circulating, or transforming Kumamon images could have been doing so for any number of reasons. Perhaps because the appropriate incongruity of sweetness and malevolence made them giggle. Perhaps because they thought Kumamon was already pretty malevolent (there's something dark, Milner insists, lurking behind those eyes). Perhaps because they appreciate Kumamon's flair for dramatic poses. Perhaps because they think that Satan is a pretty funny guy. Possible explanations for why participants might partake in Kumamon humor are, in short, endless – just as they are in embodied contexts. What is clear, however, is that through their shared participation with this Satanic muppet, individual participants were connected to broader collectives, reconfiguring Kumamon as yet another strand in a shared social tapestry.
Kumamon is most conspicuously collective in its relationship with existing memetic media. Arguably, its clearest analogue is “Disaster Girl,” a meme popularized on the same platforms the year before Kumamon. “Disaster Girl” originated from a candid photograph of a little girl standing in front of a house fire. Head turned and eyes gazing directly into the camera, the girl's mouth is stretched into a dark, knowing smile. Like play with Kumamon, “Disaster Girl” iterations craft their humor from the incongruity between an innocent little girl and the destructive impulses applied to her. While it is impossible to confirm that Kumamon's firebug doppelganger was deliberately and explicitly based on “Disaster Girl,” the two memes are used in similar ways, and feature a number of cross-pollinated memetic elements, thus establishing a bridge between members of the ingroup.
In addition to helping cohere this ingroup around a shared repertoire of texts, the spread of Kumamon highlights the role of the audience during humorous exchanges, and in particular, the importance of performing appropriately for that audience. This process unfolds identically in offline contexts. For example, speaking of embodied joking traditions amongst the Western Apache American Indian tribe, Keith Basso and Dell Hymes (1979) describe a number of similar performative markers, from word choice to specific cultural references to patterned communication modifications signaling that a joking exchange has begun. In the process, these markers do just that – mark the communicative exchange as taking place within a particular play frame, in turn establishing an ingroup able to appropriately, and collectively, decode a given incongruity. Posting a Kumamon image, or any so-called “subcultural batsignal” (Phillips 2015), asserts the same basic claim: that I am one of you, that we all comprise an us, and that, most importantly, this us exists within the magical world of the play frame.
Casting out the same old them
As we've seen, playing together can also push away outsiders. This ambivalence hinges, first and foremost, on the fact that decoding humor – regardless of where the humor unfolds, or through what tools it is communicated – requires a set of broader cultural literacies. Anthropologist Mahadev Apte emphasizes this point when he notes that “Familiarity with a cultural code is a prerequisite for the spontaneous mental restructuring of elements that results in amusement and laughter” (1985, 17). You have to know what you're looking at, in other words, to know when it makes sense to laugh.
The problem is that not all participants necessarily share the same cultural literacies. And when they don't, the play frame cannot be established, and neither can the us who collectively participates. In order to appropriately decode the left-side image in Figure 5, for example, one needs to know who Satan is – specifically the role he plays in the Christian tradition. And to fully decode subsequent iterations of the image, wherein the creepy little wide-eyed Kumamon is thrust into a hodgepodge of human suffering (the explosion of the Hindenburg airship, nuclear missile launches, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 all serve as backdrops), one must be familiar with the various historical and political references, and furthermore with the source image subsequent iterations are riffing on. On an even broader level, one must know how to read the visual grammar of these images, a process that might feel wholly automatic, but is in fact culturally contingent; different groups read different images in different ways. To appropriately decode Kumanon images, one's eye needs, essentially, to align with the eyes of the other participants. And if it doesn't, one's eye might need to find a new we.
Like all forms of humor, whether occurring online, offline, or some hybrid context in between, fully understanding the Kumamon meme demands familiarity with a number of broad cultural norms and references. These norms and references are requisite to the creation of the ingroup, which intertwines self and other through collective laughter. At the same time, this process highlights the fact that, while some people are pulled in by the laughing us, others are necessarily spit out.
The ambivalence foundational to online humor (indeed, to all humor) was especially prominent on niche shock sites like Stile Project, Something Awful, YTMND, and the quizzically cacophonous BodyBuilding.com, all popular in the late nineties and early aughts. On these sites, participants did their damnedest to create, circulate, and transform the weirdest, most disgusting, and overall funniest memetic content possible. Described as “proto-trolling” spaces by Phillips (2015), these forums and message boards were a harbinger of the antagonistic laughter later amplified on and around 4chan's /b/ board, which itself was further popularized on certain corners of Reddit, Tumblr, and YouTube. Laughter that, in each case, was used to push away at least as many participants as it pulled in.
In this litany of sites premised on ambivalent humor, 4chan is arguably the reigning (dark) prince. Since its creation by then 15-year-old Christopher “moot” Poole in 2003, 4chan's entire existence, particularly during the critical early years of subcultural formation in the mid- to late aughts, is predicated on humor. Humor was so important to subcultural formation on /b/ that Phillips (2015) was unable to undertake an ethnographic study of the space until after she began to understand the trolls' jokes. Digital media scholars Asaf Nissenbaum and Limor Shifman (2015) affirm this point in their argument that humorous play on /b/ serves as both cultural capital and a point of collective identity. And what fetishistic, generative, and magnetic play it has been. Emphasis on the fetishism, as the expressed purpose of trolling humor is the infliction of strong negative emotions (even amongst other trolls; “trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls” is its own genre of subcultural trolling). Consequently, participants must focus on nothing but their own amusement in order to remain appropriately trollish. Not context, not sympathy – just laughter in the face of their target's distress: the fetish in a nutshell.
/b/'s joyful taunting of GameStop employees provides an example. The premise of the longstanding game is as follows: participants post the phone number of a GameStop retail videogame store. Other participants make the calls, and one after another they ask employees about a (nonexistent) sequel to the 1990s franchise Battletoads. Clerks go from confused to frustrated to outright enraged as the requests continue and the prank becomes clear to them; participants either record audio of these calls or transcribe the (alleged) interactions and post their handiwork to the original thread. As the campaign unfolds, participants' fetishized laughter drowns out any concerns over the GameStop employees' state of mind. In fact, their anger becomes a punchline unto itself.
The “Be There in Thirty Minutes” meme provides another example of the laughing us creating a fetishized them. A recurring trend on 4chan in 2011, “Be There in Thirty Minutes” was born after a GIF of a Times Square cardstand being pushed over surfaced on the site. Many posters in many threads in the months that followed linked to street view webcams and promised similar vandalism; all viewers had to do was watch the webcam and wait 30 minutes for the vandal to show up. While most posters never delivered, a few did, and a meta-game emerged in trying to guess the reliability of a particular “Be There in Thirty Minutes” claim (“NYC Cardstand Earthcam Trolling” 2016).
Milner was present for one promise that was fulfilled. Early on in his dissertation research, he came across a thread containing a link to a live street view webcam. The link captured the exterior of a convenience store in New York and was accompanied only by the cryptic statement “be there in thirty minutes.” After about, you guessed it, 30 minutes, Milner saw a person in a hoodie walk into view and push over the cardstand sitting outside the store, spilling postcards all over the street. His first thought – well, after the fetishized laughter – was that some poor, underpaid clerk would have to clean the mess up. A point that was, unsurprisingly, obscured by all the other fetishized laughter in the thread. Who cares what happens on the other side of the live-stream link? What matters is that watching people knock things over is funny. And watching some poor, underpaid clerk clean up your mess is even funnier. As long as that clerk isn't you.
This kind of world-building fetishization is hardly confined to explicitly antagonistic spaces like 4chan. Constitutive humor – and a particular sort of barbed humor at that – is so common on Twitter's microblogging platform that it prompted Phillips, in a piece co-authored with feminist media scholar Kate Miltner (2012), to describe the space as “Mystery Science Twitter 3000.” This framing reflects the fact that, like the television program Mystery Science Theatre 3000 – in which a human and his two robot friends watch terrible films and make fun of them – Twitter's participants often use the platform to assert an us who laughs at the expense of a them not in on the joke. Tim Highfield (2015) highlights comedic hashtagging, ironic @mentioning and retweeting, parody accounts, and other platform-specific instances of humor, affirming the connection between humor, the extended lifespan of tweets, and a general ingroup mentality. The funnier something is – humor that, Highfield notes, is often accompanied by snide tonality – the more likely it will be circulated and transformed by others, further evidencing the constitutive magnetism of massive social networks, and further evidencing that humor can both bring together and push apart.
From murder muppets to webcam cruelty to Mystery Science Twitter, the fact that so much traditional thought on humor can be seamlessly applied to digital media underscores the significant consistencies spanning era and degree of mediation. It's the same contextually determined incongruity, the same connected us, and the same cast-out them. However, as we've seen time and again, these points of continuity are dismantled, and at times outright destroyed, by the differences ushered in by digital mediation. Differences that conjure, and then subsequently amplify, the ethical concerns central to this book.
Digital divergences and ethical buzzkill
The same fetishism, generativity, and magnetism long prevalent in embodied humor are similarly prevalent in digitally mediated humor. But beyond creating more of the same, these characteristics are amplified online in ways simply impossible in embodied spaces. As they expand and refract in novel ways, these characteristics highlight how tenuous the seemingly clear-cut binaries between positive and negative, generative and destructive, and even social and anti-social really are. This section will address these new complications, emphasizing how digital tools kick ambivalent humor into hyperdrive, how context collapse and Poe's Law further complicate motive and meaning, and how harmful amplification becomes an even more pressing problem.
The ambivalence of tools, for example blunt objects
As we've seen, the modularity, modifiability, archivability, and accessibility of digital content facilitate a deluge of incongruous humor. With an endless repertoire of multimodal source material to reappropriate, and an endless stream of prior participation to build on (and attempt to outdo), memetic media, from Kumamon captions to Dolan comics to gyrating Hogan GIFs, often push incongruity toward outright absurdity.
Figure 6 collects three such memetic absurdities, archetypical of the unique vernacular humor afforded by digital media. The left-hand image is a mashup crafted by BuzzFeed's Jen Lewis, who manipulated a Getty Images photo so that performer Kanye West could kiss performer Kanye West (Lewis and Zarrell 2016). The joke plays with West's reputation for almost self-parodying levels of self-aggrandizement and narcissism. Its visually incongruous application of that theme is uniquely jarring, afforded just enough realism by digital tools to enter the “uncanny valley,” approximations of reality that get a little too close to the real thing. Because one Kanye West is, truly, enough.
The top right-hand image in Figure 6 also represents uniquely digital play. It was created by Imgur user GuyGoald (2016), who edited scenes from the 2015 film Star Wars: The Force Awakens into a GIF set featuring characters fighting with, oogling, and scrambling to recover pieces of garlic bread, yielding a remix called, fittingly, “The Garlic Awakens.” Visually, the flimsily photoshopped two-dimensional bread cascading through the big-budget Star Wars universe makes little sense; thematically it's even more absurd. It may be a little more understandable in the context of all the other absurd memetic play surrounding garlic bread, a memetic subgenre resonant enough with enough participants for it to warrant its own entry on meme database Know Your Meme (“Garlic Bread” 2016). But, of course, the memetic resonance of garlic bread just raises its own set questions – most notably, “wait, what?” and “but why?” What really makes garlic bread (or anything) funny is as inscrutable now as it ever has been. What is different is GuyGoald's individual ability to amplify a resonant meme, and to do so by so thoroughly altering an apparently static media text.
The bottom right-hand image presents even more memetic vernacular creativity. It's one of scores of unflattering stills of Dana Scully from The X-Files shared on Tumblr, many of which use the GIF format to overlay her trademark red hair with shimmering sparkles. The thematic recurrence of unflattering Scully images is afforded by image capturing tools that allow participants to go through X-Files episodes frame by frame and immortally fix momentary facial contortions. The visual addition of shimmering sparkle hair amplifies the juxtaposition with another layer of unexpected – and uniquely digital – incongruity. The kind of absurdist collective humor illustrated by this image, by all the images featured in this section and in fact this whole book, certainly isn't new or confined to the internet; recall Chapter 1's Peanuts and Looney Tunes sex art. That said, the ease and ubiquity of multimodal reappropriation pushes that humor into hyperdrive online.
In the context of silly photoshops, incongruous image captions, and non sequitur GIFs, the fact that digital media tools facilitate absurdist humor seems like a rosy, or at least a neutral, declaration to make. So people are weird; isn't that funny? Or bemusing, or annoying, or who cares and what's for lunch?, depending on your perspective. But those are not the only contexts in which humor online occurs, and not the only contexts in which digital tools facilitate dizzying memetic absurdity. The fundamental ambivalence of these tools, and just as importantly, the chaos that can be loosed when appropriate incongruity spins out of control, is rendered much clearer when memetic humor is applied to moments of death, pain, and tragedy. In these cases, fetishism grows sharper teeth.
Playful remixes of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, exemplify the flipside of the constitutive coin. Immediately following the attacks, these joking behaviors mirrored traditional “joke cycles,” waves of humor often following high-profile events (see Ellis 2003 and Kuipers 2005 for an overview of initial joking reactions to 9/11). In the subsequent decade and a half, however, 9/11 humor online – particularly on 4chan and other forums that favor subversive or otherwise offensive content – has veered off any easily discernable course. Instead, participants have chosen to embrace, and in the process have highlighted the ambivalence of, the perpetual remix machine underscoring so much digital humor. Well-known pop culture figures, including Hulk Hogan, The Kool-Aid Man, and Kumamon have been photoshopped into images or animated GIFs of the collapsing towers, so that it looks like the figures are smashing the buildings to bits. Captions like “9/11 jokes are just ‘plane’ wrong,” “9/11 Americans won't understand this joke,” and “No you are a plane you can't work in an office, get out you don't even fit” have been overlaid on images of the moments of impact. The towers have been anthropomorphized in hand-drawn cartoons to express romantic sentiments, smoke marijuana, and fellate the incoming airplanes.
Not only do these images – which we have chosen not to reprint – illustrate the ambivalence of constitutive humor, they illustrate the ease with which modifiability and modularity can facilitate harmful fetishization. After all, the ability to extract a specific image or few-second video clip means that one is able to reduce any event to a quick visual punchline. This in turn allows one to sidestep the fuller political, historical, or emotional context – that which denotes an actual bite. Digital spaces do not require a fetishized gaze, of course. But as we saw with hijacked identities, the tools available for vernacular expression online easily lend themselves to the flattening of political, emotional, and interpersonal nuance into memetic granularity.
And the more myopic one's gaze, the easier it is to laugh at whatever might be in one's direct line of sight. Just a clever punchline. Just a funny still image. Just an amusing looped video. As evidenced by the “Bed Intruder” meme, the fetishized distancing between text (quote, image, tweet, short video) and context (the actual circumstance, including any mitigating factors and overall emotional impact) often inspires further laughter, further memetic reappropriation, and further affective distance – looping right back to the start of the cycle, one that is intimately connected to how easy it is to latch onto one component of a joke (an image, turn of phrase, clever hashtag) and spin it off into another, ad infinitum. The previous chapter referred to this process using the metaphor of a snake eating its own tail – known as the Ouroboros – to signal the cyclical, self-sustaining nature of constitutive online laughter. This chapter has added the additional point that, through the generativity and magnetism of this fetishized laughter, participants build communities and build walls. Ethically, the implications of this outcome depend entirely on what kind of community it is, and what kinds of walls this laughter might strengthen.
The technological affordances of digital media thus serve to further muddy the already brackish waters of constitutive humor. These affordances allow for the possibility that anything, from a civic mascot to a red-carpet photo to a national tragedy, can be harnessed for comedic ends. And not just harnessed, but immediately accessed and archived, allowing for a seemingly endless half-life of content that can disrupt or even destroy lives as quickly as it can engender harmless giggles – at least what feel harmless, just good silly internet fun – amongst globally dispersed audiences. Resulting, ultimately, in a fundamentally fetishistic and ever-churning trash-heap recycle bin, whose jokes have no bounds, and whose implications can never be predicted.
Context collapse + Poe's Law strikes again
It's not just digital media tools that amplify the ambivalence of humor online. The familiar combination of context collapse and Poe's Law is equally impactive. Because it's often impossible to know exactly who is present – and furthermore who is paying attention or cares – at any given moment on any given platform, it is very difficult to know how best to craft a particular message. It is similarly difficult to predict what might happen to that message once it is posted: things that were originally intended to be private, or at least semi-private, can easily be swept up into public discourse, where countless new observers may be pulled in. This magnetism can result in messages that are hopelessly unmoored from their original context, intended audience, and intended meaning. More problematic still, a person can't discern much from these messages online simply by looking at them – there is simply too much that could be happening.
On one hand, the unmoored nature of online vernacular facilitates a great deal of creative, constitutive play. Figure 6 above, for instance, highlights all the ways meaning and intention are up for grabs online. In these images, Kanye and Kim Kardashian West, Rey from Star Wars, and Scully from The X-Files are all brought into the service of incongruous humor. The process by which people connect with something online, put their spin on it, and then recirculate their personal variation on an existing collectivist theme is, in fact, the driving engine behind memetic resonance and vernacular creativity more broadly.
For these same reasons, though, memetic media can simultaneously precipitate as much confusion and strife as collective connection. When a national tragedy resulting in the deaths of thousands is juxtaposed with the cartoon mascot for a Japanese prefecture, or when found news footage chronicling the attempted rape of a young woman of color is set to a catchy beat, context collapse breeds fetishism. Further, as it's not always clear where something is coming from or what the original creator meant to communicate, it is often difficult to know how to interpret – and therefore respond appropriately to – a given text. Within different communities, groups, or dyads, the same memetic media could be deployed as a longstanding community in-joke, dadaist absurdity, or even as fighting words (or images, as the case may be). 9/11 jokes, for example, can serve each purpose, depending on the audience. And that's saying nothing of humor predicated on specific identity antagonisms, or other forms of communication that could be harnessed equally by bigots and satirists of bigots. These texts might still be constitutive, but as a result of rampant context collapse, it's not clear what worlds are being built by whom, what worlds are being challenged or dismantled, who's being invited into the conversation and who's being ridiculed, particularly when content begins zooming unattributed across and between online collectives.
The social and the anti-social are, in this way, always nipping at each other's heels online; what could be one thing one second, with one audience, could shift into the other with a simple retweet, unbeknownst to the original poster. As a result, the rejoinder that “I was just joking,” or, just as frequently, “I was just trolling,” becomes an even tougher sell. Even when both teller and listener are on the same basic page, the idea that one shouldn't be held accountable for one's own offensive speech and behavior and, furthermore, that if someone is offended it's that person's problem – for being oversensitive, for not knowing how to take a joke – is a highly self-involved, myopic framing.
And that's under the best circumstances. In the context of rapid-fire online exchange, particularly when participants have weak or nonexistent social ties to the people they're engaging with, the assertion that “I was just joking” is rendered nonsensical almost immediately. The joke may have been intended as an innocent jab ensconced by the play frame, but that point is moot if the audience does not and cannot decode that frame, or even recognize its basic existence. Due to the fact that humorous exchanges often focus on taboo, obscene, or otherwise offensive content, this Poe's Law fueled communication failure can get very serious very quickly. After all, once unmoored from the signal “this is play,” content that was meant to be funny, not harmful, looks an awful lot like actual taboo, actual obscenity, actual offensiveness. An actual bite. And when confronted by what someone regards to be an actual bite, there is a strong tendency for aggrieved parties to actually bite right back. Not as a function of oversensitivity to humor, or the inability to take a joke. But rather the inability to know that a joke is even happening.
Issues of amplification, redux
And this is precisely why issues of amplification are so fraught in digitally mediated spaces. Regardless of why someone retweets, reposts, reblogs, remixes, or further reappropriates memetic media, any act of engagement – meant to condemn, to laugh at, to analyze, to complicate – ensures that what they're sharing spreads a little further. Depending on what the media might be, the implications of it becoming further inspiration for some future joke can range from neutral to positive to downright traumatic. In these more extreme cases – for example, the kinds of targeted, sexually violent identity hijackings described last chapter – these media are actively and maliciously harnessed to do ill. Much more frequently, however, negative outcomes are difficult to assess. Because like play with the “Bed Intruder” meme, these behaviors stem not from targeted malice, but from selective insensitivity – the result of not having to think about anything beyond the fetishized, myopic, modular punchline.
The difference between repeating a disaster joke in your living room and posting the same joke to one of your social media feeds provides an example. It also provides an example of how quickly an expression can veer from “social” to “anti-social,” even if the poster's intentions are to tell (what they think is) a harmless joke intended for their friends' eyes only. In fully embodied, pre-internet circumstances, audience members might repeat the joke elsewhere, to people who may themselves repeat the joke. Meaning the joke can still spread, but not with the rapidity of similar content online, where one person can reach thousands of others at any given moment – sometimes without even knowing, or wanting to. Nor can an oral version of a joke be searched for by keyword – or worse, stumbled upon by the friends and family of those affected by a tragedy. For an example, consider the difference it would have made if the medic who took the suicide victim “prom picture” in Timothy Tangherlini's (1998) study was operating in the contemporary media landscape. Say, then, he posted that image to his Twitter or Instagram accounts. The basic behavior remains the same. But ethically something changes, ethically something should change, when something is loosed within a digital space designed to amplify content, and for which decontextualization isn't a bug, it's a feature.
In this mass and hyper and digitally mediated milieu, ambivalent content can be spread via average citizens and journalists alike. But the role of large media platforms in the amplification process cannot be overstated. The Holmies fandom described in the Introduction illustrates this point. Holmies – individuals who professed their love and admiration online for spree shooter James Holmes – initially constituted a small, self-contained group of Tumblr users. Based on her years of training and experience sniffing out the so-called “trollish fuckery,” Phillips suspects that many of these users were less than earnest in their affections – though there's no way to verify this suspicion, bounded as we all are by Poe's Law. Regardless of motivations, however, the initial visibility and overall influence of participants' generative output was limited; it was a small, specific, inside reference, if not precisely an inside joke.
That is, it was an inside reference. Its scope widened when BuzzFeed published their July 31, 2012 article condemning (while still reprinting) the worst examples of Holmie fan art (Broderick 2012). After BuzzFeed posted their article, a number of other large outlets, including Mashable in the US (Pan 2012) and the Daily Mail in the UK (Warren 2012), followed suit with their own Holmie coverage. The limited magnetism of the fandom was now gravitational in its pull; suddenly, the Holmies did have an audience. And with this larger audience came those whose laughter was unquestionably taunting, notably denizens of 4chan's /b/. Denizens, it is worth noting, who didn't take too kindly to Phillips' attempts to debunk the manufactured outrage over the Holmies “phenomenon” – a phenomenon that only existed to the extent that news outlets ran with the story, and therefore turned it into one (Phillips 2012).
Regardless of how or by whom such ambivalent humor is amplified online, the takeaway is the same – one person's joke is another person's punch to the gut. So think before you click. Also don't stop clicking, because that's what sustains the most creative, and most interesting, humor online. An unsatisfying imperative, certainly. But one reflective of the fact that humor doesn't lend itself to tidy anything. Especially conclusions.
Chapter overview and looking forward
Many, if not most, if not all, of the ambivalent expressions described in this chapter are funny, or might be considered funny by someone. Maybe you. Maybe us. Maybe your dad. Simultaneously, many, if not most, if not all, of the examples in this chapter are offensive, or could be considered offensive by someone. The possibility that both could be true highlights the fact that the us and the them established by constitutive humor isn't much of a binary at all. Scratch that surface just slightly, and either us or them can facilitate constructive, pro-social engagement, just as either us or them can facilitate destructive, anti-social engagement. The ambivalence of constitutive laughter – the fact that it could go either way, or any way, with any group – also highlights the fact that designations of good/bad, social/anti-social, generative/destructive don't have much (or anything) to do with what a particular group or individual hopes to accomplish. Or even how a particular us sees themselves in relation to a particular them, if either group is even aware of this demarcation. Rather, what qualifies as what, both online and off, depends almost entirely on where a person is standing in relation to these actions, and what impact the actions ultimately end up having.
We will continue exploring these themes in the following chapter focused on collective storytelling. Just as constitutive humor challenges any easy demarcation between the aforementioned binaries, so too does the act of sharing and telling stories – a challenge amplified by the often massive populist participation that these stories can inspire. As we'll see – and also like constitutive humor – this populism can be equally thoughtful and confusing (or offensive, or regressive), can be just as empowering as it can be marginalizing, and is, despite its collective reach, also evidence of small strands of individual voice: one more storyteller in the circle.