Deadpan humour,the comic disposition and the interpretation of ironic ambiguity online

Abstract

This article explores how the prevalence of deadpan and ironic modes of humour undermines the possibility of clear and stable interpretation in online contexts. Analysing key examples of online deadpan humour through the lens of literary and critical models of irony, I argue that the decontextualisation of deadpan humour in online spaces accentuates the deadpan comic mode’s tendency towards ambiguity in ways that hypothetically destabilise any claim to textual certainty. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, I propose the ‘comic disposition’ as a means to theorise how audiences learn to process the comic ambiguity of online deadpan humour, and suggest how the ‘comic disposition’ can be understood to inform observed tendencies towards distrust and confusion in digital culture.

In January 2021, an insurrectionary mob stormed the US Capitol Building in an ill-guided attempt to prevent the confirmation of Joe Biden as the victor of the 2020 US presidential election. Five people died in the chaos that ensued. Although details of their deaths remained unclear in the immediate aftermath, only a few days later facts began to emerge that a rioter had suffered a fatal heart attack after accidently discharging a taser into his testicles. News of this incident spread rapidly in the form of tweets, memes and Reddit posts, which took up the unfortunate event as the basis for mirth and mockery. With a mix of slapstick, political schadenfreude and gallows darkness, the innate comedy of the event seemed almost too good to be true. And, as it turns out, it was. Reporting from Internet sleuths at Snopes quickly determined that the rumour had begun with a tweet by user @ggooooddddoogg, which read:

I don’t think it’s funny at all that a maga guy accidently tased himself in his own balls until he died while trying to steal of a painting of thomas p. ‘tip’ o neill from a hallway (sic) (Dapcevich, 2021)

Originally intended as a throw-away quip, the remark had metastasised through social media and been taken up as a legitimate report, which others then used as the basis for their own humour. In the process, humour had been mistaken for sincere fact, and then repurposed back into humour. In the end, though, it turned out that it was jokes all the way down.

In a digital world of fake news, cancel culture and conspiracy theories, online communication is haunted by anxieties regarding malevolent intentions and misinterpretations. Very frequently, this takes the form of concerns regarding verisimilitude; in particular, how to determine whether a given instance of communication should be deemed truthful. However, the threat posed by fake news and false identities is not the only obstacle on the path to proper and correct knowledge in a digitally mediated world. For example, there is the related, though ostensibly less urgent, question of how to determine whether one ought to interpret a given instance of communication as humorous or not. And yet while the question of comedy might seem far less important than the existential struggle being waged over truth, in practice the question of whether one ought to laugh cuts to the heart of concerns regarding the ambiguity and antagonism of mediated communication in online contexts (Young, 2018). At one level, this is an ethical quandary, born of the lack of widespread agreement around the parameters of what might be correctly deemed acceptable humour. However, this is also meaningfully an interpretive question: one that arises when unclear distinctions between the comic and the non-comic mean that it is not always clear whether the identification of a given media text as comic is a consequence of intention, accident or over-enthusiastic (mis)interpretation.

Humour has historically presented a source of difficulty for those who wish to pin down stable and clear meanings. Irony and ambiguity are often present, especially in the context of comic modes like deadpan that are characterised by the withdrawal or limitation of guiding textual cues widely used to identify humour. This potential for comic confusion is only heightened in the context of the practices and platforms of online humour, which embrace the humorous possibilities of decontextualisation and the repurposing of pre-existing materials (Lessig, 2008). The absence of reliable contextual clues is so common in online spaces, particularly social media, that we become faced with the unsettling prospect that any instance of online communication could potentially be a form of humour, which we have failed to interpret ‘correctly’. Indeed, the prevalence of comic communication in online spaces is such that, at its extremes, it even threatens to undermine users’ abilities to make stable assumptions about intention or meaning. Not only could any article or image, tweet or meme be an instance of deadpan humour that we have failed to ‘get’, but it also becomes possible for the status of texts to shift back and forwards between sincerity and satire in consequential ways: witness the transformation of Dogecoin from parody to lucrative investment in 2021 (Mackintosh, 2021; Ossinger, 2021).

Taking up the hypothetical threat posed by the infinite expansion of deadpan, this article explores the intertwined aesthetic and social implications of the rise of online deadpan humour from the perspective of cultural studies: placing models of textual interpretation drawn from literary and cultural theory into conversation with contemporary discussions of new forms of online media. In doing so, online deadpan is approached as not simply a discursive mode, but also as a reflection of how new modes and norms of online cultural production complicate any attempt at clear communication. To better understand the function and consequence of online deadpan, this article situates novel forms of online comic irony in terms of the longer tradition of literary irony. In contrast to models that posit irony as a communicative code that indexes group membership (Day, 2008; Livnat and Dori-Hacohen, 2017), this literary model conceives of irony as the radical opening-up of meaning to both audience and authors alike. In this way, online deadpan is framed as a problem of dissemination, circulation and interpretation as much as dialogic communication (Peters, 1999: 34–35). The applicability of this model of profound ambiguity to online deadpan humour is illustrated through the formal analysis of representative comic texts, including The Onion, the ‘Dat Boi’ meme and the YouTube series Tiny Fuppets and Lasagne Cat. Such examples provide a means to theorise how the interpretive ambiguities inherent to deadpan are compounded by its online circulation in ways that can make it unclear whether a given example should even be interpreted as an instance of humour. At their most extreme, such ambiguities threaten to undermine the ability to determine whether any given statement can be confidently interpreted as sincere or humorous.

However, despite this theoretical concern, it is clear that, in practice, audiences do find ways to resolve this ambiguity. Audiences do this by making interpretive decisions regarding the comic status of texts even in the absence of clear evidence. To explain this interpretive work, I draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu to posit the existence of the ‘comic disposition’ as an emerging feature of online cultural contexts. In the work of Bourdieu, a disposition describes a reader’s proclivity to interpret a text in a particular way based on their previous social and cultural experiences. Although it is not possible to fully characterise this disposition without empirical audience research, I propose a mechanism by which the comic disposition might emerge in online contexts and, thereby, inform an increased willingness to interpret any and all ambiguous cultural texts as instances of potential humour. More than just a tendency to find humour where it is apparently absent, the comic disposition describes a broader feature of contemporary digital culture: a fundamental instability between irony and earnestness that informs contemporary conflicts regarding topics, such as fake news, distrust and the pursuit of ‘lolz’. The interpretive confusion engendered by online deadpan humour is thus indicative of fractious conflict that increasingly typifies digital and online media.

Deadpan as an ironic comic mode

In the narrowest traditional sense, the term deadpan refers to a form of emotionless and expressionless comic performance: a style of acting, associated most famously with comics like Buster Keaton, where humorous scenarios are acted out with a blank face and unenthusiastic demeanour. However, in a broader definition, deadpan expands beyond just the performative aspects of humour to potentially encompass the formal construction of a range of comic texts (Holm, 2017). More than just a style of acting, in this wider sense, deadpan refers to the use of broader aesthetic means to achieve a flattening of comic affect through the muting, undermining or withdrawal of the formal aspects – what Noam Gal, Zohar Kampf and Limor Shifman refer to as ‘intra-textual markers’ (2020: 3) – that conventionally would mark a text as recognisably comic. Understood in this manner, deadpan describes not just the way humour is performed, but also the ways in which it is mediated. By means of flat delivery, the disruptive incorporation of non-comic material or the removal of the standard textual and performative cues by which a text is marked as comic, the deadpan mode brings the form and content of humour into conflict. Deadpan is thus a mode of humour characterised by the formal denial of its own comic content.

This conflict between proper and apparent meaning suggests that deadpan can be understood as a specific manifestation of the broader aesthetic category of irony: a particularly messy concept, the multiple meanings of which hinge on divergences between intended and expressed meaning (Kreuz, 2020). However, deadpan is more precise than this general category of irony because it is further characterised by two distinguishing features. First, it relates solely to whether or not a given remark is comic (while irony is often humorous, it need not be). Second, it is defined by the absence of textual markers. Although irony is sometimes discussed as if it were – by definition – presented without any indication of its status, in practice there are multiple ways in which an ironist can cue their audience as to their intent. For example, in face-to-face communication, irony is often signalled through the adoption of a specific tone of voice, facial expression or bodily gestures (Grice, 2008: 771; Kreuz, 2020). It is through such means that an ironist can ‘signal the violation [of direct communication] to the addressee’ (Hancock, 2004: 448) and thereby prompt their audience to interpret the text in the intended manner. (Historically, there have been multiple attempts to duplicate the function of these cues in written language through the establishment of ‘irony’ punctuation marks (Houston, 2013)). In contrast, in the case of deadpan, textual markers such as tone are absent, which makes the elucidation of the indirect meaning much more awkward.

The absence or inconsistency of clear textual cues in deadpan humour creates a semiotic situation characterised by a lower level of information than is usually required for the confirmation of a given interpretation. This situation is akin to what Wayne Booth (1975: 62) refers to as ‘unstable irony’: a form of irony ‘in which the author’s intent is unclear’, and it is not clear whether a remark ought to be taken at face value or not (Kreuz, 2020: 41). In such instances, the lack of clear interpretive direction complicates the communication process and opens the door for ‘bafflement’ (Grice, 2008: 771). To resolve this bafflement, unstable irony requires the audience to play a more active role in the construction of meaning than might ordinarily be expected. As a consequence, in comparison to more straightforward media texts, the responsibility for interpretation of irony (and thus deadpan) rests disproportionately upon the audience, who are required to undertake additional interpretive work to ‘get’ the meaning (and, in the case of deadpan, to also ‘get’ the resulting joke). However, as Linda Hutcheon argues, in the case of unstably ironic texts, ‘“get” may be an inaccurate and even inappropriate verb: “make” would be much more precise’ (Hutcheon, 2018: 105), as the audience is implicated in the active construction of a particular meaning. This is thus more than simply a recognition of the importance of the moment of ‘decoding’ in the determination of meaning (Hall, 1996). Instead, this is an argument that deadpan names a peculiar class of comic texts that are characterised by the requirement of the audience to co-create, rather than just decode, meaning.

In this manner, deadpan can be thought of as a specifically comic manifestation of Umberto Eco’s (1989) concept of the ‘open text’: texts that are not simply available to interpretation, but which actively call on the audience to resolve an unspecified and undecided, that is to say, ‘open’, aspect. In extreme instances, deadpan can even place so much onus on the audience such as to call into question how they might ever be expected to recognise a given instance of deadpan humour in the absence of expected cues. The stand-up of Andy Kaufman represents a limit-case in this regard (Keller, 2005) as Kaufman’s commitment to the potentially off-putting aspects of his performance was so complete as to frequently alienate audiences. Faced with such ambiguity, the audience’s interpretation of such texts must always remain, to some extent, uncertain. Deadpan can, therefore, be understood as an aesthetic mode that opens back out towards the social for its resolution. Hence, although the ambiguity of deadpan is perhaps better understood as a difference of degree, rather than a difference of kind, relative to other texts; in practice, this difference is nonetheless meaningful given the extent to which deadpan comedy actively and intentionally courts the risk of misrecognition, aberrant readings and other forms of interpretive failure beyond the customary expectations of texts in our media environment.

Online humour, out of context

While, in theory, deadpan’s tendency towards absolute ambiguity presents a thorny question as regards audience interpretation, historically, this has been relatively easy to resolve in a practical sense. In the case of older media forms and platforms, such as television, film and print media, texts were almost never encountered in a vacuum. Instead, books, comics, films, television shows, video games, indeed the entirely litany of legacy media forms, were almost always encountered amid a veritable torrent of promotional and other material that works to orientate a potential consumer. From advertisements to reviews, schedule guides and genre tags, a wide range of highly visibly ‘paratextual’ markers existed that pre-emptively limited the possibility of ambiguity by slotting texts into recognisable genres (Gray, 2010). For example, TV listings and streaming service categories alike work to directly mark a show as an instance of comedy, while the appearance of a text on certain networks or even the presence of certain actors, writers or production houses can fulfil the same function indirectly. This is not a coincidence, one of the key functions of commercial media environments is the reduction of ambiguity to attract and retain audiences (Neale, 1999). Moreover, a similar mechanism is also at work in terms of face-to-face interactions, which, typically have permitted an even lower level of textual cues, facilitated by the shared knowledge of networks of family and friends and the flexible potential for face-saving discussion and apology in the event of misunderstanding (Goddard, 2006; Hancock, 2004). Historically, then, the complicating ambiguity of deadpan has been stabilised by its implication in multiple thick layers of contextual and paratextual information that can guide the audience’s interpretation even in the absence of clear textual cues.

However, as is the case with innumerable areas of social and cultural life, online networks have dramatically altered the ways in which humour is produced, distributed and consumed (Krefting and Baruc, 2015). As humour has become central to much of the content and communication of online spaces (Phillips and Milner, 2017; Shifman, 2007; Shifman and Blondheim, 2010), it has become ‘a key factor in determining the spreadability and salience of online content’ (Highfield, 2016: 41). This is particularly true in the case of new media forms such as memes and gifs (Kalkina, 2020; Miltner and Highfield, 2017: 4–5; Nakamura, 2014; 133) that frequently employ humour as the basis of their appeal to audiences. Unconstrained by the commercial imperatives of professional comedy, these new amateur and effectively author-less media forms (Milner, 2016: 34–36) place the means of comic production in the hands of those unconstrained by the limitations of traditional media distribution channels and the already loose traditional standards of decorum in comedy. The result has been an explosion in the quantity and variety of comic content (to say nothing of quality). The cumulative consequences of these digital transformations cannot be accounted for solely in terms of textual flows and storage: they have also lead to a mutation in the ways that humour that is employed as a form of communication, those subjects that are laughed at and the formal textual means by which that laughter is encoded and decoded (Davis et al., 2018).

One of the major complications of this new media environment is the increasing chance that an instance of humour will be encountered detached from its originary context. In contrast to traditional media forms or interpersonal interactions, mitigating systems of paratextual and social knowledge are much more likely to be absent when encountering comic texts in online media environments. This is due in part to ‘context collapse’: the phenomenon whereby a remark or piece of content expressed in online contexts tends to reach an audience wider than that for which it was specifically intended, and who may lack the requisite knowledge to ‘correctly’ interpret it (boyd, 2010; Kreuz, 2020: 155). This tendency towards ambiguity is further compounded on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr which are premised upon sharing practices that have a strong tendency to remove original paratextual cues and to thereby present videos, images and other shared content as isolated cultural units without history and disconnected from any prior systems of meaning or reference (Gal et al., 2020: 5; Miltner and Highfield, 2017: 6). The absence of such paratextual cues creates conditions that increase the likelihood of misinterpretation, miscommunication and general confusion regarding online humour as ‘the affordances of digital media . . . throw already existing ambiguity into hyperdrive’ (Phillips and Milner, 2017: 16; see also DeCook, 2020; Gal, 2019: 729–731; Topinka, 2018). As a result, in the spaces of social media audiences often encounter comic texts independently of the paratextual markers that would provide relevant information as regards their comic status.

The tendency towards decontextualisation is not a major concern in relation to humour texts that clearly and directly align with comic expectations: cases in which the text itself is so blatantly comic that misinterpretation is largely forestalled (though never impossible). Online examples might include video excerpts from broadcast comedy properties or established online content producers such as College Humor or Viva la Dirt League which feature recognisable comic attributes, such as gag structures, one-liners, deliberate parody, excessive hyperbole and explicitly signalled breaks with widely held social mores and values. Other examples might include widely circulated meme formats or gifs premised on slapstick. In such cases, the intra-textual cues are sufficient for a reader to confidently – usually unthinkingly – interpret these texts as comic. However, such decontextualisation can present substantial interpretive challenges in the case of online irony and deadpan humour where the pre-existing lack of textual cues already make it difficult enough to determine what is humour and what is not. This potential confusion is compounded when these texts are detached from their original contexts and associated interpretive cues as they circulate through online media (Young, 2018: 134). Under such conditions, ‘the combination of the polysemy inherent to ironic humor and new decontextualized digital environments entails greater potential for misinterpretation’ (Gal, 2019: 275). Consequently, it becomes unclear how an online audience could ever determine deadpan humour from sincere expression in the absence of either textual or paratextual cues.

Poe’s law and the inscrutability of online deadpan

The vernacular term used to describe this online collapse of irony and earnestness is ‘Poe’s Law’. Precedent attributes this concept to a 2005 forum discussion, where a poster named ‘Poe’ stated that ‘Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article’ (qtd. In Milner, 2016: 142–143). Poe’s Law is usually taken to mean that the affordances of online communication are such that humour and sincerity become indistinguishable in online environments. It thus raises the possibility that humour might be interpreted as earnest expression (and vice versa) due to the lack of necessary contextual information. Perhaps the most familiar example of this ambiguity in practice is the recurring phenomenon whereby articles from satirical websites like The Onion are taken up by news media as legitimate stories: for example, a 2012 incident where Chinese media picked up a fake story that declared North Korea’s Kim Jung Un to be the ‘sexiest man alive’ (Holland and Levy, 2018). ¹ Bereft of either formal elements that would mark the text as obviously comic or paratextual context that would prompt a comic reading, such texts are examples of Poe’s Law in practice, whereby insufficient evidence exists to signal the comic status of online deadpan.

Such confusion does not exhaust the implications of Poe’s Law however, which can also cut back the other way. Not only can comedy be mistaken for earnest and legitimate comment in online spaces, but earnest and legitimate comment can also be mistaken for comedy. Indeed, examples of such ambiguous content are actively curated by online entities, such as the Facebook group named (at the time of writing) ‘We have murdered satire and we sit on its corpse like a throne’ whose stated purpose is to share ‘things that are not satirical, but seem like they are’. Examples include articles such as ‘Trump says he may run again for president in 2024 in order to defeat Meghan Markle’ (Colson, 2021) (originally published in Business Insider Australia, 17 March 2021), ‘Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”’ (Kim, 2018) (originally published in CNBC, 11 April 2018) and ‘Louisiana Lawmaker Argues Schools Must Teach “Good” Of Slavery’ (Reimann, 2021) (originally published in Forbes, 27 April 2021). Such material can be considered akin to The Onion operating in reverse: instances where reportage and punditry intended to be taken as legitimate instead function as instances of unintentional parody or detail events that appear so absurd as to be contrived for comic effect. Although packaged and flagged for comic consumption in the context of the Facebook group, when encountered in the wild (as it were), such examples demonstrate how in the decontextualised space of social media, serious and sincere forms of communication can be mistaken for humour. Poe’s Law would seem to suggest, then, that in online media environments, it is not simply comedy that slips towards reality, but rather all texts whether comic or not that now tend towards an infinite horizon of the deadpan.

We might expect in such circumstances that deadpan humour would become an un-favoured mode of humour, and online communicators would adopt explicit signalling to forestall the interpretive slippage identified by Poe’s Law. Indeed, a whole host of ‘performative marks’ are available for those who wish to indicate a comic tone by employing devices such as emoticons, emoji, hashtags, and memes as well as ‘creative spelling, grammar and syntax’. (Gal et al., 2020: 10; Kreuz, 2020: 155–164; Phillips and Milner, 2017: 109–110). However, the use of such devices is not always widespread in practice; a situation that can in part be explained by a general reluctance to signal irony (including deadpan) too directly lest ‘explicit indicators of ironic intent rob such statements of their power to surprise or amuse’ (Kreuz, 2020: 143). Indeed, in the case of comedy, overtly explicit signalling might even threaten the effectiveness of the humour at play by prematurely collapsing the constitutive incongruity. Such reluctance goes some way, then, to explaining documented situations where participants engaged in online conversations forgo explicit ‘humour markers’ in favour of a deadpan style of exchange even as it increases the possibility of misunderstanding (Mullan, 2020: 141–145). Thus, even though ‘the communicative process [is] almost bound for failure’ in the absence of such makers (Gal et al., 2020: 5), there remain multiple instances where such markers are indeed absent, especially on social media platforms like Twitter.

In addition, such performative intra-textual markers of humour also carry the additional interpretive risk that they are themselves being used in an unmarked ironic way (e.g. the ironic use of a smiley emoticon, the ‘hijacking’ of a hashtag or the divergent uses of Facebook’s ‘care react’). The possibility that humour markers could also be used ironically brings us closer to an infinite deferral of meaning articulated by Stanley Fish who, writing in a different context, argues that ‘one cannot argue for an ironic interpretation by pointing to these marks, because one will be able to point to them only as a consequence of an interpretation that has already been hazarded’ (Fish, 1983: 176). This point can be aptly illustrated with reference to Tiny Fuppets: a YouTube series that presents as a crude Portuguese-language parody of the 1980s cartoon series Muppet Babies. The comic status of the text is complicated, however, by the elaborate paratextual apparatus that surrounds it, which includes videos by the show’s purported creator, Arturo Lima, who repeatedly insists that show is neither parody, nor derivative, but rather an authentic and successful franchise from his native Portugal. In an article addressing the show, the Huffington Post (2011) declared that ‘it’s unclear whether Tiny Fuppets is a real foreign knockoff or an intentional joke’; to which ‘Lima’ responded in a surly video defending his creative integrity. ² In this case of Tiny Fuppets, the use of paratextual markers does not, therefore, work to clarify the comic status of the text, but rather to confuse it further to comic effect. Thus, although a relatively unusual example, Tiny Fuppets illustrates the ultimate futility of appealing to intra-textual markers as a means to resolve Poe’s Law, by demonstrating how they too can become fodder for humour. The humour of online deadpan is premised on the active destabilisation of such intra-textual or performative markers, which are, therefore, unable to provide a means of interpretive resolution.

Beyond communities and literacies

The other means by which Poe’s Law can hypothetically be circumvented is by locating online deadpan within specific online communities, where there is some expectation that participants share a ‘common ground’ of knowledge and values (Kreuz, 2020: 152). On the basis of this common ground, community members will be able to identify when a given text should be correctly read as comic, either through the application of sophisticated subcultural literacies or because the text will contravene unspoken moral, aesthetic or political norms of that community (Gal et al., 2020: 14–15). Understood in this way, online deadpan can even be used to create and shore up in-group boundaries by ‘promot[ing] social bonding’ among those who demonstrate the ability to correctly interpret ambiguous texts and excluding those who lack these competencies (Gal, 2019). However, we should be careful not to overstate the coherence of online communities as a way of resolving ambiguous humour.

To base interpretation in community membership is to overlook the general ‘leakiness’ of digital cultures, which are characterised by the free flow of texts and the constant threat of context collapse. Previous work has been largely concerned with the interpretation of online irony in the context of clearly defined in-groups and out-groups (Gal, 2019; Gal et al., 2020; Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017). However, such clarity is not always forthcoming in online spaces where texts and other communicative acts have the potential to spread far and wide and where, consequently, we frequently encounter statements, expressions and other communiques well beyond the limits of the community from which they originated. As such, even if it is true that ‘the user who creates user-generated content in the form of memes does not post them randomly, but addresses a specific, familiar crowd’ (Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017, italics in original), this does not mean that the circulation will be limited to that crowd. Instead, the ability of memes and similar content to spread rapidly and widely means that even if a comic text had a clear(er) meaning in the particular corner of the Internet from whence it emerged, it will rapidly lose touch with those communal meanings as it disperses through the open and interconnected architectures of social media.

By way of example, we can consider the abstruse humour of memes, such as ‘Doge’, or ‘Dat Boi’ that initially circulated in specific online communities like 4chan’s /b/ board, and various subReddits. The humour of such memes skirts the edge of un-interpretability by consequence of their embrace of blank absurdity. Nonetheless, in their original contexts, these texts fulfilled particular communicative and expressive functions as a result of their integration within the dense weave of local knowledge and practice (Milner, 2016). The complications begin, however, once these texts begin to circulate on the wider Internet in ways that go far beyond – and often against the values of – the original community (Miltner, 2014). A meme like ‘Dat Boi’ becomes especially baffling when encountered beyond its initial home range. Consisting of a clipart image of a poorly rendered frog riding a unicycle (often accompanied by the text, ‘here come dat boi! o shit waddup!’) the formal aspects of the meme provide little information as to how or why it could be interpreted as comic (beyond the base incongruity of the concept, which is rapidly exhausted), rather than as the failed execution of otherwise unclear ends. Even if an unfamiliar interpreter were to decide that this meme should probably be understood as somehow comic, they would likely struggle to articulate in what specific way it is humorous. Thus, while familiarity with the necessary subcultural literacy may facilitate rapid and straightforward decoding in the original context, the potential of the meme to stray beyond that initial audience means that, eventually, it will encounter an audience less acquainted with those interpretive codes. Consequently, it is almost inevitable that such deadpan memetic texts will eventually be encountered independently of clear (sub)cultural communities and without reliable comic markers.

Moreover, rather than seek to minimise this ambiguity, multiple forms of emergent online humour actively embrace and play with this potential for confusion. For example, although presented as a descriptive theory in its initial presentation, Poe’s Law has since gone on to be adopted as a normative edict in certain corners of the online world. In cyber-communities such as 4chan (and its derivatives), Poe’s Law is not simply the expression of a complicating feature of online communication, but a ‘driving sensibility of many online groups and forums’ (Nikunen, 2018: 12). Inspired by Poe’s Law, communication in such fora strives towards excessive irony such that it is unclear whether any user’s missives should be taken at face value or not. In these contexts, the collapse of clear distinctions between sincerity and comedy is an aspiration of – rather than an impediment to – online communication (Ylä-Anttila et al., 2020: 7). In its most extreme manifestations, this tendency can even lead to doubts regarding not only clarity of interpretation, but also the singularity of intention: whether contributors themselves even know whether they’re joking or not (Milner, 2016: 143).

At a textual level, this embrace of radical comic ambiguity can be seen in the emergence of new forms of online humour. A case in point is the deeply odd YouTube series Lasagna Cat, which consists of live action re-enactments of Garfield comic strips accompanied by a laugh soundtrack, which are then supplemented by additional footage often taking the form of short music videos inspired by the strip. The overall affect is community theatre surrealism with little indication as to whether the videos are failed attempts at amateur homage or wry criticisms of the source material. In a 2017 interview, the creative team behind the videos, Fatal Farm, described the series as ‘something that people can run across and wonder why it exists’ (Blackard, 2017). As a consequence of their embrace of such profound ambiguity, it is not even clear to what extent such texts can even be usefully categorised as comedy. While their formal playfulness of such texts suggests that some form of humour is at play, the deadpan refusal to affirm a comic intention means that any stable final interpretation is almost impossible.

The comic disposition

Such ambiguously comic texts demonstrate how the shift online makes the already unstable meanings of deadpan humour even more ‘open’ still. Not only bereft of standard textual markers of humour but paratextual markers as well, online deadpan shifts the final determination of comic meaning even further away from the text and towards the audience. The result is an obligation to actively furnish an interpretive decision regarding the comic status of the text in the absence of almost any relevant evidence either way. This is no longer simply a matter of semiotics, then, but something more akin to the decision of Søren Kierkegaard’s ‘knight of faith’ who must ultimately decide what is true without recourse to evidence or indeed truth (except here the biblical figure of Abraham is replaced by a man in a giant orange cat suit) (Kiekegaard, 1985). Faced with such radical ambiguity, online deadpan thus presents us with an interpretive enigma: how, when or even why, could an audience ever come to regard a text as comic in the absence of practically any textual or paratextual cues to that effect?

It is to resolve this riddle that I turn to the idea of the ‘comic disposition’: a theoretical approach that shifts attention away from interpretation as a purely semiotic process, to instead consider it as part of a wider field of cultural practices and institutions. This account of interpretation draws on the model of cultural consumption that Pierre Bourdieu develops in Distinction, in particular, the notion of the ‘disposition’, which is ‘best understood as describing how a subject is inclined, by function of their background, to interpret the world around them’. (Holm, 2020: 145). In Bourdieu’s model, dispositions emerge out of an individual’s ‘habitus’ – their way of being in the world as a product of their particular personal history – and are, therefore, neither rational nor reflexive. Instead, a disposition is best understood as an interpretive tendency that is produced by life experience. In Distinction, the most prominent example of this concept is the ‘aesthetic disposition’: a tendency to encounter objects in the world in terms of their mode of representation and style (Bourdieu, 1984: 28–29). The aesthetic disposition is an interpretive tendency that can make of anything a work of art: that, for example, can find beauty in a photograph of a car crash or a piece of rope (Bourdieu, 1984: 536–537). Analogously, the comic disposition is a tendency to encounter any text, no matter how ‘straight’, as a potentially profoundly dry instance of comedy.

The concept of a disposition suggests that the interpretive lens applied to a text should not be understood solely as a function of formal features or social-cultural cues that encourage a particular reading: it is also shaped by how a particular audience is predisposed to interpret a text as a consequence of their own experiences and history. A disposition is, therefore, not simply subjective, but the consequence of an interpreter’s relation to the text in terms their ‘certain historical and social situation’ and their cultural ‘training’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 30). For Bourdieu, this training was conceived as formal artistic education, by which a bourgeois subject would internalise the priorities and logics of Western art. However, in the case of the comic disposition this training is much less salubrious. It takes place in the cut and thrust of forum communities and social media comments, where the comic status of ambiguous texts is debated and asserted. The comic disposition – as an element of the habitus – is, therefore, not simply an idea that forms in the interpreter’s mind, but the internalised aspect of a larger structure that finds social expression in the discursive community of production and material expression in the texts themselves. This system of proclivities, behaviours, texts and institutions is somewhat akin to Bourdieu’s (1983) account of the ‘artistic field’, constituted as it by the semi-structured negotiation of power, meaning and value, although even less formalised and standardised than the expectations of fin de siècle cultural production that he addresses. Its rule are overseen and taught not by credentialed experts, but by anonymous moderators and abrasive, abusive community members. Its sanctioned texts are not display in galleries and reproduced in textbooks, but acclaimed through acts of redistribution enabled by social media platforms and high-speed Internet connections.

Consequently, although the current study does not have the scope to empirically confirm how the ‘comic disposition’ manifests in audiences’ interpretive tendencies, what can be identified are the affordances and attitudes that constitute key elements of the wider cultural field to which the comic disposition corresponds. As already discussed, at a textual level this manifests in terms of the embrace of radical comic ambiguity and the playful embrace of paratexts as part of online comedy, while the adoption of Poe’s Law as a communicative principle and the decontextualising effects of circulation in social media function as social and technological correlates at a structural level. While for Bourdieu (1984), ‘the aesthetic disposition becomes an institution’ in the context of the art museum (p. 30), the comic disposition is institutionalised, albeit in less physical ways, in online spaces such as 4chan, Reddit and meme-based groups on Facebook and Instagram. Just as the art gallery provides a physical space that ‘objectifies’ the expectations and practices of the art world that forms that underpin the legitimacy of the aesthetic disposition, so too do specific online spaces function to affirm, reproduce and enforce the comic disposition as a privileged form of interpretation. Moreover, just as the aesthetic disposition is not limited to museums (but only finds in those spaces its most tangible material expression), so the comic disposition has the potential to spread more widely than the dankest spaces of the web. This is because a disposition is more than just a mode of interpretation that a subject happens to adopt. It is tied to both the prior aesthetic experiences of subjects and the potential to accrue ‘distinction’ – social, cultural, political and even economic benefits – by taking on a particular interpretive mind-set. While the adoption of a disposition is not conscious, it is, therefore, nonetheless motivated. The question, then is what could motivate the adoption of the comic disposition?

The answer to this question relies upon the potential of deadpan, as a form of irony, to segregate its audience in ways that are about hierarchy and judgement as much as interpretation (Hutcheon, 2018: 107). Like all forms of unmarked or under-marked irony, deadpan produces both an in-group – those who have the skills to correctly decipher the subtle clues and discern the true meaning – and an out-group. Those who do not or cannot access this meaning are not only excluded but revealed as somehow lacking: ‘credulous enough to take the ironist’s words at face value’ (Kreuz, 2020: 58). To misunderstand irony is, therefore, not simply a socially neutral instance of misinterpretation (nor an active assertion of interpretive agency), but also a potentially socially consequential act of failure, as one reveals oneself to be lacking the requisite sophistication or savvy needed to participate in this high-level textual game. The interpretation of deadpan is, therefore, not simply neutral, but is better understood as a socially weighted form of challenge: are you in on the joke or not? To interpret an ambiguous text as sincere is to risk missing the joke, and thereby exposing oneself as insufficiently attuned to the trends of online culture. The comic disposition provides a mechanism that explains the broader phenomenon of Poe’s Law as the product of a cultural context shaped by an inclination to comic interpretation, so as not to be caught out by the ambiguously comic.

An entire world made comic

The comic disposition describes a new interpretive tendency that emerges in online contexts whereby audiences become pre-inclined to interpret any and all texts as potentially comic. Cultivated in the first instances by new forms of weird online humour such as Lasagne Cat and ‘Dat Boi’, and nurtured in extremely online communities, the comic disposition emerges as a response to a new class of deeply ambiguous deadpan texts. However, there is no guarantee that online deadpan and the comic disposition will remain tied to each other in any reliable way. Just as Bourdieu’s aesthetic disposition was not restricted to the art museum or to particularly artistic texts – but instead became more broadly applied to a range of non-artistic texts across a range of contexts (indeed, this is one of the main points of Distinction) – so too the comic disposition is not limited to any specific texts or contexts. When context collapses, so does the possibility of contextual talk, which explains why the comic disposition is not and cannot remain restricted to the members of particular online communities. This is further compounded by the very nature of deadpan as an ironic textual category, which makes it near impossible to determine the difference between the ambiguously comic and the actually serious with absolute certainty. In light of this textual uncertainty, in conjunction with the decontextualising effects of online circulation, it becomes more than likely that the comic disposition and online deadpan will come to exist independently of one another, with disruptive comic consequences.

On one hand, the promulgation of increasingly blank forms of online deadpan humour increases the odds that intended-to-be comic texts will be (mis)interpreted as sincere accounts of true facts or actually held views. This becomes even more likely when those deadpan texts circulate beyond the boundaries of their initial interpretive context: a process facilitated by the technological affordances and social attitudes that constitute online practices of ‘sharing’. The fundamental permeability of online communities means that deadpan texts that originate on Reddit and 4chan are unlikely to remain there and when the flotsam and jetsam of long-concluded conversations and distant flame wars seep into our social media stream, they usually do so without any indication of the specific literacies by which they were once made to carry comic meanings. As radically deadpan texts move into the social media mainstream of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter they generate confusion, misinterpretation and potentially anger as they are encountered by audiences unable to recognise subtle (or non-existent) comic cues.

On the other hand, it is not just texts that can circulate in the broader channels of the Internet, but also the interpretive attitudes associated with them. Sustained exposure to online deadpan has the potential to cultivate the comic disposition whereby audiences read any and all texts as comic even in the absence of textual and paratextual cues. Such interpreters become predisposed to ‘get the joke’, even when there is potentially no joke to get. Because such a disposition tends to find humour in places where it is not marked in any clear way, it creates the potential for any content encountered online – and especially in the decontextualised flows of social media – as the basis for an un-flagged joke. From the perspective of those who manifest a comic disposition, the online world has the potential to appear as nothing so much as an unrelenting deluge of deadpan humour. Every ostensible serious act of communication or interaction has the potential to be a joke that one has failed to interpret. Reluctant to be taken for a gullible fool, some interpreters will be primed to read any statement that departs from expected norms as an instance of dry parody or satire. Moreover, not only does this attitude foster an interpretive mind-set that tends to read the unexpected, unsuccessful or unlikely in terms of humour, but it also increases the likelihood of disruptive heckling and horseplay by those who cannot or do not distinguish between serious speech and comic banter. When everything looks like a potential joke, any discussion or situation becomes an opportunity for levity, flippancy or glibness. ³

Arriving from opposite directions, both of these tendencies contribute to the same broader process: the erosion of the basis for clear and mutually respectful interaction in online spaces. The spread of online deadpan and the comic disposition both diminish our ability to accurately identify how a sender intends a message to be decoded and the resulting interpretive ambiguity threatens to undermine the potential for online media to play host to socially and politically meaningful speech. Humour and irony complicate interpretation creating ambiguity; this is exponentially compounded when it is not clear whether a given remark ought to be interpreted as humour. This unstable context makes it increasingly difficult to convey earnest expression online, especially through social media channels, where there is a risk of taking others’ remarks at face value. The resulting inability to determine whether a text is comic or not in online contexts undermines trust in digitally mediated communication, not just in terms of information, but also in terms of its broader affective atmosphere. Online deadpan and the comic disposition, therefore, do much more than just introduce (the potential for) humour into every online discussion: they have the potential to embrace modes of radical absurdity and profoundly stunted empathy that push at the limits of what are usually understood as the edge of both mutual comprehensibility and social acceptability. This is not simply a case of comic texts being mistaken for serious texts, or vice versa, but both at once: an expanding zone of interpretive deadpan indeterminability across social media and vernacular online communication.

Consequently, while the expansion of humour as a communicative principle might seem potentially positive – laughter potentially lurking anywhere – in practice, the results are just as likely to be disruptive, disconcerting and even potentially dangerous. For example, the possibility of the unmarked intrusion of humour decreases the reliability of texts: not simply as a feature of the texts themselves or even their authorship, but due to the sceptical relations between text and interpreter that are cultivated by the comic disposition. The circulation of the comic disposition undermines the interpretive foundations of trust in online spaces and increases, and further empirical research – akin to Bourdieu’s (1984: 37–38) investigation into interpretive predilections – will be required to determine who is most likely to exhibit this disposition and which corners of the Internet they frequent. Elsewhere, the ever-present possibility of deadpan humour allows for the distinction between chaotic comic irreverence and once forbidden politics to become worryingly blurred: creating a situation where comedy provides a way to access otherwise socially prohibited political rhetoric (Nagle, 2017). By collapsing the boundary between sincerity and satire, both the comic disposition and online deadpan create conditions in which misinterpretation becomes more likely and distrust can fester: where it is increasingly difficult to confidently assume how online texts ought to be understood. This is not simply a case of comic texts being mistaken for serious texts, or vice versa, but both at once: an expanding zone of interpretive deadpan indeterminability across social media and vernacular online communication. In this context, it can become difficult to distinguish hyperbolic comic fiction from what is intended as serious fact; to identify clear grounds by which deception, slander and misinformation might be recognised or to locate the stable sites of meaning and clarity that are required to properly parse the expectations and conventions of mediated communication. Faced with such radical ambiguity, it is difficult to do anything other than laugh.