This study investigates the humorous threads established by Korean television drama (K-drama) viewers when they create conversational humor. It relies on naturally occurring asynchronous online conversations in a fandom-based forum of a famous K-drama entitled What's Wrong with Secretary Kim. As an asynchronous media platform, online forums provide opportunities to share, discuss, and comment on every episode of the K-drama watched by fans from all over the world with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
Four research questions are investigated in this study: (1) how the humorous threads occur in the fans' comments forum of What's Wrong with Secretary Kim, (2) what discursive strategies the first speakers apply to create humorous threads, (3) how the interlocutors give humor support to prior commenters, and (4) what humor markers are employed by the forum members in the online threads. By applying a digital ethnomethodology research design, the data in this study were obtained from non-participant observation and qualitatively analyzed by applying Digital Conversation Analysis (DCA) and Cyber Pragmatics as part of Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis. These approaches are deployed concurrently to see the dynamics of the conversations in the forum by emphasizing the series of comments and the context that forms humorous threads. Besides, non-bona-fide principles, the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTHV), and the theory of humor support were also used to figure out the construction of humorous threads, the viewers' humorous intentions as the first commenters and thread starters, are also used to investigate how the viewers supported each other.
The research reveals that while the viewers collaboratively create dynamic and humorous interaction, they also establish humorous threads. The initial commenters in the online communication promote their humor intentions by using several strategies, such as portraying self-denigration, disclosing self-identity, retelling the funny scene, exposing sexual identity, laughing at characters' comical attitudes, and deploying intertextual humor. After reading the posted comments and recognizing the humorous intention shown by the first commentors, other viewers deliberately engage in the conversations by providing supports in a number of ways, such as aligning with the initial speakers' humorous comments, contributing more humor, and providing silent support. To emphasize their emotive stances, viewers also exploit a variety of humor markers, such as acronyms, emoticons and emojis, and Gifs, to replace their physical appearance.
This study provides evidence that K-drama viewers can be creatively and collaboratively involved in humorous conversations in an online context and share mutual understanding regardless of their cultural backgrounds. In addition, it provides an insight that joint conversation among global users can be established by utilizing internet affordance to emphasize their knowledge of multimodal cues such as applying humor markers which indicate their humorous stance. |