This fishbowl invites the AoIR community to discuss the issues and challenges involved in studying humor in online exchanges. Despite the ubiquity of humor online – from snark, irony and sarcasm to pranks, slapstick and plain absurdity; from Twitter burns to memes and strategically used emojis – its forms and dynamics are not means easy to account for in analytical work. These challenges are connected to both methodological choices and the very slipperiness of humor itself: who is laughing at what or whom and in what contexts; what is understood as funny; what laughter effects and sets in motion.

Humor is a means of crafting distances and proximities, hierarchies and alliances, from forms of “kicking down” targeting racialised, gendered, and sexualized others (Askanius 2021; Hakoköngäs et al. 2020; Marwick 2014; Kanai 2016; Phillips 2019) to resistances towards online hate (Rentschler & Thrift 2015; Ringrose & Lawrence 2018; Sundén & Paasonen 2020). Meanwhile, humor fuels mundane sociality in myriad and ambiguous ways (Phillips & Milner 2017) as something of a default.

This fishbowl welcomes people to discuss their experiences in, and solutions for studying online humor and to address the forms and social meanings of “fun” across case studies. Our overall aim is to bring different forms of inquiry together, address the political stakes involved, and further develop the field of inquiry which currently has limited visibility as one. We are interested in what happens when interdisciplinary Internet research meets the field of humor studies operating with a classificational logic, and when the messy realities of online platforms meet the affordances of qualitative textual and visual methods, digital methods and big data analysis.’

The discussion is kicked off by the “fishes” Mahli-Ann Butt, Chris Muller, Benjamin Nickl, Susanna Paasonen and Jenny Sundén.