Perception of а comic text-prank in the dialogue of network communication: Creating a problem

Abstract

The modern Russian political discourse is characterized by the thrust of the vector of satirical modality against an external enemy, which is played by states that support the policy of sanctions and oppose Russia in the foreign policy arena. The satire has a polemic charge corresponding to the communicative task of exposing and convicting the enemy. The comical source is the contradictions of the very reality. The goal of the research is to identify communicative response regularities to comic manifestations which are found in media speech interaction. The discovery of these patterns makes it possible to understand how the embeddedness of any text in a dialogue (its intermediate position in communication) affects the features of text making. Our focus is on model text forms that originate from a result of the “meeting” of two texts. The material of this study is the media discourse centered on the prank by Vovan and Lexus, based on the joke over US Congresswoman, Maxine Waters, which was posted by Russian media: “RIA Novosti”, “Gazeta.ru”, “Nezavisimoye obozreniye (Independent review)”, “Tsargrad”, and others. The comedy formed by the prank arose from the contradiction between the US political establishment representatives’ arrogance, the way they appear in the Russian media, and their ignorance. We analyzed speech models of users’ comments to the video prank on YouTube and to publications about it in network media. As the study illustrated, several types of reactions to the prank are formed in network communication: disapproval of the prank and pranksters, approval of the pranksters’ actions, ridiculing the “victim” of the prank, expressing an emotional reaction to the comic form, expressing a reaction to the satirical content, comical playful comments, and encouraging pranksters to conduct further activities.