I’m preparing for my upcoming presentation at the ADDA-2 conference. ADDA is the perfect-sized conference, plus all of the presentations have something to do with online discourse, so it’s always inspiring and a great place to meet researchers with similar interests. ADDA-2 will be held in Turku, Finland next month.
This year, I’ll be presenting a case study of two of the seven novelty Twitter accounts that are described in more detail in my forthcoming book.
For this presentation, I’ve decided to focus my analysis on the 2 novelty accounts that originally got me hooked on this topic: Kim Kierkegaardashian and Shit Academics Say.
There are some interesting differences between these accounts. For example, Shit Academics Say speaks more from a voice of collective experience, whereas Kim Kierkegaardashian blends the voices of two real individuals, one living (mega-celebrity Kim Kardashian West) and one dead (19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard). The focus of my talk is on how, in spite of these differences, both accounts rely on a similar discourse strategy to construct their tweets: register incongruity. Register incongruity refers to as a situation where you have a text in which most of the language is in a particular style or tone, except for a few words which are in a tone, or register, that is radically different from the rest. While register is not a precisely defined concept, it is related to factors such as formality, literariness, standardness, and so on. Register incongruity creates a clash of styles.
So, for instance, in the following Kim Kierkegaardashian tweet, we can see how two sociohistorically distinct voices, which represent extremely different concerns and realities are juxtaposed.
The Kardashian voice tends to center on themes such as fashion trends and beauty tips – as well as self-promotional discourses that are typical of celebrity tweets. A novel twist is provided by the inclusion of additional elements that represent the voice of nineteenth-century existential philosopher, Kierkeggard: these include more profound themes of contemplation, despair, suffering, and so on. Having these two distinct voices (or registers) appear side-by-side in every individual tweet – and the incongruity between those two registers – is the “formula” that underlies the verbal humor in the tweets posted on this account.
Similarly, several tweets from Shit Academics Say start out in one linguistic register, but end in a different one. For instance, the tweet below begins with a cliché (X is like a box of chocolates), that is traceable to the popular film, Forrest Gump. But the text following the colon continues in what might be called “academese,” a linguistic register that is characterized by its syntactic complexity, as well as specialized vocabulary specific to this register (words like scope, magnitude, competencies).
Therefore, even though the content and the topics posted on the two accounts are very different from one another, they both rely on the same discourse strategies to create humor.
