Humorous self-censorship strategies on YouTube: semiotic structure and social-semiotic functions
By: Alexander Brock and Merle Willenberg
| ARTICLE INFO: Volume: 11 Issue: 01:Summer 2025 ISSN: 2459-2943 DOI: 10.18680/hss.2025.0003 Pages: 51-72 Lic.: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 |
KEYWORDS: Humorous self-censorship Multimodality Social semiotics Metacommunication YouTube |
ABSTRACT
This article looks at the semiotics of humorous self-censorship. To this end, selected examples from a corpus of YouTube commentary videos and their respective comment sections are presented and discussed. On the one hand, the analysis focuses on structural aspects of humorous self-censorship signs from various modes (written, spoken, images, emojis, etc.) in their multimodal interplay. On the other hand, we analyze socio-semiotic aspects of our examples: their anchoring
in specific speech communities, marked by background knowledge and shared communicative practices. The analysis shows that (1) structural manipulations of the spelling and/or phonetic shape of lexical items and of images etc. serve to secure both the understanding of the censored item as well as plausible deniability, while generating potentially humorous incongruities, (2) various positions in the participation process are exploited to participate in this process, including
trigger warnings and other metacommunicative actions and levels, (3) humorous self-censorship serves a number of social-semiotic functions, such as the negotiation of group norms of sayability, the expression of group solidarity, and – importantly – entertainment.
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