On the Identification of Humor Markers in Computer-Mediated Communication

This study presents a quantitative analysis of humor markers in computer-mediated communication (CMC). The data for this analysis consists of naturally occurring asynchronous CMC interactions from a public fan forum. Posts were tagged and coded as either humorous or non-humorous, and each individual humorous unit was coded as being one of 8 specific forms of humor. Next, each post was tagged and coded for the use of linguistic markers in the following categories: Punctuation, formatting, emoticons, laughter, and explicit. Descriptive and inferential statistics determined the following in the present data set: 1) Markers from each of the 5 marker categories occurred significantly more in humorous than nonhumorous turns (p > 0.001); 2) Each of the 8 forms of humor present in the data were tested for the use of each marker-type, which suggests the existence of correlations between the iconic use of formatting in hyperbole (p > 0.001), the use of laughter in jocularity (p = 0.019) and insult (p = 0.024), and the use of emoticon in jocularity (p = 0.031); and 3) Humorous units which used humor markers gained significantly more humor response than unmarked humorous units (p > 0.001). These results provide a better understanding of features potentially related to the automated identification of humor.