Remediating the Celebrity Roast: The Place of Mean Tweets on Late-Night Television

Abstract

This article uses the “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets” segment on late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! as a case study in how television can remediate social media to maintain its dominant position in entertainment. The incorporation of tweets into television appears to demonstrate the power social media has over broadcast media, but a careful study reveals that television and film celebrities use television appearances to denounce “mean tweets” as an example of frenzied and cacophonous social media. Drawing on the history of the televised celebrity roast, I argue that contemporary roasts resemble Internet trolling while segments like “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets” embody the spirit of historical roasts by granting celebrities the opportunity to laugh at jokes about themselves. Thus, the segment reiterates the hierarchical position of “old media”: television as a source of comfort and clarity, and the Hollywood celebrity as the epicenter of culture.

Investigating the Dark Side of Social Media Marketing: Case of Cyberbullying on Micro Celebrities

“…After we quote respectively according to the order of importance flaming, harassment, trickery or outing, exclusion, cyberstalking and finally dissing. On this point, our results are contrary to what has been demonstrated in previous researches where harassment was the most used category of cyberbullying (Kies, 2021;Ab Rashid et al, 2022). This divergence can be explained by the difference of the cultural context.…”

Verbal Responses toward Insults in the Celebrity Read Mean Tweets Segment

“…Previous scholars have studied this segment for the sake of science. For instance, Kies (2021) explored how television, presented by Jimmy Kimmel Live, remains powerful despite the appearance of social media. Then, Darma et al (2017) analyzed swearing words used by the celebrities featured in the segment which the result of this study contribute to linguistics study.…”