Weird reactions to weird Twitter: How expectation and intention relate to appreciation for absurd humor.

Abstract

Violations to our sense of meaning have traditionally been thought of as a source of anxiety and threat. However, meaning violations can also be a source of humor, as is evidenced by their abundant use within comedy in the form of absurd humor. This has recently been exemplified by Weird Twitter, a popular subculture organized around aggressively absurd comedic tweets. The present study investigated this apparent paradox by examining the effects of expecting absurdity and perceiving an intention to be funny on humor ratings of absurd jokes taken from Weird Twitter. Based on the Benign Violation Theory of Humor (McGraw & Warren, 2010), we predicted that experimentally manipulating the expectation of absurdity and an intention to be funny would increase humor ratings for these jokes, by rendering them "benign." We found that expecting absurd jokes had a small positive effect on ratings of humor, whereas intentionality had no effect after accounting for expectations. In addition, individual differences in Openness to Experience and Need for Cognition did not seem to play a role in the appreciation of absurd humor. Public Policy Relevance StatementIn this study, we examine the apparent paradox of absurd humor: how can meaning violations, traditionally thought of as threatening, be found funny? We investigate this in the context of Weird Twitter, a popular community of Twitter users devoted to absurdist and nonsensical humor. We find that expecting absurdity helps to make absurd humor funnier, which helps to explain why Twitter users enjoy absurd tweets so much.