Laughing It Off: How Linguistic Analysis Turns Humour into Moral Policing

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 142-3):

As the examples so far have shown, graduation is a key resource for realising shifts in stakes. However it is not the only resource. Humour was also used throughout the corpus to lower the stakes of confessed violations of implicated positions regarding good mothering – combining this lowering of stakes with deferring of the meanings being tendered. For example, a frequent choice was to use laughter tokens to ‘laugh off’ positions that do not accord with shared values. These represent semiotic “wrinkles” (Knight, 2010b, p. 329) that are potentially disruptive to social relations and need to be tempered. For instance, in (52) the ‘Face With Tears of Joy’ 😂 emoji targets the meaning in the post, directing evaluation toward the situation described. While it could be interpreted as ‘laughing at’ the proposition, the hashtag provides additional evidence that the meaning clashes with some other value (and hence engenders ‘guilt’), making ‘laughing off’ a more logical interpretation. In this case what is being laughed off is the notion that it is ever ok to feed your child canned goods.

(52) When you buy "organic" to make yourself feel better about feeding your child dinner out of a can. #momguilt 😂

This is stakes-lowering because it is a way of stating something controversial without directly violating a shared ethical parameter or metric. The intertextuality of the proposition itself is also stakes-lowering – it is structured as a kind of point of view meme ‘When you do X’ aimed at sharing an amusing observation about a particular situation.

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In their account of humour as a stakes-lowering resource, Doran, Martin & Zappavigna once again mistake relational modulation for moral repair. Laughter, in their reading, functions as a safety valve for norm violation — a way to “temper” the semiotic disruption produced when mothers confess to feeding their children canned food. What emerges is a theory of compliance: laughter as the last line of defence for “shared values.”

This move is analytically circular. By presupposing that “shared values” are both real and knowable, the authors can always interpret laughter as the reassertion of those values. It cannot signify irony, resistance, or critique — only containment. The result is a moralised semiotics in which every deviation is already pre-interpreted as a breach, every joke already a confession.

More subtly, the analytic gesture that calls humour a stakes-lowering device performs its own ideological work: it lowers the epistemic stakes of the analysis. Instead of treating humour as a perspectival shift — a re-construal of the relational horizon where “stakes” even become intelligible — the authors anchor it to a static moral grid. Laughter becomes modulation rather than meaning, effect rather than construal.

Humour doesn’t soften transgression; it reframes it. It’s not a form of guilt management but a recalibration of perspective — a semiotic act that discloses, through play, the arbitrariness of the norms being invoked. The smile doesn’t conceal critique; it is critique.

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The Moralisation of Humour: Laughter as Ideological Containment

The authors’ account of humour here again presupposes a social order defined by “shared values” that the analyst can simply read off from the data. Humour is treated as a kind of safety valve for deviance — a semiotic buffer that absorbs the friction produced when a speaker violates what are taken to be stable norms of maternal virtue. This framing imports a moral teleology into the analysis: laughter does not signify play, irony, or perspectival re-alignment, but the reassertion of an ethical boundary.

By construing humour as a stakes-lowering device that protects social harmony, the authors erase the relational complexity of the semiotic act. What if laughter here were not a sign of guilt but a gesture of resistance? What if the “shared value” was itself being parodied? The assumption that the corpus reveals breaches of a fixed value-system, rather than indexical negotiations of relational stance, forecloses the possibility of humour functioning as critique, inversion, or alignment across difference.

The “logical interpretation” that emoji 😂 “laugh off” guilt presumes both that guilt is objectively present and that the analyst’s inferential hierarchy determines its proper construal. This is a methodological sleight-of-hand: by defining laughter as modulation rather than meaning, the analyst ensures that the social system always remains intact, its contradictions papered over by a smile.

Laughter is not containment but reconstrual: a metapragmatic act that redefines what counts as “transgression” in the first place.