Humorous online dialogue on Romanian Reddit: Discussing conspiracy theories

We aim to investigate the forms and functions of online humor. We apply several suggestions from the discursive analysis of humor in face-to-face interaction to mediated online exchanges. Our research perspective combines dialogue analysis and multimodal discourse analysis with approaches from the computermediated discourse analysis (CMDA) paradigm (Herring 2004, 2007), as well as from humor studies (Norrick 1993, Dynel 2009, Kotthoff 2007). This paper presents a qualitative analysis of seven online exchanges collected from r/Romania, a subreddit dedicated to discussing life in Romania. Our corpus consists of thematically-related exchanges on the topic of conspiracy theories. These theories are created and spread both globally and locally. We aim to investigate humorous dialogues concerning the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the ‘mythical’ past of the Romanian people, which refers to the Dacian conspiracy. Our aim is to describe the linguistic and discursive mechanisms of humor in online dialogic exchanges on global and local conspiracy theories and topics. The results of our analysis suggest that CMC conversational humor functions similarly to offline humorous interaction: users engage in a dialogic manner to create humor. Beyond analyzing ChatGPT’s pragmatic behavior, the paper positions AI not merely as a tool but as an integral component of the research process. Accordingly, the author proposes a new disciplinary framework − trans-pragmatics − which examines the hybrid communicative dynamics between humans and chatbots. The paper argues that instead of continuing to contrast human pragmatic competence with machine adaptation based on textual input, pragmatic competence should be reconceptualized as an emergent property of ontologically distinct communicative systems, rather than as an inherent trait of individual speakers. This reconceptualization broadens the scope of pragmatics to encompass synthetic participation and asymmetrical distributed agency, wherein meaning is co-constructed and pragmatic effects arise collaboratively. Such an approach reflects the shifting ecology of human– machine interaction, suggesting that communication is not limited to internal cognitive states but can be scaffolded by external systems.