
Limor Gultchin
Former MSc Student
Limor holds an honours BA in Computer Science from Harvard University. Research interests include algorithmic fairness, transparency and accountability.
One of the most prominent manifestations of humorous communication nowadays is ‘cyberhumour’, or Internet-based humour. Humour has long been recognised as a key to understanding individuals and cultures; accompanying human society from its very beginnings and changing form, format and style according to social, cultural and technological processes.
Today, a large portion of our humorous daily communication is mediated by the Internet. Countless websites are devoted to humour, and an enormous traffic of emails containing humorous messages daily congests servers and PC terminals all over the world. This salient phenomenon appears to be highly significant to the understanding of both humour and the Internet.
The study investigated the implications of the Internet on various phases of humorous communication, starting from the senders of humorous messages and ending in receiving procedures. It was carried out in two phases.
In both of these phases, the study combined quantitative and qualitative methods.
This work was partly supported by a grant from the John Fell OUP Research Fund at the University of Oxford.