Laughing til' I'm dead : A qualitative study of emojis in laughable contexts

Abstract: Since 1990, the usage of emojis has increased and become a part of our everyday communication.The ambiguous nature of emojis has been shown by multiple previous studiesbut there is a qualitative gap in research of what the meaning of these emojis are. On thesocial media app TikTok emojis, in combination with written text, are used by users of theapp to communicate with each other, and the content creators, via the comment sectionof videos. This study researches in which laughable context specific emojis, representinglaughter, appeared. Laughter has always been a part of human communication and was previously referredto as being a way of showing agreement. Laughter was a way to give a preferred answer toa humorous situation. Later research has expanded this claim to other dimensions wherelaughter is not only a response to humor, but also a way of making dispreferred answersagreeable. Laughter is a way of affiliation and is a quick way to establish a relationshipwith another person. This study collected thirteen examples from the comment section on the digital app,TikTok. All examples were related to laughter and contained at least one emoji. To beselected as an example, the original comment also needed a direct response. All exampleswere analysed with multimodal interaction analysis. When preforming the analysis, thefocus was recipient design, preference, common ground and affiliation. In line with previous studies, the results confirm the ambiguous nature of emojis butalso that laughter can be represented in many different ways. One meaning found wasgenuine, hysterical laughter which was represented by both face with tears of joy emojiand rolling on the floor laughing emoji. Another meaning found was the embarrassinglaughter context where the comment creator is looking for someone to relate to the loudlycrying emoji and the grinning face with tear of sweat emoji were present. The skull emojiwas used in context where the laughter was some what hysterical and the context wasfunny, but there was serious truth behind the laugh. The amount of emojis used makes adifference in meaning but also how the text that the emojis are related to in the comment isexpressed. This study contributes to the field of internet linguistics and conversation analysis andcould hopefully give more insight to the digital communication of today.