Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Language & Communication

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom

Humour and (mock) aggression: Distinguishing cyberbullying

from roasting
Marta Dynel a, b
a
Department of Pragmatics, Institute of English Studies, University of Łódz, ul. Pomorska 171/173, Łódz, 90-236, Poland
b
Department of Creative Communication, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Vilinus, Lithuania

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This paper postulates a distinction between two types of discursive aggression in the
Available online 25 August 2021 context of humour production. This theoretical argument is supported by a qualitative
(meta)pragmatic analysis of posts on the RoastMe subreddit devoted to an online com-
Keywords: munity’s original humorous practice based on jocular insults. The study of emic (com-
Cyberbullying munity members’) and etic (outsiders’) metapragmatic evaluations of the content on the
Discursive aggression
subreddit yields divergent insider/outsider interpretations of the practice at hand; it also
Emic/etic label
uncovers some ambivalence in the polysemous folk concepts of roasting and cyberbullying
Metapragmatics
Online community of practice
and the relationship between them. “Roasting” and “cyberbullying” are formally distin-
Roasting guished based on the intended form of aggression on which each relies. Also, the points of
convergence between humour and aggression are surveyed. First, mock aggression un-
derlies benevolent humour (typified by roasting proper); second, genuine aggression
(exemplified by cyberbullying proper) may amuse individuals other than the target of
discursive aggression.
Ó 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC
BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

In the Andaman Islands, peace is concluded after each side has been given ceremonial freedom to strike the other. This
example, however, also illustrates the labile nature of the frame “This is play” or “This is ritual.” The discrimination between
map and territory is always liable to break down, and the ritual blows of peace-making are always liable to be mistaken for
the “real” blows of combat. In this event, the peace-making ceremony becomes a battle (Radcliffe-Brown) (Bateson 1987
[1955]: 187–188)
I saw two young monkeys playing, i.e., engaged in an interactive sequence of which the unit actions or signals were similar to
but not the same as those of combat. It was evident, even to the human observer, that the sequence as a whole was not
combat, and evident to the human observer that to the participant monkeys this was ‘not combat’. (Bateson 1987 [1955]:
185)

E-mail address: marta.dynel@yahoo.com.

URL: https://martadynel.com/

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2021.08.001
0271-5309/Ó 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
18 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36

1. Introduction

While the notion of “aggression”, understood as “all attempts to damage the other” (Bateson, 1987[1972]: 331), is typically
considered to apply to negatively evaluated, harmful practices,1 the two longer quotations from Bateson (1987 [1955])
presented above raise three interesting issues about aggression, understood as acts of physical violence among humans
and monkeys. First, aggressive actions can be done as a kind of playful ritual. Second, such ritualistic playful acts can be
misunderstood as acts of “real” aggression. Third, while the participants in a combat-like play have their understandings of
their interactional goings-on, an outside observer will have an independent understanding. While in Bateson’s second
narrative above, the interpretations are compatible, on other occasions, they may diverge. These are some of the issues that
this paper aims to address with reference to what may be called verbal aggression (e.g. Hamilton, 2012) or language aggression
(e.g. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Sifianou, 2013). This is what is perhaps best termed discursive aggression, a concept of
relevance to linguists studying communication in spoken and written genres of human communication. Such a label seems to
be the most adequate because aggression may be examined with regards to not only words used but also non-verbal mes-
sages and non-verbal components of multimodal messages (e.g. prosody in spoken and emoticons in online interactions).
Discursive aggression can be thought of as linguistic behaviour (sometimes accompanied by non-verbal components or cues)
that is intentionally hostile and potentially offensive (cf. Meibauer, 2014)2 and aims to damage another person psycholog-
ically. This is an apt definition of genuine aggression in discourse.
Although aggression lies at the root of many communicative practices (typically addressed by im/politeness scholars), the
concept per se does not seem to have been amply discussed in linguistics, while the labels “aggression” and “aggressive” are
typically used in a commonsensical, non-technical manner. This paper aims to fill this gap and argues for a clear theoretical
distinction between genuine (discursive) aggression and what is here dubbed mock/overtly pretended (discursive) aggression.3 It
is also shown that each of them may lie at the heart of different categories of humour. This proposal about the two types of
discursive aggression and their relationships with humour is made with reference to online data, notably the interesting
RoastMe practice done on Reddit. It is also shown that the differentiation between the two types of aggression is not always
easy to make in practice, especially when the interpreter misses some inside knowledge (typical of the specific interactants or
a community of practice). What further complicates the picture of the different (mis)interpretations of the aggression at r/
RoastMe is polysemous capture-all folk labels, notably "roasting" and “(cyber)bullying,” that language users employ in their
metapragmatic comments on one another’s verbal actions. Such metapragmatic comments and lay labels is what the present
study capitalises on, comparing them with the labels used as scholarly notions.
Metapragmatic comments can be defined as users’ commentaries about previous discursive actions (Hübler, 2011) within
the same interaction or in other interactions (see e.g. Kádár and Haugh, 2013; Sinkeviciute, 2019). Metapragmatic comments
typically offer metapragmatic evaluations (see Caffi, 1994; Hübler and Bublitz, 2007), which – among other things – help to
gauge “the judgements of appropriateness on one’s own and other people’s communicative behavior” (Caffi, 1994: 2461).
Such comments often include metapragmatic labels, that is folk concepts that serve language users to interpret and assess
“the communicative status and meaning” of the described discursive actions (Verschueren, 2000: 451). Metapragmatic labels
are various “lexical expressions that denote cognitive and cultural models associated with how (verbal) human communi-
cation is conceptualized” (Verschueren 1999: 196). Consequently, a given concept “is manifested in [lay] uses of the words
expressing that concept” (Black, 1975: 14–15). Metapragmatic labels do not have to correspond to technical academic terms,
even though the latter should be inspired by the former. Moreover, as is shown here, users often diverge in their un-
derstandings and uses of metapragmatic labels.
Metapragmatic labelling may be done as an etic practice or an emic one (Pike, 1967; 1990; Headland, 1990; see also Eelen,
2001; Haugh, 2012; Sinkeviciute, 2019). Although interpretations of this anthropological linguistic distinction vary (see
Headland, 1990), an emic unit is typically understood as that used by insiders, that is participants in a given culture or, more
narrowly, within a given community, whilst etic units are judged and dubbed by outsiders. Most importantly, as Pike put it, an
etic approach is that adopted “by an outsider to an inside system, in which the outsider brings his own structure d his own
emics d and partly superimposes his observations on the inside view, interpreting the inside in reference to the outside
starting point” (Harris, 1990: 49). This generic “outsider” concept may be thought of as encompassing both language users
from outside the community and – as if often done, following Harris (1990) – academics, whose labelling and/or con-
ceptualisations may vary from language users’ (see e.g. Dynel, 2017a). However, academic conceptualisations of new and very
specific communicative practices should draw on emic understandings of insiders in a community engaged in these practices.
It must also be underlined that emic units are concepts (not always conscious) and cannot be reduced to metapragmatic labels
(see Haugh, 2012). This is because such labels need not be used by speakers at all. On the other hand, users may apply various
folk labels for one emic practice (understanding the former in different ways), while one label may mean different things to

1
However, it has been proposed that “moral aggression”, albeit exerting negative effects, can be an efficient way to achieve positive goals, namely to
maintain moral order as “restorative” behaviour and uphold interpersonal relationships (Kádár et al., 2019).
2
Overall, Meibauer (2014) seems to suggest also that it suffices for an utterance to be only interpreted as hostile and offensive, the speaker’s intent
regardless. This view is not endorsed here. In analysing any interaction from a pragmatic perspective, both the production and reception end should be
considered (and potential miscommunication taken into account). In any case, the speaker’s intent (whether or not fully verifiable) cannot be eschewed.
3
This should not be mistaken for make-believe aggression, a term used in developmental psychology in reference to children’s practices, such as war toy
play. This type of aggression is imagined and acted out by children for fun but is not benign or good-willed, which is what mock aggression is like.
 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36 19

different community members. Because of this, metapragmatic emic labels need to be studied in context so that they are
interpreted in line with the users’ intentions.
This theoretical discussion of aggression and humour is inspired by, and illustrated with a convenience sample of ex-
amples, namely selected Roasts and moderators’ “meta posts”, including user comments (both isolated posts and chunks of
conversational strands) taken from the RoastMe subreddit, an online platform devoted to a humorous practice based on
hurling multiple jocular insults at volunteering roastees. All the posts on the subreddit are purposefully made public and
accessed without signing in; thus, after anonymisation, they can be used ethically in academic research (cf. franzke et al.,
2020). The focus of the analyses is primarily on the metapragmatic comments about selected non-normative Roasts,
whose pragmatic analysis is also offered, and the alleged cyberbullying on the RoastMe subreddit. Roasting and cyberbullying
are conceptualised as the two faces of aggression postulated here, namely mock/overtly pretended aggression and genuine
aggression respectively.
This paper is organised into seven sections. Following this introduction, Section 2, drawing on users’ emic perspective,
gives the gist of the RoastMe subreddit as a community devoted to a specific humour-oriented practice. Section 3 discusses
two infamous non-normative Roasts that are known to have infringed the rules of RoastMe, inviting ambivalent etic meta-
pragmatic evaluations indicative of abuse and cyberbullying, standing in contrast to regular Roasts. However, even the latter
sometimes receive the etic label “cyberbullying”, contrary to the community’s prevailing (albeit not unanimous) meta-
pragmatic evaluation, as Section 4 will report. These two empirically driven analyses necessitate Section 5, which examines
theoretically the concept of cyberbullying, also in the context of humour, as previously depicted in literature, mainly psy-
chological. In Section 6, the various strands pursued in the course of the paper are brought together and examined critically in
the light of relevant humour research to give a general picture of the two types of aggression as concomitants and adversaries
of humour. The paper closes with conclusions in Section 7.

2. RoastMe community and its normative practice

The academic (technically, etic) interpretation of Reddit’s RoastMe (Dynel and Poppi, 2019, 2020) is informed by
prototypical users’ (i.e. central community members’) emic understanding and negotiated implementation of the nature
of their interactional goings-on within the online community. Active users of RoastMe (in February 2021, over 2 million
people) present the hallmarks of a community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 1992). They
have a joint enterprise, show mutual engagement and share a repertoire of resources (Wenger, 1998), and so they can be
thought of as an online community of practice.4 Essentially, RoastMe Redditors are an online community insofar as they
“come together for a purpose online” on the specific platform and “are governed by norms and policies” (De Souza and
Preece, 2004: 580).
Holding Roasts for ordinary people is part and parcel of the RoastMe community of practice operating on Reddit (https://
www.reddit.com/r/RoastMe/). This joint enterprise involves the sharing of bona-fide humour in the form of creative jocular
insults that multiple roasters hurl at roastees, i.e. volunteers shown in pictures, necessarily exhibiting “roast me” messages
(see Dynel and Poppi, 2019). While insult-based ritualised interactions used to be seen “solely as a by-product of communal
existence and under no circumstances could be recognized as constitutive”, being just one “of the multiple ways of doing
things together” (Dayter, 2017: 30), the online RoastMe community is pivoted and determined by the humorous insults,
which are the raison d’être of its existence.
Fig. 1 shows an example of a Roast (one of the top Roasts of all time in 2021) involving not just one but a selection of
pictures of the roastee, together with the title “Ten years ago I purchased a $50 Groupon for professional acting
headshots. The results were... unfortunate. Please destroy me for this choice.” The roastee is duly pelted with jocular
insults (1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 in Fig. 1) that may come independently or be organised in conversational strands, as is the case
here. The jibes are to be evaluated by other users, thereby earning both roasters and roastees online plaudits (cf. the high
number of upvotes and awards given to the Roast, as well as to the individual comments). All community members,
whether the roastees themselves, other regular community members or moderators, may comment on or evaluate the
specific jibes (see 2 posted by the OP, i.e. the roastee himself, and 7 posted by a different community member). When
moderators step in by either deleting user content or posting cautionary comments (see Figs. 7 and 11), some
malpractice must have occurred, namely a violation of one or more RoastMe rules.

4
I am aware (and I owe this to Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich) of the various details of the original conceptualisation taken as counter-arguments that
question the widespread applicability of the concept, as originally proposed (see Angouri, 2016). However, that secondary features and specifics (addressed
in the early discussions of communities of practice) do not apply to online data does not cancel the relevance of the general concept, which may need some
fine-tuning to better capture new online spaces.
20 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36

Fig. 1. Example of a Roast.

Members of the RoastMe community of practice (i.e. signed-in users who are active at times, i.e. make posts, rather than
just being unregistered lurkers) operating on the relevant subreddit need to be cognisant of the (updated) rules and follow
them as they make their posts, monitored by moderators and other community members. This is to guarantee that any posts
that do not abide by the rules are deleted. In the present context, the most important rules5 are the unfunny abuse rule and
the “don’t be evil” rule (see Fig. 2).

5
Previously, the two rules actually spelt out that “hating” and “bullying” were not allowed on the subreddit. However, the updated version (downloaded
on 2 February 2021) no longer contains these terms.
M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36 21

Fig. 2. RoastMe rules.

22 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36

These rules mark the difference between the humour that roasters should aim at and various destructive and dangerous
acts that they should avoid, such as abusing, offending, threatening or harassing others, inciting them to (self-)violence, or
being malicious.6 The rules stress the common focus on “humour”, a “reasonable expectation” to “make an audience laugh”,
“comedy” and being “funny”. Even though the perceptions of humour are idiosyncratic, the humour of RoastMe insults seems
to rely on the creativity of users, who are engaged in a competition of wits. When hurling jocular insults at volunteering
targets, users aim to display their verbal and conceptual creativity, inspired by roastees’ posts (not only photographs but also
titles and brief descriptions), whether or not referring to some objectively perceptible features (see Dynel and Poppi, 2020).
Interestingly, roasters most often address roastees’ salient features, which the latter gladly exhibit in an inviting manner; it is
not the feature per se but rather how it is roasted that matters (Dynel and Poppi, 2020). All in all, roasters’ central goal is to
cause amusement and earn kudos among the community with their witty jocular insults. This is also the goal of roastees who
hope to inspire countless many comments and get upvoted as they get roasted, similar to the honoured targets of classical
roasts, whether during private parties or on the media, as typified by US Presidents’ roasts (Dynel and Poppi, 2019).
Overall, by design, RoastMe is premised on the community members’ mutual agreement that they are engaged in
benevolent autotelic humour, that is humour for its own sake (see Dynel, 2017b, 2018a), which does not communicate any
“serious” meanings or perform any socio-pragmatic functions beyond those central to benevolent humour (notably, joint
amusement, positive image management and solidarity building). As argued previously (Dynel and Poppi, 2019, 2020), the
normative RoastMe activity is performed within a humorous frame (see Dynel, 2017b and references therein) and a play mode
(Morreall 2009), based on the “this is play” metamessage (Bateson, 1956). This premise is tacit but presupposed in all standard
roasting and roasted posts, and is explicitly reflected in the RoastMe rules and the very definition of roasting found of the
subreddit: “To humorously mock or humiliate someone with a well-timed joke, diss or comeback. (.) Everybody needs to
laugh at themselves! And other people, of course!”. In cognitive terms, users operate within a paratelic state of mind (Apter,
1991), also called a humour mindset (Ferguson and Ford, 2008; Martin and Ford, 2018). Thereby, “serious” thinking, logic and
moral principles are suspended (cf. Mulkay, 1988). This is why users cannot be held accountable for communicating any
truthful meanings about roastees pertinent outside the humorous frame (Dynel and Poppi, 2019; Poppi and Dynel, 2021) or
have any ill feelings towards them, despite their purported aggressiveness.
All the above presents the default workings of the RoastMe practice, which can be intermittently violated, as the two
infamous cases below illustrate.

3. Two cases of non-normative abuse/bullying at r/RoastMe

This section reports on two peculiar Roasts that seem to have gone awry and are more of exceptions to the RoastMe
practice, given that many (and not just a few) roasting posts were considered to infringe the rules, and hence the norms, of the
subreddit, violating the “unfunny abuse” and the “don’t be evil” rules. These Roasts are worth addressing in the present
context as they invited many metapragmatic comments from the community members, as well as moderators’ meta posts,
which make manifest the Roasts’ peculiarity from the emic perspective and reveal a lot about the normative workings of
RoastMe vis-à-vis the dubious roasting comments. Overall, the two Roasts reported here appear to involve two main breaches
of normative practices for roasting in the RoastMe community: (1) an initial move by each of the two roastees was in some
respect non-normative (the first case being the Instagram model sending mixed messages about whether she was really
intending to be roasted or aiming at a different goal; the second case being a journalist who wanted to be roasted for the
purpose of reporting on it); and (2) subsequent roasting comments were in some respects non-normative as well. These
comments, whose non-normative character was recognised by community members (and can be accounted for in pragmatic
terms here) duly prompted metapragmatic comments on the roastees’ and roasters’ behaviour, including interventions by the
subreddit’s moderators.
One of these two atypical non-normative Roasts concerns an Instagram model (for a different discussion, see Dynel and
Poppi, 2019), who incited roasters to action with a professionally taken and edited picture showing her as the epitome of
beauty and entitled “fuck it”. Heavily pelted with insults, she deleted her account within a few hours after submitting her
post, but – in the teeth of the “doxxing” rule meant to guarantee roastees’ anonymity – users linked the Roast to her Instagram
account on the pretext that she was a public figure and an online celebrity anyway, which she never hid. She was duly verbally
attacked on her Instagram account too, which violated what is now the closing part of the unfunny abuse rule.7 The roasted
picture was deleted by moderators, and the thread is archived, which means that no new posts can be added and no upvotes
can be given. Among the 6,400 posts in the thread (a substantial number, given the temporal brevity of the Roast), many
qualify as creative jocular insults, such as: “fuck it no thanks”, “You should list your Photoshop experience on your job
resume.” or “You look like the only thing you know how to add is more makeup.” However, it is two peculiar roasting
comments that remained on the upvoted top for many months before the thread was archived (see Fig. 3).

6
However, it cannot be ruled out that sometimes roastees may feel offended when a roasting comment touches a raw nerve, but they will not claim
offence, which would be tantamount to the infringement of the premises of RoastMe and an indication of a limited sense of humour (Barrow, 2005).
7
Presumably, incidents such as the one at hand have caused this condition to be added.
 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36 23

Fig. 3. Two peculiar posts targeting a model.

The two roasting posts about a model, rather than being the normative brief and witty insults, come across as being
long-winded diatribes. The first one, posted by someone posing as the woman’s ex-boyfriend (cf. the implicature,
whether truthful or deceptive8 (see Dynel, 2018a), in the opening question, cf. line 1), has some humorous potential in a
few of the sentences which show conceptual creativity (e.g. gold digging as the roastee’s major at line 2, presumably
evidenced by her posh looks; the complex insult starting with “Your tattoos” that target not only the woman but also her
boyfriends at lines 5–6; or the absurd insult concerning her nipples at lines 7–8, as well as the hyperbolic comparison to
a flossing dentist at lines 6–7). However, the clustering of the different jocular, witty insults, even if humorous, and the
suspicion that the post comes from an actual former boyfriend privy to some personal details about the roastee (her dog
and tattoo), together with the hostility transparent in the last two sentences, may make for the whole post’s genuinely
offensive and aggressive character. The second diatribe, devoid of humorous conceptualisations (except for the “per-
sonality of the handbag” idea in line 9) offers a pseudo-psychological analysis of the roastee by listing a series of
presumptuous evaluations throughout, for instance targeting her insecurity and crave for attention (line 1), shallowness
(line 3), superficial relationships, with her likeable feature being her looks, but not personality (lines 5–6), etc. The latter
post appears to stand very little chance of amusing anybody through any humour and may be regarded as infringing the
first condition of the unfunny abuse rule.
The ensuing discussion in the thread contains various metapragmatic comments about these two non-normative posts
taken from a discussion following the reposting of the two salient comments (see Fig. 4). Regardless of the theoretical
consideration of the peculiar posts (cf. Fig. 3) provided above, users’ metapragmatic interpretations thereof vary. Some users
deem them very harsh and mean and/or amusing, and hence in line with the emic understanding of the subreddit, not
necessarily counting them both into the same category (e.g. finding only one amusing). Some users talk about the roughness
of both the comments (1 [presumably, as the referent is not clear], 3 and 5), just the second one (2 and 4) or, by contrast,
exclusively the first one (based on the assumption that the post did come from a former partner, who was just being honest),
whilst appreciating the humorousness of the second one (8). Although some of the metapragmatic comments explicitly
juxtapose the hateful, genuine insults with humour (3 and 5); there are those that seem to attribute the humour to the
genuinely “brutal” character of the posts (4). One of the users (6) also seems to empathise with the roastee but, at the same
time, rationalises that, topically, they do conform with the nature of other roasting insults on the subreddit, without passing
any judgement on their humour.

8
It seems that the self-presentation as the roastee’s former partner was the user’s strategy for roasting so that he could refer to the woman’s personal
characteristics. Some of the details can be validated online (e.g. her dog or tattoo), which is also what the roastee confirmed in her reply, while denying
other features attributed to her and doubting whether she had met the roaster.
24 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36

Fig. 4. Metapragmatic discussion of the two diatribes about the model.

The thrust of all the comments in Fig. 4 is that the perception of humour is idiosyncratic, and hence that funniness
evaluations by ordinary people may diverge (all in line with psychological research, see e.g. Martin and Ford, 2018), which one
of the comments (7) suggests as well. This also indicates how ambivalent the speaker’s humorous vs non-humorous in-
tentions may be, despite the assertion in one of the rules of RoastMe that there is “a clear and definitive line between humour
and abuse” (see Fig. 2). From a theoretical perspective, the presence of humour can be objectively detected in jocular insults
based on the presence of some form of incongruity (e.g. Forabosco, 1992; Martin and Ford, 2018), which often involves some
surprising, clever combinations of concepts and/or language forms that reflect the underlying user creativity. Nevertheless,
when evident formal cues for humorous incongruity are missing (the second post targeting the model in Fig. 3) or when
something in the communication eclipses the humorous incongruities (the first post targeting the model in Fig. 3), it is
difficult to categorically establish whether each of the posts was meant as autotelic humour or whether it was viciously
 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36 25

intended to offend the target. (The latter interpretation is preferred here, given the perceptible characteristics of the posts, as
discussed earlier. This is what many users seem to have endorsed in their metapragmatic comments, whereas some others
users regarded them as being in line with the emic view of RoastMe, clearly cognisant of it.) In the present context, this
distinction translates into the question of whether a post is intended to be genuinely aggressive or only playfully aggressive
for the sake of collective humorous experience, whilst it may – in either case – cause entertainment and elicit some
amusement.
Overall, some of the non-humorous insults carrying genuine aggression that the celebrity roastee received may have
been provoked by her photoshopped picture and perfect looks, which gave rise to suspicions of whether she had actually
wanted or expected to be roasted, as understood by the community, or whether she had had other intentions. As is evident
from many comments, the RoastMe community members can sense an intention to fish for compliments (see 1 and 4 in
Fig. 5). Also, one user shares his personal experience with a former girlfriend, who – similar to the roastee – would crave
admiration and seek compliments online (5). A different user observes, whether or not sincerely, that the same picture
appeared on a sibling subreddit devoted to compliments, followed by a parodic echoic comment, a fake excuse from the
model (2). Another member (3) attempts mind-reading, suggesting that the model had thought that roasters would not
have anything to roast in her (unlike in other roastees); and this assumption on her part could be questioned based on her
actions. Overall, in many comments, the roastee is alleged to have flouted the rules of RoastMe by expecting herself to be
unroastable. Her post seems to have thus been considered non-normative, triggering non-normative comments from
roasters.

Fig. 5. Comments about the roastee’s underlying motives.

The model further exacerbated the situation by taking roasting posts seriously regardless of her attempt to show, pre-
sumably only feigned, amusement (cf. the “Haha” opening her post in 1 in Fig. 6). She responded to the various insults she had
received, also the creative and evidently humorous ones (i.e. those clearly in line with the rules of RoastMe), in a matter-of-
fact manner, by rationalising them and/or revealing some personal information. She thus justified the general suspicion that
she could not have expected to be roasted for the sake of collective humour experience, not having embraced the rules of
RoastMe. Her reactions prompted users to pour scorn on her (2 and 5) and instruct her about the nature of jocular insults (3),
as well as question her knowledge of the RoastMe practice (4), which is summarised by another user (6), who seems to
conclude that the roastee must have underestimated the severity of the comments she could receive, while agreeing to
receive them, and so she got what she deserved.
26 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36

Fig. 6. The roastee’s reaction and ensuing metapragmatic comments.

While in the case above, the roastee’s non-normative intentions, divergent from the pure intentions expected by the
RoastMe community, could only be conjectured, the second exceptional Roast considered here targets a user who was open
about her goal from the outset. This second female roastee entitles her post by making the following admission “I’m a
journalist writing about r/Roastme. Give me some firsthand experience. Disclaimer: I’m writing about this in the article.”9 The
roasted post is still available, but the thread worth of 3,500 comments has been locked, with a moderator’s post showing on
top (see Fig. 7).

Fig. 7. Meta post about the journalist’s Roast.

9
The journalist does present her ambivalent experience and thoughts on RoastMe here: https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/the-strange-psychology-
of-rroastme.
 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36 27

Fig. 7. (continued)

This meta post is a response to the fact that many roasters’ comments were considered “decidedly unfunny”. What this
means, technically, is that they were often devoid of humorous potential insofar as they were lacking in the creativity
conducive to humorous incongruity, which is the hallmark of jocular insults (see Dynel and Poppi, 2019). Writing about the
unfunny “personal attacks and abuse” that may make the roastee “feel bad”, the moderator must be referring to posts like the
three examples in Fig. 8.

Fig. 8. Three peculiar posts targeting the journalist.

The first non-normative post comprises three insults with little coherence (similar to the diatribe the model received).
While the second and third might have worked independently as rather crude but conceptually creative jocular insults,
together they look more abusive than amusing insofar as the roaster jumps from one referent (i.e. roasted feature) to another,
which gives an impression of a massive attack on the roastee. If the roaster had had pure humorous intentions, they would
have submitted the comments independently, in the hope of boosting their kudos with each of the creative insults inde-
pendently rather than wasting them all in only one comment. There is even less potential for amusement in the other two
posts (2 and 3 in Fig. 8), which maintain some topical coherence, but show no humorous creativity in the insults.
28 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36

Overall, both the Instagram lingerie model and the journalist seem to have been peripheral participants (see Lave and
Wenger, 1991) in the community. Although they registered on the subreddit and asked for roasting, they did not operate
on the normative premises, which must have incited other community members to violate the norms en masse as roasters and
as upvoters of the former’s potentially abusive content, sometimes regarding it as amusing. Additionally, some members must
have reported the journalist’s Roast as a violation of the rules given the ulterior motive that the roastee presented explicitly,
disregarding the fact that this was something the moderator team had approved, as the moderator confirms (cf. Fig. 7). Even
though no unequivocal conclusions can be drawn based on the users’ non-unanimous metapragmatic evaluations (such as
those in Fig. 4), some of the roasting comments that the two roastees received, such as those in Figs. 3 and 8, cannot be
formally conceptualised as standard jocular insults found on the subreddit, consonant with the community’s raison d’être:
“getting a laugh at each other’s expense” jointly by “both roastees and roasters”, which is contrasted with “insults” proper (as
opposed to jocular ones, see Dynel, 2021), or acts of “abuse” and “bullying” (see the moderator comment in Fig. 7). However,
these emic norms of the RoastMe community of practice, which are typically observed by members (exceptions like the two
Roasts aside), can be easily misunderstood or just disregarded by outsiders.

4. RoastMe with the “cyberbullying” etic label and its emic evaluations

In a previous Google-based pilot study, an association was observed – on parent portals and news websites – between
roasting and “(cyber)bullying”, a genuinely aggressive activity (Dynel and Poppi, 2019). Journalists, parents and random
Internet users operating outside the RoastMe community of practice sometimes associate RoastMe with unequivocally
hostile, destructive and harmful behaviours, metapragmatically assigning it the “cyberbullying” etic label. This must be the
consequence of the fact that outsiders tend to pass judgements about RoastMe without learning about the community rules
and its rationale, taking random examples at face value and using them as the basis for sensational news. A mention of one
such report can be found in a RoastMe moderator’s meta post (see Fig. 9).

Fig. 9. Meta post about a news report on bullying at r/RoastMe.

 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36 29

This post includes a picture reporting a traditional media broadcast that shapes public opinion about RoastMe, which is
admonished for being a form of “cyberbullying” and a “growing concern”. The first comment submitted by the moderator
serves as a defiant comment, implicitly criticising the news. The moderator considers (as other community members do)
being roasted a peculiar form of pleasure thanks to the good-willed disparagement roastees invite (cf. the play with the slogan
“you won’t regret it”). The post also refers members to the rules that safeguard the community’s interests and guarantee the
positive, benevolent nature of the online practice.
The thread inspired by this meta post (worth of 998 comments), now archived, contains many comments about the alleged
cyberbullying at r/RoastMe in line with the moderator’s perspective. A selection of these posts is presented in Fig. 10.

Fig. 10. Metapragmatic comments questioning cyberbullying at r/RoastMe.

30 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36

Fig. 10. (conitued)

An overwhelming majority of comments in the thread that address the news report are unequivocally critical of it. This
criticism is implicit in two humorous posts that ridicule the news. One user (1) echoes in a parodic manner an incompetent
interpreter of RoastMe (and a very poor speller) who agrees with the news; the post closes with the clarification of his/her
intent. Another user (2) draws an irony-based parallel between the malevolence of RoastMe and correcting grammar. On the
other hand, referring to a legal definition of bullying (3), a different user points out that aggression qualifies as bullying only
when it is “unwanted”, whereas roastees deliberately solicit comments. This idea reverberates across other posts (4, 5 and 9),
next to the observation that roasting is by no means a new concept (5, 6 and 7); indeed, the practice goes back far in the past,
especially in the history of the USA (see Dynel and Poppi, 2019). Thereby the users criticise the journalistic style of the
traditional news broadcast, at times explicitly (4, 5, 8 and 9). Another observation is that such news discredits the real
problem of bullying (9), which is not what RoastMe is about. A different user also attempts a diagnosis of the source of the
misconceptualisation and mislabelling, attributing it to some child’s poor excuse for bullying others (10). Another reason may
be sought in infamous incidents at r/RoastMe of school bullies going online (see also Fig. 11). Tacitly endorsing the RoastMe
practice as benevolently humorous, users bring to the focus of attention the cases of illegitimate uses of RoastMe as a venue
for deception and bullying (11), for which the RoastMe community should not be held accountable (12). Bullying is a flagrant
violation of the RoastMe norms by users who cannot be considered legitimate community members, at least not when they
are engaged in this activity. As one of the comments reports (11), these illegitimate practices, which should not be mistaken
for roasting, have caused the rules on the subreddit to be tightened up (Fig. 11).

Fig. 11. Meta post in response to (illegitimate) school children’s bullying at r/RoastMe.

While the various posts by both regular community members and moderators draw a clear dividing line between roasting
and bullying, a minority of metapragmatic uses of the labels are ambivalent at r/RoastMe too, as the comments in Fig. 12
illustrate.
 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36 31

Fig. 12. Ambivalent metapragmatic comments about roasting and cyberbullying.

While drawing a distinction between bullying and roasting, a user (1) implicitly suggests that roasting is similar to bullying
(presumably in terms of the aggression it involves) and can get “real”, presumably in the sense of the aggresion being genuine.
However, he/she states also that it is less dangerous than cyberbullying, because one can put an end to it, unlike to bullying.
Another user (2), who rightly traces the story behind RoastMe to traditional roasts, seems to liken the two practices, the
difference being that bullying is non-consensual and organised. Yet another user talks about non-consensual “roasting” and
“cyberbullying” at the root of it (3), which blurs the distinction between the two practices entirely. Similarly, in (4), a user
presents the label “roasting” as a euphemistic synonym for “bullying”, as if both mean the same thing, that is “attack verbally”,
except that roasting is consensual. Another commenter goes further than this in stating that all disparaging jokes qualify as
un-funny bullying (5). Finally, in (6), a comparison is drawn between rape and consensual sex that is bad for one person as
metaphorical representations of cyberbullying and roasting, thus suggesting that roasting does not actually give the roastee
pleasure. These different opinions may thus indicate people’s varying perspectives on what roasting involves and rather
idiosyncratic uses of the terms “bullying” and “roasting”.
Precisely because of people’s diverse lay conceptualisations of the labels (and lack of academic formalisation), in previous
academic research, the distinction between cyberbullying and humour is not always presented as a dichotomy, even though
“cyberbullying” is defined as a negatively-loaded, harmful practice.

5. Cyberbullying and its relationship with humour

Cyberbullying is studied mainly from a socio-psychological perspective (see Jenaro et al., 2018 for an overview), especially
with regards to its correlates and repercussions for the victims (see Tokunaga, 2010). Cyberbullying, an online version of
traditional bullying (Olweus and Limber, 2018), may take various forms such as communicating embarrassing and hostile
information about the victim (Silva et al., 2018) or other verbal and non-verbal behaviours (e.g. sending pictures), as well as
impersonation with malicious intent (e.g. hacking someone’s account) or exclusion from a group (Nocentini et al., 2010).
Whatever form it may take, cyberbullying is understood as deliberate and repeated aggressive acts intended to cause harm to
a victim who cannot defend himself/herself (Smith et al., 2008; Slonje et al., 2013; Olweus, 2013; Wolke et al., 2016).
Additionally, power imbalance, central to standard bullying (Olweus, 1993), may involve not only the target’s physical or
psychological weakness and lack of popularity within a peer group but also the bully’s technical opportunities, which
facilitate anonymity and acts of multiple bullying (Slonje et al., 2013).
Anonymity also minimises the threat of confrontation and other repercussions for the oppressor (Widyanto and Griffiths,
2011). Anonymity is conducive to the deindividuation effect (Siegel et al., 1986), which is well known as an explanation for
aggressive behaviours among groups (Le Bon, 1985 [1895]). Specifically, deindividuation may foster a sense of impunity and
impulsive, uninhibited communicative actions, from which one would refrain if their identity were to be disclosed, whether
in online or in offline spaces, especially in face-to-face encounters. This is tantamount to the online disinhibition effect (Suler,
2004), which allows a user to build online selves other than the offline one. Group psychology also has a role in cyberbullying;
users acting as an anonymous mass show little personal responsibility and liability for their actions (see Spears, 2017).
32 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36

None of these definitional components of cyberbullying can be found in the standard workings of RoastMe. The social
practice is, by design, based on equality and power balance that anonymous users share in the online community, regardless
of their foibles and shortcomings experienced in real life. According to the negotiated rules the community follows, RoastMe
is not about spreading genuinely hostile or embarrassing information, and it is by no means intended to cause harm to
roastees (as long as they are central not peripheral, community members), who do not need to defend themselves. Moreover,
roastees aim to elicit humorous jibes from other users, for instance regarding the potential flaws that they are deliberately
sporting in their pictures or the (alleged) misfortunes they are reporting on in their self-descriptions, presumably in order to
solicit more roasting comments (Dynel and Poppi, 2019, 2020).
However, what problematises the relationship between the humorous practice of roasting and cyberbullying is the as-
sociations made between cyberbullying and humour in cyberbullying research, mostly in studies based on interviews with
young people. As reported by Steer at al. (2020), one of the motivations of cyberbullies is to “joke” and to have “fun” (Baas
et al., 2013; Raskauskas and Stoltz, 2007), insofar as it is an enjoyable (Topcu et al., 2013; Vandebosch and Van Cleemput,
2008) and humour-generating activity (Raskauskas and Stoltz, 2007). What these studies seem to show, in fact, is that
cyberbullies aim to derive (sick) pleasure from their victims’ misfortune and helplessness. However, this kind of pleasure
consequent upon superiority and power-building need not have anything to do with humour, whether intended or perceived
(see Section 6). In other words, not all pleasure, entertainment and “having fun” or “joking” (notice the lay metapragmatic
uses of the labels and their blurry denotations) involves humour. On the other hand, bullying may be realised in the form of
pranks or wittily formulated genuine insults, potentially humorous to individuals other than the victim, which explains the
perceived/reported humorous motivation, and not just the motivation to “have fun”. These humorous effects may be
appreciated by observers, as evidenced by Huang and Chou’s (2010) study. Their participatory role regardless, young people
can even justify cyberbullying as harmless jokes (Baas et al., 2013). The humorous effect may be boosted by the physical
distance and lack of empathy for the target (Smith et al., 2008), which is related to the disinhibition effect. Some studies also
report that interviewees have problems recognising intentions, not being able to differentiate between cyberbullying and
harmless humour from the victim’s vantage point (Baas et al., 2013; Carrera et al., 2011). This may have to do with the hu-
morous form that some bullying takes, irrespective of its malignant intent.
On a related note, in their study on humour and cyberbullying, Steer et al. (2020: 3) venture a rather dubious statement
that “online humour is more likely to be ambiguous and therefore interpreted as cyberbullying. Consequently, humour may
play a larger role in cyberbullying perpetration than in traditional bullying perpetration.” Benevolent humour, such as
friendly banter, may indeed be misinterpreted as (harmful) cyberbullying (and – perhaps less likely – vice versa cyberbullying
may be (mis)taken for humour), but the potential ambiguity of messages that are both aggressive and humorous is no reason
for coining the oxymoronic term “humorous cyberbullying”, one that Steer et al. (2020) endorse, even though cyberbullying
may indeed bring about humorous effects for individuals other than the target (essentially because of incongruities within
the bullying message, if creatively formulated).
Additionally, Steer et al.’s (2020) “‘bad banter’ as cyberbullying” conceptualisation arising from interviewed subjects’
evaluations is a mere indication of one of the two alternative communicative problems.10 What may have been envisaged as
benevolent humour but is not well received (e.g. because it touches a raw nerve) and ends up being considered unacceptable/
offensive to the target may be metapragmatically mislabelled “cyberbullying” (just like jocular RoastMe insults misunder-
stood by outsiders to the community, even though they are not the targets); this is nothing but failed humour. Alternatively, a
claim to banter and underlying jocular intent may be a cover-up, a poor excuse for the intended genuinely aggressive practice
(cf. comment 10 in Fig. 10), which boils down to a special form of deception based on covert pretending (see Dynel, 2018b) to be
benevolently humorous and to be “only joking” (which may be the case with the peculiar mean insults hurled at the model
and the journalist at r/RoastMe on the pretext that the authors were operating within the humorous play frame). This banter
vs cyberbullying juxtaposition is a topic reverberating across official advice portals.11 Incidentally, reports like these indicate a
metapragmatic shift in the use of the users’ metapragmatic label “banter”, which seems to involve some form of aggression,
and thus it can serve as a smokescreen for cyberbullying in order to be confused with it. By contrast, as a technical label,
“banter” is known in humour studies as a perfectly benign, aggression-free humorous practice (e.g. Norrick, 1993).
Any epistemological, interpretative problems aside, cyberbullying and playful humour can be clearly distinguished in
theoretical terms, referring to the two distinct forms of aggression put forward here, which are tacitly reflected in previous
humour research.

6. Aggression, cyberbullying, and humour: distinctions and overlaps

Davies (1990, 2002) seems to be the sole humour scholar to have explicitly drawn the distinction between “real-world”
and “playful” aggression only to focus on the latter in his postulate about canned jokes. Accordingly, in his view, jokes do not

10
Both interpretations are equally plausible based on the short extracts of interviews that Steer et al. (2020) provide while using un-appealing academic
parlance and drawing un-appealing conclusions.
11
https://www.esafety.gov.au/young-people/banter-vs-bullying
https://www.cybersmile.org/news/banter-or-bullying-a-report-exploring-the-relationship-between-banter-and-bullying-in-the-u-k
https://www.childcomwales.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Cyberbullying-Secondary-2019.pdf
 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36 33

represent the “real world”, which is why poking fun at targets does not really represent one’s genuine negative beliefs about
them. By contrast, the idea that humour is not separate from real, or rather, genuine aggression lies at the heart of the well-
entrenched superiority theory of humour, which has roots in ancient philosophy (see e.g. Keith-Spiegel, 1972) and is the subject
of a plethora of psychological studies (for an overview, see e.g. Ferguson and Ford, 2008; Martin and Ford, 2018). The
fundamental postulate of the various superiority approaches is that humour relies on a feeling of superiority over the target/
butt, who has some weaknesses or foibles of which to make fun. This poking fun may be thought of as an act of aggression.
According to classics and the most zealous contemporary proponents of this approach, superiority/aggression is the source of
all humour (see Martin and Ford, 2018). However, a great proportion of humour may be completely devoid of any aggression,
having no target/butt and being entirely benign, while superiority theory can cover (only) disparagement humour (see e.g.
Martin and Ford, 2018; Morreall, 1983).
It is also convincingly posited that superiority is actually a booster of mirth, a facilitator of humour (Zillmann, 1983), while
the humour per se needs to arise from perceived incongruity, something novel and/or surprising. As Zillmann and Cantor
(1976: 111) put it, “the individual’s positive affective reaction is the pure enjoyment of witnessing maltreatment. Such
enjoyment is likely to be expressed in mirth, but the situation cannot be labelled humorous.” This kind of enjoyment may
stand behind the “fun” and “entertainment” derived from cyberbullying reported by language users/subjects in previous
studies on cyberbullying (see Steer et al., 2020). The cyberbullying that formally qualifies as humour needs to involve some
creativity and wit, as in caustic putdowns or witty pranks. These kinds of communications, viewed by the perpetrators and
receivers other than the target, may indeed be considered amusing and indicate the perpetrators’ humorous intent, which
does not cancel the malicious intent with regard to the target. In other words, through genuinely aggressive humour, the
speaker antagonises the target and manifests his/her superiority over the latter whilst attempting to amuse other non-
targeted individuals, who also disaffiliate themselves from the deprecated target. Such humour can only operate in multi-
party interactions, involving at least one more interactant than the target (who may recognise the presence of humour),
the individual to reap humorous rewards (see Dynel, 2013, 2016 on humour in multi-party interactions).
Because of this twofold communicative force, i.e. humour and derogation to be experienced independently by participants
in multi-party interactions, the evaluations of what qualifies as cyberbullying may vary, depending on whose perspective is
assumed. According to many superiority accounts, what facilitates amusement at the target’s expense is the variously termed
lack of affiliation with, or affective disposition for this target on the amused individual’s part (e.g. Wolff et al., 1934; Zillmann
and Cantor, 1972, 1976; see Dynel, 2013, 2016). Needless to say, the Internet enables (like no other channel of communication)
the disinhibition effect, making (witty) bullying very easy to appreciate by multiple individuals on the reception end.
While most supporters of superiority theory seem to depict humour as relying on genuine aggression, in his approach
(intended to cover all humour, which is not very convincing, see Martin and Ford, 2018), Gruner (1997) endorses the playful
aggression, similar to children’s and animals’ play fighting, where there is no intention to inflict actual harm, which is pre-
cisely what Bateson (1987 [1955]: 185–186) wrote about: “‘This is play’ looks something like this: ‘These actions in which we
now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote.’ (.) The playful nip denotes the bite, but it
does not denote what would be denoted by the bite.” Simplifying what Bateson (1987 [1955]) proposed for the monkey
combat play and bringing the topic to the human domain, one may extrapolate that a jocular insult does not denote what a
genuine insult would. This is because the aggressiveness is not genuine but overtly pretended as part of the game. The
overtness of this pretence (unlike covert pretence, which is meant to deceive, cf. Dynel, 2018b) means that all participants in
the (here, humorous) play are aware of the benign nature of their interaction. This is precisely what standard, normative
Roasts at r/RoastMe represent.
Reddit’s RoastMe practice epitomises autotelic humorous play (performed for its own sake) contingent on mock/overtly
pretended aggression subsumed under a humorous frame. According to the explicitly stated rules, coinciding with the
community’s norms, which members need to accept and, typically, do obey, roasting insults are not anchored in genuine
negative dispositions towards the targets or the intent to cause the latter any harm. This is in line with some superiority
theoreticians’ postulate of the need for a playful context in aggressive humour: disparagement is humorous if an individual
can attribute his/her amusement to the “joke world,” which facilitates moral amnesty, thereby differentiating humorous
disparagement from disparagement in serious contexts, where no humour can be derived (Zillmann and Cantor, 1976;
Zillmann, 1983).12
RoastMe insults bear some similarity to teasing, a heterogeneous category of humour, which has earned various defini-
tions and conceptualisations also with regard to the aggression it may involve (see e.g. Haugh, 2017; Sinkeviciute, 2019).
These faces of aggression may be retroactively interpreted as either mock aggression or genuine aggression (see e.g. Boxer and
Cortés-Conde, 1997 on the diverse manifestations of teasing). However, teasing is traditionally regarded as involving overtly
feigned hostility and aggression, which, in actual fact, testifies to real friendliness (Radcliffe-Brown, 1940). A jocular insult,
similar to standard teasing, is “a potentially insulting/aggressive comment but simultaneously provides/relies upon cues that
the utterance is to be understood as playful/non-serious” (Alberts, 1992: 155). The very presence on this Reddit platform
works as a meta-cue for what roasting proper involves, as detailed by the rules. Rather than including contextual cues

12
This proposal, nonetheless, does not account for the multiplicity of vantage points in multi-party interactions and the fact that serious disparagement of
the target, as in creative cyberbullying (which RoastMe is not by design), may co-occur and elicit humorous reactions in other individuals, who need to find
the moral amnesty.
34 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36

indicative of the ultimately benevolent humour (see Martin and Ford, 2018), RoastMe insults are presupposed to rely on mock
aggression given that they constitute a well-defined, normative practice enclosed within a humorous frame.
The self-explanatory central cue for the presence of benevolent humour in RoastMe insults is their creativity conducive to
incongruity, which are perceived as normative on the subreddit. If the creativity and incongruity are missing or something
different eclipses them (e.g. an explicit threat), suspicions may arise about potential abuse and cyberbullying, as is the case
with select jibes in the two non-prototypical, non-normative Roasts commenced by roastees with (asserted or alleged)
motives other than humorous play (cf. Section 3). What Haugh (2017: 204) proposes for teasing applies to the RoastMe
practice of roasters’ jocularly insulting roastees: although it “is playful or done in jest, it can easily slide into being charac-
terized as [genuinely] aggressive, and so may also be construed by participants as a covert form of bullying or harassment.”
There are two reasons for this.
On the one hand, even when it is perfectly in line with the negotiated norms and despite the roaster’s original benevolent
intent, a mock aggressive roasting message is prone to cause offence (if it should touch a raw nerve from a roastee’s
perspective) and/or misunderstanding when receivers lack the inside knowledge shared by the online community about the
underlying purpose of RoastMe (see Dynel and Poppi, 2019). When assigned the etic “cyberbullying” label and recognised as a
pernicious practice, the standard RoastMe humour seems to be misunderstood; it fails in all stages of what Hay (2001)
conceptualises as “humour support”: the humorous frame is not recognised, the humour is not understood, let alone
appreciated (found funny), with no overall communicative agreement being reached.
On the other hand, a perpetrator may have the evil intention to (deceptively) pass off genuinely aggressive messages (such
as cyberbullying) as humour based on mock aggression, such as “teasing” (in the traditional sense) or “banter”, a contem-
porary metapragmatic label for this type of humour. The “just kidding” or “only joking” intent (see Haugh, 2016) seems to
serve as a prevalent excuse for the harmful cyberbullying practice, lest the perpetrator should have to face the consequences
of his/her deeds (see Dynel, 2018a on this kind of deceptive humorous intent). Even though users’ metapragmatic evaluations
may vary, a few marked Roasts do seem to involve such cyberbullying, understood in a technical sense, making use of the
presupposed humorous frame on the subreddit. The salience of these Roasts stems from the violation of the normative
behaviour on RoastMe on the part of (some) roasters, incited by the norm-violating roastees.
As illustrated by the metapragmatic discussions about RoastMe, misunderstandings in humour communication can arise,
and some examples may escape unequivocal qualification. Nonetheless, it is useful to draw the theoretical distinction be-
tween genuine aggression and mock aggression in the context of humour production. It is also worth remarking that mock
aggression, exemplified by jocular insults, is amenable to consideration as mock impoliteness (inherently, non-face-
threatening), as opposed to genuine aggression, exemplified by insults proper or put-downs, which qualify as genuine
impoliteness (see Dynel, 2013, 2016 and references therein). Thus, (im)politeness offers – nowadays very popular – analytic
tools with which to examine discursive aggression, as well as humour in the context of its aggressiveness. In general, humour
may range from entirely benign, innocuous forms that serve politeness and solidarity, through mock aggressive/impolite
communications that fulfil the same purpose, to genuinely aggressive forms (such as sarcasm and ridicule) that bring about
impoliteness effects for the disparaged (potentially also abused and bullied) target and, at the same time, bring about
pleasurable humorous effects for the non-targeted individuals who share the humour producer’s negative affective dispo-
sition for the butt, see e.g. Dynel, 2013, 2016).

7. Conclusions

The overarching goal of this paper has been to draw a clear distinction between two types of discursive aggression:
genuine aggression and mock aggression. While intuitive, if not obvious, this distinction does not seem to have been formally
postulated and widely recognised in linguistic research. This paper has aimed to fill this gap, proposing this distinction in the
context of humour and addressing two markedly different online practices, namely cyberbullying and roasting. The thrust of
the discussion is that cyberbullying represents genuine aggression that may be the source of mirth and witty but mean
humour for individuals other than the target, whilst roasting relies on mock aggression and is, by design, conducive to
benevolent humour.
Albeit distinct in theory, these two aggressive practices tend to be confused due to the user-imposed polysemy of the two
metapragmatic labels, whose denotations get confused, and due to the lack of the requisite emic (i.e. insider) understanding
of the nature and purpose of roasting performed by the online community. An adequate academic (a type of etic) definition of
the practice at hand needs to be informed by the community’s emic understanding of their humour-oriented activities. This
understanding has been built here on the grounds of the clearly stated community rules, pragmatic analysis of standard
Roasts, as well as community members’ metapragmatic comments on non-normative roastee and roaster behaviour, illus-
trated with two case studies. These metapragmatic comments, however, also indicate emic users’ idiosyncratic, contradictory
applications of the key labels. Moreover, the study of lay etic (outsider) evaluations of the RoastMe community’s standard
practices points to the sources of misunderstanding consequent upon the purposeful or unwitting mislabelling of other
communicative practices (technically constituting cyberbullying) as “roasting”.
Taking all this into account, it is put forward here that the notions of roasting and cyberbullying are best formally
distinguished on the basis of the form of aggression on which each relies. Furthermore, it has been shown that each type of
aggression may exert humorous effects (another potential source of confusion), albeit again of two distinct kinds. Mock
aggression is connected with benevolent humour shared by interactants for the sake of their joint amusement (typified by
 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 81 (2021) 17–36 35

roasting), whereas genuine aggression (such as that characterising cyberbullying) may invite mirth and vicarious pleasure in
individuals other than the target of aggression.
The basic implication submitted by this study for other scholars is that any seemingly aggressive discourse needs quali-
fication with regard to the genuine/mock nature of the aggression involved. This qualification rests on getting insight into the
relevant emic understandings of the practices and specific messages, with the caveat that users’ labelling may sometimes be
inconsistent. It is also crucial that scholars do not rashly adopt misapplied (etic) labels and elevate them to the status of
academic terms, thus shifting their original denotations or contradicting their previous academic definitions. This is what we
can do in our academic capacity, even if we cannot prevent misguided labelling or unjust etic evaluations from arising and
affecting public opinion.

Funding information

This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland (Project number 2018/30/E/HS2/00644).

Declaration of competing interest

The author has no conflict of interest to declare.

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