An American in Milan — Audrey Claire Willoughby

A social scientist and a digital-media expert: Tell us briefly about yourself and your work.

I am a doctoral researcher in linguistics at the University of Milan, working mainly on humour in short-form audiovisual content. My work looks at how humour is not always located in a punchline or a single retrievable moment/sentence, but in the way different modes  (text, sound, gesture, facial expression, editing, gaze, and timing) guide viewers toward one interpretation and then ask them to revise it after incongruity. I am interested in humour as a process of inference: viewers build expectations from the cues given to them and their social and cultural knowledge around those cues, and humour often emerges when those expectations are disrupted in a way that feels intentional, socially recognisable, and interpretable. More broadly, I am interested in digital performance, platform vernaculars, and the small semiotic choices through which people stage identity, intimacy, irony, embarrassment, or social critique online.

What is your understanding of “humour” proper; or, at least, of those features thereof to which you have paid the keenest attention? And how does your work merge with, or is influenced by, your quotidian encounters with a potentially ubiquitous and ambiguous phenomenon such as humour?

I tend not to think of humour as a single stable object, but as an interpretive event. In my work, humour happens when a viewer recognises that something does not quite fit, a mismatch between what is expected and what appears, and then seeks to resolve that mismatch as meaningful rather than accidental. I am especially interested in this when it happens digitally across modes: for example, when a short-form video text overlay sets up a serious or familiar situation, but the creator’s face, voice, gesture, or soundtrack changes the frame. That is where humour becomes less about a punchline and more about the viewer’s work of reinterpreting the scene.

My everyday encounters with humour absolutely shape this. Online humour is fast, layered, and often only half-explicit. Much of it depends on knowing the format, the platform, the shared script, or the attitude being performed. I am drawn to that ambiguity because it makes humour socially rich. The same video can be affectionate, mocking, absurd, cruel, self-deprecating, or all of those at once, depending on who is watching and what knowledge they bring. So I approach humour as something ordinary but not simple. A small, everyday form of meaning-making that reveals a great deal about social expectations.

Thinkers as different as Nietzsche, Judith Shklar, and Derrida have argued that cruelty is baffling because, even if we want to eliminate it from human life, it always finds a way to re-emerge therein, almost as if it were part and parcel of the same human life. Has cruelty ever played a significant role in your work’s purview, and/or your understanding of social and economic phenomena?

Cruelty has not been the central object of my research in the same way humour has, but it is difficult to study humour seriously without eventually encountering cruelty. Humour can create belonging, but it can also exclude. It can soften social tension, but it can also make domination or humiliation feel playful and therefore harder to contest. In digital contexts especially, cruelty can hide behind ambiguity: “it was just a joke,” “you did not get the format,” or “everyone knows this is ironic.” That ambiguity is part of what interests me.

In social media short-form platforms, for example, creators often exaggerate social types, relationships, or embarrassing situations. Sometimes this is self-reflexive and harmless; sometimes it depends on making someone, or some imagined kind of person, ridiculous. So cruelty enters my work as a problem of framing and uptake. Who is being invited to laugh? Who is being positioned as the object? Can the target answer back? Does the humour open interpretive space, or does it close it by turning someone into a simplified social figure? I would not say that humour always entails cruelty, but I do think humour always raises the question of relation between performer and audience, audience and target, and recognition and exclusion.

Are there two or three works that, when it comes to addressing any of the themes fuelling my own philosophical and literary production, you would describe as true “classics” and, therefore, advise the reader of this blog to familiarise themselves with — the way, say, Plato’s Republic or Machiavelli’s Prince can be said to be “classics” in politics? And are there any works from the past ten years that you would equally recommend?

I think the overlap between your work and mine is not that we study the same objects, but that we both take humour seriously as a social force. Your work asks what humour can do ethically and existentially: how it can wound, expose, discipline, protect, or resist. My work begins from a more micro-level and digital perspective: how humour is built through multimodal cues, platform conventions, shared formats, and audience inference.

For that reason, I would not offer a general canon of humour, but a small bridge between our concerns. Bergson’s Laughter treats humour as social correction rather than mere entertainment. Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious shows how jokes can carry meanings that polite or direct language cannot easily express. I would also lean more “my work’s direction” and point to Salvatore Attardo’s work on internet humour, especially Humor 2.0, because it asks what changes when humour becomes networked, participatory, visual, and platform-based. I would also recommend Villy Tsakona’s work on the sociopragmatics of online humour, because it is useful for thinking about humour as something produced and interpreted within specific social contexts, not simply as a property of a text.

So the connection between our work that I see is this: your work asks what humour can become in ethical and social life, while mine asks how humour becomes recognisable in the first place. Both questions depend on the same basic point: humour is not simply found; it is built by communities, formats, histories, and expectations.