Group boundaries in humor in the online public sphere

Abstract One of the fundamental functions of humor is establishing the boundaries between groups. While it is very easy to trace this function in private settings, it often becomes more challenging in the online public sphere, where different groups of humor audiences overlap; there, using audience-restricting references can be counterproductive by establishing boundaries and preventing the efficient spread of jokes. Using the database on humor and conflicts in the public sphere, we look at how humor producers use both in-group specific and widely known humorous references (that we call universal) to create jokes and memes. Based on a corpus of Belarusian and Polish public humor, we outline the most common specific categories of references, analyze how the prevalence of certain categories and types of references depends on the nature of the controversies, and explore the connections between the types of references (verbal or visual) and their nature (in-group and universal).