Fabio I . M . Poppi

University of Łódz, Department of Pragmatics, Faculty Member

Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Department of Entertainment Industries, Faculty Member

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Dr. Fabio Indìo Massimo Poppi (BSC and MSC, Social Psychology, University of Trieste; MA, Sociocultural Linguistics, Goldsmiths College, University of London; PhD, Society, Language and Communication Studies, UEA) is Chief Research Fellow at Vilnius Tech (Lithuania) and Research Associate Professor at the University of Łódź (Poland).

Characterized by an interdisciplinary background in critical discourse studies and qualitative social research, he works on the sociocultural dimensions of the identity, social interaction, deviant behavior, and Italian culture, often using a discourse analytical, narrative, and interactional fantasizing approach.

Among the international journals where he has published are Information, Communication & Society, Journal of Pragmatics, Discourse, Context & Media, Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, European Journal of Criminology, Deviant Behavior and Discourse & Communication.

For further information, please visit: www.fabioimpoppi.com (website) or Researchgate.

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Pragmatics by Fabio I . M . Poppi

Visio Colletiva: The Role of Joint Fantasizing in Qualitative Social Research

International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2025

This study explores joint fantasizing as a valuable methodological tool in qualitative social res... more This study explores joint fantasizing as a valuable methodological tool in qualitative social research, emphasizing its potential to uncover hidden and sensitive content. Traditional methods, like interviews, often fail to capture authentic expressions due to social dynamics and self-presentation concerns. Joint fantasizing, involving collaborative creation of improbable scenarios, offers a unique way to access natural, unguarded dialogues, especially among marginalized groups. By enabling participants to explore complex emotions, values, and identities through absurd, imaginative narratives, it reveals how people negotiate social boundaries and construct self-concepts. Despite its strengths, joint fantasizing poses challenges due to its sporadic occurrence and the need for rapport between researchers and participants. We suggest strategies to enhance its ecological validity, including minimizing researcher influence and using naturalistic or participant-led settings. Ultimately, joint fantasizing provides a powerful means of accessing content that traditional methods might overlook, offering deeper insights into identity and group dynamics.

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Ad libidinem: Forms of female sexualisation in RoastMe humour

This article reports the findings of a qualitative and quantitative study of seemingly aggressive... more This article reports the findings of a qualitative and quantitative study of seemingly aggressive but inherently benevolent humorous jibes that involve the sexualisation of women in the RoastMe practice performed by a growing social media community on Reddit. Based on a corpus of jocular insults, six forms of sexualisation comments are proposed: hyper-sexualisation, de-sexualisation and meta-sexualisation, each concerning the female body or practices. We account for the distribution of these categories, offering conclusions about humour and sexist ideologies, which RoastMe insults jocularly echo. Although the RoastMe community operates with a humour mindset, producing and recognising sexualisation jibes as a playful activity within a humorous frame, RoastMe insults speak volumes about the contemporary sexist ideologies and the salience of sexuality as a topic arbitrarily invoked in humour performance.

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Arcana imperii: The power of humorous retorts to insults on Twitter

This paper reports the findings of a study on the mechanics of insult-retort adjacency pairs in T... more This paper reports the findings of a study on the mechanics of insult-retort adjacency pairs in Twitter interactions. The analysis concerns primarily the humorous retorts made by the pornographic entrepreneur Stormy Daniels, who has been pelted with politically-loaded misogynist insults, many of which qualify as slut-shaming. These acts of verbal aggression are the result of her involvement in a legal dispute with President Donald Trump and his former attorney. Based on a carefully collected corpus of public exchanges of tweets, our qualitative analysis achieves a few goals. First, it brings to focus a previously ignored function of witty and creative humour, including the self-deprecating variety, as a powerful rhetorical strategy that helps address insults with dignity and that displays the speaker’s intellectual superiority over the attacker and a good sense of humour, as evidenced by multiple users’ positive metapragmatic evaluations of Stormy Daniels’s retorts. Second, these findings carry vital practical implications for handling misogynist comments, including slut-shaming, online. Third, this study offers new insights into the workings of insults and retorts thereto, not only in multi-party interactions on social media, specifically on Twitter, but also through traditional channels of communication.

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Caveat emptor: boycott through digital humour on the wave of the 2019 Hong Kong protests

Information, Communication & Society , 2020

This paper addresses the topic of social media users’ polyvocal political activism facilitated by... more This paper addresses the topic of social media users’ polyvocal political activism facilitated by participatory culture and expressed through multimodal digital humour (including humorous memes) in the context of a threat of a regime. The focus of attention is political humour on the r/HongKong subreddit, specifically the posts pertinent to the ongoing boycott movement of multiple companies consequent upon their actions in response to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. Apart from presenting the multimodal characteristics of the creative digital data through the lens of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, the central aim is to discuss the functions of users’ political humour online, offering various socio-pragmatic conclusions about the polyvocal participatory practice at hand. It is argued that this digital humour resides solely in the attention-grabbing form, with the otherwise serious posts performing informative and persuasive functions as they convey community members’ socio-political critique. While disparaging the ‘butts’, online users do bonding through collectively expressing their political dissent (which also gives them psychological relief) and sharing subversive ideologies. The humorous items inform and warn potential punters and tacitly call for a boycott of the companies that bow to the regime, all in an act of solidarity with Hong Kong protesters.

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Ad libidinem: Forms of female sexualisation in RoastMe humour

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In tragoedia risus: Analysis of dark humour in post-terrorist attack discourse

Discourse & Communication, 2018

In this article, we examine dark humour in Internet posts commenting on an online Italian newspap... more In this article, we examine dark humour in Internet posts commenting on an online Italian newspaper report published by Il Fatto Quotidiano and devoted to the 2016 terrorist attack in Nice. The analysis focuses on the linguistic forms and socio-pragmatic functions of this dark humour in the wake of the tragedy. We argue that the creative humorous posts are meant to communicate Internet users’ ideologies conceptualised as their true beliefs about the sociopolitical situation and that they are oriented primarily towards criticising terrorism-related themes, notably: inept security enforcement, radical Islam, political and public reactions and integration policies. The humour in the Italian posts is used as a means of displaying Internet users’ wit and attracting other users’ attention.

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Quid rides?: Targets and referents of RoastMe insults

Humor, 2019

This article offers a qualitative and quantitative socio-cultural examination of RoastMe, a pecul... more This article offers a qualitative and quantitative socio-cultural examination of RoastMe, a peculiar humorous practice deployed on Reddit and reposted on various social media. First, RoastMe is characterized from the emic (user) perspective and conceptualized in the light of humor theory (superiority and incongruity approaches). RoastMe consists in some users' posting pictures of themselves with a view to being roasted, i. e. pelted with jocular insults, by other online community members. Albeit a type of disparagement humor, RoastMe is an innocuous humorous activity enclosed within a humorous frame; it is a form of affiliative humor based on users' unbounded creativity. Second, this paper reports the findings of a quantitative study on the predominant types of targets/roastees depending on their (lack of) salient features, as well as the source and nature of the jocularly disparaged referents in roasting comments, i. e. the central features that roasters make harmless fun of most often, relative to the different categories of roastees. Roasting (v.)-To humorously mock or humiliate someone with a welltimed joke, diss or comeback.

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Risum teneatis, amici?: The socio-pragmatics of RoastMe humour

Journal of Pragmatics, 2019

This paper gives the first academic description of RoastMe e a prevalent, but hitherto unexplored... more This paper gives the first academic description of RoastMe e a prevalent, but hitherto unexplored, humorous practice formed on Reddit and re-posted on various social media, notably Imgur e in the light of the relevant socio-pragmatic literature on humour and (im) politeness. Taking into account the emic perspective of the RoastMe community of practice (as opposed to recurrent etic "cyberbullying" metapragmatic evaluations), RoastMe is conceptualised as an online humorous activity which, similar to the traditional roast (including the celebrity roast genre), is centred on ritual insults addressed to the target who has agreed to be roasted for the sake of humour. RoastMe is enclosed within a humorous frame (regardless of whether or not insults are truthful, i.e. communicate roasters' true beliefs) and thrives on its community members' unbounded creativity. Roasting comments can also be seen as mock impoliteness, constituting utterances that display overtly pretended face-threat, while being oriented towards amusement and solidaritybuilding among anonymous users. However, even though the online community of practice conceives RoastMe as an innocuous activity, the possibility of roastees' taking, while not necessarily claiming, offence cannot be ruled out.

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Fidelis ad mortem: multimodal discourses and ideologies in Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter (non)humorous memes

Information, Communication & Society, 2021

This paper reports the findings of a study of two automatically generated corpora of multimodal d... more This paper reports the findings of a study of two automatically generated corpora of multimodal digital items user-tagged as ‘Black Lives Matter memes’ and ‘Blue Lives Matter memes’. The central aim is to flesh out the memetic trends representing the discourses and ideologies on the Black and blue memescape, which is explored in the wake of the most infamous but interest-generating tragedy in the history of the Blue Lives Matter movement, namely George Floyd's death at the hands of white police officer Derek Chauvin. Studied through a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analytic lens, the internet memes are shown to contribute to the polyvocal political discussion and, with some neutral or ambiguous exceptions, to display a positive (pro-) or – more often – negative (anti-) stance on each of the opposite movements (with anti-BLM items consituting the largest category in the dataset). Also, contrary to the well-entrenched conceptualisation of memes as a type of humour, the majority of the memes at hand manifest no humorous potential. Humour is present mainly among the negative-stance memes, which points to the disparagement of a target as a concomitant of humour in the memes on this serious political topic.

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