Only Idiots Get Vaccinated w: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of Laughter-Text in Japanese Online (Anti-)Vaccination Discourses

Building on Partington’s research on laughter-talk in press briefings (Partington 2006, 2017), this study examines the textual representation of laughter in the subforum korona wakuchin tte yabaku nai? ‘isn’t the COVID vaccine insane?’ on the Japanese web forum 5channeru ‘Channel 5’. On Channel 5, user interaction is very straight-talking and the COVID vaccine is framed as a highly controversial topic. This prompts interactants to signal (dis)affiliation with the (no-vax) stance in a variety of ways, one of which is laughter. The study focuses on the character ‘w’, which conventionally denotes laughter in written Japanese. The main questions that I ask are: What are the functions of laughter-text in the data? What elicits laughter? The analysis of 3,006 comments (285,582 tokens) revealed 195 valid instances of the laughing character ‘w’. The meticulous close reading of concordances, combined with keyword and collocational analysis, revealed that, in this specific setting, laughter often accompanies messages conveying aggression towards and superiority over the recipient (laughing at) and that it is almost invariably triggered by the very same post the laughter is embedded in, rather than by something previously posted by others. Although a Japanese online forum is very different from English press briefings, the study shows that it can be analysed adapting the methods and taxonomies developed by Partington.