LAUSR

Abstract Viewers on viki.com comment on Korean television drama series while watching: They produce timed comments tied to the timecode of the audiovisual stream. Among the functions these comments have in the community, the expression of emotive stance is central. Importantly, this includes humour support encoded in a variety of linguistic and paralinguistic ways. Our study identifies a range of humour support indicators, which allow us to find comments that are responses to humour. Accordingly, our study explores how commenters make use of the affordances of the Viki timed comment feature to linguistically and paralinguistically encode their humorous reaction to fictional events and to previous comments. We do this both quantitatively – based on a multilingual corpus of all 320,118 timed comments that accompany five Korean dramas we randomly selected (80 episodes in total), and qualitatively based on the in-depth analysis of two episodes. What we contribute is a typology and the distribution of humour support indicators used in a novel genre of technology-mediated communication as well as insights into how the viewing community collectively does humour support. Finally, we also present the semi-automatic detection of humour support as a viable strategy to objectively identify humour-relevant scenes in Korean TV drama.