Response to Madelyn's Main Blog


Twitter is arguably one of the funniest and most controversial forms of social media.  I started my Twitter account and told myself that I would use it strictly as a way to see different pressing news and sports articles that are posted by Fox News, CNN, ESPN, etc. etc.  A few years in now and my twitter is full of nothing but memes and ridiculous tweets such as those of the Hurricane Florence page along with the occasional tweet about a new concept car.  To be honest, I could not be happier about it.  Twitter offers a place to go and see truly funny statements, pictures, and videos and just laugh for the sake of laughing.  I also followed the Hurricane Florence page as the (at the time) category 4 monster barreled toward the North Carolina/South Carolina border.  I’m not sure how the person who ran the account came up with so many funny ideas and things to say about the storm.  The account had multiple tweets per day for about a week and almost all of them made me bust out laughing.  There were similar pages and events on other forms of social media too.  For example, I remember seeing Facebook events like “shoot guns at Hurricane Florence to scare it away” or “sacrifice Florida to appease Hurricane Florence” scheduled for the day that the storm was supposed to make landfall.  In the end, my favorite was a Facebook post I saw which made a reference to a 2001 Petey Pablo song and said, “if there was ever a time for North Carolina to raise up, take their shirt off, and twist it around their head like a helicopter, it would be now.”  All of these posts make light of a situation which is very serious and for this reason I think that they can best be described by the relief theory.  They serve as a way to break the rising tension and apprehension that come with a hurricane and allow people to laugh.

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 19, 2018 at 8:25 AM

    The idea of people shooting at a storm, or the video of a guy holding an american flag during a storm makes me laugh because of how ridiculous it is. I definitely agree with you that these jokes use relief theory to lighten the situation.

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  2. Shane HerronOctober 19, 2018 at 9:47 AM

    I think you are right that relief theory is really the essence of this kind of dark humor. It is true that social media seems to have created its own brand of comedy and that now it is mostly this kind of comedy.

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  3. UnknownOctober 21, 2018 at 1:18 PM

    I am glad we agree about relief theory being represented through this twitter account. I also think the tweets you mentioned about shooting at the storm sound hilarious. Twitter is definitely an interesting social media platform.

    ReplyDelete
  4. carolinekOctober 21, 2018 at 3:40 PM

    There is too many funny memes and accounts on Twitter to just look at news. I know that if I were to get a Twitter I would spend so much time looking at funny accounts. I agree that these accounts allow people to laugh when times get rough.

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