Humour and Modal Interplay in TikTok’s POV Genre

Abstract

TikTok is widely recognised for its humour-driven performances, yet the specific multimodal strategies through which humour is produced remain underexplored. This study examines humour in the platform’s “POV” genre, analysing 16 English-language videos tagged with humour-related hashtags. Drawing on multimodal discourse analysis (Bateman et al. 2017; Wildfeuer 2014) and pragmatic humour theory (Attardo 2020; Tsakona 2020), it introduces cross-modal incongruity as a distinct form of modal interplay: a moment when one semiotic mode subverts the interpretive frame set by another, prompting the audience to reconcile the mismatch through inference. Six semiotic modes were examined to identify how expectations are established and violated. Cross-modal incongruity was present in every video analysed, most often when textual or verbal framing was overturned through embodied or visual cues. These mismatches acted as prompts for reinterpretation rather than signs of communicative breakdown, drawing on viewers’ familiarity with genre conventions, platform performance styles, and shared cultural scripts. The findings suggest that such incongruities are systematically embedded in the multimodal design of POV videos, making the audience’s interpretive work integral to the humour and offering a clearer account of how comic effects are orchestrated across audiovisual resources in short-form digital media.