Language & Communication 74 (2020) 1–14

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Language & Communication

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom

Vigilante disparaging humour at r/IncelTears: Humour as

critique of incel ideology
Marta Dynel 1
University of Łódz, Department of Pragmatics, Institute of English Studies, ul. Pomorska 171/173, 90-236 Łódz, Poland

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This paper gives a comprehensive account of a humorous practice on the IncelTears sub-
Available online 18 June 2020 reddit, whose aim is to poke fun at, and give a social commentary on, the notorious online
community of incels (hateful involuntary celibate men). Based on a representative corpus,
Keywords: the predominant categories of user-generated multimodal items are teased out relative to
Disparaging disaffiliative humour their form and stance. The central characteristics and socio-pragmatic aims of these hu-
Incel ideology
morous practices are discussed, together with the ideological meanings they communi-
Misogyny
cate. Apart from disparaging and critiquing what they consider to be indicative of the
Multimodal critical discourse analysis
Satire and parody
pernicious incel ideology, the subreddit community members derive pleasure from the
Trolling humorous items and forge solidarity links. Overall, this study offers valid conclusions
about the (dis)affiliative and informative functions of creative humour on social media
represented by the subreddit which humorously addresses a socially relevant, serious
problem.
Ó 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC
BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

1. Introduction

The online community of men self-identifying as incels, shorthand for “involuntary celibates”, has been in the spotlight
thanks to several acts of mass homicide, notably the Isla Vista killings near the UCLA campus in 2014 and the Toronto van
attack in 2018. These killing sprees were preceded by the attackers’ online grievances about their involuntary celibacy (see
Blommaert, 2017; Baele et al., 2019; Jaki et al., 2019). The sociological phenomenon of involuntarily celibate men is by no
means a new one, while verbal of physical aggression is not its inherent feature or definitional component (see Donnelly et al.,
2001). Celibate men often simply seek moral support through sharing (Donnelly et al., 2001), sometimes through social
media. However, in the aftermath of the attacks, incels’ online platforms seem to have veered into hate speech and misogyny,
as well as incitement to acts of violence and even terrorism (see also Jones et al., 2019 and references therein), marking their
place on the vociferous “manosphere” (Ging, 2017). This is a testament to the online disinhibition effect (Suler, 2004) and the
fact that online anonymity facilitates sharing radical views (Neo et al., 2016). Due to the extremity of incel messages, the r/
incels forum was banned from Reddit on 8th November 2017, giving rise to Incels.me on the very same day. The latter was
suspended in October 2018 (see Baele et al., 2019; Jaki et al., 2019). At the time this paper is being revised (March 2020), many

E-mail address: marta.dynel@yahoo.com.

1
https://martadynel.com/http://anglistyka.uni.lodz.pl/dynel-marta-prof-ul-dr-hab/.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2020.05.001
0271-5309/Ó 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
2 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 74 (2020) 1–14

other Incel-related fora appear to have been banned (including Reddit’s r/braincels or r/shortcels), due to their offensive
content, whereas incels.co is still active.
The previous corpus-assisted studies of incels’ discourse, based on the now-banned Incels.me forum, used mixed quali-
tative and quantitative methods to describe Incels’ extremist us-them worldview and narrative (Baele et al., 2019), as well as
their discourse and group dynamics (Jaki et al., 2019). This study contributes to the linguistic research on incels by addressing
their ideology as reported and ridiculed by the users of the IncelTears subreddit through their multimodal humour. This
humour relies on verbal and visual discourse, which is studied with the use of linguistic apparatus. Specifically, based on a
corpus of (re)posted user-generated content at r/IncelTears, this paper reports the primary categories and socio-pragmatic
functions of disparaging humour serving as a vehicle for social critique.
Reddit can be regarded, among other things, as an entertainment portal, as well as an Internet agora and a
touchstone for online political discussion among digitally literate users. Each subreddit is devoted to a specific topic
and has its own goals, which may – but do not need to – involve humour (see also Dynel and Poppi, 2019). r/
IncelTears or - at present - r/IncelTear, is an anti-incel subreddit, as indicated by the humorous, sarcastically ironic (cf.
Dynel, 2017a) header, “IncelTears: Because hating women will always get you laid”, which criticises this flawed
opinion and implicates that hating women rules out having sexual intercourse with them. This is an active subreddit
forum commenced on 19th May 2017. IncelTears had a continually growing number of members (334,000 in mid-
November 2019 and 346,000 in March 2020), with the top post reaching over 43,500 votes and over 1,000 com-
ments (the status quo for mid-November 2019, when the study was carried out). However, the subreddit was set to
private (presumably, as a result of a successful hacking attempt) only to see its immediate rebirth as r/IncelTear on
10th April 2020 (https://www.reddit.com/r/IncelTear/comments/fyje8w/this_is_what_happened_to_the_original_
rinceltears/). r/IncelTear(s) can be perceived as a vigilante humour-oriented platform for users willing to have fun
and exchange their critical opinions about incels. According to the subreddit’s self-description,
“IncelTears is a part-mocking, part-watchdog subreddit for posting screenshots of hateful, misogynist, racist, violent,
and often bizarre content created by ‘incels’ (hateful involuntary celibates). (.) Occasional meta/discussion and advice-
seeking posts are also welcome.” (https://www.reddit.com/r/IncelTears/, retrieved on 15th December 2019, emphasis
added)
The workings of the forum are predicated on several rules established by the moderators (see the right-hand column on
the subreddit) to be followed by the subreddit’s community. These rules guarantee anonymity and prevent violent, in-
flammatory content other than reposted screenshots, which cannot bear traceable links to the original hatemongering
websites. Also, the subreddit takes a welcoming view of choices regarding all consensual sexual practices. Negative, stig-
matising generalisations about all women and men, incels included, are prohibited. So are slurs and insults. All of this is to
guarantee that the website serves the purpose of safe entertainment and social critique of harmful ideologies manifest in
previous inflammatory posts. Therefore, these safety rules must be followed. However, the content on the subreddit, as this
study will bear out, transcends the originally envisaged format, namely screenshots of hateful incels’ provocative messages.
Similar to other subreddits, the goal of this specific online space is subject to negotiation, with the community’s co-
establishing the rules regarding the content (cf. Massanari, 2015). Thus, one of the rules specifies that “posts are about
self-identified incels, or people with clear tendecies (sic) seen in the incel community” (https://www.reddit.com/r/IncelTears,
emphasis added), which suggests that legitimate posts on the subreddit may not quote but rather be about incels or features
attributed to them. To illustrate this description of the subreddit, here is one humorous item/post that anticipates the topic of
this paper (see Fig. 1).
Each post on the subreddit at hand is based on what is here called its “pivot”, i.e. the central multimodal message, which
can be originally constructed by the Reddit user, copied from an offline source or reposted from another website. The pivot in
Fig. 1 is a photograph/scan of an old comic strip (presenting characters with speech bubbles) printed on a yellowish sheet of
paper with a crease. The Reddit user (i.e. Redditor), whose nickname has been deleted for ethical reasons (see the section on
methodology), recognises the comic as being reminiscent of the hypocritical incel logic, thereby giving the former a new layer
of meaning and humour. This is achieved through the post’s title, “A perfect example of an incel”, coupled with an evaluative
searchable tag “Self-awareness Level: Zero”. By the time the screenshot in Fig. 1 was taken, the post had generated 17,900
upvotes and 480 comments organised into various topical threads, which is typical of Reddit (see Massanari, 2015; Dynel and
Poppi, 2019). Besides sharing their views about incels and the surprising aptness of the comic, the users are preoccupied with
who the author of the comic is, and whether or not it could have been originally meant as satire (see Simpson, 2003; Park-
Ozee, 2019).
This paper is organised into seven sections. The second section briefly introduces the topic of humour as a vehicle for
serious meanings (here conceptualised in reference to ideologies), a research strand to which this paper contributes. Section 3
carefully depicts the methodology of the present study, describing the data collection and annotation methods. This is fol-
lowed by an analysis of three overarching types of humorous posts at r/IncelTears as the means of offering social critique of
incel ideology (Section 4). In Section 5, a methodological disclaimer is made about potential trolling practices. The picture of
incel ideology, as represented by the community members, is provided in Section 6. The paper closes with a discussion and
 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 74 (2020) 1–14 3

Fig. 1. Example of a post at r/IncelTears.

conclusions, summarising the nature and functions of the collective humorous practice on the subreddit in the light of
relevant humour theory and research on social media interactions.

2. Humour (online) as a vehicle for meanings and ideologies

Humour vs seriousness is a well-entrenched dichotomy, frequently captured under various monikers that indicate the
distinct key or frame pertaining to humour understood as a type of play or autotelic activity, i.e. one done for its own sake (for a
detailed discussion and references, see Dynel, 2017b, 2018). However, scholars agree that humour can communicate “serious”
meanings in everyday interactions (see Dynel, 2017b, 2018). That humour can reflect prevalent ideologies and communicate
relevant messages has been amply shown also in reference to public media discourse (e.g. Simpson, 2003; Billig, 2005; Santa
Ana, 2009) and humour on public social media. Non-humorous meanings are carried by not only memes (e.g. Shifman, 2013;
Milner, 2013, 2016; Duerringer, 2016; Al Zidjaly, 2017; Zappavigna, 2018; Dynel and Poppi, 2020c), the best known form of
online humour, but also other more rarely studied types of creative user-generated content, whether verbal or multimodal
(e.g. Davis et al., 2018; Dynel and Poppi, 2018; Vásquez, 2019). Most of these studies show online community members’
expression of critique of a wide range of pertinent socio-political topics. Participatory culture (Jenkins et al., 2009) fosters
social media users’ political participation (Anduiza et al., 2009), and hence collective representation of their shared beliefs
(Milner, 2013, 2016). Therefore, the analysis of online humour can offer important insights into the “social mind”, and hence
various ideologies (Shifman and Lemish, 2010).
Ideology is traditionally understood as “mental frameworksdthe languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of
thought, and the systems of representationdwhich different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of,
define, figure out and render intelligible the way society works” (Hall, 1996, 26). As many contemporary scholars reit-
erate, ideology concerns a systematic representation of the world comprised of beliefs shared and agreed on by a social
group (e.g. van Dijk, 1998; Charteris-Black, 2011). Ideologies, shaped by community members, then help organise social
life, and they are also reflected in group members’ discourse. Ideology can be communicated not only verbally but also
through multimodal means, which is what the present study will show. Based on the community rules about content-
sharing, the r/IncelTear(s) subreddit offers a venue for the humorous ridicule, coupled with serious criticism, of incels’
extremist ideology, as seen by the Reddit community. This critique is done in different ways, which will be examined
here.
4 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 74 (2020) 1–14

In line with Shifman’s (2013) studies on memes, the present focus is on three interrelated aspects that help depict
the nature of the digital items (which, however, cannot be reduced to memes) at r/IncelTears: their content (meanings
and ideologies), form (message composition) and stance (the participant structure). This last component concerns
“the ways in which addressers position themselves in relation to the text, its linguistic codes, its addressees, and other
potential speakers” (Shifman, 2013, 40). The notion of stance is of crucial significance for this research project insofar
as the items in the dataset are diversified and involve various (often nested) vantage points, which need to be teased
apart.

3. Methodology: data collection and annotation procedure

The data for the present study were culled manually from the then publicly accessible r/IncelTears subreddit in accordance
with the standard ethical practice in social-media research (see Townsend and Wallace, 2016; Franzke et al., 2020). The data
are fully anonymous (even nicknames are deleted in the selected examples), except for the names and monikers of public
figures, and were publicly available in accordance with the individual posters’ intent.
Using the “Top” and “of all time” criteria, the corpus of 250 most upvoted and commented on posts on the subreddit was
compiled on 9th September 2019. Therefore, the corpus is comprised of the most successful, i.e. attention-grabbing, pro-
vocative and possibly amusing, posts at the time. Since the focus of this study is humorous posts – in line with the envisaged
purpose of the subreddit to have fun and “enjoy” the “mockery” of incels – the data were gauged in the light of two criteria to
distil the relevant humorous examples within the corpus, which also encompassed non-humorous posts. Thereby, I avoided
the problem of the researcher bias in terms of what is amusing (see Dynel, 2018). First, the presence of humour (which need
not correspond with actual funniness, which is a matter of an individual’s idiosyncratic preferences) was identified based on
some form of incongruity, the hallmark of all humour (see e.g. Martin, 2007; Forabosco, 2008). Incongruity is perceived as a
structural property of creative stimuli (with innumerable manifestations, as the analysis of examples in Section 4 will
indicate) or a cognitive clash based on the surprise effect (see Dynel, 2009, 2013a and references therein). In line with the
recent trend in social media research (e.g. Vásquez, 2019; Dynel and Poppi, 2020a; cf. Chovanec and Tsakona, 2018), this
selection was further corroborated by users’ metapragmatic comments indicating their amusement, such as laughter signals
(notably, emoticons, “LOL” or “haha”) or verbal evaluations (“that’s funny”). As long as any such was found and validated as an
amusement indicator among the top 50 comments, a given post was confirmed as being humorous. Essentially, both
structural properties of humour (incongruity) and users’ metapragmatic evaluations were taken into account in order to
distinguish humour from non-humour on the subreddit. The two factors are considered necessary and jointly sufficient
conditions for the presence of humour.
Following a grounded-theory approach, the corpus data were hand-coded through iterative analysis. The coding process
relied on unpacking the multimodal units in terms of the form, content and stance (Shifman, 2013), as well as their humorous
potential (based on the two criteria mentioned above), and grouping them into categories. Hence, in several analytic steps,
five categories of items at r/IncelTears were ultimately identified and quantified (see Fig. 2). The proposed categories proved

Fig. 2. Distribution and categories of posts at r/IncelTears.

 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 74 (2020) 1–14 5

mutually exclusive and exhaustive of the entire dataset. They guaranteed the saturation of description, also beyond the
corpus, which was verified inductively based on another 200 random posts on the subreddit. Overall, the corpus is considered
representative in a sense that it contains sufficient data for the description, and in that the top content indicates what the
community sees as relevant and the “best” in line with the purpose of the subreddit.
The methodological operations leading to the local categorisation presented in Fig. 2 involved several steps. First, based
on the entire corpus (n ¼ 250), the category called “residue” (n ¼ 17) was teased apart, namely posts with no humorous
potential or ridiculing/critiquing function, such as a print screen with the note that incels.me is banned, former incels’
success sharing, or friendly advice-giving, which the subreddit does allow for but to which it is not devoted primarily.
Among the relevant posts, a distinction was made between those presenting (seemingly) reposted incel-generated content
in the pivots and those evidently showing criticism of incel ideology in the pivots from a non-incel perspective. All of the
latter qualified as items of (re)posted creative humour about incels (n ¼ 88). The former category further bifurcated into
(re)posted incel humour (n ¼ 26), i.e. humour (presumably) constructed by incels, and reposts of incels’ non-humorous
communications (n ¼ 119). Further, this latter group was divided into humorous appropriation reposts (n ¼ 91) and
reposts of inflammatory messages with no evident humorous potential manifested in the items or recognised by users
(n ¼ 28). This category encompassed extremely offensive pivots, such as those endorsing the abuse of women and pae-
dophilia, and other gruesome topics that might potentially promote “sick” humour (e.g. Dundes, 1989). However, the
pivots’ gravity seemed to have prevented humorous reactions. Like the residue category, the inflammatory messages did
not receive any amusement-indicating comments in the ensuing discussions. Some of them give rise to suspicion of
trolling, which the analysis will also address (see Section 5). The three categories of humour (humour about incels, incel
humour, and humorous appropriation reposts), which constitute the overwhelming majority of the corpus (n ¼ 205, cf. the
light blue, dark blue and purple in Fig. 2), are the main focus of analysis presented in Section 4. The illustrative examples
are selected for their representativeness of a given category.
The final stage of the annotation procedure involved dissecting the social critique of incels, their activities and beliefs
(i.e. ideologies), communicated through the humorous (re)posts constituting the dataset (see Section 6). This was done by
two coders (one of them being the author), whose results were then compared, with a neat verbal paraphrase of the
multimodal message (see Rose, 2007) being reached in each case. Then, again based on grounded theory, the data were
grouped topically into the recurring issues and overarching themes, following a pattern-coding approach (Saldaña, 2015).
All this was done through a Critical Discourse-Analytic lens, involving multimodal analysis (van Leeuwen, 2009; Machin
and Mayr, 2012; Machin, 2013) of the social media data (KhosraviNik and Unger, 2015). Critical Discourse Analysis proved
ideal for this investigation given its focus on the form and content of multimodal communicative acts informed by social
processes and practices, which had to be unearthed. Each multimodal digital item, comprised of visual and verbal com-
ponents (images, pictures and text, including that embedded in images), was vetted carefully in the light of a broad and
diversified socio-political context, in line with the Critical Discourse Analytic tradition (see Milner, 2013, 2016). This
analysis entailed understanding, among other things, incel jargon (e.g. “Chad” or “Alpha”, i.e. the most attractive man
whom women crave), the colour-pill rhetoric (see Ging, 2017; van Valkenburgh, 2018; Jaki et al., 2019; Baele et al., 2019)
and various socio-cultural phenomena (e.g. Karen hairstyle), as well as pop-cultural references (e.g. to feature films or
cartoons).

4. Categories of humorous posts

In this section, the three categories of vigilante humour at r/IncelTears are depicted in order to account for how the
community members make use of the platform.

4.1. Humour about incels

The first amply represented category of IncelTears humour (35,2% of the corpus of posts) encompasses items based on
pivots constituting humour that evidently takes an anti-incel stand; it makes fun of incels and criticises their actions and
ideology. The stance, as manifest in the pivot of the post and its title, is thus critical of the incel community.
As the five examples in Fig. 3 show, humorous items at r/IncelTears are sometimes reposts from other (social) media: a
repost of a witty tweet from a female comedian that implicitly juxtaposes the incel perspective with the standard non-
violent course of action (top left); a repost from 4chan that displays the oxymoronic contradiction within incel logic
(top right); as well as an online magazine article whose title addresses incels’ double standards. Alternatively, Reddit users
may claim authorship of the pivots, as in the item entitled “Am I allowed to do memes?” (bottom right). In many cases,
however, the authorship/source cannot be unequivocally identified, as is the case with the meme that presents incels’
hypersensitivity and that does not bear any signs of reposting (right column in the middle). In any case, since r/IncelTears
promotes reposting, the Redditors’ creative input tends to be reduced to a novel title (bottom left, see the next subsection).
This is unlike on most other humour websites, where mere replication of content is frowned upon, if not banned (see Dynel
and Poppi, 2019).
The examples are rooted in verbally communicated incongruities (with the pictures having little bearing on the humorous
message), except for the Loony Tunes item (bottom right). This post rests on the verbal-visual incongruity between a cartoon
for children and the serious topic of incels manifest across modalities. It features Bugs Bunny talking seriously to the ferocious
6 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 74 (2020) 1–14

Fig. 3. Five examples of humour about incels.

and dim-witted Taz, the metaphorical representation of “Incels”, as indicated by the tag embedded in the picture. Above the
picture is the serious advice to incels that Bugs Bunny gives in his idiolect (cf. the famous “Doc”). Overall, the (re)posts can
take various verbal and multimodal forms, such as a witty verbal tweet, an online satirical article title with a picture, and
visual-verbal humour that the users label “memes” (cf. Shifman, 2013). Indeed, some of the units do capitalise on evident
memetic patterns by creatively re-using stock images, whilst others arepresumably, nonce creations.
In Fig. 4, the two items in the upper row are based on popular meme templates with relevant novel captions about incels.
The top-right one involves a multimodal manifestation of the deception-based garden-path mechanism (see Dynel, 2009,
2018). This mechanism relies on the humour receiver’s being led to make a default/salient interpretation only to realise
that an alternative, hitherto hidden, one is actually intended. In this case, this deceptive effect depends on the offensive verbal
quotations (embedded in the picture) seemingly coming from a bully, together with the zoom-in followed by zoom-out
camera effect. Ultimately, the receiver’s recognition of a verbally and physically abused child turns out to be misguided,
with this “abuse” being actually self-inflicted. Additionally, this item offers a metaphorical representation of incels as naïve
children playing a silly game. The top right post is also based on multimodal metaphor (Forceville, 2008), involving text and
image, and incongruous juxtaposition of markedly different ways of incels’ negotiation/decision-making, depending on the
topic; as the captions indicate, the pictures are metaphorical illustrations of incels’ disagreement about the (ultimately all
misguided) causes of their celibacy and their orderly discussions about how to harm women. Conversely, the other two items
exploit novel visuals in tandem with verbal components. The pie chart shows the uneven distribution of people who ponder
about Chad, i.e. the epitome of attractive men (bottom right), incels being the overwhelming majority. The bottom left item
presents a sequence of pictures taken from the SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon with verbalisations added to them. The male
characters are conceptualised as incels who chant their slogans in the presence of women and later attribute their failures
with the latter to their own lack of physical attractiveness.
 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 74 (2020) 1–14 7

Fig. 4. Four examples of (non)memetic patterns.

4.2. Incel humour

This rather narrow category (10.4%) consists of posts with pivots that, similar to the category above, are inherently humorous.
This content seems to have been originally constructed by incels in order to communicate their ideology in a creative manner.
However, many of the items representing incels’ stance bear no signs of reposting and are, presumably, authored by the subreddit
users as satire, i.e. humour that criticises a social group through distortion or exaggeration (Simpson, 2003; Park-Ozee, 2019). The
satire of incels is done through parody, which represents a given object (here incel ideology) through imitation and “flaunts that
representation in order to criticise that object in a humorous way” (Rossen-Knill and Henry, 1997, 721; cf. Vásquez, 2016, 2019 and
references therein). The use of parody, which relies on hyperbole and exaggeration, explains the absurdity manifest in the posts.
However, what seems relevant in this context is a version of what is known as Poe’s law: “It is difficult to distinguish extremism from
satire [or rather parody] of extremism in online discussions unless the author clearly indicates his/her intent” (Milner, 2016, 142). It is
then impossible to tell without a shadow of the doubt who the original authors of many pivots in this category are, namely whether
these are genuine incel posts or (re)posts that dissociatively imitate, and hence mock (Everts, 2003), incel ideology. Be that as it may,
all the incel-supportive multimodal communications are (re)posted on the subreddit in order to ridicule the represented ideology.
Fig. 5 shows a selection of posts, only one of which is an evident repost from a misogynist platform, r/MGTOW, i.e. “men going
their own way” (see Jones et al., 2019), while the other four, for lack of reposting signs, could be the creations of the users operating
on this anti-incel subreddit, namely acts of parody and mockery of incel ideology. All the five items are based on pivots that display
incel ideology in a humorous manner, namely through various purposeful incongruous juxtapositions: women-supportive men
portrayed as dogs reaping sexual rewards for barking at incels (top left); a romantic vignette vs the woman’s cunning thoughts
(middle left); men’s sublime priorities vs women’s trivial ones (top right); the visual-verbal metaphorical representation of penises
as sausages either robust in virginity or shrinking due to sexual experience (bottom right); and an implicit comparison between
women and the Nazi, based on the pictures of Brie Larson (an actress who has recently played the eponymous heroine in Captain
8 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 74 (2020) 1–14

Fig. 5. Five examples of incel humour.

Marvel) and Hitler, each interacting with a little girl, presumably happy to be talking to a famous person (bottom left). The (re)
posting on the subreddit adds another humorous dimension through the presentation of this unfounded, irrational ideology that is
incongruous with a standard belief system. Redditors dissociate themselves from this warped worldview, which may also show in
the humorous titles of their posts, such as these ironic statements, which communicate implicit criticism through overt untruth-
fulness (see Dynel, 2018): “Guys, they got us.” and “It’s simple science.”, whereby the users imply respectively that incels’ eval-
uation of sexually active men is inadequate and that the presented claim about male penises is fallacious.
Like posts representing the other two categories, incel humour posts may rely on reposts of the same pivots on the IncelTears
subreddit. Overall the corpus (n ¼ 250) contains four cases of one pivot with two different titles, which can add extra humour.
Fig. 6 presents two items based on the same pivot (involving the chiastic-like juxtaposition of pictures and verbal replies from a
woman and from an incel, who – in the act of vengeance – mimics the woman’s negative reaction), with the version on the right
being a replication of the content on the left. Interestingly, the earlier version is less successful in terms of the number of
comments and upvotes, despite the ironic and humorous title that the later repost lacks. This indicates the unpredictability and
arbitrariness of users’ interactive responses. Incidentally, this pivot features an unknown individual (nicknamed St. Black-
Ops2Cel), who is an incel mascot present in many memes and on the r/braincels subreddit banner.
 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 74 (2020) 1–14 9

Fig. 6. One example of pivot reposting at r/IncelTears.

4.3. Humorous appropriation reposts

This most amply represented category of humour (36.4% of the dataset) encompasses reposts of incels’ originally non-
humorous posts from social media sites for sharing incel and/or misogynist messages (verbal or multimodal), such as these
subreddits: r/Incels, r/braincels or r/MGTOW, or from personal written conversations with people who appear to endorse incel

Fig. 7. Five examples of humorous appropriation reposts.

10 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 74 (2020) 1–14

ideology. This category is the primary type of post envisaged by the r/IncelTears subreddit (cf. its description). The humour
within this category arises primarily through Redditors’ reposting, and thus their dissociation from incels’ dubious logic, specious
arguments and vehement discourse, which tend to be so preposterous as to be amusing from an outside perspective. An
additional layer of humour may come from the witty titles Redditors give to their reposts.
The first verbal pivot (top left) develops in a surprising manner; what starts as a rational, peaceable anti-racism post turns
into a hateful one preaching extreme misogyny. Albeit serious by design, this post is considered humorous thanks to the
unexpected shift, and thus incongruity between the two parts of the text observed by those who do not subscribe to the
pernicious ideology. A similar humour-inducing shift can be found also in another repost (centre), which presents a forum
exchange of incels. While the original visual-verbal post appears to be a heart-warming endorsement of the idea of having a
dog when one is single, the commenting users, apart from criticising dogs, chastise women for being similar to dogs in that
they care for whoever maintains them. The last verbal post escalates the offensiveness by implicitly disparaging women
through the use of the polysemous term “bitch”. The humour of these reposts may stem from more than one source. For
instance, the item in the bottom left corner is a repost of an anti-incel post from a different subreddit that encompasses a
multimodal communication of an incel irrationally ranting about a woman who has put her bag on the seat beside her in a
train compartment with only the two of them inside. The repost includes a close-up of the man’s mirror reflection that he
unwittingly captured in his photograph of the woman. Both the man’s vindictive irrational post and the compromising selfie
are open to ridicule. Additionally, humour may stem, sometimes solely, from titles given to pivots. The latter is the case with
the witty title “Just because I look up.” (top right). The Reddit user dissociatively attributes these defensive statements to the
incel who has authored the pivot comprising a selection of pictures showing a muscular sportsman (with the looks for which
the incel longs) in order to implicitly criticise incels’ predilection for ogling handsome men and their homophobia. On the
other hand, the humorously ironic title “Almost there” (bottom right) critically implicates that the incel quoted in the pivot is
far from recognising his hypocrisy that emerges in the quoted exchange of posts. This hypocrisy is a source of humour in its
own right, revealing the incongruity within the incel’s logic.

5. Potential trolling

The above analysis is based on the reconstruction of the original users’ and reposting users’ stances and communicative
intentions. The interpretations have been offered in the light of the evidence at hand, including various cues (in form and
content) indicating that a given message is a repost, a post with an offline message constructed by a different individual, or an
original contribution. However, an important methodological disclaimer needs to be made. Due to the anonymity that social
media afford, the authorship, and hence the genuine stance (incel vs counter-incel), of any of the content in the r/IncelTears
posts cannot be categorically known and can only be conjectured, with various degrees of certainty. While the lack of full
confidence about the originality/replication of the pivots has no impact on the proposed categories of humour on the sub-
reddit, some suspicion of trolling activities within the data has arisen.
Trolling is a polysemous notion in both popular parlance and academic discourse. The understanding endorsed here cor-
responds to the provenance of the word and the properties of the activity it captured originally. The alternative folk meanings,
sometimes elevated to the status of academic ones (see Graham, 2019), capture a whole range of aggression-based or pro-
vocative communicative acts that formally fall under other technical terms, such as flaming, hate speech or e-bile (see Dynel, 2016
for discussion and references). In contrast to these other overtly aggressive practices, trolling – as traditionally understood – is an
online activity that need not involve verbal aggression but that inherently rests on deception (Dynel, 2016; cf. Hardaker, 2010),
which resides in insincere and covertly untruthful messages (see Dynel, 2018). Therefore, a troll intends to come across as an
individual sincerely participating in a computer-mediated interaction whilst covertly pretending to honestly have the opinions,
interests or goals in order to deceive the target, often multiple users, in order to trigger their emotional reactions; this is all for
the sake of his/her own pleasure, as well as the entertainment of those who can see through the deception (see Dynel, 2016).
Various manifestations of potential nested acts of trolling, whether or not detected or suspected by any users, can be
observed among the posts on the subreddit. Due to their dubiousness, these examples could not be assigned to any category of
humour (the potential candidate being humorous appropriation reposts); they are all qualified as being non-humorous for
lack of humorous reactions in the commenting posts that follow.
In the first case in Fig. 8 (left), the Redditor shares his forum exchange with a man, labelling him as an incel. Within the
repost of this (evidently, edited) part of the interaction, the allegedly abused man’s (now, the posting Redditor’s) confession
was received with some suspicion by the presumed incel who regarded the former as not being honest, and hence explicitly
considered him a troll. It is difficult to tell where this reposted interaction took place (e.g. on an incel forum or a platform for
sharing problems) or how it began, and this is crucial for an adequate analysis of this item. Logically, if the Redditor was
reporting on his genuine self-revelation on a non-incel forum, it is rather unlikely that he should be willing to reframe his
interaction about the traumatic experience as a post on the anti-incel subreddit. In any case, there are no reasons to label the
disbelieving man as an incel, based solely on his suspicion of trolling or humble bragging. If, however, the interaction was
performed on an incel forum, the man reporting the abuse must have been trying to stir up controversy only to show the
effect at r/IncelTears, regardless of the discovery of his trolling activity. This is because an abused individual (supportive of
anti-women ideology) should not be willing to first sincerely share his ordeal with incels and then contribute to an anti-incel
forum and act against incels. Whatever the underlying premises and context of the original interaction may be, it is rather
clear that the Redditor was intent on (deceptively) picturing the interlocutor as an incel.
 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 74 (2020) 1–14 11

Fig. 8. Three examples of potential trolling (non-humorous inflammatory posts).

The second item taken from an incel forum (centre) comes across as an act of trolling that ridicules incels, while the
Redditor appears to take it at face value. The pivot presents an incel’s complaint about his mother’s fussiness and a self-
revelation about prolonged lack of hygiene (measured in months), which sounds implausible, and can hardly be inter-
preted as the man’s sincere admission. Whilst deliberate lack of hygiene is a leitmotif on incel forums, a real incel would,
presumably, avoid hyperbole in such a context and would not label his post as a serious one, which is a default assumption.
Therefore, this post must have been submitted to incite the legitimate users of incels.me. The Reddit repost of this message
tagged with some good advice may be a manifestation of the user’s naivety or, more likely, a deliberate act of overtly feigned
ignorance geared towards ridiculing the “incel”.
The same might hold for the third example (right), as long as it was indeed posted on an incel platform, rather than being the
Redditor’s fabrication. Which is the case is impossible to tell; despite the “posted by” and “report post” notes, the original post
cannot be found anywhere online (and the flag symbol and blue font do not seem to be used on any mainstream platform). In this
Reddit post, the user appears to naively (or deceptively) report what he/she considers a previous act of gender deception. The
pivot (which has gone viral thanks to further reposting) is a misogynist message whose author presents himself as a woman
advocating an extreme version of incels’ misogynistic ideology (cf. Jaki et al., 2019), which pictures women as zealous sex
providers. However, opening with the “Legalize it already” catchphrase and closing with a third-person reference to women, the
text verges on absurdity, all of which discloses the covert untruthfulness of the gender self-description (cf. Dynel, 2018). The
pivot, if indeed posted elsewhere previously, appears to have been a parodic spoof – as some commenting users also observe –
meant to ridicule incel ideology, or an act of trolling intended to incite unknowing incels to gladly endorse the content, rather
than being an incel’s deceptive creation, which the (re)posting Redditor suggests. Ultimately, the latter may actually be the
original author of the entire kudos-generating (but deception-based) pivot, which does not show evident signs of reposting from
an identifiable website despite the saliently obliterated username of the of alleged incel (deceptively) acting as a woman.

6. r/IncelTears community’s conceptualisation and critique of incel ideology

This section collectively presents the underlying ideological themes carefully distilled based on the corpus of posts
(n ¼ 250) through Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis. These components of incel ideology tend to recur across the dataset
(here illustrated with the examples given in the previous sections), while one item can merge two or more themes. This
general picture of incels’ ideology represented by the totality of outsiders’ multimodal (re)posts at r/IncelTears is very much in
line with Baele et al.’s (2019) results about the hierarchical organisation of incels’ social reality and the historical narrative
behind their actions, and Jaki et al.’s (2019) findings about incels’ in-groups and out-groups. Nevertheless, the r/IncelTears
community places more emphasis on the matters that are subject to humorous disparagement, which, by default, underlies
each (re)post on the platform. This also means that some of the users’ original items are based on hyperboles, and hence
absurdity, which augment the posts’ humorous potential. These hyperboles must be teased apart (in tandem with intertextual
allusions) from the propositional content of the multimodal items. This is the premise underlying the non-humorous
description and critique of incel ideology depicted below.
One of the themes prevalent in the data is incels’ irrationality and flawed logic, which shows in numerous ways,
encompassing striking errors in reasoning (e.g. Fig. 4, bottom left) and unfounded claims based on no evidence or fabricated
scientific evidence (e.g. Fig. 5, bottom right), as well as manipulated social and historical facts (cf. Baele et al., 2019). Thereby,
incels pursue their agenda and subvert commonly accepted principles, such as safe sex. On a related note, incels are presented
as being hypocritical and having double standards. For instance, they protest against being judged based on their looks but do
evaluate women according to their attractiveness (e.g. Fig. 1, Fig. 3, bottom left, and Fig. 7, bottom right). Incels’ ideology is rife
with contradictions, such as the fact that they preach hatred and harbour hostility towards women but simultaneously yearn
for their attention and affection (e.g. Fig. 3, top right).
12 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 74 (2020) 1–14

Whilst emphasising their psychological, intellectual and moral superiority over women and all males who pander to
women, incels are resigned to their alleged physical inferiority, and hence inescapable doom (Baele et al., 2019). Focused on
their physical flaws, they revel in their frustration and misery, with their predicament being actually self-inflicted (e.g. Fig. 4,
top left). Blind to their own responsibility, they point to the social injustice, which is not amenable to change. At the same
time, they are hypersensitive and recognise prevalent anti-incel bias and aggression (e.g. Fig. 3, middle right). They take
offence at any criticism, even mild, considering it intolerance, which is also why they find r/IncelTears abusive and unfair.
They are absolutely devoted to their ideology and impervious to logical argumentation or advice on how they could be more
successful in their interactions with women.
Incels conceptualise themselves as inadvertent victims of fate and women, by whom they are (supposedly) rejected. Incels
believe that women care for men’s looks (notably, great height). Consequently, incels attribute their lack of success with
women primarily to their repelling looks (e.g. Figs. 1 and 4, bottom left), at the same time not bothering to take basic care of
themselves as if they are doomed to failure. They are preoccupied with attractive males (more than women are), whom they
envy and whom they like to ogle (e.g. Fig. 4, bottom right and Fig. 7, top right), albeit often voicing homophobic views (cf. Jaki
et al., 2019). They also secretly seek attractive men’s acceptance and long for relationships and genuine contacts with women.
However, they are, in fact, timid and scared of rejection; they do not know how to approach women, whether online or in
face-to-face interactions. This is why they prefer to identify with war-mongering fictional villains and misfits and act as
vociferous advocates of anti-female abusive ideology, which shows in their discourse. Perhaps this is because they are often
compared to, and even equated with, MGTOW (see Jones et al., 2019).
Deprived of sexual contacts and disgruntled about their inefficient attempts at interacting with women, they burn with hate
for all females, the alleged reason of their predicament and the root of all evil, which shows in their radical misogynist discourse
(Jaki et al., 2019) and dastardly deeds they report on or fantasise about (e.g. Figs. 6 and 7, bottom left). Seeking revenge, they fuel
hatred for women (e.g. Fig. 4, top right), denying them any human rights, let alone the privileges that feminists have been fighting
for (e.g. Fig. 7, top left). They vocally endorse verbal and non-verbal aggression against women, who are sex objects to whom all
men, incels included, are naturally entitled (e.g. Fig. 3, bottom right and Fig. 7, centre). Moreover, they have deviant sexual
fantasies involving molestation and rape, claiming that this is what incels (oppressors) and women (victims) deserve by default
(e.g. Fig. 6). Women are conceptualised as sex providers, always on duty for cheap favours that non-incel men (“normies”/“betas”
and “chads”/“alphas” cf. Ging, 2017; Baele et al., 2019) pay them; they engage in prostitution and promiscuity, even though they
ignore incels. Women are chastised in all dimensions, not only the sexual one (e.g. Fig. 5, top right, and Fig. 7, bottom left). Incels
picture them as manipulative, mercenary, cunning (e.g. Fig. 5, middle left), and generally evil creatures acting to the detriment of
the society (e.g. Fig. 5, bottom left). Incels also show disdain for men who do not endorse incel beliefs and are respectful towards
women, with a view to receiving sexual benefits (e.g. Fig. 5, top left), despising them for feminism endorsement and lookism.

7. Discussion and conclusions

Based on a corpus of most highly evaluated items, this study has examined the vigilante humour on the IncelTears sub-
reddit, a platform for sharing, preferably humorous, posts concerning incels. As the content analysis has shown, the platform
features (but is not restricted to): (1) humorous posts critical of incels, constructed or reposted by the community; (2) parodic
posts or dissociative reposts of items resembling incel humour and indicative of their ideology, which takes on a new
humorous-critical dimension; (3) as well as humorous appropriation reposts of originally non-humorous communications,
which may demonstrate the humorous potential to the new audience, thanks to witty titles and/or the vices of the original
item’s author (e.g. irrationality, preposterous logic or vehemence). The category of humorous appropriation indicates that
reposting can shift the original message’s function and meaning within a different participant structure, which entails
embedding the distinct interactional frames (see Chovanec, 2015).
Even though the subreddit is touted as a platform for reposting, which might be tantamount to simple reproduction of
previously encountered content, most of the items in the corpus display a high degree of creativity in the user-generated
multimodal content (see also Massanari, 2015; Vásquez and Creel, 2017; Vásquez, 2019, Dynel and Poppi, 2019). Except for
the humorous appropriation category, creativity underlies the humorous pivots at r/IncelTears, with the credit being given to the
original authors of the (re)posted content, whether users of the subreddit or other authors, including incels. Creativity may also
show in the humorous post titles across the three categories of humorous items distinguished here. In the case of humour
appropriation reposts or mere repetition of pivots within the subreddit, creativity is restricted to the title, with the pivot being
non-creative. Generally speaking, creativity is a concomitant of humour (see Vásquez, 2019; Dynel and Poppi, 2019 and refer-
ences therein). Both involve novelty and surprise (see Martin and Ford, 2018), as well as uncanny and surprising juxtapositions.
All this is the essence of incongruity, which is the central mechanism of humour (for discussion and references, see Martin, 2007;
Forabosco, 2008; Dynel, 2009; Martin and Ford, 2018). The humorous items on the subreddit exhibit some structural incongruity
(e.g. a juxtaposition of two incongruous pictures or chunks of text, and hence the notions or ideas they represent; or a mismatch
between what is stated and meant in irony or parody) and/or cognitive incongruity (notably, the shocking/preposterous ideology
that incels have; or internal contradiction in an incel’s logic).
The second common denominator underlying the humorous items on the subreddit is the disparagement of incels. This is done
through ridicule, as specified by the official rules of the subreddit, which aims to demean and humiliate the butt/target (Billig,
2005) and through mockery (see Everts, 2003), i.e. imitation oriented towards dissociation from the echoed ideology, consti-
tuting a form of parody (Rose, 2007; Rossen-Knill and Henry, 1997; Denith, 2000; Hutcheon, 2000; Vásquez, 2016, 2019 and
 M. Dynel / Language & Communication 74 (2020) 1–14 13

references therein). Generally, all the vigilante humour at r/IncelTears qualifies as disparagement humour, which is intended to
“elicit amusement through the denigration, derogation, or belittlement of a given target” (Ferguson and Ford, 2008, 283-284) and
is amenable to consideration through the lens of the classical superiority theory of humour (see Martin and Ford, 2018; Dynel and
Poppi, 2020b for discussion and references). This disparagement of, and the expression of superiority over, incels (whose vices are
pointed out) contribute to the online community’s mirthful experience even though disparagement/superiority-building cannot
be considered the source of humour per se (Zillmann and Cantor, 1976; see also Dynel, 2013b). Importantly, the disparagement of
incels at r/IncelTears is anchored in the Reddit community’s genuine negative disposition towards, and hence disaffiliation from,
the target (see Dynel, 2013b). This disaffiliative disparagement humour must not be mistaken for other forms of humour, also
online, based on playfully pretended aggression and jocular abuse (see Dynel and Poppi, 2019 and reference therein). Negatively
disposed towards incels, community members voice their “serious” criticism of harmful incel ideology while (re)posting mes-
sages orientated towards amusement. Hence, the humorous items on the subreddit offer further evidence that humour tends to
be the bearer of serious meanings, notably critique performed by individual users as a participatory online practice (see also
Milner, 2013; Duerringer, 2016; Zappavigna, 2018; Davis et al., 2018; Dynel and Poppi, 2018; Vásquez, 2019).
At the same time, this sharing and enjoying of the humour and serious criticism of incels (also through the comments
following the (re)posts) serve the purpose of the community members’ bonding and solidarity-building against the target
(see Dynel and Poppi, 2020a). The producers and receivers of anti-incel humour build an in-group (for an overview, see
Martin and Ford, 2018), disaffiliating themselves from the target, whose ideology is mocked and ridiculed, and thus criticised
beyond the layer of humour and outside the humorous frame. Like many other forms of user-generated humour online (e.g.
Massanari, 2015; Demjén, 2016; Vásquez and Creel, 2017; Vásquez, 2019; Dynel and Poppi, 2019), the humour at r/IncelTears
fosters solidarity among anonymous community members. Engaging in the online practice, the Redditors testify to their
compatibility in terms of their sense of humour, as well as the ideologies they endorse or criticise. This affiliation is also the
hallmark of the Reddit participatory culture, which relies on “civic engagement” and “strong support for creating and sharing
one’s creations, giving the members a sense of social connection” (Jenkins et al., 2009, 3; Massanari, 2015).
Overall, through their diversified vigilante (re)posting activities, most of which display humorous potential and exert
humorous effects, Reddit users report on and criticise extremist incel ideology. The conceptualisation of this pernicious
ideology emerging from the social critique rendered via humour is compatible with the previous studies of incels’ online
rhetoric (Baele et al., 2019; Jaki et al., 2019), which shows their distorted view of the world and facts, coupled with their faulty
and perverse logic rife with contradictions. Blaming women for their predicament, they hurl abuse and voice various
misogynistic opinions about women (on online misogyny, see Anderson and Cermele, 2014; Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos
Blitvich, 2014; Banet-Weiser and Miltner, 2016; Ging, 2017; Jones et al., 2019). However, some extreme examples posted by r/
IncelTears users raise suspicions regarding the sincerity of the pivots, which qualify as potential trolling performed by the
Redditors or other users. This sheds new light on the conceptualisation of incel ideology based on automatically compiled
corpora, the analysis of which may unwittingly include also the discourse of trolls deceptively acting as incels or their
supporters/followers with a view to sparking emotional reactions both in incels and in their critics.

Funding information

This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland (Project number 2018/30/E/HS2/00644).

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Fabio I. M. Poppi for drawing my attention to r/IncelTears and his inspiration, as well as Gosia
Krawentek for her help with data collection and annotation procedures (all in accordance with their duties in the Sonata Bis
project, Project number 2018/30/E/HS2/00644).

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Marta Dynel is Associate Professor in the Department of Pragmatics at the University of Łód
z. Her research interests are primarily in humour studies, neo-
Gricean pragmatics, the pragmatics of interaction, communication on social media, impoliteness theory, the philosophy of irony and deception, as well as the
methodology of research on film discourse. She is the author of 2 monographs, over 100 journals papers and book chapters, as well as 13 (co)edited volumes
and special issues. She is Editor-in-Chief of Lingua.