'That’s depressing, lol': Humor markers in the self-addressed discourse of futureme letters
Abstract
This article examines humor as a cognitive and pragmatic resource in asynchronous self-addressed digital discourse, focusing on publicly available letters written on the FutureMe.org platform. A corpus of 3,426 English-language letters sent by users to their future selves was compiled and searched for four widely used humor markers, lol, haha, hehe, and lmao (along with their spelling variants). The resulting 652 concordances were manually annotated to determine whether these markers generally index humorous intent or specifically signal amusement at the communicative incongruence inherent in addressing a future self. Drawing on incongruity-based theories of humor, the study conceptualizes the FutureMe letter as a genre that simultaneously presupposes an addressee and challenges the epistemic conditions typical for epistolary communication. The results indicate that 11.7% of all humor-marker occurrences explicitly accompany reflections on the paradoxical status of the addressee (being both Self and Other), revealing humor’s role in managing conceptual fuzziness. It has also been found that lol, haha and lmao signal humorous effect (laughter) more often than hehe. Qualitative analysis further discusses three primary functions of humor markers: (i) indexing amusement at the strange, playful incongruity of writing to oneself across time; (ii) signaling or reinforcing a joke; and (iii) mitigating excessively grave, emotional, or face-threatening content. The findings suggest that humor in these letters serves less as a reaction to situationally humorous content and more as a pragmatic device for stance adjustment under atypical communicative conditions. By foregrounding humor’s role in resolving genre-based and epistemic incongruities, the article contributes to research on digital communication, humor pragmatics, and stance in self-addressed discourse.
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