This paper gives a theoretical introduction to the pragmatic research on the communication of public humour in traditional and new media, notably on social media. It discusses some of the central problems relevant to humour research and media communication. It describes, among other things, how the technological affordances of traditional and new media affect the underlying participation frameworks and how audience involvement affects humour as an interactional process, in both unscripted and scripted (sometimes also fictional) mediatised discourses. This introductory article to the special issue on the creation and sharing of humour across the media also calls attention to the need for multimodal analysis of media humour, which ranges from memes to broadcasts and films, as well as to the processes of decontextualisation and recontextualisation, which are germane to the production and reception of humour in various traditional and new media contexts.

本文对传统媒体和新媒体尤其是社交媒体上的公共幽默传播进行了务实的研究，从理论上进行了介绍。它讨论了与幽默研究和媒体传播有关的一些核心问题。它描述了传统和新媒体的技术能力如何影响底层的参与框架，以及在无脚本和脚本（有时也是虚构的）调解性话语中，观众的参与如何通过互动过程影响幽默。这是一篇关于在整个媒体上创造和分享幽默的特刊的介绍性文章，还提醒人们注意对媒体幽默进行多模式分析的必要性，从模因到广播和电影，以及去上下文化和重新上下文化的过程，