Puns in Japanese Computer Mediated Communication: Observations from Misconversion Phenomena

This study extends humor theory to explain puns originating from orthographic conversion in Japanese computermediated communication (CMC). Standard word-processing software converts Romanized input to appropriate orthographic output consisting of phono-graphic kana and ideographic kanji. Such software may produce an output often semantically incongruent with the intended output, which can be humorous. The dataset analyzed here consists of 492 online submissions to the “Humorous Misconversion Contest” held by the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation. Since not all misconversions are funny, the study accounts for how misconversions satisfy funniness conditions of the Semantic Script Theory of Humor. The study finds that script interpretability, as the basis of script compatibility, and script opposition are of most importance in humor perception. It also finds that script oppositeness resides not only within texts but also in outer contexts. As yet, very few academic studies have discussed humor in Japanese CMC. Since a majority of verbal humor is researched on alphabet-based languages, the observations here are expected to enrich and broaden our knowledge of humor.