Humor in satirical news headlines: Analyzing humor form and content, and their relations with audience engagement

Satirical news presents a critique of current affairs through humor. Previous research suggests that satirical news can have different humor forms (e.g. linguistic strategies) and humor contents (e.g. news topics, targets), and that such differences in humor characteristics can influence audience effects of satirical news. This paper extends this research by analyzing these relationships across different types of outlets in a content analysis (Study 1) and audience engagement analysis (Study 2). In Study 1, we compared humor forms and contents of satirical news headlines posted on Facebook (N = 5,775) between outlets from different countries (United States and the Netherlands) with different political leanings (liberal and conservative). Findings showed that the coded humor forms reasonably consistently characterized satirical news across outlet types, while humor contents did not. In Study 2, we examined associations of the humor characteristics with the number of likes and comments the Facebook posts received. Results were often outlet-specific, especially in case of the coded humor contents. This paper thus reveals that when satirical news’ audience effects differ by humor characteristics, this may be attributed less to differences in humor form, and more to differences in humor content.