An audience reception study of danmu-enabled humour in multimodal texts

Danmu-mediated communication reveals the intricate process of audience participation and preference. Such intricacy of communication includes danmu subtitling as a translation, danmu commentary as a multimodal text as opposed to the original, subtitled video clip, which consists of audiences’ insights into their heads-on experience, and familiarity with the audiovisual subject matter, all as a reception-side paratext (Freeth, 2021: 130–131). Reception-side paratexts provide an invaluable platform for capturing readers’ critical understandings of original texts (ibid.: 118). Among these paratexts, this article argues that danmu functions significantly and cumulatively to transform humour in the digital mediascape. The authors aim to measure participants’ reception of danmu-enabled humour in thematically heterogeneous films, fantastic animation and romcom-themed films. To gauge the impact of danmu-enabled humour on viewers, this paper conducted a survey and interview-based reception study with 30 participants who watched danmu and non-danmu-loaded videos from different film topics. The results suggest that, while danmu videos do not significantly differ from non-danmu videos in terms of evaluations of humour, participants prefer the animation themed without danmu and the romcom themed with danmu. This suggests that the consumption of danmu-loaded videos is film-topic specific and humour-feature diverse. This study points to insightful relations between audience reception and the production of digitally-born multimodal texts, which could provide evidence to improve online participatory and interactive experience, and build customizable and accompanying user experience.