“Who says talking about depression isn't fun?” Exploring targets of humour in TED Talks on mental disorders

In 2006, TED – originally conceived as a conference aimed at the dissemination of Technology, Entertainment, and Design – started hosting the videos of the now-famous TED talks online. This allowed TED to spread ideas beyond the physical and temporal constraints of the hic-et-nunc setting in which the talks were delivered and to make them accessible to a potentially world-wide audience made of both experts and non-experts. At the outset, TED talks represented “an innovation within innovation, as they are a new tool of popularisation that breaches the typical ‘scientist-mediator-audience’ triangularisation, bringing scientists directly into contact with their audiences” (Scotto di Carlo, 2013, p. 82). In order to disseminate knowledge, TED talks combine traits of English for Specific Purposes and English for Academic Purposes (e.g., the use of specialized terms, references to research studies and figures), although with a lower frequency than in expert-to-expert communication, and traits of colloquial language. Within this general framework, TED talks developed their own characteristics, which Mattiello (2017, p. 79) grouped into the following three categories: reduced technicality in both content and vocabulary, informal register and humorous tone, and narrative text type. Given their popularity, TED talks eventually became “a new spoken web-based genre” (Scotto di Carlo, 2013, p. 82) or a “new hybrid genre” (Caliendo, 2012, p. 101), which soon turned into an accepted, no longer really novel web-mediated genre. Given the peculiar features that distinguish them from other genres of popularization discourse, in recent years TED talks have attracted increasing interest (Compagnone, 2014; D’Avanzo, 2015; Masi, 2020a, 2020b; Pierini, 2019; Rasulo, 2015; Scotto di Carlo, 2014b, 2014a, 2015). Some studies have focused their attention on the use of humour in TED talks (Mattiello, 2017; Pozdena, 2020; Scotto di Carlo, 2013; Shilikhina, 2015), and this paper aims to contribute further to this subject. TED talks are “planned speech events” (Salvi, 2012, p. 75) and the very fact that an official guide to public speaking specific to TED talks exists (Anderson, 2016) confirms that in a TED talk nothing is left to chance, humour included. Indeed, the just-mentioned guide explicitly mentions humour and concentrates on two of the various functions that humour may have (see Lee, 2006, p. 64, although focussing on spoken academic discourse), namely to create connection with the audience and to stimulate reasoning. This paper presents a study conducted on a corpus of TED talks delivered in English and related to mental disorder, with particular emphasis on depression. In particular, the study focuses on how humour is used to disseminate knowledge about a topic that is generally perceived, written and spoken about as particularly serious, when not treated as a taboo. Bearing in mind that in TED talks humour is mainly non-spontaneous and carefully crafted, the study also aims to show how humorous tones intertwine with storytelling, since in many cases the speakers draw on their personal experiences with mental illness either as patients or as health care professionals (or even both), and to explore how humour is deployed as a resource to raise awareness on mental health and overcome the stigma associated with it.