Social Media War: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Black Humor in Bassem Yousef Interview with Piers Morgan

Abstract

With the development of social media technology, language becomes a crucial tool that influences the recognition of the entire world especially in sensitive cases like the Palestinian-Israeli war in Gaza, October 2023.  Agitating the world street, Arabic as well as the western one, is an intellectual method to end the war and save Palestinian citizens from the Israeli Holocaust. Black humor is a knowledgeable policy which can be used in a time when all the parties involved are emotionally charged. Bassem Yousif uses such genre with Piers Morgan's interview to show his rejection toward the war as well as the Israeli state's methods of warfare. Such procedure appears to be operative as his interview is watched by four million people after only three hours of publication. At the same time, many social media influencers and actors support Palestinian people through messages posted on their social media accounts though they had not done so previously. This study attempts to answer the question of how humor is used to expose the violence of the war from a critical discourse point of view. It also aims at finding out how this method influences and shapes public perception. To achieve the aims, it is hypothesized that different critical discourse tools are used like speech acts, understatements, rhetorical questions and repetition. To accomplish the aim and test its hypothesis, a critical discourse analysis is conducted on Piers Morgan interview with Bassem Yousif by means of an eclectic model.