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Article published In: ‘Only joking’: Negotiating offensive humour in interaction
Edited by Chi-Hé Elder, Eleni Kapogianni and Ibi Baxter-Webb
[Pragmatics & Cognition 32:1] 2025
► pp. 233–260

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Insincerely yours

On the uses of sarcasm

 | Yale University
Published online: 26 September 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.24020.hor
Abstract
A lie commits the speaker to the truth of an assertion they believe false. But a speaker uttering a falsehood in jest or sarcasm arguably neither asserts that falsehood nor lies. The insincere speaker essentially “uncommits” to the truth of their remark. Social media posters, criminal defendants, and politicians facing pushback regularly appeal to the sarcasm defense as a get-out-of-accountability-free card, often supporting this move by citing a purported insincerity marker accompanying the critical utterance. But proffered plausible deniability may be implausible, resulting in legal or public disputes. How credible is the sarcasm or “only joking” defense, particularly when retroactively invoked? In Grice’s terms, how do we distinguish what a speaker says from what a speaker makes as if to say? This study surveys modes of “uncommitment” and the interactional and grammatical properties of devices associated with signals of insincerity that have been employed from twenty-two centuries ago to today.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Sarcasm, flagged and unflagged: Take 1
  • 3.Sarcasm, parody, and the reasonable reader
  • 4.Winking eyes, crossed fingers, exculpatory emojis
  • 5.Falsehood, morality, and the garden path
  • 6.Sarcasm (flagged and unflagged) revisited: Linguistic evidence
  • 7.Double audience revisited: Equivocations and dogwhistles
  • 8.On failed sarcasm and its consequences
  • 9.Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
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