Who says that talking about depression isn’t fun? Exploring humour in TED talks on mental disorder

In 2006, TED started hosting the videos of the now-famous TED talks online. 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). In order to disseminate knowledge, TED talks combine traits of English for Specific Purposes, English for Academic Purposes and colloquial language. Given their popularity, TED talks eventually became “a new spoken web-based genre” (Scotto di Carlo 2013) or a “new hybrid genre” (Caliendo 2012). This paper presents a study conducted on a corpus of TED talks delivered in English and related to mental disorder. 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.