Digital Orality and Islamic Preaching: Ethnosociopragmatics as a Lens for Humor in Religious Discourse

Humor has become a pervasive yet insufficiently theorized feature of Indonesian digital da’wah. Existing studies tend to describe rhetorical techniques or audience reception, but rarely examine humorous utterances as culturally embedded pragmatic acts within platform-mediated preaching. This study addresses that gap by investigating how humor in Indonesian YouTube sermons encodes social, cultural, and religious values using an ethnosociopragmatic framework grounded in Mey’s pragmatics as social practice and sociopragmatic theories of appropriateness. The corpus comprises 10 sermons (approximately 600 minutes) delivered by five prominent ulama, selected through explicit criteria: minimum 20-minute duration, over 50,000 views, verified channels, and identifiable humorous segments. From these videos, 109 humorous utterances were segmented as the unit of analysis based on syntactic completion, prosodic closure, topic shift, and audience laughter cues. Data were transcribed verbatim and coded inductively using a structured codebook mapping value domains and oral forms; double-coding yielded 87% inter-coder agreement, and findings were triangulated with repeated viewing and 15 semi-structured audience interviews. Results show three dominant value domains: social solidarity and soft critique (38%), cultural identity through oral forms such as pepatah, pantun, parikan, and guyon pesantren (34%), and reinforcement of religious virtues including sabr, adab, humility, and moderation (28%). These findings demonstrate that humor functions as a value-bearing speech act that digitally recontextualizes sastra lisan while sustaining moral authority. The study contributes theoretically by extending ethnosociopragmatics to digital religious discourse and implies that culturally calibrated humor enhances ethical engagement in contemporary platform preaching.