This paper reports the findings of a study on the mechanics of insult-retort adjacency pairs in Twitter
interactions. The analysis concerns primarily the humorous retorts made by the pornographic entrepreneur Stormy Daniels, who has
been pelted with politically-loaded misogynist insults, many of which qualify as slut-shaming. These acts of verbal aggression are
the result of her involvement in a legal dispute with President Donald Trump and his former attorney. Based on a carefully
collected corpus of public exchanges of tweets, our qualitative analysis achieves a few goals. First, it brings to focus a
previously ignored function of witty and creative humour, including the self-deprecating variety, as a powerful rhetorical
strategy that helps address insults with dignity and that displays the speaker’s intellectual superiority over the attacker and a
good sense of humour, as evidenced by multiple users’ positive metapragmatic evaluations of Stormy Daniels’s retorts. Second, these findings carry vital
practical implications for handling misogynist comments, including slut-shaming, online. Third, this study offers new insights
into the workings of insults and retorts thereto, not only in multi-party interactions on social media, specifically on Twitter,
but also through traditional channels of communication.
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