Digital Death Humour: Exploring the Role of Humour in Death-Related Content on TikTok.

Abstract

This study explores the role of humour in shaping digital death discourses on TikTok. examining how users engage with mortality, the afterlife, and dying in playful yet profound ways. Through an analysis of three content strands--#celebritydeathprank, Heaven Receptionist skits, and mourning-dedicated accounts--it investigates how TikTok's participatory culture enables users to navigate and reframe death through creative and often comedic means. Rather than centering grief, this study highlights how humour serves as a mechanism for engaging with existential themes, fostering communal rememberence, and reimagining collective imaginaries of death. By leveraging TikTok's affordances--such as remixing, commenting, and algorithmic visibility--users produce content that blurs the boundaries between adversity and the absurd, intimacy and spectacle. This study contributes to research on digital death by demonstrating how social media platforms cultivate new vernaculars and ephemeralities of death discourse, where humour becomes the central mode of engagement with mortality.