Irony and sarcasm: British behaviours?

This paper starts from a theme that Prof. Morley and I addressed in work for the IntUne project; that of national identity. At that point, we looked at how the British press described the countries and nationalities of our project partners and how the construction of the Others shaped the construction of the Us group (Morley & Taylor 2012). In this paper, I examine the ways in which irony, and to a lesser extent sarcasm, are characterised as British national identity traits and investigate whether this stereotype contains the proverbial grain of truth. In the first part of the paper, I examine to what extent irony and sarcasm are associated with (national) cultural identities in the UK and Italy, and in the second part I analyse behaviours which have been labelled as ironic/IRONICO and sarcastic/SARCASTICO in UK and Italian forums and ask whether there are significant differences in the behaviours.