Keywords

The main focus of this chapter is the analysis of the humour that occurs in the space between the in-game content and its reception by the audience of a particular streaming media channel. The following inquiry aims to address the research gap not only in eSports studies, but also in the research of game spectatorship more generally. Although there are studies that cover areas such as audience engagement (Dux 2018) and the social aspect of communication tools available during live broadcast (Recktenwald 2016), so far little to no attention has been devoted to the topic of the arguably crucial role of humour in stimulating both online and on-site participation during streamed large-scale eSports events. This study aims to contribute to the existing work on humour in the digital public sphere, focusing especially on phenomena which transgress the boundaries between the physical and digital space (see Kalkina 2020; Kuipers 2011). The globalised eSports media system provides platforms for expressing a wide variety of humour-related cultural and social commentary, whose scope often exceeds the game-related discourses. This chapter looks at one of such platforms—Twitch.tv, and a selected group of three large-scale events broadcast through its channels. The material for this chapter was gathered during 2019 and 2020’s three major eSports events: the 2019 StarCraft II World Championship Series (WCS), Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) Katowice 2020, and DreamHack SC2 Masters 2020: Season Finals tournaments. The majority of the data has been obtained during live broadcasts on the Twitch.tv streaming platform; the official channels used as a source for this study provide both visual and text data, with VOD services enabling the analysis of chat messages according to time stamps.

The chapter focuses on game-related events which unfold simultaneously in the physical space of eSports arenas and in the digitally mediated space of Twitch.tv. It treats them as vantage points for further analyses concerning humour in eSports, especially in its most popular iteration of a mediated ludic spectacle. As such, I will concentrate on only one game, StarCraft II (Blizzard Entertainment 2010, 2013, 2015), as exemplary of the dynamics that could be found in many other eSports titles following the online streaming method of live coverage. It is crucial to note that only the WCS StarCraft tournament allowed on-site presence of the audience. Both IEM and DreamHack occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic and thus followed a different format. Of these two, the first tournament was forced to make last-minute changes to its formula and simply did not permit spectators to enter the Spodek arena in Katowice, Poland. The latter followed an online-only format, with players, commentators and viewers participating remotely from their homes. This unusual predicament necessitated the rapid development of digital tools aimed at fostering audience engagement, among which were many designed to capitalise on the emergent nature of humour-related events unfolding live during the stream.

The study will also take into consideration the gendered aspect of the analysed phenomenon, with humorous (and sometimes offensive) comments being addressed to underprivileged groups of eSports fans and professionals. I will address three particular areas in which humorous activity emerges and is fostered through various media-related tactics: the more formalised, production-related area, often connected to the work of officially appointed commentators; the online and offline audiences, meaning Twitch.tv users and on-site spectators respectively; and finally the in-game performance side of the eSports spectacle—that is, the players themselves. Looking at the sociocultural context tied to humour-related paratexts such as memes, hand-made banners and the so-called copypastas will allow me to assess the interplay between the digital and physical dimensions of humour associated with large-scale eSports events.

The Physical Dimension of the (Non)digital Spectacle

In the cases of both offline and online live spectatorship, humour is both emergent and ephemeral. While it often stems from a particular in-game situation, there are numerous instances where it occurs on the border between physical and digital space, involving spectators, players and eSports professionals. Live context and targeted fandom culture provoke spontaneous reactions to humorous content from all of the parties involved. Online chat, emotes, banners, cosplay elements, scripted “humorous” events and live commentary all provide data for a comparative analysis.

The oft-cited definition of eSports mentions “electronic systems” as a key element to facilitate sports-like rivalry within the computer games medium, where “the input of players and teams as well as the output of the eSports system are mediated by human-computer interfaces ” (Hamari and Sjöblom 2017, 213). During live-streamed coverage of eSports events, this poses a significant obstacle to scripting humorous elements of the broadcast—the emergent nature of the gaming spectacle forces both the hosts and the audience to work with impromptu solutions to maintain satisfactory levels of engagement. eSports events covered on the Twitch.tv platform are accompanied by two types of live commentary: one delivered by fans via chat, and one provided in predominantly spoken form by the officially appointed commentators. This connects the eSports spectacle to traditional sports coverage in online media, which is also aimed at fostering the engagement of global audiences and providing an additional, non-televisual level of sports representation (see Chovanec 2018; Lewandowski 2012; Sandvoss 2004).

Based on the gathered data, I distinguish two key aspects of humour in the context of large-scale eSports events: emergence and ephemerality. The first term derives from Ian Bogost’s take on games as emergent systems “in which simple rules combine to lead to consequences unpredictable from those rules” (Bogost 2006, 95). Emergent humour is in this case related to what Joan Soler-Adillon described as “emergent novelty”, that is a situation in which the tested and iterated systems reveal new events or interactions in the process of play (Soler-Adillon 2019). The category of emergent humour therefore covers those elements of eSports coverage that are, on a basic level, governed by certain rules of the game and formulaic codes of conduct, but at the same time rely on adventitious developments of otherwise formulaic situations in live stream circumstances. This is especially relevant in two aspects: the mediated broadcast and the gameplay. The former includes, for example, pre- or post-match discussions, and the latter involves standardised gameplay progression and gradual build-up of the rules determining the winner, amongst other things. The ephemerality of humour in the eSports context is related to the means of communication: chat messages, audience reactions, even particular gameplay situations not caught by the in-game observersFootnote 1 are ephemeral in the sense that they disappear shortly after they have been displayed—assuming that they got noticed at all.

Commentators: Televised Laughter

Hosts and commentators are key to the success of any live eSports event: a live studio crew not only narrates particular elements of the broadcast, but also serves as a conduit between live and digital audiences and, to a lesser extent, players participating in the given competition.

With the increased professionalisation of the tournaments, the production values of large-scale eSports events started to incorporate elements from televised sports shows. When T. L. Taylor wrote about the merging of streaming media with more traditional broadcast media models (Taylor 2018, 136–137), she suggested the expression “ditching the TV dream” as a term to encapsulate the need for eSports events to go beyond the well-established formula of communicating the live experience to viewers. Whereas many of the elements of traditional TV broadcasts have been dropped or drastically altered, some still thrive in the eSports media system (see Felczak 2020). This legacy can be witnessed in the roles assigned to commentators and hosts responsible for broadcasting the live events and ensuring that the in-game actions are translated into a format that is appealing to the wider audience. The chief task of a commentator (also known as a caster—the term “host” is usually reserved for the person conducting on-stage interviews and orchestrating the broadcast between different rooms and/or cameras) is to provide verbal commentary closely accompanying the live events. The importance of speech during live coverage seems self-evident, but it also ties to the broader conventions of communication that permeate eSports culture, such as team speak and voice chat. Commenting on the latter, Veli-Matti Karhulahti observes that “it also conveys extra information such as nuances in mood, humour, and attitude” (Karhulahti 2020, 118).

Even a cursory survey of “funny” video compilations showcasing commentators bursting into laughter during in-studio discussions or live matches demonstrates the contagious nature of laughter. Oftentimes it is hard to pinpoint any particular object or trigger of laughter; the situation is deemed funny because the laughter has already begun, not the other way around. Commenting in eSports is rarely a job for a single person—the dynamic of a live spectacle demands not only constant attention and a stream of words coming from the casters, but it also benefits from the social interaction between the personalities involved in transferring the intricacies of the event to the public. The most famous caster duos, such as Artosis (Daniel Ray Stemkoski) and Tasteless (Nick Plott), rely not so much on providing professional live coverage as traditionally understood, but on maintaining the viewers’ attention by employing endless streams of gags, jokes and references, in which skilful assessment of the in-screen situation is just a trigger for the emergent humour. This kind of improvised performance, which is hard to replicate in TV shows (Edge 2010), maintains its humorous edge in the eSports environment largely because of the constant presence of the competitive game frame. From voice modulation to the substance of the jokes, all elements of the humorous commentary are inseparable from the on-screen, in-game actions of the competing players. To better understand how this type of casters’ humour manifests in the oftentimes abrupt “vocalized bodily response” (Janus 2009, 151) heard during the high-stakes broadcasts, we may refer to Lisa Trahair’s commentary on Georges Bataille’s philosophy of comedy:

In this case, laughter does not emerge on the basis of comic sovereignty; the comic is rather constituted in the instant that laughter bursts out and in that instant alone. The comic here is not something that precedes laughter; it is rather an effect of it. Therefore, in spite of Bataille’s claims that the techniques of the comic can be produced at will—much as we can define the conventions of comedy by considering its opposition to tragedy or account for the joke in terms of condensation and displacement—the temporal precedence that Bataille gives to laughter emphasizes the priority of the unknowable that conventional theories of the comic so often forget about but which Bataille argues is nevertheless the single cause of laughter. (Trahair 2007, 26)

Comical situations during live eSports coverage can emerge as results of physical manifestations of laughter even in the most technical and formulaic parts of the broadcast. Such events often happen during the post-match analysis, when the selected casters dissect the recently finished games and highlight key moments and strategies with the help of replays displayed on a separate screen with a special, interactive interface overlay. The involvement of the corporeal on-screen presence of the casters, with the addition of circles, lines and arrows drawn on the analysis screen, does not in itself make this section funny; but the ephemeral—spontaneous and perhaps even involuntary gestures paired with the brief and relatively jargon-rich verbal analysis—provokes uncontrolled outbursts of amusement. These elements of the eSports spectacle allow us to “treat laughter not as a side-effect of humour or comedy, but as an acoustic, aesthetic and existential event” (Janus 2013) in the spirit of Jean-Luc Nancy’s take on laughter as “pure presentation” (Nancy 1987, 725)—in this case largely disconnected from the technical intricacies of the professional gameplay, albeit somehow provoked by the spatial proximity of digital technology and (mediatised) human bodies. The juxtaposition of digitised corporeality and the pressure to perform (and broadcast the effects of) arguably inhuman prowess needed to compete at the highest levels of play has the potential to bring forward the almost tangible, material dimension of humour, which is inextricably connected with personalised bodies: their imperfections as well as uncontrollable reactions to both physical and social stimuli. The highly formalised eSports gameplay would not be “funny” nor perhaps even “fun” without the human element of the spectacle. Therefore, commentators’ task lies not only in providing much needed respite in-between the periods of in-depth analysis, but also in fostering audience engagement, which may include playful use of automated tools provided by Twitch.tv.

Jokes concerning appearance, particular outfit or off-camera activities (including anecdotes about various forms of socialising with other eSports professionals) are the staples of humorous content during eSports live streams. Examples encompass wide range of humour, from the light-hearted remarks on the supposedly jet-lagged Artosis (who, although an American, lives and works full-time in Korea) during the 2019 WCS Global Finals in Seoul, up to the unsophisticated wordplay about sexual organs during IEM Katowice 2019 desk analysis. As the global pandemic imposed restrictions on the traditional studio format of the commentary in-between matches, there was a need to replace the person-to-person humorous interactions between casters and hosts with other means of introducing comical elements. Changes in the broadcasting formula demanded by the pandemic also altered the audience-casters interplay.

For example, creative methods of entertaining eSports enthusiasts emerge as real-time polls in the form of Twitch.tv add-ons. The format is simple: short pop-up questions with up to three answers, on a timer, with results available afterwards in the same format for each of the voting viewers. DreamHack finals featured context-specific questions such as “How long will this game be?”, but many of the polls were designed with a comical effect in mind. Some referenced well-known “factual” memes—blatantly false statements circulated to confuse the non-insiders. This category featured a question, “Is Serral the best NA [North America region] player?” Many included humorous overtones in the available selection of answers (question: “Who is the real rap god?”; answers: “Eminem”, “Nathanias” [one of the tournament’s casters]). Asking “Which is better?”, with a choice between Europe’s Grandmaster (top 1000 players in the region) and North America’s Bronze (lowest tier) leagues, can also be considered a flagrant travesty. The polls based their comical effect on unabashed mockery made at the expense of a selected group or a particular person, although the offensive edge was always accompanied by references to the specific elements of a particular gaming culture. Here, the parody, in the sense of a “comic refunctioning of preformed linguistic or artistic material” (Rose 1993, 52), turns into a more hermetic satire that serves a delineating purpose—fostering engagement for those possessing the necessary gaming capital (Consalvo 2007), and possibly alienating those who are not familiar or remain in disagreement with the comical content. Such performances could be considered forms of trolling, and it could be argued that establishing a community of laughter based on pointing out differences within a given group has more in common with harassment (in the form of direct insults) rather than with comical practices (see Ortiz 2020).

Audience: Humour as a Means of Communication

Audiences produce humorous content by implementing two chief strategies: intertextual references and reactions to the events happening live during the stream. Both are conveyed through the common medium, which is the Twitch chat with its short textual messages and an even shorter time window to “activate” the rest of the audience and communicate the message. The successful transfer of humorous content is contingent—if sufficient number of users responds to it in a given time frame, it means that the joke has gained enough traction to extend its lifespan beyond its own momentary appearance on the chat screen.

The shortest way to implement intertextual tactics is to post links, but that strategy is often impossible to execute due to restrictive chat policies, which are enforced especially rigorously during large-scale events. More often, intertextuality hinges on direct or indirect references to memes, viral videos and other content circulating within the given gamers’ community.

It is difficult to “measure the funniness of the text” other than to observe if it gains traction and accumulates responses from the most engaged parts of the eSports audience. Even physical props used by the audience during live events, such as banners or posters, are often an iteration of a particular fan-based cultural text. The StarCraft WCS Fall 2019 tournament provided a good example of three main types of such fan-made banners and posters. The first type builds on the intertextuality within gaming culture: a cardboard banner bearing the handwritten words “clown fiesta” accompanied by an appropriate picture can be interpreted as a metatextual commentary on the catchphrase initially used by commentators to describe two distinct types of League of Legends gameplay.Footnote 2 The second type references texts that are not specific to gaming, but are iterations of popular memes or other viral artefacts of the internet culture; an example of this is a large banner saying “Reynor [Riccardo Romiti, a professional StarCraft competitor] best player in the world. Change my mind”, which used a template based on the viral photo of the conservative podcaster Steven Crowder, seated behind a desk with a sign that reads “Male Privilege is a myth / Change My Mind”. The third type of such messages is game-specific and marked with irony: this category encompasses boards with slogans such as “ProtossedTM” or “Spoiler: Zerg won.” This last type represents the most ephemeral and emergent take on humour, as such banners make sense only in the context of a particular event and have to be prepared shortly before or even during the multi-day tournament.

The communication strategies employed in fan-made banners and posters can also be traced in the specific formats of humorous chat messages known as copypastas—self-contained blocks of text which are copied and pasted (hence the name) by individual users. Even though some studies point to the fact that this particular format tends to occur on Twitch during the times of relatively low in-game activity (Musabirov et al. 2018), at the three events analysed in this chapter, copypastas were often circulated during high-stakes matches and were directly linked to a dramatic unfolding of in-game events. The specific example of such eSports-related copypastas are blasphemous paraphrases of popular prayers, used as means to support certain players. They are distinguished in the stream of messages by virtue of their sheer length, and despite their potentially divisive nature, almost never get censored by the moderators. Usually this type of fan-made work is reserved for addressing the most successful players, and each iteration differs substantially from the other, as it is adapted to the gameplay strategies of one of the three StarCraft races (playable factions called Zerg, Terran or Protoss). One telling example of such paratextual work, a copypasta praising Joona Sotala, one of the most successful European players, can be traced back to the 2018/2019 season, when the Finnish player achieved the first major victories of his international career:

Our Father Serral who art in Finland, hallowed be thy macro. Thy Lair come. Thy roach speed be done, on WCS as it is on ladder. Give us this day our daily all-in, and forgive us our BM, as we forgive those who BM against us, and lead us not into cheese, but deliver us from Protoss. Amen.Footnote 3

This fragment is a re-appropriation of the Lord’s Prayer (Pater Noster), which in this format and context can be related to the “inappropriate” form of festive laughter and other forms of culture observed and analysed by the famous Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (Bakhtin 1981, 1984, 1993). While being circulated via Twitch chat during important matches, this particular copypasta template can be considered an instance of a carnivalesque ambivalence, a deliberate, yet ephemeral mixture of high- and low-brow culture manifesting in a moment of comedy-induced communication, temporarily unifying participants in the eSports spectacle. The accuracy of this adaptation is striking in its attention to detail, and the creative use of game jargon (cheese—unfair tactics, BM—bad manners, roach speed—one of the key upgrades for the Zerg units) clearly points to the prayer’s canonical text. Such copypastas can be interpreted as chat-specific “practices of coherence” (i.e. efforts to make this form of communication legible, consistent and easy to follow), employing bricolage aesthetics (see Ford et al. 2017) to create a chain of similarly structured texts addressing—in the case of a 1v1 StarCraft match—both competing sides. The aforementioned Serral’s “prayer” has been accompanied by a mirror copypasta addressing his rival Neeb, with its content altered to fit the Protoss player. Very much in the Bakhtinian spirit, both copypastas created an ephemeral, albeit radical, polyphony and heteroglossia of audience’s voices (see Majkowski 2015, 36). The two competing “prayers” formed a paradoxical mantra in the circle of comical self-referentiality; while seeking favour from two omnipotent “gaming gods”, the copypastas were simultaneously designed to offer a sign of support for a particular player in the public space of Twitch chat.

Not all chat messages are playful in nature. During the StarCraft II WCS Fall 2019 there were several instances of contentious jokes made in the chat at the expense of the lately deceased Geoff “iNcontroL” Robinson. Some of the attempts passed under both the moderators and chat participants’ radar and were not engaged with, especially if they were based on wordplay, such as “only way to let the pain die is to be incontrol of it.”Footnote 4 Other attempts, especially if they involved repeated posting in the hope of catching the chat members’ attention (by spamming the same “joke”), were met with disdain. One commonly used line of critique pointed towards the general rules of chat netiquette: user MetaFurrical wrote that “having to try the same joke 20 times is pretty sad.” Some among the online audience pointed out that iNcontroL “was very loved and respected here, and [making jokes about him is] just very inconsiderate and disrespectful.”Footnote 5 The community reactions to Geoff Robinson’s untimely demise highlight the boundaries of what is considered appropriate in terms of humour in the context of eSports; iNcontroL was not only considered one of the most influential figures on the professional StarCraft scene, but also a very cheerful media personality, whose “wonderful, terrific sense of humor”Footnote 6 was a key asset in achieving popularity among the eSports fans. It is important to note that the seemingly ephemeral instances of the iNcontroL-inspired “funny” word-play and jokes in the online environments are “a way of establishing precedent” (Phillips 2019, 3) and normalising the insensitive, potentially harmful and offensive behaviour. Within the StarCraft community, there had been previous instances of circulating false information about the alleged death of popular eSports personalities, using such messages as jokes to provoke reactions from other chat participants. Perhaps the most famous case concerned a popular streamer and commentator, Sean “Day9” Plott. However, such pranks used the mechanism of hypertext-based jokes which led to false source material, and their connection with the factual mishaps of the persons in question was easy to verify.

The Twitch.tv chat, similarly to many other text-based internet communicators, allows one to use a wide variety of emojis,Footnote 7 which “depict the faces of prominent streamers and staff members”, and “their facial expressions represent a particular emotion” (Recktenwald 2017, 74). It is worth noting that with spatial and temporal constraints making each individual message hard to capture in the constant stream of signs, Twitch.tv gradually implemented methods to highlight them. The two most commonly used ways are: through a gamified mechanism of purchasing colourful message backgrounds in exchange for the points gathered by spending time watching the stream, or by using channel-specific emojis. Some of the chat messages are constructed from multiple emojis that must be posted in a precise order to convey a particular message. There are several emojis used to express laughter or comment on a particularly funny in-game event, although some of them, even when used with a similar intent, can be read as racist and are banned from some of the channels (Grayson 2019). As one of the African American streamers commented, “the internet is a very racially conscious environment” (Taylor 2018, 106). Despite the seemingly inclusive environment, where in theory the ability to stand out and differentiate oneself from the rest of the content creators should be an asset, game-related streaming media and eSports broadcasts are especially liable to provoke offensive remarks from the audience. Moreover, despite efforts from initiatives such as AnyKeyFootnote 8 to gradually increase inclusivity in the eSports scene, denigrating jokes made at the expense of non-binary players have not been eradicated. The repeated offensive harassment reaches even the highest levels of competitive StarCraft play, as nearly every public appearance of Canadian player Sasha “Scarlett” Hostyn is met with transphobic jokes.

Players: Humour and Corporeal Work

Even at the highest levels of play and with significant monetary rewards at stake, humorous situations may be initiated by the players. Situations that can be interpreted as “funny” may involve unsportsmanlike behaviour, such as killing the opponent in a way that is considered disrespectful (Irwin and Naweed 2020, 240). Making jokes at the direct expense of other players is usually limited by the official tournament’s regulations, and the increasing competitiveness leaves less time for spontaneous or planned “griefing” behaviour, although it can be argued that its chief premise—“intentional disruption of gameplay” (Sparrow et al. 2020)—can still be achieved through means that are not related to humour. The only exceptions to the large-scale events formula promoting “good manners” are official interviews with the players. During live pre-match interviews, it is not unusual for hosts to try to provoke some sort of belligerent statements aimed at the interviewee’s direct competitor. Such strategy can be framed as an important element of the mediatised “spectacle of excess” (see Hill 2015), although its contextual frame changes dramatically from physically oriented traditional sports shows to the live-streamed competitive gaming events. Here, the two stereotypes of gaming masculinity—the geek and the athletic (Taylor 2018, 196)—come together in a peculiar mixture of awkwardness-fuelled comedy and a somewhat forced performance of power. The comical effect is produced when a player standing alone on a stage is interrogated in a stereotypically militant and confrontational manner. High-profile eSports events have gradually introduced means to alleviate the unpredictable component of such potentially humorous live moments by broadcasting pre-recorded excerpts of players answering short sets of questions. The IEM 2020 tournament in Katowice showcased StarCraft competitors telling the viewers who they think the best player in the world is. The last one to answer was the aforementioned Finnish player Serral, who cheerfully stated: “Well I’m the best, because I’m unbeatable.” This clearly orchestrated moment served as a prompt for fostering online audience engagement via Twitch chat and later appeared on several YouTube compilations featuring the “best moments” of the tournament.Footnote 9

Studies on spectators’ motivations during large-scale events provide data to back up the claims about the importance of the corporeal dimension of eSports: the engagement ratings of drama, novelty and aesthetics for online eSports audiences were higher in comparison to those for on-site spectators, who conversely pointed to the physical attractiveness of players and social interaction (Sjöblom et al. 2019). The dominant aspects of corporeality and aesthetics get mixed with dramatic development of events—either on-stage or within gameplay. Commentators usually take notice of any body language expressed by the competitors, and multiple cameras provide constant live coverage of players, even inside the soundproof gaming booths. During the DreamHack tournament, commentators directly addressed this issue by pointing out the potential differences in comfort levels between players performing on stage during large-scale tournaments and players performing at their homes with only personal cameras on. The importance of the corporeal—and spatial—elements of the eSports spectacle has been succinctly (and jokingly) addressed in a telling remark from one of the casters during the final’s matches: “We all know that the real reason that we have this cameras set-up is in case one of these players has a dog that just tries to jump up on them in the middle of a game, and we can see something insane or silly happen.”Footnote 10

Despite eSports’ potential for being a levelled field where binary gender and sexual differences are irrelevant in terms of performance (Taylor 2018, 195), eSports athletes still suffer from such toxic “meritocracy” (Paul 2018) and are regularly confronted with media techniques that showcase their physicality. Streaming plays an important role in putting the corporeal in front of the digital (see Anderson 2017), but the most explicit displays of physical appearance of players happen at large-scale live events. Occurrences such as pre-match introductions, post-match interviews and live reactions recorded from multiple cameras are all important parts of the long tournament events and provide a necessary interlude between gaming sessions. Thus, any potentially humorous, unexpected or simply awkward situation that happens during that time is carefully picked up by the broadcasters or the audience, which subsequently results in an instantaneous series of comments or memes. While live performance for professional or aspiring streamers may purposefully include elements of comedy to foster audience engagement (Woodcock and Johnson 2019, 816), high-stakes and live broadcasted eSports matches provide a very different media frame, where such elements may work to the detriment of players. Refusing to shake hands with the opponent and offensive on-stage gestures are usually frowned upon, and even more subtle in-game mocking behaviour (usually tied to a specific, “wasteful” use of units) is immediately noticed and commented on accordingly.

Conclusion

The goal of this chapter was to point at ephemerality and emergence as key features of humour in the context of large-scale eSports events. In all of the three analysed aspects (audience, commentators, players) negotiating the codes of conduct pertaining to the digital and physical space have been crucial in establishing temporary communities based on shared moments of festive humour. The collective laughter (Bakhtin 1984; Majkowski 2015) manifested itself in manifold forms: from playful paraphrases of popular cultural texts to metatextual references requiring a high degree of familiarity with particular gaming cultures. The predominantly digital format of the tournaments analysed in this chapter arguably (and perhaps paradoxically) strengthened the corporeal (Nancy 1987; Janus 2009), unpredictable and potentially offensive (Ortiz 2020) nature of the comical elements of the large-scale eSports events. Emergent and ephemeral humour is an inherent part of the eSports spectacle: it has the potential to alleviate the inconveniences associated with high barriers of entry for potential viewers by providing a corporeal respite from the formulaic developments of live-streamed professional gameplay. Challenges brought by the global pandemic arguably speed up the process of integrating particular forms of humour through digital tools into the live broadcasts. Despite the evolution of streaming technology, many of the core aspects of eSports humour capitalise on already existing formats of digital and analogue media.