Punchlines Unbound: Comedy Practices in Social Virtual Reality

TL;DR

This paper explores how comedians adapt their performance techniques in social VR platforms like VRChat, highlighting creative strategies to overcome expressive limitations and foster audience engagement.

Contribution

It provides new insights into avatar-mediated comedy practices and offers design recommendations for improving social VR performance environments.

Findings

Comedians use exaggerated gestures and control to compensate for limited nonverbal cues.

Audience reactions like emoji responses form a unique cultural practice in VR comedy.

Challenges include audio latency and moderation issues affecting performance quality.

Abstract

Social VR platforms serve as an emergent venue for live performance, enabling co-presence and real-time interaction among distributed performers and audiences within shared virtual environments. Live performances, such as comedy, rely on subtle social cues between performers and audiences, which are missing in VR. However, it remains unclear how comedians utilize avatar-mediated cues in social VR. We conducted semi-structured interviews and observations with 23 virtual comedians on VRChat. Results revealed that virtual comedians transformed their limited nonverbal expressiveness into performative opportunities through intentional control and exaggeration. Additionally, a distinctive culture emerged around context-appropriate emoji reactions from audiences, while challenges such as audio latency and moderation against trolling were highlighted. Our findings advance understanding of how performers creatively adapt to expressive constraints in avatar-mediated settings. We further demonstrate how challenges in performer-audience interaction and moderation provide design insights for systems enhancing feedback visibility and sustain community norms without restricting creative expression.