Everyday multilingual humour increasingly operates through fluid translanguaging practices that blur the boundaries between named languages. Drawing on a corpus of Indonesian-English gombal (playful flirtatious utterances) collected from TikTok comment sections, this study investigates how Indonesian users mobilise translanguaging practices to construct humour, intimacy, and symbolic positioning in digital interaction. Using a qualitative discourse-analytic approach, the analysis identifies three dominant forms of multilingual humour; pantun-like structures, phonological and orthographic wordplay, and riddle-based humour. The findings demonstrate that Indonesian and English are strategically combined to generate affective and comedic effects, with English frequently positioned as a climactic semiotic resource associated with romantic payoff, playfulness, and performative stylisation. Rather than reflecting linguistic deficiency or incomplete English competence, these practices reveal high levels of metalinguistic awareness and creative negotiation across unequal global language hierarchies. I argue that multilingual gombal can be understood as forms of decolonial linguistic creativity through which local poetic traditions, global English, and participatory digital culture are recontextualised in everyday interaction. By foregrounding vernacular multilingual humour from the Global South, this study contributes to ongoing efforts to de-westernise comedy studies and rethink digital laughter as a meaningful site of language, affect, and power negotiation.
Bambang Sugiarto (Tue,) studied this question.