Online Humour, Cartoons, Videos, Memes, Jokes and Laughter in the Epoch of the Coronavirus (original) (raw)
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Humor in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic
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The research is focused on the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Croatia – March 2020. The subject of the research are humorous messages related to the pandemic. By combining quantitative and qualitative methods, this research showed how the interviewed respondents experienced the received humorous content related to the coronavirus and what content characteristics of the humorous messages were detected through the content analysis.
Humorous memes for Covid-19 communications and carnivalesque functions
HO CHI MINH CITY OPEN UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF SCIENCE - SOCIAL SCIENCES
This study described the types and functions of humor in memes during the Covid-19 pandemic to have a better understanding of the content and the role of humor during a crisis. This study identified the general ideas that emerged from the Bisaya memes including the types and functions of Bisaya humor. Using the qualitative and research methods, the results revealed the general ideas which included health practices, security, and health behavior. Comparison, pun, and exaggeration predominated which could be attributed to the Filipinos’ creativity and fondness of vivid images and by virtue of its repressive colonial history. For carnivalesque functionality, the exposition of social inequities, therapy, and subversion of social order prevailed. These imply the Filipinos’ dissatisfaction with the government’s programs, fight against information disorders, and parodying hierarchic authority in a comical manner. Consequently, memes cannot reflect Filipinos’ knowledge of the pandemic becau...
Humor in Times of COVID-19 in Spain: Viewing Coronavirus Through Memes Disseminated via WhatsApp
The COVID-19 crisis, and its ensuing periods of confinement, has generated high levels of social stress on a global scale. In Spain, citizens were isolated in their homes and were not able to interact physically with family members, friends or co-workers. Different resources were employed to face this new stressful and unexpected situation (fitness, reading, painting, meditation, mindfulness, dancing, listening to music, playing instruments, cooking, etc.). Humor was one of the most frequent and widely used strategies in an attempt to keep perspective, deal with the seriousness of the situation and make the day-today more bearable. Humor is cultural: it varies from one country to the next and is part of the idiosyncrasies of a culture. It is deemed a particularly important feature of the Spanish personality. During the COVID-19 crisis, the main means or channels of communication were social networks. Throughout the confinement period, there was an excessive flow of humorous memes concerning Coronavirus and related shared experiences during the National State of Emergency decreed by the Spanish Government. The memes draw on irony, ingenuity and creativity to make a difficult and stressful experience more bearable. In this paper, a qualitative methodology based on ethnography research is used and ethnographic fieldwork is carried out on the memes disseminated through WhatsApp during the lockdown period experienced in Spain (14 March to 21 June 2020). The memes are considered to be an example of Netlore, digital contemporary folklore, and a theoretical framework on memes and humor is presented that discusses its different functions in order to channel grief, fear and suffering or to play down specific situations. A corpus of 644 memes that have flooded social networks are categorized and analyzed to witness how the Spanish have managed to bring out their humorous and creative side in difficult times even as they have criticized political decisions, let out their frustrations, described their new "normal" lives, interacted with others and anticipated the future.
Sophisticated humor against COVID-19: the Polish case
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 2021
The analysis undertaken in the article focuses on a group of memes selected from the database which drew on culture-specific references. Specifically, they embrace the memories of socialist times and call on references to comic films and easily recognized characters in order to bring out the rediscovered absurdity of the current COVID-19 situation. This material seems ideal to revisit Raskin's early notion of sophistication, which was broadly argued to derive from intertextuality as well complexity of references that function as sources of humor. In all the examples discussed we can observe the intertextual and metatextual elements, multiple levels and shifts in points of view and attitudes as well as the mutual relations of verbal to visual within the meme cycles. In order to identify specific mechanisms of sophisticated humor, we attempt to identify the visual or verbal triggers of overlap of the two worlds in question, and discuss comic mechanisms of sophistication, including attributions of desire, belief and intention (purpose) to characters or the narrator as commentators on events or situations.
Crisis and Humorous Stories: Laughing at the Times of COVID-19
Literary Geographies, 2020
Humour is commonly associated with enjoyment, which, partly mistakenly, is considered to be an antidote to seriousness (Ridanpää 2014a). However, humour has several social, political, cultural and economic functions which in most cases are not acknowledged, due to its common associations with buoyancy, innocent amusement and entertainment. Various narrative forms of humour are almost always socially, culturally and geographically conditional, transforming alongside local and global socio-political changes (Davies 1990; Ridanpää 2014b). The concept of crisis refers to multiple forms of ruptures, events, during which the normal rhythm of (social, political, economic, psychological, everyday) life is halted. As a result the concept of crisis entails a certain sense of seriousness, or to be more precise, seriousness is an elementary aspect of what crises mean in practice. This said, there can easily be found several convergences of crisis and humour, but do we need or want to scrutinize these convergences, getting behind the logic and semiotic structures through which serious events change into something which might prompt laughter?
Russian Journal of Linguistics
This paper problematises political satire in a time when the COVID-19 virus has provoked numerous deaths worldwide, and had dramatic effects on social behaviour, on a scale unknown in western nations since World War II. Most populations have endured lockdown, periods of enforced domestic imprisonment, which led to images of the empty streets of big cities appearing in media, symbols of the drastic changes that the health emergency was making necessary. Yet, from the outset, comic memes began to circulate across (social) media, while in mainstream print media political satirists continued to lampoon official responses to the ongoing crisis. The paper thus aims to explore the connection of political satire and humour, asking two principle research questions: firstly, how to explain the humorous effects of these multimodal artefacts in such depressing circumstances; secondly, from a pragmatic perspective, to account for their overall socio-political function.The study uses memes taken ...
frontiers in Psychology , 2021
The COVID-19 crisis, and its ensuing periods of confinement, has generated high levels of social stress on a global scale. In Spain, citizens were isolated in their homes and were not able to interact physically with family members, friends or co-workers. Different resources were employed to face this new stressful and unexpected situation (fitness, reading, painting, meditation, mindfulness, dancing, listening to music, playing instruments, cooking, etc.). Humor was one of the most frequent and widely used strategies in an attempt to keep perspective, deal with the seriousness of the situation and make the day-today more bearable. Humor is cultural: it varies from one country to the next and is part of the idiosyncrasies of a culture. It is deemed a particularly important feature of the Spanish personality. During the COVID-19 crisis, the main means or channels of communication were social networks. Throughout the confinement period, there was an excessive flow of humorous memes concerning Coronavirus and related shared experiences during the National State of Emergency decreed by the Spanish Government. The memes draw on irony, ingenuity and creativity to make a difficult and stressful experience more bearable. In this paper, a qualitative methodology based on ethnography research is used and ethnographic fieldwork is carried out on the memes disseminated through WhatsApp during the lockdown period experienced in Spain (14 March to 21 June 2020). The memes are considered to be an example of Netlore, digital contemporary folklore, and a theoretical framework on memes and humor is presented that discusses its different functions in order to channel grief, fear and suffering or to play down specific situations. A corpus of 644 memes that have flooded social networks are categorized and analyzed to witness how the Spanish have managed to bring out their humorous and creative side in difficult times even as they have criticized political decisions, let out their frustrations, described their new "normal" lives, interacted with others and anticipated the future.
Humour in The Midst of Pandemic: Critical Discourse Analysis on Covid-19 Related Memes
2021
This study aims to reveal the implicit meaning contained in memes related to Covid-19 through Van Dijk's critical discourse analysis approach. This meme is taken from social media and several websites that contain a collection of memes that are focused on pictures and writing in Indonesian and English. The results showed that through the text dimension, the macrostructure of the Covid-19 meme has four sub-themes, namely the naming of the coronavirus, wearing masks, violations of guarding distance, and rules of doing activities at home. The Covid-19 meme superstructure has four schemes, namely 1) a scheme starting from the main idea pattern followed by supporting ideas, 2) a scheme with a supporting idea pattern first then the main idea, 3) a scheme with the main idea pattern without supporting ideas and titles and 4) a visual scheme. Next, the Covid-19 meme microstructure consists of syntactic, semantic, stylistic, and graphic elements, which all elements are needed to show the ...
Linguistic Humor in Memes to Mitigate Post Covid-19 Severity
2020
This paper aims at exploring how the use of humor in memes can serve as a relief therapy in the face of the grave situation of the postCOVID-19 world. The conceptual framework for this study is drawn from Sultanoff (1994) theory of humor. He believes in the relieving effect of humor on humans’ psyche. Content analysis was used as a research method to analyze twelve memes shared at WhatsApp, an electronic, social media app for swift human interaction. The study demonstrates that humor is essentially the creative spirit of life that carries on despite hardships. It enables humanity to laugh in order not to cry. The linguistic humor in memes created in the context of the Pandemic Covid-19 serves as a tool to release stress, provide relief and create a sense of well-being