Days of our ‘quarantined’ lives: multimodal humour in COVID-19 internet memes

Aslan, E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4174-5493 (2022) Days of our ‘quarantined’ lives: multimodal humour in COVID-19 internet memes. Internet Pragmatics, 5 (2). pp. 227-256. ISSN 2542-3851 doi: 10.1075/ip.00075.asl

Abstract/Summary

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, many users around the world exploited internet memes as a digital source of humour to cope with the negative psychological effects of quarantining. Drawing on multimodal discourse analysis, this study investigates a set of COVID-19 internet memes to explore the quarantine activities and routines to understand ordinary people’s mindsets, anxieties and emotional narratives surrounding self-isolation as well as the pragmatically generated humorous meanings relying on verbal and visual components of memes. The findings revealed that quarantine humour is centred around themes including quarantine day comparisons focusing on the perceived effects home quarantines on physical and mental wellbeing, quarantine routines, and physical appearance predictions at the end of quarantine. Intertextuality was a productive resource establishing connections between quarantine practices and popular texts. In addition, humorous meanings were created through anomalous juxtapositions of different texts and incongruity resolution is largely dependent on the combined meanings of verbal and visual components.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/100260
Identification Number/DOI	10.1075/ip.00075.asl
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Language and Applied Linguistics
Publisher	John Benjamins
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