Beyond laughter and smiles

Abstract

Amid the deluge of serious social media posts regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, humorous posts brought users much-needed respite. This article reviews studies on social media-based COVID-19 humour in 42 research articles that were selected from four databases, viz. Science Direct, Scopus, Taylor & Francis, and Web of Science. After the classification and analysis of the articles on the basis of some key features, a detailed description and discussion of the findings have been carried out. The results concerning the characteristics and functions of COVID-19 humour reveal that most studies investigated image-text memes; the most important feature found was ‘humour,’ in addition to others like sarcasm, irony, satire, criticism, juxtaposition, and locality. Intertextuality played a significant role in the structure of humorous posts, especially those related to specific countries. Additionally, it shows that although research on COVID-19 humour on social media is still in an early phase, several findings appear stable across various studies included in this review. Moreover, most humour studied is not only about the virus or the disease itself, but also focuses on absurd situations individuals found themselves in due to the pandemic and the lockdown that followed.

The Faces and Forms of Pandemic Humor: Exploring Covid-19 Memes with Visual Machine Learning

“…These studies often focus on specific settings, relying on a particular subset of memes or jokes about particular themes, such as representations of parenting (Han & Kuipers, 2021;Lemish & Elias, 2020), politics (Zekavat, 2021) or the shaping of public responses to the pandemic (Hagedoorn et al, 2023;Sebba-Elran, 2021). Other studies have presented more general inventories of the themes in pandemic humor and memes, but these were mostly based on smaller, often local samples and generally used qualitative methodologies (Aslan, 2022;Bageshwar & Zafar, 2023;Dynel, 2022;Literat, 2021;Olah & Hempelmann, 2021). This article presents a different approach.…”

“…Humor is notoriously culture-specific, but because of the global nature of the pandemic, pandemic humor was shared globally and (more or less) simultaneously. Especially the first wave of the pandemic was unique in the sense that people around the world shared similar experiences, often responding to it in similar ways; i.e., by joking about it (Bageshwar & Zafar, 2023). Thus, a global pandemic brought about the first truly global humor cycle.…”