Hitler's out of Dope: A cross-cultural examination of humorous memes

‘I’m not blue or green. I’m black’. The participatory entextualization of translingual memes and metapragmatic comments in transnational sociopolitical discourse

“…Dynel, 2021) across linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries. Although the humorous parodies presented in the videos may be influenced by sociocultural presuppositions (Hirsch, 2019), indexical values and functions cannot just be presupposed but actually take shape in the memes (Varis and Blommaert, 2015). When constructing memes that use Mr.…”

“…Part of the humor is derived from the clash of registers (cf. Hirsch, 2019) between the serious theme of historical events involving influential people and the colloquial discourse of ordinary people in present day society, which seems to align political ideologies with socioeconomic values.…”

“…Tsakona (2018) suggested that political jokes and parodies include intertextual allusions, which rely on linguacultural knowledge frames and ideological standpoints to create humor or convey criticism across wide audiences. Exploring YouTube users' comments on three Hitler memes in a video with different language subtitles, Hirsch (2019) found that the incongruity in the clash of register, that is, incongruity between the spoken high German and subtitles in vernacular English, Hebrew, and Spanish, made the parodies humorous and that viewers' stances toward the humorous parodies were influenced by their sociocultural presuppositions.…”

“…Emerging studies have also examined digital citizens’ interpretations of political discourses (e.g. Hirsch, 2019; Piata, 2016) and humorous and critical metapragmatic comments on sociopolitical issues across linguistic and national borders (e.g. Chun, 2013; Nguyen, 2021; Sharma, 2014).…”

Memes, memeiosis, and memetic drift: Cheryl’s Chichier She Shed

“…Hence we can reach the conclusion that, while joke cycles and meme cycles differ in significant ways, the differences are not structural, but rather they belong to the pragmatic domains of the means of production and distribution, which have radically changed and whose affordances enable forms and genres that would have been impractical or impossible without them. For example, reaction videos or Hitler in the bunker parodies [Hirsch 2019] are possible only when recording vast amounts of footage is essentially cost-free, and thus one can select a couple of minutes of funny reactions from hours of recoding, or when one has access, again essentially for free, to video-editing capabilities that would rival those of a professional video-maker.…”