Humourising Covid-19 Pandemic Crisis in Nigeria: A Discourse Study of the Selected Online Memes and Posts
Keywords:
Humour, Covid-19, Discourse, Memes, Social Media PlatformAbstract
As the global community attempted to fight COVID-19 and cope with the new reality created by the global pandemic, online and mobile social networks played a key role in this new order. This study expands research on the use of these new media technologies for public health-based civic engagement in Nigeria. The primary aim is to explore the use of humour as a discourse strategy in online posts on the COVID-19 pandemic that were designed to create awareness, educate the public, and promote social and public morality. Using approaches in discourse analysis and humour in combination with Scollon’s (1998) Discourse Mediated Theory (DMT), the study discusses how a combination of texts and images mediated through socio-technical affordances of the online platforms underpin the extrapolation of social meanings conveyed through humorous memes and posts. The data set was extracted from the repository of an ongoing project on the corpus of digital health humanities discourse at the Centre for Digital Humanities, University of Lagos. It consists of posts and messages on the COVID-19 crisis circulated on WhatsApp platforms between February and March 2020. Using a qualitative interpretive paradigm, the study shows how serious and more profound themes of the pandemic are expressed through creative comical online posts and memes. A major observation is that humour appeal is generally sensitive to the culture of the audience as it draws its persuasive tenor from materials, artifacts, and symbols that the audience can easily relate to. Equally, instances of Scott’s (1990) notion of infra politics are found in some of the memes that satirise political situations and political actors in the country. Thus, weaponising the event-generating and event-driven memes for political ends heightens their functions within this situated socio-discursive milieu.
References
Adegoju, A. and Oyebode, O. (2015) Humour as discursive practice in Nigeria’s 2015 presidential election online campaign discourse. Discourse Studies Vol. 17, No. 6 (December 2015), pp. 643-662.
Akyus, A. (2015).The Effectiveness Of Using Humor Appeal In Advertising: The Key Takeaways. Available from
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320067985
_[accessed Mar 31 2020]
Ademilokun, M. & Olateru, M. (2016) “A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of some Visual Images in the Political Rally Discourse of 2011 Electioneering Campaigns in Southwestern Nigeria”. International Journal of Society, Culture & Language. Volume 4, 1; March 2016, pp. 1-19.
Austin, J.L. (1962). How to do Things with Words. London, Oxford Press.
Beermann, U. & Ruch, W. (2009). ‘How Virtuous is humor? Evidence from Everyday Behavior’. International Journal of Humor Research, 22 (4), 395-417.
Burton, J. (2019). Look at us, we have anxiety: Youth, memes, and the power of online cultural politics. Journal of Childhood Studies, 44(3), 3-17. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.18357/jcs00019171.
Chagas, V., Freire, F., Rios, D., & Magalhães, D. (2019). Political memes and the politics of memes: A methodological proposal for content analysis of online political memes. First Monday, 24(2). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i2.7264.
Davidson, P.(2014) , The Language of Internet Memes, [in:] M. Mandiberg (ed.), The Social Media Reader, New York 2012, p. 122, L.K. Börzsei, Makes a Meme Instead: A Concise History of Internet Memes, February 2013, p.3,http://works.bepress.com/linda_borzsei/
, 23.01.2014.
Dela Rosa-Carrillo, E.L. (2015) “On the Language of Internet Memes”. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of Arizona.
Duncan, C.P. (1979). ‘Humor in advertising: A behavioral perspective’. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science JAMS 7, 285–306 (1979).
https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02729680.
Goddard, A. (2004). The way to write a phone call: Multimodality in novices’ use and perceptions of interactive written discourse. In: P. Levine and R. Scollon (eds.) Discourse and Technology. Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Washington D.C: Georgetown University Press. pp. 34-46.
Gosman, A. (2016, October 20). Real life lessons: Social media and the 2016 presidential election. Nasdaq Corporate Solutions. Retrieved from
Halliday M.A.K. and Hasan R. (1976). Cohesion in English: England, Longman.
Kayam, O., Galily, Y & Sover, A. (2014). ‘Humor, Media and Public Discourse’. French Journal for Media Research. 1 (2014) pp. 1-16.
Lefcourt, H.M (2001) Humor: The Psychology of Living Buoyantly. New York: Springer Science+ Business Media.
Kamińska, M (2014) , Niecne Memy. Dwanaście wykładów o kulturze internetu,
Lessig, L. (2001) ‘The Future of Ideas: The fate of the Commons in a Connected World. US: Random House.
Peterson, C. & Seligman, M.E.P. (2004) Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. American Psychological Association; Oxford University Press.
Poznań 2011, s. 60, U. M. Husted, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way from the Forum: The life and death of internet memes, p. 19, http://purl.umn.edu/137171, 23.01.2014.
Mey, J.L (1987). ‘Poet and Peasant: A Pragmatic Comedy in Five Acts’. Journal of Pragmatics, Vol 11, (1987) pp. 281-297
Kobierecki, M.M.(2014) Internet Memes as an Example of Political Dissatisfaction of Poles on the Internet. Kwartalnik Naukowy OAP UW" e- Politikon", 243-269, 2014.Available at
Accesed on 6th April, 2020.
Obadare, E (2009).The Uses of Ridicule: Humour, 'Infrapolitics' and Civil Society in Nigeria. African Affairs, Vol. 108, No. 431 (Apr., 2009), pp. 241-261.
Reece, B. (2014). Putting the Ha! In Aha!: Humour as tool for Effective Communication.
https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1060&context=mapp_capstone
(accessed 31st March, 2020).
Schifrin, D. (1994). Approaches to Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scollon, R. (1998). Mediated Discourse as Social Interaction: A Study of New Discourse. UK; Routledge.
Scott, J.C. (1990). Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Searle, J.R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shifman, L. (2014). ‘The Cultural Logic of Photo-Based Meme Genres” Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 13, Issue 3 (2014)
Vaillant, G.E. (1977). Adaptation to Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2004). ‘Ten reasons why Linguists should pay attention to Visual Communication’. In P. Levine and R. Scollon (eds.) Discourse and Technology. Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Washington D.C: Georgetown University Press. pp. 7-19.
Weaver, S. (2011): Jokes, Rhetoric and Embodied Racism: a rhetorical discourse analysis of the logics of racist jokes on the internet. Ethnicities, Vol. 11, No. 4 (December 2011), pp. 413-435.
Wilkins, K. (2014). Valhallolz: Medievalist humor on the internet. Postmedieval, 5(2), 199-214. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2014.14
Yang, S. (2017). An analysis of factors influencing transmission of internet memes of English-speaking origin in Chinese online communities. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 8(5), 969-977. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.0805.19
Webography
Kellianne Clarke (2019). The Role of Social Media in Political Campaigns https://strategicsocialmedialab.com/the-role-of-social-media-in-political-campaigns/
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
You are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially.
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
- The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
