Political-electoral memes and interactional humour on Twitter

Abstract

This chapter presents the results of a qualitative study of a corpus of replies to humoristic memes, which were published and viralised on Twitter during the Spanish general elections campaign held on November 2019. Based on the General Theory of Verbal Humour and on its adaptation to multimodal humour, this study aims at establishing whether and how memes made up of a single image or a combination of an image and a caption may generate humorous effects on the imagined audience on Twitter and encourage responses that entail continued humour. The results show that most of the memes analysed convey recognition, understanding, appreciation, and agreement among Twitter users, whose responses express laughter using different multimodal affordances, or replicate the humorous contents of the meme by producing new memes. Moreover, humour created by these memes enables producer users and recipients to challenge the political power, while nurturing in-group solidarity.