Interpreting Covid-related memes

Abstract

One of the sources of relief, entertainment and socialisation during the Covid pandemic lockdown was the massive exchange of memes on social media and messaging applications. The objective of this chapter is to analyse and categorise 150 Peninsular Spanish memes collected from different interactive channels online (mainly social media and the messaging app WhatsApp) during the strict 2020 Covid lockdown in Spain (March-May 2020). The sample was then analysed under “incongruity-resolution theory” and categorized with the following research questions in mind: (a) what inferential strategies the internet user is expected to perform to interpret these Covid memes correctly; (b) what role text and image play in the eventual derivation of humorous effects from these memes; and (c) what kind of contextual information the internet user is expected to have access to for successful comprehension. Answering these research questions will eventually allow for a differentiation between Covid memes and non-Covid ones, as already intuitively felt by most users.