This study is a qualitative semiotic analysis of the humor in 13 representative K-drama memes drawn from a corpus of approximately 200 memes bearing the hashtag #kdramameme. K-dramas are one of the key aspects of the global Korean Wave, and there is a thriving body of memes created by and for the global K-drama fandom. Despite the centrality of humor to the meme genre and the fact that memes constitute a prominent form of 21st-century expression, K-drama memes have not previously been analyzed from a humor theory perspective. We analyze the humorous element of the K-drama memes in our corpus according to three semiotic theoretical mechanisms, namely the concepts of meme templates, blending, and benign violation. We argue that these three semiotic mechanisms feed into two overarching functions of K-drama meme humor, i.e., a social function (construction and enhancement of in-group identity and belonging), and a psychological one (expression of emotions). Our study shows that the K-drama memescape is multifaceted and connected to K-drama and real life in complex ways.
Humor is widely recognized as a way to process and deal with disasters and tragic events. This is particularly the case in our digital age: political controversies, wars, natural disasters, and other crises, such as COVID-19, often lead to the rapid proliferation of creative and amusing memes as a digital response mechanism, creating a sense of community and levity and an outlet for anxiety and frustration in participatory digital cultures. While it turned out to be relatively minor, the earthquake that shook Melbourne in September 2021 during the city’s sixth COVID-19 lockdown prompted an outpouring of multimodal humor on Australian social media, becoming a memetic moment (Smith and Copland 2022). Humorous tweets and memes began circulating just moments after the tremors stopped, and continued unabated for several days, much of it linking the earthquake to the lockdowns in Melbourne. Using multimodal digital discourse analysis, this article will analyze a selection of interconnected sociopolitical tweets, memes, and other online humor that circulated in the week of September 22, 2021, as a result of the earthquake. By focusing primarily on the semiotic, linguistic, and pragmatic elements (intertextuality, wordplay, incongruity), it will be shown how the humor in these multimodal examples was not just performing as a coping mechanism for the earthquake, but as a creative way of engaging with current political issues to create a sense of collective identity. This article will illustrate the construction of the social identity of Melbourne as a strong and resilient city following an earthquake experienced during the pandemic.
In Italy, barzellette, or ‘short funny stories’, are joke-telling practices that speakers perform in diverse social events with large or small groups of friends, relatives, or colleagues. In Northern Italy, where a strong anti-immigration platform has been implemented by the influential far-right political party Lega Nord (‘Northern League’), barzellette are often performed to talk about migrants and migration issues. In this article, after a brief historical overview of this genre, which has deep roots in the Italian fifteenth and sixteenth-century literary ballads, I examine the semiotics of multilingual play in race-based humor through a linguistic anthropological analysis of one barzelletta that I video-recorded in 2019. I show how speakers of Venetian, the local language of the Northeastern Italian region of Veneto, engage in these short storytelling practices to mock migrants, using approaches that purport to obscure their racist remarks in their local code. Ultimately, I examine how racializing discourses emerge in barzellette through participants’ semiotic and scalar enactments and how racist ideologies thus get solidified in Italy.
Humor can be key in counteracting harmful discourse and addressing conversational injustices. This paper introduces the concept of counterspeech humor as the antithesis of hate speech, highlighting its ability to promote discursive justice. First, the central role of the counterspeaker is analyzed; second, three specific strategies of counterspeech humor are proposed: resignifying parody, bending irony, and intentionally blocking laughter. These forms of counterspeech humor are explored as effective responses to neutralize discursive harm and dismantle unjust practices. The effectiveness of counterspeech humor and its limitations in addressing harmful discourse are assessed through concrete examples. The paper emphasizes the reparative capacity of humor, showcasing its potential to offer constructive responses to hate. It concludes that counterspeech humor is a powerful tool for challenging injustices, transforming exclusionary contexts, and promoting social justice through creative use of language.
The paper discusses multiple instances of sociopolitical irony conveyed by memes which reflect people’s reactions to Russia’s current internal and external policy. Despite the danger of legal prosecution, several Telegram channels, whose owners reside outside Russia, specialize in creating and spreading online memes that comment on current events and official political statements produced by Russian officials. The study is based on a collection of 124 memes posted by several oppositional Russian-language Telegram channels in 2022-2024. The complex image-language relationship in memes allows them to convey various explicit and implicit social meanings. In this research, the analysis centers around the semiotic status of verbal and non-verbal components used in satirical memes. The visual part of memes is usually an original photo, which sometimes can be edited or altered, often to make it look funny. The main function of the visual component is to create an intertextual connection with the specific person or political event. The verbal part is a concise comment that places the image in a new context. In memes, the visual part can function as a full-fledged component of the message which contributes to the creation of the ironic meaning: it triggers an intertextual connection with a well-known visual object and functions as a source of a mismatch with the verbal part of the meme.
This article looks at the semiotics of humorous self-censorship. To this end, selected examples from a corpus of YouTube commentary videos and their respective comment sections are presented and discussed. On the one hand, the analysis focuses on structural aspects of humorous self-censorship signs from various modes (written, spoken, images, emojis, etc.) in their multimodal interplay. On the other hand, we analyze socio-semiotic aspects of our examples: their anchoring in specific speech communities, marked by background knowledge and shared communicative practices. The analysis shows that (1) structural manipulations of the spelling and/or phonetic shape of lexical items and of images etc. serve to secure both the understanding of the censored item as well as plausible deniability, while generating potentially humorous incongruities, (2) various positions in the participation process are exploited to participate in this process, including trigger warnings and other metacommunicative actions and levels, (3) humorous self-censorship serves a number of social-semiotic functions, such as the negotiation of group norms of sayability, the expression of group solidarity, and – importantly – entertainment.
This paper aims to illustrate the semiotic and pragmatic basis of the humorous opposition between past and present scripts, which underlie many examples of multimodal humor. Highly popular among Polish viewers, the Netflix series 1670 (produced in 2023) is taken under scrutiny as a good illustration of the possibilities that the historical mockumentary as a broadly conceived genre offers to comment on contemporary global conflicts, especially between liberalism (cosmopolitanism) and conservatism (patriotism), and specifically on the political and ideological situation in Poland. The main characters of the series are depicted in rural contexts, which serve as an environment to mock the class system, different ethnic groups and religions in Old Poland, gender roles, social attitudes, technology of the past and present, and the stereotypically Polish communication style, which we discuss based on representative examples. Past topics, historical events, and stereotypes recur as vehicles for current debates, while catchy comments by characters make dialogs memorable and allow the screenplay to avoid predictability. The series tends to assume a grotesque or even farcical nature and thrives in simplifying and stereotyping Polish tradition to resonate with the audience. As contemporary problems are dressed in historical costumes, the twenty-first-century socio-political context is then viewed from a fresh point of view that allows the reinterpretation of tradition and is a good source of humor at the same time.
The meaning-potential of humor – whatever traditional or modern forms it takes – is inseparably linked to the social context, which not only provides the background for the un/successful deployment of humor, but also ends up being shaped by the humor used therein. From a semiotic perspective, humor involves both the handling of complex socially embedded and publicly shared meanings as well as individualized personal motivations that underlie interlocutors’ intentions and eventual communicative effects. In our view, there are two semiotic processes involved in the creation of humor: the first-order level of semiotization,1 which resides in the particular incongruity- resolution mechanism, i.e. a device that is fundamental to signs operating in the service of humor; and the higher-order level of resemiotization (Iedema 2001; 2003), which captures the shifts of meaning from context to context, i.e. a property that arises from the common intertextual function of humor and explains how signification ‘floats’ (after Laclau 2000) across contexts in the sense that it may engender multiple, even opposing interpretations.
The article analyzes the phenomenon of a unique meme-literary character that appeared simultaneously with ChatGPT. This meme is a striking example of a floating signifier (Buchanan 2010) arising from mixed discourses. This is the Shoggoth meme, which was created based on a fantastic monster from the novels of Howard Lovecraft, and in our time has turned into a humorous picture with a smiley. The seriousness of “Lovecraftian horrors” as an element of mass culture of the 20th century gave way to a playful, humorous beginning in the digital reality of the 21st century. To understand the meaning of the meme, it must be considered from the standpoint of the semiotics of fear, according to the classification of Lotman (2004d), but also from the point of view of the semiotics of humor. The meaning of the humorous meme Shoggoth is to show that artificial intelligence and human intelligence can interact and understand each other.
The present study aims to put forward a critical analytical schema for discriminatory humor, taking into consideration the incongruity and aggression/superiority theories of humor and the notion of social critique as conceptualized by Reisigl and Wodak (2001). Emphasis is placed on how humorous texts, which appear to criticize racist practices and values, turn out to be ambiguous by also reproducing them, thus constituting instances of liquid racism (Weaver 2016). In particular, we analyze three internet memes comparing two different disastrous events: the Titan submersible implosion and the Messenia migrant boat sinking, both occurring in June 2023. Our textual analysis at the micro-level in terms of humor theories constitutes a form of text immanent critique, as it brings to the surface the logical contradictions/incongruities included in the texts; namely, the fact that, although a large number of migrants lose their lives, Western authorities do little to save them. At the macro-level of analysis, the sociodiagnostic critique reveals the manipulative character of antiracist discourse with which the internet memes under scrutiny seem to align. We argue that this hypocritical, as we could call it, antiracist discourse obscures the origins of the problem, i.e., the existence and strengthening of the borders and related practices, which are not humorously questioned or even ridiculed in the data examined here. We conclude by discussing the underlying assumptions that could contribute to creating humorous texts that offer an unambiguous antiracist perspective on contemporary racist acts.
The semiotics of curating is a theoretical approach that focuses on constructing, communicating, and interpreting signs, symbols, and meanings in museum exhibitions. With the increasing prevalence of digital technologies, curators are tasked with balancing different technologies, encompassing visual, sound, and multimodal experiences. In this perspective, the paper examines the role of sound as a semiotic dimension within exhibition contexts, analyzing how it functions as a potent signifier and enriching the interpretation of curated spaces with exhibited artefacts. This study explores the semiotic dimensions of soundscapes by analyzing examples from an exhibition at GAM Turin, Italy, the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, USA, and the work of Nicholas Party at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada. It will study how sonic elements such as music, language, and ambient noises intersect with cultural contexts to create layered, polyphonic interpretations of exhibited artefacts. I will finally discuss the potential of sound as a powerful medium for conveying meaning, evoking affective responses, and immersive engagement of the public.
This special issue aims to expand and enhance existing understandings of the semiotics of curation or, more precisely, of curating as a semiotic practice. The goal is to examine its theoretical elaboration, methodological perspectives, and manifold applications in diverse sectors where curating is now ubiquitous but effectively used to serve diverging purposes, including personalize access, signal distinction, amplifying ideological positions (propaganda), generating wealth by inflating value, and even establish identities. Otherwise put, the issue’s ambition is to explore how semiotics (with an emphasis on interpretation, framing, translation, engagement, enunciative assemblages, image-acts, storytelling, open text, multi-modality, and meta functions) could be used as a valuable toolkit to unpick and grapple with the intended and unintended consequences of human and algorithmic curation on personal and collective sensemaking and valorization processes.
