Abstract
Advancing the concept of multimodal voicing as a tool for describing user-generated online humour, this paper reports a study on humorous COVID-19 mask memes. The corpus is drawn from four popular social media platforms and examined through a multimodal discourse analytic lens. The dominant memetic trends are elucidated and shown to rely programmatically on nested (multimodal) voices, whether compatible or divergent, as is the case with the dissociative echoing of individuals wearing peculiar masks or the dissociative parodic echoing of their collective voice. The theoretical thrust of this analysis is that, as some memes are (re)posted across social media (sometimes going viral), the previous voice(s) – of the meme subject/author/poster – can be re-purposed (e.g. ridiculed) or unwittingly distorted. Overall, this investigation offers new theoretical and methodological implications for the study of memes: it indicates the usefulness of the notions of multimodal voicing, intertextuality and echoing as research apparatus; and it brings to light the epistemological ambiguity in lay and academic understandings of memes, the voices behind which cannot always be categorically known.
Highlights
The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has monopolised news reports and public discussions in traditional media and on social media
The best part of the year has seen cities and countries being put on lockdown and civilians being quarantined or given stay-at-home orders/recommendations for the sake of their own safety. All this stimulates citizens’ social media activity, which shows in their prolific production of digital humour, commonly called ‘memes’, about COVID-19
Situated in the context of the Bakhtinian notion of voicing and related notions, this study argues that memes about COVID-19 face masks programmatically involve various nested vantage points, whether endorsing or ridiculing previous voices, and whether conforming with or recontextualising and re-purposing the original posts as they are reposted, not infrequently to the extent of going viral
Summary
The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has monopolised news reports and public discussions in traditional media and on social media. Baxter, 2014; Cooren and Sandler, 2014), underlying one’s (spoken or written) words, or – as is postulated here – any form of expression, verbal and non-verbal and even multimodal, namely based on multiple integration of meaningbearing resources across modes (Jewitt et al, 2016; Kress, 2010; van Leeuwen, 2004) It is perhaps the conscious and/or recognisable replication of previous messages that is most naturally amenable to consideration as voicing. For instance, parodying someone’s gait or facial expression need not entail any serious criticism (and does not carry any propositional meaning); instead, it may merely be a performance based on exaggeration of some salient features solely for the sake of humour and entertainment This observation is relevant to some COVID-19 mask memes
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