Inferring the Target of Self-defeating Humour in Internet Memes: A Pragmatic Analysis

Abstract

Nowadays, people spend hours on social media conversing and sharing information through jokes and references made online. Digital memes are one of the most favourable means of internet communication, which thrives on humour. The main purpose of humour is to entertain and make people laugh. So, to avoid hurting others by joking at the expense of others, many people turn to self-mockery. One type of self-mockery is self-defeating humour in which the speaker targets himself/herself in a “poor me” fashion. By using a mixed approach of qualitative and quantitative analysis, this research investigated how internet users interpret the target of self-defeating humour in memes. This analysis used the relevance theory of Sperber and Wilson (1995). On this account, this research addressed the process of decoding and inferential enrichment, and lexical pragmatic adjustment. It is said that making oneself the target of a joke is safer and less sensitive than targeting other people. After analysing the inferences of 100 netizens that were drawn from five self-defeating memes, it has been concluded that targeting oneself could be as sensitive as targeting others.