Abstract
Abstract This paper offers a cross-cultural contrastive study of what we term ‘nation memes’. These are humorous internet memes which refer to a particular country/nation. Our analysis of cultural scripts in memes related to Switzerland is based on a tripartite corpus of digital items shared by Polish, Swiss and international communities. By adopting a grounded-theory approach, we examine the prevalent scripts that represent the Swiss and Switzerland from each of the three perspectives. The results of our qualitative study indicate that Swiss memes are based on experiential knowledge of life in Switzerland, as well as a few stereotypes adopted by the Swiss about their own nation. The Polish subcorpus addresses Switzerland from an outsider perspective by invoking well-known cultural scripts, similar to those on international websites, on which Polish users sometimes scavenge. However, the Polish memescape uses scripts about Switzerland to address problems and scripts specific to Poland. Importantly, nation memes do not necessarily involve humorous disparagement, i.e. they do not always take Switzerland/the Swiss to be the target at which to poke fun when building humorous superiority. Moreover, by referring to their own national vices, the Swiss and Poles sometimes use cultural scripts as the basis for self-deprecating humour.
Highlights
The last two decades have seen a massive increase in the number of studies devoted to online humour across disciplines
The goal of this qualitative study has been to compare contemporary nation memes relating to Switzerland from the perspective of Polish, Swiss and international social media communities
All the memes in our corpus – namely, three subcorpora taken from Polish, Swiss and international websites which are aimed at their respective audiences – make some reference to Switzerland, albeit from different vantage points
Summary
The last two decades have seen a massive increase in the number of studies devoted to online humour across disciplines. This is a consequence of the development of Web 2.0 and the emergence of participatory culture (Jenkins et al, 2009), and the ever-increasing wealth of user-generated humorous data. These data include both traditional forms of humour, such as verbal jokes circulated on the Internet rather than being passed on orally or in print Following Kecskes (2014), culture should be understood to be a set of shared norms and beliefs and behaviours and artefacts, as represented in socially constructed mental models (van Dijk, 2008) encoded in the multimodal text-image ensembles that we examine in this study (cf. de Jongste, 2016 for a different application of mental models in humour research)
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