Rhetorical Devices and Humor by Jordanian Social Media Users During COVID-19 Pandemic (June 2022)

Abstract

The current study examines the deployment of the rhetorical strategies found in 25 jokes that are used by Jordanian social media users after the emergence of COVID- 19 during the months of March until September in the year 2020. The data were purposively selected from different social media, like Facebook and WhatsApp. The study analyzed how the rhetorical strategies are used in jokes to generate humor, depending on the context of humor. Therefore, the present study analyzed the corpus qualitatively, and it adopted Berger’s rhetorical techniques (1993) that deal with language and logic for analysis purposes. The findings of the present research indicated that a collection of rhetorical strategies were utilized to highlight several political, social, and psychological themes that were prominent in the Jordanian society during the COVID-19 pandemic. These rhetorical strategies were employed to enact humor. According to the results of the study, Jordanian social media users develop humor by employing strategies such as satire, pun, irony, exaggeration, definition, ignorance, rigidity, disappointment, allusion, and absurdity in an attempt to cause laughter.