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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.