The Humor And Functioning Of Internet Memes

The humor and functioning of Internet memes

Introduction

What is done in this work is an analysis of humor in memes. These are understood as, as defined by the Spanish Language Dictionary, an image, video or text, usually distorted for cartoon purposes, which is spread mainly through the Internet, so a meme is a multimedia unit within the speech Multimodal that has a humorous purpose and whose main origin has been – and continues to be the Internet, as well as its primary diffusion channel. Its analysis is carried out based on a corpus of 100 images that have been extracted from the Twitter social network, covering the chronological period from the beginning of 2010 to the mid -2020.

In this way, understanding the functioning of a meme is very similar to understanding contemporary society in the internet field, especially in how people multiply the semantic meaning of an image for our benefit in order to make a new significance and disseminate other concepts different from those of the initial image, having as main objective to make other speakers laugh during a specific communicative act.

Developing

Internet users or meme receptors assimilate the images they receive, changing their way of communicating and expressing their identity through them, turned, at the same time, an element that has different purposes: political and social pressure, messages only humorous, etc. In fact, Twitter Spain stands out for the almost instantaneous realization of memes during some political event, as already happened during the November 2019 electoral debates.

During events like this, many are the newspapers that are subsequently responsible for collecting the various satirical editions and criticisms that have been disseminated through this social network.

Taking all this into account, as we can verify, the power and abilities of the image are currently undeniable, but in this work these multimodal images (the memes) will be studied according to their merely humorous purpose.

The main objective of this work is to analyze and explain the mechanisms and resources that the authors of the memes use in their editions to achieve a comic effect, based on a pragmatic perspective. The theoretical and methodological basis that will be followed will be the general theory of verbal humor (TGHV), established by Salvatore Attardo and Raskin in 1991, where they define the main humorous mechanisms that apply to the subsequent analysis of the memes, although it is taken into consideration, At the same time, the modification carried out by the Graial Research Group in 2012 of the theory in question, an adaptation that can be found in the work of the linguistics of Spanish humor of Leonor Ruiz Gurillo.

Therefore, in the first point we will talk about multimodality and humor, attending to the origin and definitions of the meme concept, to the multimodal discourse intertwined with this and about irony and humor, specifically, taking into account Ruiz’s proposal Gurillo and mixture or blending theory. Next, the formation, selection and division of the corpus will be explained for its subsequent analysis of 10 memes. Finally, a series of conclusions and reflections will be collected on the totality of what has been worked throughout this work. 

conclusion

Humor is a complex concept of defining and, in addition, for many speakers, a difficult mechanism to use in any conversation due to the diversity of factors that must be taken into account once you want to introduce into a conversation or a speech, having as Epicenter always the context, so we will also have to attend to the pragmatic.