Keywords
humour
intertextuality
parody
Twitter/X
How to Cite
Abstract
This study explores the role of intertextuality in shaping humorous responses to the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter/X. Through an analysis of a corpus of 381 English-language posts from 2020-2021 tagged with leading COVID-19 humour hashtags, 72 posts were identified as containing intertextual references. These draw from diverse domains, including religion, culture, cinema, television shows, songs, popular icons, literature, sports, and history, to frame the pandemic through relatable narratives. By intertwining these varied elements, the posts present individual perspectives and reveal broader societal attitudes and concerns regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. Posters employ these references to entertain, express anxiety, critique authority, and foster solidarity. Parody, in particular, through imitation and exaggeration of the intertextual elements, comments on pandemic-related experiences. The findings reveal that intertextual humour functioned not only as entertainment but also as a means of cultural reflection during a time of global crisis.
References
Alkaraki, S. M. S., Alias, N. B., & Maros, M. (2024). Exploring the impact of social media humour related to the COVID-19 pandemic: A systematic literature review on themes, coping mechanisms, critiques and linguistic devices. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2024.2322227.
Attardo, S. (Ed.). (2014). Philosophy of Humor. In Encyclopaedia of humour studies (pp. 566-570). SAGE Publications.
Bageshwar, B. R., & Zafar, S. (2023). Beyond laughter and smiles: Analytical paradigms in social media COVID-19 humour studies. The European Journal of Humour Research, 11(1), 95-116. https://doi.org/10.7592/EJHR.2023.11.1.757.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.; M. Holquist, Ed.). University of Texas Press. (Original work published in 1975).
Bischetti, L., Canal, P., & Bambini, V. (2021). Funny but aversive: A large-scale survey of the emotional response to Covid-19 humour in the Italian population during the lockdown. Lingua, 249, Article 102963. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102963.
Cancelas-Ouviña, L.-P. (2021). Humor in times of COVID-19 in Spain: Viewing coronavirus through memes disseminated via WhatsApp. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 611788. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.611788.
Cheshmedzhieva-Stoycheva, D. S. (2022). Ideology and intertextuality in Covid-19 memes. Cultural Perspectives, 27, 27-50.
Chiaro, D. (1996). The language of jokes: Analysing verbal play (1st Ed., 1992). Routledge.
Chłopicki, W., & Brzozowska, D. (2021). Sophisticated humour against COVID-19: The Polish case. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 34(2), 201-227. https://doi.org/10.1515/humor-2021-0015.
de Saint Laurent, C., Glăveanu, V. P., & Literat, I. (2022). Mimetic representations of the COVID-19 pandemic: An analysis of objectification, anchoring, and identification processes in coronavirus memes. Psychology of Popular Media, 11(4), 340-354. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000370.
de Saussure, F. (1916/1983). Course in general linguistics. Duckworth.
Dynel, M. (2021). COVID-19 memes going viral: On the multiple multimodal voices behind face masks. Discourse and Society, 32(2), 175-195. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926520970385.
Dynel, M. (2022). The life of COVID-19 mask memes: A diachronic study of the pandemic memescape. Comunicar, 30(72), 73-85. https://doi.org/10.3916/C72-2022-06.
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.
Freud, S. (1960). Jokes and their relation to the unconscious (J. Strachey, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Co. (Original work published 1905).
Gee, J. (2011). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (3rd Ed.). Routledge.
Hamed, M. S. M. (2024). An account of humour in Covid-19 internet memes from the perspective of cognitive relevance: A contrastive case study. International Journal of Arabic-English Studies, 24(2), 165-180. https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes.v24i2.659.
Hitchon, J. C., & Jura, J. O. (1997). Allegorically speaking: Intertextuality of the postmodern culture and its impact on print and television advertising. Communication Studies, 48(2), 142-158. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510979709368497.
Hobbes, T. (1991). Leviathan (R. Tuck, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1651).
Kadri, K., & Jumrah, J. (2022). Shifting meme content during information development on the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia. Journal of Information Science Theory and Practice, 10(1), 30-44. https://doi.org/10.1633/JISTaP.2022.10.1.3.
Kant, I. (2007). Critique of judgement (J. H. Bernard, Trans.). Cosimo Classics (Original work published 1790).
Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (2007). Online memes, affinities, and cultural production. In M. Knobel & C. Lankshear (Eds.), A new literacies sampler (pp. 199-227). Peter Lang Publishing.
Kristeva, J. (1980). Word, dialogue and novel. In L. S. Roudiez (Ed.), Desire in language: A semiotic approach to literature and art (pp. 64-91). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1966).
MacDonald, S. (2020). What do you (really) meme? Pandemic memes as social political repositories. Leisure Sciences, 43(1-2), 143-151. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2020.1773995.
Martin, R. A., Puhlik-Doris, P., Larsen, G., Gray, J., & Weir, K. (2003). Individual differences in uses of humour and their relation to psychological well-being: Development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality, 37(1), 48-75. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-6566(02)00534-2.
Martínez-Cardama, S., & García-López, F. (2021). Ephemeral mimetics: Memes, an X-ray of COVID-19. The European Journal of Humour Research, 9(4), 35–57. https://doi.org/10.7592/EJHR2021.9.4.558.
Mittal, R., Mittal, A., & Aggarwal, I. (2021). Identification of affective valence of Twitter-generated sentiments during the COVID-19 outbreak. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 11, Article 108. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-021-00828-x.
Nicholls, C. (2020). Online humour, cartoons, videos, memes, jokes and laughter in the epoch of the coronavirus. Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, 10 (November), 274-318. http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.10.17.
Norrick, N. R. (1989). Intertextuality in humour. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 2(2), 117-140. https://doi.org/10.1515/humr.1989.2.2.117.
Norstrom, R., & Sarna, P. (2021). Internet memes in COVID-19 lockdown times in Poland. Comunicar, 67, 75-85. https://doi.org/10.3916/C67-2021-06.
O’Donnell, M. B. (2021). Using Twitter to understand humour as stress relief during the COVID-19 outbreak [Honors college senior thesis, University of Vermont]. UVM ScholarWorks. https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/items/83097254-4b57-4f2c-9eae-4309606f5a37.
Ogoanah, F. N., & Ojo, F. O. (2021). ‘This coronavirus didn’t ask questions before entering Nigeria’: A socio-cognitive account of Covid-19 humour in Nigeria. English Academy Review, 38(2), 76-92. https://doi.org/10.1080/10131752.2021.1986985.
Phillips-Kumaga, L., Hansen-Garshong, R., Ackom, C. K., Teku, C., & Osei-Tutu, A. (2022). ‘Kwatakwata by June diεε…’: Internet humour used during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic by social media users in Ghana. The European Journal of Humour Research, 10(1), 134-146. https://doi.org/10.7592/EJHR2022.10.1.600.
Pinar, M. J. (2020). Humour and intertextuality in Steve Bell’s political cartoons. The European Journal of Humour Research, 8(3), 16-39. https://doi.org/10.7592/EJHR2020.8.3.Pinar-Sanz.
Roig, A., & Martorell, S. (2021). A fictional character in a real pandemic: Humanization of the Covid-19 virus as a parody account on Twitter. Information, Communication & Society, 24(6), 886-902. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1909094.
Ross, A. (1998). Language of humour. Routledge.
Rossen-Knill, D., & Henry, R. (1997). The pragmatics of verbal parody. Journal of Pragmatics, 27(6), 719-752. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(96)00054-9.
Schopenhauer, A. (1969). The world as will and representation (E. F. J. Payne, Trans.). Dover Publications. (Original work published 1819).
Shilikhina, K. M. (2020). Humour and intertextuality in online spoof news. The European Journal of Humour Research, 8(3), 83-98. https://doi.org/10.7592/EJHR2020.8.3.Shilikhina.
Tsakona, V. (2020). Scrutinising intertextuality in humour: Moving beyond cultural literacy and towards critical literacy. The European Journal of Humour Research, 8(3), 40-59. https://doi.org/10.7592/EJHR2020.8.3.Tsakona2.
Tsakona, V., & Chovanec, J. (2020). Revisiting intertextuality and humour: Fresh perspectives on a classic topic. The European Journal of Humour Research, 8(3), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.7592/EJHR2020.8.3.Tsakona.
Tulloch, R. (2023). #BoomerRemover: COVID-19 and the intertextual politics of internet memes. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 29(5), 1151-1167. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231176181.
Wiggins, B. E. (2019). The discursive power of memes in digital culture: Ideology, semiotics, and intertextuality. Routledge.
Zenner, E., & Geeraerts, D. (2018). One does not simply process memes: Image macros as multimodal constructions. In E. Winter-Froemel & V. Thaler (Eds.), Cultures and traditions of wordplay and wordplay research (pp. 167-194). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110586374-008.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2026 The European Journal of Humour Research