Humour in times of mourning? A contrastive analysis of memes
Humour in times of mourning? A contrastive analysis of memes

Summary/Abstract: This study investigates the use of humorous memes in times of mourning from a contrastive English-Spanish perspective. The study of the discourse of death and grief is receiving increasing attention mainly due to the changes brought about by the migration of mourning practices to the internet. Previous research has revealed that mourning personal losses or those of public figures is not exempt from including negative evaluations of the deceased or the circumstances surrounding them. Despite the identification of ideological discourses around death, to our knowledge, no attention has been paid to the use of humour in times of mourning, especially from a contrastive perspective. The present study aims to begin to fill this gap through the analysis of humorous memes published following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. We pose a distinction between two uses of humour in times of mourning, laughing while mourning and laughing at mourning, and argue that humorous memes in our study fall within the second category. Two corpora of humorous memes in Spanish (n = 60) and English (n = 67) were compiled and analysed using a mixed methods approach within a pragmatics perspective. The contrastive analysis identified (i) the underlying ideologies in terms of intentions and attitudes, (ii) the expectations of mutuality of information, (iii) the humorous strategies devised, (iv) and the elements characteristic of the discourse of mourning. Findings show that online posters were not actually in mourning, and that they combined the discourses of mourning, humour, and criticism with different intentions within and across the two languages under scrutiny. Our study suggests changes in mourning etiquette in the public sphere and concludes that laughing at mourning was the type of humour in times of mourning that prevailed in our data.

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