Cartoons in memes: recycling popular art forms as a humorous response to the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract As an established form of semiotic expression in the digital world, memes provide online users with the possibility to express diverse functions, including articulating shared norms and values. Memes function as multimodal signs, combining pre-existing visual elements with typically innovative textual components. Due to their dependence on current events, they tend to be ephemeral, serving to provide topical—and often humorous—commentary and criticism of contemporary society. Drawing on the international database of COVID-related humour, this article explores a hitherto overlooked area of research, namely, how memes draw on visual aspects of popular culture by incorporating well-known cartoons and animated movies in order to provide humorous social commentary on diverse aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a social semiotic and multimodal perspective, the research identifies how meme creators draw on globally as well as locally known cartoons, what humorous themes they employ, and with what shared and newly constructed meanings they operate. The findings indicate that the creative reuse of established intertextual references, manifested in humorous memes through the reworking of cartoon characters and animated films, is related, on the one hand, to the ‘hypermemetic logic’ (Shifman) of replicating images, and, on other, to the focus on the ‘performative self’, with users reflecting on the contrast between their pre-pandemic lives (cued by childhood reminiscences associated with cartoon imagery) and the current reality.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Word & Image

• Publication date

  2025-04-03

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/02666286.2025.2463037
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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