“I Has Seen Image Macros!” Advice Animals Memes as Visual-Verbal Jokes

Authors

  • Marta Dynel Lodz University

Keywords:

Advice Animals, incongruity–resolution model, Internet humor, joke, meme, verbal humor, visual humor

Abstract

This essay considers the prevalent but underresearched phenomenon of humorous Internet memes by focusing on Advice Animal image macros, conceptualized as an internally diversified joke genre proliferating across social media. Specifically, Advice Animals are seen as cycles of visual–verbal jokes—widespread humorous units typical of participatory new media, which flourish via individual users’ creative contributions. Based on a selection of meme templates that have been very popular in the past few years, I advance several hypotheses about the pragma-cognitive mechanisms underpinning the humor that stems from the visual or verbal components, or combinations of them.

Author Biography

Marta Dynel, Lodz University

Marta Dynel is Associate Professor in the Department of Pragmatics at the University of Łódź. Her research interests are primarily in pragmatic and cognitive mechanisms of humour, neo-Gricean pragmatics, the pragmatics of interaction, (im)politeness theory, the philosophy of overt and covert untruthfulness (irony and deception), as well as the methodology of research on film discourse. She has published internationally in linguistic journals and volumes, contributing over 60 articles in the space of the past 10 years.  She also authored Humorous Garden-Paths: A Pragmatic-Cognitive Study (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) and edited The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains (John Benjamins, 2011), Developments in Linguistic Humour Theory (John Benjamins, 2013), as well as Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions (with Jan Chovanec, John Benjamins, 2015).https://unilodz.academia.edu/MartaDynel

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Published

2016-01-29

Issue

Vol. 10 (2016)

Section

Features

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