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The Dynamics of Interactional Humor: Creating and negotiating humor in everyday encounters
Edited by Villy Tsakona and Jan Chovanec
[Topics in Humor Research 7] 2018
► pp. 257–282

Chapter 11
On-line humorous representations of the 2015 Greek national elections

Acting and interacting about politics on social media

| University of Geneva & University of Athens

The recent development of social media platforms has given rise to new forms of digital communication in which humor seems to play a prominent role. This chapter is concerned with humor in such a newly emerged, mediated genre, so-called internet memes (i.e. units of image, text, animation, and/or sound spread through the internet), focusing on the memes generated, disseminated, and commented upon on Facebook after the Greek national elections in January 2015. This chapter examines memes along with the responses posted by Facebook users, showing that, being humorous themselves, internet memes enact mimetic responses that are also humorous. This line of research aims to do justice to the interactional aspect of meme-based humor not previously acknowledged in the literature.

Keywords: political humor, internet memes, computer-mediated interaction, multimodality, General Theory of Verbal Humor, Greek national elections
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Internet memes and political humor
  • 3.The theoretical framework
  • 4.The data
  • 5.The analysis of the data
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 January 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/thr.7.11pia
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[no author supplied]
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