Interpreting Covid-related memes:

The role of inferential strategies and context accessibility

Francisco Yus and Carmen Maíz-Arévalo

University of Alicante / Complutense University, Madrid

ABSTRACT
One of the sources of relief, entertainment and socialisation during the Covid pandemic
lockdown was the massive exchange of memes on social media and messaging applications.
The objective of this chapter is to analyse and categorise 150 Peninsular Spanish memes
collected from different interactive channels online (mainly social media and the messaging
app WhatsApp) during the strict 2020 Covid lockdown in Spain (March-May 2020). The
sample was then analysed under “incongruity-resolution theory” and categorized with the
following research questions in mind: (a) what inferential strategies the internet user is
expected to perform to interpret these Covid memes correctly; (b) what role text and image
play in the eventual derivation of humorous effects from these memes; and (c) what kind of
contextual information the internet user is expected to have access to for successful
comprehension. Answering these research questions will eventually allow for a differentiation
between Covid memes and non-Covid ones, as already intuitively felt by most users.

Keywords: memes, Covid memes, internet humour, multimodality, incongruity-resolution

1 Introduction

In this chapter, we will analyse the famous incongruity-resolution humorous strategy

(henceforth IR) and apply it to the memes that were massively exchanged and forwarded
among Spanish internet users during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown (March-May
2020). These Covid memes, as they will generically be labelled, were mainly exchanged
through the messaging app WhatsApp and on social media such as Twitter and Facebook.
Memes are textual, visual and especially multimodal discourses that spread through
the Net with different purposes, humour and political criticism being two major reasons
for sharing memes with other users and communities across platforms. Many memes are
made of text but are forwarded as if they were images (e.g. they are kept in the smartphone
store of photos, see Yus 2021a). In the case of multimodal memes made up of text and
image (e.g. the famous image macro memes), they exhibit interesting combinations of
their textual and visual semiotic modes with clear pragmatic implications (see Yus 2019).
Needless to say, many of these memes played a crucial role in facilitating or triggering
interactions in a time when all the society was forced to remain at home due to the
pandemic. Very often these memes were the initial attempt of users to obtain reciprocity
and relieving interactions based on the mutuality of the suffering inflicted on society at
large. The inherent humour of these memes was thus supplemented with their interactive
role and in smoothening the tension and suffering of Spanish society.
In this chapter we will focus on the IR strategy and will analyse the kind of
incongruity and expected inferential patterns that are at work in the generation of
humorous effects and parallel affective effects from Covid memes (Maíz-Arévalo and
Yus 2021). Additionally, we will elucidate to what extent Covid memes may be
differentiated from normal memes, so as to be able to account for the feeling that users
hold about Covid memes, namely that they served additional purposes during lockdown
to the ones typically associated with normal, non-Covid memes.
The chapter is organised as follows: The next section introduces the main attributes
of IR for verbal humour and arranges them in several categories. Section 3 summarises

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previous research on IR applied to non-Covid memes (see Yus 2021b). In Section 4, we
will comment on the methodology used in the analysis of a corpus of Covid memes. In
Section 5 we will carry out the analysis of that corpus and will compare their humorous
strategies with the ones at work in non-Covid humorous memes. Finally, in Section 6 we
will provide some possible reasons why Covid memes are felt to be different and serving
different (or additional) purposes to the ones normally found in non-Covid humorous
memes.

2 The incongruity-resolution humorous strategy (IR)

IR is one of the most important proposals to account for the slippery issue of why jokes
and other discourses turn out humorous to the addressee. Initially proposed by Suls (1972,
1983), IR mainly pictures humour as the outcome of two phases: one in which the hearer
comes across some form of incongruity while interpreting the text, and one in which the
hearer finds a cognitive rule that reconciles the incongruity and leads to humorous effects,
because unresolved incongruities lead to puzzlement, rather than humour (Yus 2016: 66,
2017).
In previous research (Yus 2016), a proposal has categorised IR depending on the
combination of a number of factors:
1. A distinction between frame-based incongruities and discourse-based ones.
Regarding the former, some humorous discourses exploit the addressee’s mental
construction of a situation to understand the joke, often carried out beyond the person’s
full awareness. In Yus (2013a, 2013b, 2016) the term make-sense frame was proposed as
an umbrella term for similar terms proposed in the bibliography, such as frame or schema,
which refer to the addressee’s extraction of general information about the world and
everyday situations that is stored as accessible chunks of encyclopaedic information
(specifically stored as “I conceptualise X as p” or as a more factual “I believe that p”),
information which is often retrieved almost unconsciously in order to make sense of the
intended scenario for the comprehension of utterances. An example is the Covid meme
(1), whose humour does not rely on manipulating the inferential strategies performed for
the interpretation of the meme text, but on the construction of a proper mental scenario
(make-sense frame) for its comprehension:

(1) Última hora. Marruecos intercepta una patera llena de madrileños.

[Breaking news: Morocco intercepts a boat (patera) filled with people from
Madrid].

While interpreting (1), the construction of a proper mental situation for the meme
generates incongruity and puzzlement in the audience, since these boats (pateras) are
normally filled with African migrants, not people from Madrid. The resolution (essential
for humorous effects, as already stated) entails the user’s retrieval of very specific Covid-
related background information from context: “People from Madrid will do the utmost to
reach their second residences on the coast despite the lockdown.”
By contrast, other incongruities rely on manipulations of the actual interpretation
of the joke text, typically involving a play with the accessibility to senses of ambiguous
words, as happens with the accessibility to different meanings of the word prórroga
(meaning both extended lockdown and extra time in football matches) in the Covid meme
(2) below, the pandemic-related meaning being very accessible and selected by the

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audience due to the pandemic situation at the time, and the sport-centred sense eventually
getting imposed on this initial choice by the meme creator.

(2) Creo que una prórroga es una barbaridad. Deberíamos ir a penaltis ya.
[I think extended lockdown / extra time is just nonsense. We should go straight
to penalties].

The discourse-based IR also includes playing with various possible referents for
indexicals (pronouns, proper names, adverbs…), the inference of the elided part of sub-
sentential utterances, the derivation of implicatures and playing with literal and figurative
senses of phrases and utterances, as happens with lavarse las manos (wash one’s hands,
which may be inferred literally or as an idiom meaning to avoid responsibility) in the
Covid meme (3):

(3) El coronavirus no acabará con ningún político de este país, porque si en algo
son buenos es en lavarse las manos.
[Coronavirus will not kill any politician in this country, because if they are
good at something, it is at washing their hands].

2. A three-fold classification of resolutions was also proposed depending on what

the hearer is expected to do in order to solve the incongruity:
a. Discourse-based resolution, when the hearer has to perform a supplementary
inferential operation to make sense of the incongruity found in some portion of the text
of the joke, for instance to select a previously undetected sense of a word, to locate a
different referent for an indexical from the one initially chosen, etc. For example, in (4)
the humour lies in the polysemy of calle, initially meaning “to shut up” and which
subsequently has to be replaced with its second meaning: “street”, with connotations
regarding how eager society is to return to the streets:

(4) Si me preguntan que hable ahora o calle para siempre, elijo calle.
[If I am asked now to speak or shut up, I choose street].

b. Frame-based resolution, when the hearer has to alter the current make-sense
frame constructed for the situation and replace it with a different frame that reconciles the
incongruity. For example, in (5) the reader is forced to inferentially retrieve and compare
the typical situation (frame) of Christmas to the specificity of pandemic lockdown:

(5) No me digáis que no parece Navidad. Todos reunidos en casa en familia, los
niños sin cole, la nevera llena, sin fútbol y esta noche discurso del rey. Estoy
por sacar el árbol y las luces en el balcón.
[Don’t say this isn’t like Christmas. Family gathering at home, kids without
school, the fridge full, no football and tonight the king’s speech. I am toying
with taking out the Christmas tree and the tree lights to the balcony].

c. Implication-based resolution, which applies to two cases (a) when the hearer has
to look for the resolution outside the text of the joke with the derivation of implicated
premises (i.e. contextual information) and implicated conclusions (implicatures); and (b)
when the hearer looks for implications that allow for the derivation of humorous effects
after a full comprehension of the joke has taken place. For example, the wife’s words in

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(6) result in a humour-connoted contextual implication beyond the explicit interpretation
of the text:

(6) The husband was at home, talking to his wife one evening over supper. “Get
this…” he chuckled, “That ridiculous janitor of ours claims he’s made love to
every woman in the building except one.” “Hmm,” said his wife, assuming a
thoughtful faraway type expression, “must be that stuck-up Mrs. Stewart on the
eighth floor.”

3. A distinction was made between incongruities whose source is located at the

initial part of the joke (the setup) and those whose source is situated at the final part (the
punchline). The former often demand some kind of inferential backtracking from the
hearer, that is, to return to an already processed part of the joke and re-interpret it in the
light of the new evidence arising from the processing of a subsequent stretch of the joke.
On the other hand, incongruity-triggering elements placed at the end of the joke often
demands the hearer’s participation with the derivation of implicatures that are necessary
to make sense of the joke and obtain the desired humorous effects.
The combination of (1-3) yielded the classification of IR types provided in Table 1,
with cases resulting from the aforementioned elements: frame-based or discourse based
incongruity, located in the setup or in the punchline of the joke, and with different types
of incongruity resolution (discourse, frame, implication).

Type of incongruity Location Type of resolution

1 frame-based setup discourse-based
2 frame-based punchline discourse-based
3 frame-based setup frame-based
4 frame-based punchline frame-based
5 frame-based setup implication-based
6 frame-based punchline implication-based
7 discourse-based setup discourse-based
8 discourse-based punchline discourse-based
9 discourse-based setup frame-based
10 discourse-based punchline frame-based
11 discourse-based setup implication-based
12 discourse-based punchline implication-based
Table 1. A classification of IR types in verbal jokes (Yus 2016).

3 Incongruity-resolution in general-topic memes

In Yus (2021b), an application of the aforementioned twelve-case classification of IR was

proposed for the analysis of a corpus of 150 image macro memes (memes with text at the
top and/or the bottom and an image in the middle), with special emphasis on the
relationship existing between text and image in these memes. The analysis yielded seven

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types of IR patterns, some of which more or less resembled the qualities of some of the
twelve cases of IR proposed for verbal jokes, while other types were more meme-specific
due to the multimodal semiotic configuration of these discourses. Specifically, the two
types of incongruity (discourse- and frame-based) suggested for verbal jokes were also
at work in memes, plus a third combinatory pattern arising from a humour-triggering
combination of the text and the image in the meme: discourse-image incongruity –which
involves an inferential clash when obtaining an interpretation of the meme that demands
a convergence between the partial meanings of the text and the image. The role performed
by the image in the meme yielded three major cases: (a) image plays no role in IR; (b)
image aids in IR; and (c) image is essential in IR. The cases ensuing from the combination
of such parameters yielded the seven patterns collected in Table 2, which also shows the
percent occurrence rate corresponding to these types in the corpus of 150 memes.

Type of incongruity Role of image

8.66% frame-based image plays no role
31.33% 18.00% frame-based image aids
4.67% frame-based image is essential
38.67% text-image based image is essential
8.00% text-based image plays no role
21.34% 7.34% text-based image aids
6.00% text-based image is essential
8.66% no incongruity no role
Table 2. A classification of IR types in general memes (Yus 2021b).

Predictably, the most frequent IR pattern was the one in which the parallel interpretations
of text and image in the meme clash for humorous purposes (near 40%). Apart from that
type, others were isolated depending on the main source of incongruity (frame vs.
discourse-based) and the role of the image in the correct humorous interpretation of the
meme: no role, aiding role and essential role. Besides, as can be seen in Table 2, only
8.66% of the memes did not exhibit a humorous IR pattern, often because they were not
meant to be humorous in the first place. Some explanation and examples of the seven
types is provided below.

3.1 Frame-based incongruity where the image plays no role in the IR strategy

In this case of the taxonomy, the user is forced to replace the frame that was previously
constructed to interpret the meme with another frame so as to find a resolution and obtain
the intended effects. An example would be (7), with no role for the image and in which
the top text generates some expectations regarding the continuation in the bottom text,
but which are subsequently disconfirmed, triggering an incongruity:

(7) Top text: A guy walks into a bar…

Image: An image of a hen.
Bottom text: He has a family of four and a drinking problem.

3.2 Frame-based incongruity where the image aids in the IR strategy

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Two main varieties may be distinguished in this category. On the one hand, some
instances show that the referent of the image is compatible with the top text but not with
the bottom text; on the other hand, other memes are compatible with the bottom text but
not with the top text. The former increases the potential effectiveness of the incongruity,
since the initial interpretation selected for the top text is corroborated by the validating
interpretation of the image in the meme. Three examples of this variety can be found in
Figure 1, where the image of an angry-looking woman (meme on the left and right) and
of a hippy-looking girl (centre) is fully compatible with the top text, but the bottom text
becomes incongruous with both the top text and the image, thus creating an incongruity.

Figure 1. Memes with congruity between top-text and image but not with bottom text (Yus 2021b).

Alternatively, the image may be compatible with the bottom text but not with the
top text. The inferential pattern in this category entails the identification of an incongruity
when reading top and bottom text in succession, and the image somehow smoothens the
contrast between these texts, not only making the inferential incongruity less radical but
also allowing for a number of implicated conclusions about what is depicted in the image
(Yus 2021b: 141). This is at work in the memes below: (8) exemplifies a sharp contrast
between the texts (if the neighbour does not return the tools he may be murdered).
However, the bottom text is compatible with the referent of the image, namely the actor
in the film Taken, where the actor plays a desperate father performing violent actions in
order to rescue his kidnapped daughter. Instead, the contrast in (9) refers to the typical
objective of university life: not to repeat courses. Again, the image of the student is not
incompatible with the bottom text; and it smoothens the contrast as well. Finally, in (10)
is a curious example of image-text compatibility, since the bottom text reproduces the
famous activist Greta Thunberg’s words that she uttered exactly with the nonverbal
behaviour portrayed in the photo of the meme while she was delivering a speech (viewers
who are able to make that connection between the meme and her actual words will derive
more humorous effects). This time, it is the top text that is completely incompatible.

(8) Top text: Borrowing our tools? If not returned.

Image: Photo of actor Liam Neeson.
Bottom text: I will find you and kill you.
(9) Top text: Why make college the 4 best years of your life.
Image: Photo of university student drinking a beer.
Bottom text: When you can make it 6.
(10) Top text: When you parents turn off the wifi.

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 Image: Photo of activist Greta Thunberg delivering a speech.
Bottom text: How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood.

3.3 Frame-based incongruity where the image is essential in the IR strategy

Here, the image becomes essential both to work out the incongruity detected in the frame
constructed while processing the top text and when trying to find a possible resolution to
the incongruity. In (11), the image of Donald Trump has a key importance for the proper
comprehension of the accompanying texts, since the image provides visual information
about the person to whom the top and bottom texts are referring.

(11) Top text: Says he’ll create 25 million new jobs.

Image: Photo of Donald Trump.
Bottom text: Went bankrupt 4 times.

3.4 Discourse-image based incongruity (the image is essential)

With this type, meme creators exploit the interrelation of the partial text and image
meanings when brought together in a single discourse for humorous purposes. A
commonly used strategy is a direct contrast between the meaning provided by the text
and that of the image. Some examples are provided in Figure 2, with a sharp contrast
portrayed in the meme in the middle between the expectations of the Marine job provided
in the top and bottom text and the actual activity performed by a Marine. The memes on
the left and right of the Figure generate incongruity by relating an intense nonverbal
gesture (the act of crying) to the trivial situations described by the top and bottom text.

Figure 2. Memes with incongruity between text and image (Yus 2021b).

3.5 Discourse-based incongruity where the image plays no role in the IR strategy

This category shows a discourse-based incongruity created without the aid of the image,
as happens with several memes whose IR strategy is based on the similar pronunciation
corresponding to some stretch of discourse in the meme. By way of example, in (12) a
similarity of pronunciation exists between Al Gore rhythms and algorithms, the drawing
of a racoon being irrelevant in this IR strategy. By contrast, meme (13) plays with
ambiguity in the phrase get high, initially understood as “get high [on drugs]” (a relevant
choice of an interpretation at first, then invalidated by the bottom text), and in which the
photo of a black man seems to play no significant role in this choice of an initially relevant
interpretation.1

1
Of course, we do not deny the possibility that the meme creator could be appealing to the stereotype of
black people as drug dealers/consumers and not as good students… It would certainly be very aggressive

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 (12) Top text: What do vice presidents listen to while doing math problems?
Image: Drawing of a racoon.
Bottom text: Al Gore rhythms.
(13) Top text: Let’s all get high.
Image: Photo of a well-dressed black man.
Bottom text: Grades on our finals.

3.6 Discourse-based incongruity where the image aids in the IR strategy

In this category the accompanying image favours a discourse-based incongruity typically

triggered by some kind of ambiguity (homonymy, polysemy, homophony, similar
pronunciation, to quote but a few). The similar pronunciations of Chopin and shopping
in (14) is illustrative of this mechanism, in which the image aids in the user’s
interpretation of the meme:

(14) Top text: Can’t we just make up…

Image: Drawing of composer Chopin.
Bottom text: And go Chopin.

3.7 Discourse-based incongruity where the image is essential in the IR strategy

Finally, this category covers an IR strategy in which the meme creator manipulates the
audience’s interpretation of the text in the meme with the aid of its image, that is, the
image becomes essential in leading the viewer to select a single specific interpretation for
that text, only to invalidate it (typically when the bottom text is encountered). The
audience then realise that they have been fooled into selecting that initially relevant top-
text interpretation. Some examples are portrayed in Figure 3. The meme on the left offers
a combination of the word covered and the Muslim man’s image that inevitably leads to
the choice of one of the senses corresponding to this polysemous word (i.e., to cover one’s
body with clothes). However, the bottom text reminds the viewer of a parallel, initially
less relevant sense of covered – to have insurance – which finally turns out to be the
correct interpretation. In the meme in the middle, the man’s image makes one
interpretation of the ambiguous word coming (to reach orgasm) more likely to match the
intended meaning, but the bottom text invalidates this initially relevant choice. The same
happens in the meme on the right: despite being presented as very accessible and initially
relevant interpretation aided by the man’s image, the firstly assumed possible sense of
beating is once again invalidated by the bottom text.

(i.e. racist) kind of meme then, besides de wordplay. However, the look of the man in the meme (smartly
dressed) makes this possibility less likely.

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 Figure 3. Memes with discourse-based incongruity, with essential role of the image (Yus 2021b).

Another possibility is one single interpretation for the top text, and the image is
essential in forcing the audience to entertain simultaneously two meanings of a word or
phrase in the bottom text, as happens with cabinet in (15) below, which is interpreted as
“piece of furniture” due to the top text of the meme and also as “committee of senior
ministers responsible for controlling government policy” due to the image of the
politician:

(15) Top text: Hello, is that Ikea?…

Image: Photo of British politician Theresa May.
Bottom text: I need a new cabinet.

4 IR in Covid memes: Methodology of analysis

The main objective of this chapter is to apply this seven-case classification of IR patterns
in general humorous memes to the specificity of Covid memes shared and forwarded
during the strict pandemic lockdown in Spain. We hope that the analysis will yield
possible differences in the way the humorous intention is accomplished, the incongruity-
resolution is resolved and which category is more often resorted to, together with the
implications that may be drawn from these uses.
For this chapter, we collected 150 memes that specifically dealt with the
coronavirus pandemic, and which were shared between March and May 2020, a time
when Spanish people were forced to stay at home under lockdown. Then, these memes
were analysed and commented upon in a Table.
As can be seen in Figure 4, in that Table the memes were first numbered. Secondly,
we labelled them according to whether the memes were made up only of text, only of an
image or exhibited a multimodal text-image combination. We predicted, just like with the
normal meme classification described above, that these multimodal memes would be the
most interesting for a pragmatic analysis of their humorous effects, together with an
account of the role of text and image in their derivation. Thirdly, we analysed the extent
to which these memes fitted any of the seven IR cases outlined in Section 3 above.
Fourthly, we included in the Table the kind of contextual information that the meme
creator expects their audience to be able to access in order to obtain the humorous effects.
This contextual information was divided into general context (GC) and Covid-related
context (CR). As will be discussed in Section 6 below, in many Covid memes mutual
awareness of sharing certain Covid-related information suffices to generate humorous
effects, without needing the aid of discourse-based IR strategies such as playing with
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ambiguity or with multiple possible referents for an indexical. Finally, we added a column
to the Table commenting on which are, in our opinion, the specific sources of humorous
effects at work in these Covid memes.

Figure 4. Table of analysis of the corpus of Covid memes.

5 IR in Covid memes: Categories

As happened with the normal humorous memes analysed in Yus (2021b), many Covid
memes exhibited some form of IR strategy. However, 29.3% of the memes in the corpus
could not be ascribed to any of the seven categories proposed in Yus (ibid.), compared
with just 8.66% of normal memes, even if they were also meant to be humorous. A
possible explanation lies in the fact that the Covid pandemic was a sudden and unexpected
situation and people did not know very well what measures to take to avoid infection or
how to cope with being isolated at home for many weeks. In this environment of
collective fear and suffering, it is understandable that some of the memes would base their
humorous effectiveness not on some humour-triggering discursive strategy, but on
reminding others about collective habits, media references and shared suffering, the
simple awareness of mutuality of information being enough to lead to humorous effects.
The analysis of these non-IR humorous Covid memes shows that this argument for
the presence of humour in Covid memes beyond an IR strategy is in the right direction.
As already stated, they remind of mutuality of Covid-related information, specifically
through alternative interpretations of popular media discourses (11.4%), as in (16) below;
signalling collective mutuality of general background assumptions (20.5%), as in (17);
and strengthened collective status of Covid-specific background information, mainly
divided into: (a) criticism of government’s actions to tackle the pandemic (6.9%); (b)
expected behaviour to prevent the spread of the virus (16%), as in (18); (c) people’s
overall habits during the pandemic (18.2%); and (d) people’s suffering under lockdown
(11.25%), as in (19):

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 (16) Top text: Doc, por qué no hay nadie en la calle?
[Doc, why is there nobody in the street?].
Image: Still of the famous film Back to the Future.
Bottom text: Mierda Marty, estamos en 2020.
[Shit Marty, we are in 2020].
(17) ¿Crees que tienes ansiedad? Ansiedad tienen los Testigos de Jehová, que no
pueden salir a tocar puertas, sabiendo que todo el mundo está en su casa.
[Do you think you are anxious? Jehovah's Witnesses ARE anxious, they
cannot go out knocking on doors, while knowing that everyone is at home].
(18) Top text: Esta no es la mascarilla con la que fuiste al cole esta mañana.
[This is not the mask you went to school with this morning].
Image: Father talking to his son who is wearing a mask.
Bottom text: Son: No, esta es mucho más chula! Me la cambié con Diego y
él se la cambió a Lucas.
[No, this one is much cooler! I exchanged mine with Diego and
he exchanged his with Lucas].
(19) Día 2 de la cuarentena; mi mujer me ha dicho que salga a la calle que ella
paga la multa.
[Day 2 of lockdown; my wife has told me to go out to the street; she will pay
the fine].

Regarding IR types 1-7 outlined above, these are also at work in Covid memes
except type 2 (frame-based, image aids), type 6 (discourse-based, image aids) and type 7
(discourse-based, image is essential), which just amount to 0.7% of the corpus. In the
following Sections we will describe the other five IR types as specifically used in Covid
memes for humorous purposes.

5.1 Frame-based incongruity where the image plays no role in the IR strategy

In our corpus of humorous Covid memes, 21.3% of them fits this IR type, in which
incongruities are not based on the processing of the image (or the meme contains no
image). As already described, the humorous effects of this IR strategy stem from
incompatibilities between inferring the information coded in the meme and the mental
construction of an appropriate situation for its comprehension (make-sense frame). Some
of the memes rely on straightforward incongruities between the frame expectations raised
by the initial part of the meme and its continuation, as in (20-21):

(20) Me estoy volviendo loca sin ir al gym, con esta semana ya van 5 años.
[I am going crazy without going to the gym; this week it’s been 5 years
already].
(21) Día 26 del confinamiento. Me he montado un gimnasio en casa… Tampoco
voy.
[Day 26 of lockdown. I set up a gym at home... I am not going either].

However, a more frequent and interesting source of frame-based incongruity (and

in our opinion one of the reasons why Covid memes are felt to be different from other
humorous memes, as will be explained in more detail in Section 6 below), is the
inferential clash that does not take place when building up a frame for the comprehension
of the meme discourse, as in (20-21) above, but extends beyond the meme, that is, a clash
between the pandemic-related information provided in the meme (often in an exaggerated

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way) and other encyclopaedic information, highly accessible to users, about what life
used to be like before the pandemic and lockdown, including broader assumptions about
life in general, often with a critical connotation about the suffering that the pandemic has
exerted on our society. Consider the memes in (22-24):

(22) Dan lluvia para el viernes. Se nos va a joder el finde.

[They forecast rain for Friday. It’s going to ruin our weekend].
(23) Tengo tanto tiempo libre en casa que en vez de poner los garbanzos a remojo
los voy duchando uno a uno.
[I have so much free time at home that instead of soaking the chickpeas I
shower them one by one].
(24) Top text: Todavía no he decidido dónde pasar Semana Santa,
[I still have not decided where I will spend Easter holidays].
Image: Still of famous actor Rowan Atkinson.
Bottom text: si en el cuarto o en la sala.
[whether in the bedroom or in the sitting room].

When interpreting (22), the user retrieves from background knowledge information such
as “weekends are normally the time of the week to enjoy ourselves, go out, have fun” and
“rain is not welcome when plans for the weekend have been arranged.” These pieces of
general information clash with very accessible lockdown-related information about the
impossibility to leave homes due to the pandemic. The meme in (23) portrays an
exaggerated behaviour that is absurd and clashes with the user’s common-sense
assumptions, and which simultaneously leads to the derivation of critical implications
regarding the obligation to stay at home with a lot of spare time. Finally, in the meme
(24) the image plays no significant role. A typical pre-pandemic situation is portrayed in
the top text, a person wondering about Easter holiday destinations, a frame which turns
out incongruous with the bottom text that reminds the audience of the impossibility to
leave home during lockdown.

5.2 Frame-based incongruity where the image is essential in the IR strategy

This IR strategy underlies 16% of the Covid memes in the corpus. Two major types of
frame-based incongruity can be isolated in this IR strategy. Firstly, some memes puzzle
the user by showing images that clash with the user’s background information regarding
these images, together with the mentally stored visual syntax associated with them (Yus
2009). The accompanying text may also aid in directing the user in the intended inferential
direction towards incongruity. Crucially, the resolution to the incongruity detected at the
visual level can only be reconciled by retrieving some pandemic-specific information.
Some examples are provided in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Memes that exploit the user’s stored background information on images and their “syntax.”

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 The first meme in Figure 5 shows a striking mixture of two people in charge of
security on the beach (Baywatch) but not holding lifesavers, as would be expected from
the stored visual syntax of this kind of image, but a huge ruler and protractor, which
causes puzzlement in the audience. The resolution necessarily demands the retrieval from
context of information (25a) below. The second meme is interesting because the text at
the top (“Day 856 of lockdown. A6 Madrid-Coruña”) is partly compatible with the image,
but the user cannot help being struck by the anomalous syntax of the image, which
combines a motorway and a jungle in a single, worrying picture. In the third meme we
find another surprising visual syntax bringing together a beach and the number display
typically used in markets to show whose turn it is. Again, for the resolution of the
incongruity in this visual syntax, the user needs to access pandemic-related contextual
information such as (25b) below to be able to resolve the incongruity. Finally, the fourth
meme contains no text and all the humorous strategy is centred upon the anomaly of its
visual syntax. In this case, the juxtaposition of two dogs and the Holy Week procession
creates puzzlement in the user, who can only resolve it by accessing and humorously
combining two Covid-centred pieces of information from context, as quoted in (26a-b)
below.

(25) a. After a decrease in Covid infections, people were again allowed to go to

the beach but there were strict distancing measures that had to be taken.
Some workers were contracted to ensure that the law was enforced.
b. After a decrease in Covid infections, people were again allowed to go to
the beach, and one of the measures to prevent the spread of the virus was
to control the number of people who could gather at the beach at specific
times of the day.
(26) a. Faithful believers will do the utmost to follow the Holy Week procession
outdoors despite lockdown.
b. People can only leave their homes to go to the supermarket or take the dog
out for a walk.

A second major strategy within this IR strategy is to use the image in the meme (in
combination with the text) as a means to spread a layer of information which refers to a
mental frame that works within the pandemic context but, at the same time, is clearly at
odds with the users’ background information about life in general and especially pre-
pandemic habits and behaviour. The result is an absurd depicted situation that would not
be possible or likely in pre-pandemic life but somehow works within the boundaries of
lockdown. This incompatibility is eventually the key to the generation of humorous
effects. Two examples would be (27-28).

(27) Text: Décimo día de confinamiento. Por mis cojones que aparece el calcetín.
[Tenth day of lockdown. I’ll find the sock, no matter what].
Image: Picture of a fully disassembled washing machine.
(28) Top text: 2019. Vago de mierda [superimposed on top image].
[2019. Lazy git].
Image: A duplicated image of a fat man sleeping on a sofa.
Bottom text: 2020. Adulto responsable [superimposed on bottom image].
[2020. Responsible citizen].

(27) shows a totally unlikely situation for which there is no background frame: to
disassemble a washing machine completely in search for a missing sock. However, when

13
combined with pandemic-related information, specifically the amount of free time that
people were granted due to lockdown, the meme finally makes sense within the
boundaries of this imposed Covid frame and generates humorous effects. Similarly, the
top image in meme (28), with the text lazy git on it, resonates with the users’ background
information about human behaviour, duties and obligations. However, the same image
with a different text, this time responsible citizen, clashes with this pre-pandemic
commonsense frame and forces its replacement, and which only makes sense in the
bounded frame of human behaviour during the pandemic.

5.3 Discourse-image based incongruity (the image is essential)

This type of IR strategy is present in 24% of the memes in the corpus. They exhibit sharp
contrasts between the text and the image with a number of possible inferential
implications. Our analysis yielded 3 main categories:
1. Text-image incompatibility generates critical implications. In this category, the
user is forced to infer information from the text and the image, both being incompatible
and generating incongruity. The resolution necessarily entails the derivation of implicated
conclusions tainted with criticism regarding the pandemic and how it has been managed
by the authorities. Figure 6 reproduces some of these examples. All of them exhibit
incongruities between the information provided by the text and the information from the
prototypical referent of the image.

Figure 6. Clashes between text and image with critical implications.

The text of the meme on the left provides information about the user being fine
despite the lockdown and about his new hobby of making crafts (Sixth day stuck at home
and everything ok. I started making crafts with ropes), which clashes with the picture of
a lace typically used to kill people (or to kill oneself, as the meme seems to suggest). The
implicated conclusion would be a critical standpoint regarding the suffering condition of
people under lockdown. Also critical is the meme in the middle with the text Work starts
in Spain to build a hospital to treat the virus, which plays with the stereotype of the lazy
Spaniards, most of them unwilling to work and watching while others do the job. An
effective text-image incongruity demands from the user access to specific contextual

14
information regarding the ability of the Chinese to build a hospital in just 10 days. Again,
the implication is critical, this time towards Spanish society in general. The top right
meme portrays a baseball bat, which is incongruous with the frame of the supposedly
non-dangerous activity of going to the supermarket. This time, the user is expected to
access Covid-related information about how complicated going to the supermarket was
during the pandemic, often with fewer supplies and people fighting to get hold of basic
goods. This meme-context pairing also generates criticism despite the default humorous
purpose. Finally, in the bottom right meme the text and the image are fully incompatible.
The text asks the user about planned outdoor weekend activities (ready for another
weekend of lust and debauchery?), and the image shows a woman in a house dressing
gown, again generating critical implications about the impossibility to leave the house
due to lockdown.
2. Text-image incompatibility underlines collective fears on pandemic. This specific
category is used to generate mutual awareness of the danger of the pandemic and the
effect of lockdown on our society while, at the same time, minimising it through
humorous effects. An example would be the meme (29); it shows a still of the film The
Shining, in which the main actor of the film, Jack Nicholson, terrorises his family in a
house:

(29) Image: A still of the actors starring in the famous film The Shining, inside a
car.
Text: Nada malo puede pasar por unas semanas aislado con la familia.
¡Relajaos!
[Nothing bad can happen for a few weeks isolated with the family.
Relax!].

3. The text imposes a pandemic-related interpretation on the default referent of the

accompanying image. This is often achieved through metaphorization of initially explicit
interpretations of these images, and also triggering the derivation of certain implicated
conclusions on the pandemic and people’s behaviour during lockdown, often with some
criticism involved. Examples are provided in Figure 7. The top-left meme shows a
picture of the typical tents used in the famous Sevilla Easter Fair over which the labels
of estanco (tobacconist’s), tintorería (dry cleaner’s) and peluquería (hairdresser’s) have
been superimposed. The only way to infer this meme properly is by retrieving from
context, as implicated premises, the lockdown-related contextual information in (30a-b).
The combination of these implicated premises with the visual labels-plus-image allows
for the derivation of the implicature (contextual implication) in (31):

(30) a. While in lockdown, people could only leave the house to go to places for
essential activities.
b. During the pandemic, feasts and celebrations (such as Seville’s Fair) were
prohibited.
(31) People in Seville will do the utmost to leave their houses and celebrate their
local fair despite explicit prohibition.

The bottom-left meme features a famous still form the film Star Wars, but the
accompanying text (I am walking the dog, officer) forces a new humorous lockdown-
based reading of the image. The top-middle meme includes a photo of a tradition in Spain:
to run away from bulls that have been released and to chase them in the streets. Again,
the accompanying text (The Ministry of Health tries new methods to prevent us from

15
going out) forces a new pandemic-related reading of the referent of the image. The
bottom-middle meme portrays the famous painting Las Meninas by Velázquez with a new
title: Brawl to see who gets the dog out. Again, this new reading of the painting resonates
with events during lockdown, specifically regarding taking dogs out for a walk, one of
the few reasons why people were allowed to leave their homes. Finally, the meme on the
right is a typical example of metaphorization of an otherwise explicit reading of an image,
turning it into a multimodal metaphor (see Forceville and Urios-Aparisi 2009). Two stills
from the famous film Titanic are given new labels. The sinking ship is now
metaphorically connoted as Mankind in 2020 and the band playing on the deck is labelled
as Teachers giving lessons online, another metaphorization of the image with a number
of critical implications.

Figure 7. Text-image combinations with text imposing a new reading of the image.

5.4 Discourse-based incongruity where the image plays no role in the IR strategy

This type of IR strategy is found in 7.3% of the meme corpus. As the description indicates,
in this case the meme creator plays with the expected inferential strategies performed by
the audience in order to make sense of the Covid meme discourse. As in most instances
of humour, these strategies may be predicted and manipulated for the sake of deriving the
desired effects. Among the possible inferential strategies that may be performed, one
stands out in the corpus: to play with ambiguous words by invalidating an initially
accessible interpretation of the text and replacing it with a new, less unlikely but
eventually correct one. Consider these memes:

(32) Si me preguntan que hable ahora o calle para siempre, elijo calle…
[If they ask me to speak now or shut up forever, I choose shut up / street].
(33) -Cómo os va por España?
[How are you doing in Spain?].
-No nos podemos quejar.
[We can’t complain].
-Ah, entonces todo bien?
[Ah, then everything ok?].

16
 -No no, que no nos podemos quejar.
[No no, that we can’t complain].

The meme in (32), already mentioned in this chapter, plays with an initial accessible
interpretation of calle as a verb (shut up), only to be replaced with its meaning as a noun
(street). The meme (33) also plays with ambiguity, this time with the multiple meanings
of the modal verb can. There is an accessible phrase stored as a unit, we can’t complain,
meaning we are happy as we are, which is eventually replaced with another possible
interpretation (we are not allowed to complain), all that variation being critically framed
in the context of the pandemic.

6 Just like any other humorous meme?

One of the main objectives of this chapter is to assess to what extent IR strategies in Covid
memes differ from those at work in normal humorous memes, together with an account
of in which way the IR strategies outlined above are used in similar or different ways.
Our analysis does indeed yield differences between these two types of humorous meme
(normal vs. Covid), as shown when comparing the percentages of both types regarding
the IR strategy, as provided in Table 3.

[general] Type of incongruity Role of image [Covid-related]

8.66% frame-based image plays no role 21.30%
38.00%
31.33% 18.00% frame-based image aids 0.70%
4.67% frame-based image is essential 16.00%
38.67% text-image based image is essential 24.00%
8.00% text-based image plays no role 7.30%
21.34% 7.34% text-based image aids 0.70% 8.70%
6.00% text-based image is essential 0.70%
8.66% no incongruity no special role 29.30%
Table 3. Percentage of humorous IR strategies in normal memes versus Covid memes.

As can be deduced from the percentages provided on the left of the Table (normal
memes) and on the right (Covid memes), these memes exhibit several differences:
1. As already pointed out, a higher percentage of Covid memes (29.30%) does not
exhibit an IR strategy, compared to normal memes (8.66%). The main source of humour
mainly lies in the collective mutuality of information regarding the pandemic (and in the
collective awareness of this mutuality), together with the humorous exploitation of
imposed behaviour under lockdown. This strategy resonates with a long tradition of
humour to cope with tragedies (disaster jokes) and collective stress. Indeed, during the
pandemic humour helped Spanish society to alleviate stress, reduce suffering, and
dissipate feelings of anxiety, with people being granted a sense of power and control in
this helpless situation (Blaber et al. 2021).
Specifically, regarding the Covid pandemic, Aslan (2022) comments on how people
displaying humour were able to laugh at their own shortcomings and difficult

17
circumstances despite the emotional intensity of the negative experiences. Amici (2020)
remarks that, during the pandemic lockdown, making people laugh was a way to
communicate emotions and stay in touch, triggering positive non-propositional effects
(feelings, emotions…) and creating a mental state which acted as a social lubricant.
Similarly, Sebba-Elran (2021: 231-232) comments on how disaster jokes, within which
Covid pandemic can be fitted, work as “as a psychological tool for channeling threatening
emotions and coping with uncertainty, as a social tool for demarcating external and
internal boundaries and particularly for enhancing social cohesion, and as an educational
tool for disseminating advocacy and propaganda, or alternatively, for expressing social
protest.”
In this scenario, Covid memes work as effective stress-reducing discourses for the
suffering via collective awareness of habits, impositions and pain, and without requiring
an explicit IR strategy for a humorous outcome (see Bischetti et al 2020, Flecha Ortiz et
al. 2021: 169, Aslan in press, Murru and Vicari 2021, Ponton 2021: 769).
Three examples are presented in Figure 8. The meme on the left, with the text
Change of plans for Easter, humorously refers to the collective frustration at being unable
to travel or having to cancel scheduled travelling due to the pandemic lockdown. The
meme in the middle effectively portrays the mutual awareness of collective suffering due
to the pandemic. The text, Here, painting a mandala to relax a bit, paired with the image,
cunningly conveys the negative psychological state that many people were in during
lockdown. Finally, the meme on the right humorously criticises the oxymoron of normal
life and lockdown as depicted in the criticisable slogan by the government: Stay at home
but conduct normal lives.

Figure 8. Covid-meme humour alleviating collective suffering during a stressful situation.

2. Crucially, many Covid memes rely on frame incongruities, more so than on

discursive incongruities, with the image also playing a lesser role in these Covid memes.
A possible explanation lies in the fact that humour often stems from the mutual awareness
of shared information that successful meme interpretation foregrounds and makes more
prominent, not needing additional discursive IR strategies. The mental construction of a
frame associated with pandemic-related information clashes with background frames
about what life should (or used to) be like, and from this clash some collective mutuality
of information is generated, made mutually manifest and tainted with humour.
In previous research (e.g. Yus 2004, 2016), this humorous strategy was labelled joy
of mutuality of information (specifically joy of mutual manifestness, using the relevance-
theoretic terminology), and initially applied to stand-up comedy performances. In a
nutshell, the term describes the frequent situation in these performances in which the
comedian’s monologue bases much of the enjoyment in the audience on the collective
realisation that certain information conveyed by the comedian is, in fact, not individually

18
held, but collective and shared by all the audience (mutually manifest), and it immediately
acquires a cultural status (in a broad sense) within the boundaries of the venue. This
collectivity-connoted information adds to an overall improvement of the audience’s
encyclopaedic knowledge of how their social environment is organised and of the rules
concerning social behaviour. Therefore, many stand-up monologues focus on ordinary,
everyday aspects of lifestyle within a certain social environment, without needing specific
humorous discursive strategies to generate effects. They just need to get a collective
assessment and mutuality of this information.
This joy of mutuality of information may also be achieved via successful meme
comprehension that demands pandemic-related contextual information from the users. In
short, while interpreting these Covid memes, users have to combine the information
coded in the memes with pandemic information, and the successful interpretive outcome
generates a vivid sense of mutuality among the users involved. This strategy of mutuality
resonates with a long tradition of intertextuality in memes as one of the key attributes of
their effectiveness. As Aslan (2021: 51) summarises, “memetic humour relies heavily on
the combination of familiar and well-known knowledge and references with current
situations and experiences in unique, creative and surprising ways” (see also Dynel 2021:
179). In this specific case, Covid memes connect users and generate a sense of shared in-
group bonding through pandemic-related contextual information accessed as part of
meme comprehension. Examples include (34-36) below.

(34) Nunca algo de los chinos había durado tanto.

[Never had something from the Chinese lasted so long].
(35) Día 21 del confinamiento: Señor, perdóname por las veces que te pedí que mi
marido me dedicara más tiempo.
[Day 21 of lockdown: God, forgive me for the times I asked you to get my
husband to spend more time with me].
(36) Si las escuelas siguen cerradas por más tiempo, los padres van a encontrar la
vacuna antes que los científicos.
[If schools remain closed much longer, parents will find the vaccine before
scientists].

To understand (34), correctly, the user has to access information about Covid originating
in a Chinese town, together with more straightforward information about the quality of
Chinese products. Upon interpreting (35), the user has to retrieve information about the
stressful situations provoked by being forced to remain at home during lockdown. In this
case, besides collective awareness of this suffering, the meme also conveys soothing non-
propositional effects (feelings, emotions) through humour. A similar case is (36), whose
successful interpretation demands context accessibility about the pain that parents went
through while having children permanently at home.

7 Concluding remarks

In this chapter we have analysed humour in Covid memes by applying a classification of

incongruity-resolution (IR) patterns (Yus 2021b). The analysis has yielded that these
specific Covid memes also fit these IR strategies except cases two, six and seven, whose
occurrence is negligible. Furthermore, we have come up with a possible explanation for
the feeling that most users hold regarding the specificity of Covid memes and the role

19
that they played during the pandemic lockdown in Spain beyond the generation of
humorous effects.

Funding

This chapter has been funded by the research project PID2019-104980GB-I00: “El humor
interaccional en español. Géneros orales, escritos y tecnológicos” [Interactional humour
in Spanish. Oral, written and technological genres] (MICINN, AEI) (2020-24).

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