By Anastasiya Fiadotava, Anastasiya Astapova, Rebecca
Hendershott, Merryn McKinnon and Anna-Sophie Jürgens.
Sharing funny memes on social media is a way of making others laugh, but recent research shows it can also be a useful way of making controversial issues, like vaccination, more understandable.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination has become a popular topic for jokes, memes and other forms of humour. But heated debate - and hilarious humour - about vaccination has been around for decades. Despite the omnipresence of vaccination humour, little is known about its role and impact on public responses to highly politicised mass vaccination. In science communication, humour effectively makes content more entertaining and accessible; therefore, it is important to know what layer it adds to the vaccination debates.
We collected and analysed humorous content and memes from social media and websites dedicated to popular culture between December 2020 and February 2021 to try to address this knowledge gap.
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| Text by Anastasiya Fiadotava. Image by MEME TN on Flickr (CC BY 2.0) |
Most of the 320 English language memes in our dataset combined written text and visual elements. The ‘joke’ was primarily created by text, but visual elements enhanced the memes’ recognisability and underscored that they belong to the vaccination debate.
Looking at pro- and anti-vaccination memes from the perspective of folkloristics, humour studies and science communication shows that humorous and serious discussions about vaccination go hand-in-hand. People on both sides of the debate are likely to produce and share both serious and humorous information on vaccination.
Humour is inherently social and can be used to build communities, or it may also be used to establish boundaries between in- and out-groups. Much of humour’s appeal is connected to the feeling of belonging to a group of like-minded individuals, e.g. vaccination supporters or opposers. Those who do not share the same knowledge or values (the ‘out group’) do not appreciate the humour, and thus humour can become a mechanism of exclusion.
The most popular mechanisms for creating humour that our dataset employed were analogy, exaggeration and juxtaposition. Analogies and exaggerations simplify the complex issue of vaccination and make it understandable and tangible, while the frequent use of juxtaposition in pro- and anti-vaccination memes shows that humour sharers acknowledge opposite views on the matter.
Due to their popularity, visibility and entertaining potential, humorous vaccination memes play an important role in contributing to science’s construction of meaning. However, the use of humour in advocating for a certain agenda also has its obstacles. The very same aspects of humour that make it less vulnerable to censorship – its subversive and elusive nature – make it a less persuasive device in the vaccination debate. As there is often no clear borderline between humour – especially in the form of aggressive ridicule – and genuine hate speech, the reaction of the prospective audience can also be mixed and requires further in-depth research.
Using humour to support a claim is not as straightforward as serious arguments, since people understand and appreciate humour in different ways depending on their social, cultural or personal backgrounds. Humour may help engage audiences, but are they leaving with the intended message? Or are we simply reinforcing our own ‘echo chambers’ and hardening the lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’? We need to know more about how our audiences respond to various forms of humour before we can use it effectively as a communication tool. Otherwise, the joke’s on us.