Intern
Geolingual Studies

#staystrongmelbs: Online Humour and Community Caused by an Earthquake

#staystrongmelbs: online humor and community caused by an earthquake
Datum: 20.09.2024, 10:00 Uhr
Ort: 00.002
Vortragende: Kerry Mullan, RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia)

On the 20th of September at 10.00 o'clock Kerry Mullan of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology will give a talk with the title "#staystrongmelbs: online humour and community caused by an earthquake" about humor and resilience in Social Media. For this a case study of an earthquake in Melbourne in 2021 will serve as an example. We welcome you to join us in room 00.002 in the zpd (Zentrum für Philologie und Digitalität, Campus Hubland Nord, Emil-Hilb-Weg 23).

Associate Professor Kerry Mullan, RMIT University

Abstract: It is well known that humour is a common way for people to process and deal with tragic events such as genocide, war, pandemics, and sites of occupation and/or political oppression (e.g., Browning & Brassett 2023; Cheurfa 2019; Cottingham & Rose 2023; Fluri 2019; Lionis 2021; Üngör & Verkerke 2015). Political controversies, natural disasters, and other crises often lead to the rapid proliferation of creative and amusing memes as a digital response mechanism (Dynel 2024), creating a sense of community and levity (Aslan 2020) and an outlet for anxiety and frustration. While it turned out to be relatively minor, the earthquake which shook Melbourne in September 2021 (during the city’s sixth Covid lockdown) prompted an outpouring of humorous tweets and memes on Australian social media. No sooner had houses stopped shaking than the humour began - and it came fast and furious for the next 48 hours, not all of it connected to the earthquake. Other topics in the firing line that week were the anti-lockdown protests in Melbourne and the AUKUS submarine deal.

In this presentation I will analyse a selection of tweets, memes and media articles (received from my own contacts over the period of one week from 22nd September 2021), focusing on three linguistic elements of humour: intertextuality, wordplay, and incongruity. It will be shown how the humour in these examples was not just performing as a coping mechanism for the earthquake, but also as a creative way of engaging with current political issues.

 

Keywords: humour, Melbourne, community, social media, earthquake

 

References

Aslan, E. (2020). When the internet gets ‘coronified’: Pandemic creativity and humor in internet memes. Viral Discourse. https://viraldiscourse.com/2020/04/28/when-the-internet-gets-coronified-pandemic-creativity-and-humor-in-internet-memes/

Browning, C.S. and Brassett, J. (2023). Anxiety, humour and (geo)politics: warfare by other memes. International Relations 37(1): 172–179. https://doi.org/10.1177/004711782311515

Cheurfa, H. 2019. Comedic resilience: Arab women’s diaries of national struggles and dissident humour, Comedy Studies 10(2): 183-198. https://doi.org/10.1080/2040610X.2019.1623501

Cottingham, M.D. & Rose, A. (2023) Tweeting Jokes, Tweeting Hope: Humor Practices during the 2014 Ebola Outbreak, Health Communication 38(9): 1954-1963. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2022.2045059

Dynel, M. (2024). The pragmatics of sharing memes on Twitter. Journal of Pragmatics 220: 100-115. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2023.12.001

Fluri, J.L. (2019). What's so funny in Afghanistan?: Jocular geopolitics and the everyday use of humor in spaces of protracted precarity. Political Geography 68: 125-130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.08.011

Lionis, C. (2021). Humour in states of occupation: Contemporary art and cultural resilience in Palestine, Greece and Australia. In J. E. Taylor (ed.). Visual Histories of Occupation: A Transcultural Dialogue. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 139–156. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350167513.ch-006

Üngör, U.U. & Verkerke, V.A. (2015). Funny as hell: The functions of humour during and after genocide. European Journal of Humour Research 3(2/3): 80–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.7592/EJHR2015.3.2.3.ungor

 

Bio
Kerry Mullan is Chair of the Board of the Australasian Humour Studies Network (AHSN). She is also Convenor of Languages at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, where she has been teaching French language and culture and applied linguistics for twenty years. Her main research interests are intercultural communication, particularly intercultural pragmatics. She also researches in the areas of language teaching, linguistic and semiotic landscapes, and humour in French and Australian social interactions, and has published widely in these fields. In 2016, Kerry was awarded Chevalier des Palmes Académiques by the French government for her contribution to French language and culture.