Irony inside and outside memes: a case of meme series within relevance theory

This paper examines irony in Internet memes, focusing on its occurrence across multiple layers – a phenomenon observable in meme series rather than in isolated memes. The analysis concentrates on a meme series featuring Polish athletes: football player Robert Lewandowski and tennis player Iga Świątek, the former being the central figure of this partly fictitious world. In the analysis, conducted within relevance theory, irony is understood as a thought, norm, expectation or utterance that is echoed with an underlying dissociative attitude. The study argues that the series of memes forms a scenario, i.e., a set of mutually manifest assumptions about the fictitious world depicted in the memes. Such scenario allows the identification of irony at different layers, with the two main variants being irony outside the meme (when the Internet user expresses irony by posting a meme), and irony inside the meme (when a character in the meme is being ironic). The two ironies typically co-occur, being either targeted at the same person or not. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the variety of ironic meaning is strictly linked to the scenario developed, and also contributes to the entertaining function of the series.