Canonical artworks and humorous memes: sophisticated humour in Corona discourse

This study builds upon the international collaboration of researchers on humour during the pandemic and focuses on digital humour inspired by canonical works of art (for example, Mona Lisa wearing a face mask). By adapting the General Theory of Verbal Humor to the purposes of multimodal (mostly visual) analysis, we investigate how and why world-renowned paintings are transformed for humorous purposes and cross-culturally repackaged to thematize various aspects of the pandemic experience. We subdivide our corpus into nine classes containing different instantiations of the same visual/multimodal ‘jokes’: (1) emptiness memes; (2) social distancing memes; (3) virtual meeting memes; (4) entrapment memes; (5) law enforcement memes; (6) transformation memes; (7) PPE memes; (8) revaluation memes; and (9) imitation memes. Subsequently, we concentrate on virtual meeting memes and their most sophisticated examples, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s "Last Supper" remixes, analysing them in terms of specific dimensions of humour communication: script opposition, logical mechanism, situation, target, narrative strategy, and semiotic strategy. We argue that canonical paintings are suitable for humorous reworking because of their recallability and complex structure. They encourage sophisticated humour, with multiple incongruities based on the manipulation of the physical, pictorial, literary/historical, and aesthetic layers of the original artworks.