Memes, memory and monuments: Humorous debate on memory politics in Estonia

This paper studies a humour-mediated controversy on memory politics in the Estonian online public sphere. The debate started in autumn 2022, when a monument to Konstantin Päts, an influential but controversial Estonian political leader of the interwar period, was erected in central Tallinn. The statue soon became a target of online visual and verbal jokes, particularly on digital platforms. The analysis of 38 humorous items and their associated comments reveals that humour around this sculpture does not constitute a fully-fledged debate on memory politics: most of the items, and many of the comments, are related to the aesthetics of the monument. Only in some of the comments is the controversial political legacy of Konstantin Päts debated.