Agresyvus memų humoras: tariamas žinutės siuntėjas ir memo juokingumo bei agresyvumo vertinimas /

Aggressive humour is a paradoxical, double-message form of communication that often seeks to belittle the other person on the one hand, and to deny the realness of the message on the other (Martin & Ford, 2018). With the advent and the development of the internet, a new form of humour is rapidly spreading: online memes. Some of these memes are characterised by the image macro format (Shifman, 2014), and some of them are characterised by aggressive jokes (Knobel & Lankshear, 2019). Although, in a broader sense, much is already known about the aggressive humour sent by the memes, we still have a limited understanding of the functions of the person or animal depicted in the background photo of an aggressive meme (which in the context of this paper is referred to as the alleged message sender). Given these knowledge gaps found in the literature, the aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between the alleged sender of the message and the evaluation of the meme‘s aggressiveness and funniness. The study used an experimental strategy in which all participants were randomly assigned into three groups to assess online memes featuring either a man, a woman, or an animal in the background photo. In order to avoid the influence of extraneous variables, all other elements of the meme (joke, meme design) were identical across groups. The results showed that an aggressive meme with a picture of an animal was rated as funnier, less aggressive and more likely to encourage further communication than a meme with a picture of a man featuring the same text. Given the theoretical assumptions of humour, we can speculate that perhaps the “talking” meme with the animal leads to a greater moment of incongruity and funniness, which leads to more peripheral processing, which lowers the evaluation of the aggressiveness of the message, which lowers the negative consequences of the aggressive message for the actual meme sender. However, other explanations discussed in the paper also remain possible.

Grantor dc:publisher

Institutional Repository of Vilnius University

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Tamošaitytė, Eglė,

Statement dc:rights

• info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Language dc:language

lit

Repository record dc:identifier

https://repository.vu.lt/VU:ELABAETD210642300&prefLang=en_US

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vu.lt:elaba:210642300