Using Wordplay to Create Humor in Estonian, Hungarian and Belarusian COVID-19 Memes

Abstract Wordplay is one of the most recurrent techniques used to create humor, and it is often among the first forms of humor to appear as a reaction to disastrous events ( Kuipers 2002). In this article, we categorize wordplay in COVID-19 humor according to the type of wordplay that accounts for the humorous effect. The analysis reveals that most of the wordplay humor in memes and jokes is based on paronymy, homonymy, with its subtypes of homography and homophony, metathesis, etc. In addition to looking for universal types of wordplay humor in our dataset, we also focus on how global pandemic terms have been adapted to local language contexts. We show that wordplay can enhance both the local and the global aspects of humor related to COVID-19. We also consider the diachronic aspects of the spread of wordplay humor and examine how the previously known cultural texts (for example, fixed language units such as proverbs and idioms) are reused to make humorous memes (see also Hiiemäe et al. 2021). In our analysis of memes, we also pay attention to the visual elements and the role of multimodality ( Yus 2019) in meaning-making.