COVID-19 Humor on Jordanian Social Media: A Diagnosis of Written Jokes on Facebook

Abstract

This study investigates COVID-19 jokes created and circulated on Jordanian social media during the period between March to October 2020. The jokes used in this study were collected from several Facebook accounts. The study presents a content analysis and a linguistic analysis of 197 COVID-19 jokes in terms of the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) (Attardo, 1994, 2001; Attardo & Raskin, 1991) with the goal of uncovering the thematic and structural aspects of these jokes. A mixed quantitative and qualitative approach was adopted for the data analysis. The jokes were categorized into eight major groups and subgroups depending on the themes they target. Various topics featured in these jokes: ethnic jokes, government decisions, effects of restrictions, sexist jokes, the virus, miscellaneous offensive jokes, the year 2020, and remote education. The linguistic analysis of the jokes revealed that they obey the six Knowledge Resources of the GTVH. Moreover, it was found that lexical relations (I.e., synonymy, antonymy, Homophony) as well as wordplay (i.e., pun, metaphor, prosody) are crucial strategies in forming such jokes. This paper contributes to the literature on dark or disaster humor and furthers our understanding of jocular discourse during global crises.