Comic Effect of Internet Memes Among Nigerian Netizens
Keywords:
Internet memes, twitter, comic effect, netizens, tweeps, bomboclaat, common ground theory of presuppositionAbstract
Internet memes in recent times are attracting interest amongst scholars. Language scholars and scholars in journalism are beginning to study the use of memes amongst netizens to determine its use, effect and influence on people on the internet. Also, the use of internet memes has been studied from different perspectives by Nigerian scholars from its use as a tool of political and socio-economic commentary on the internet. However, little attention has been placed on its comic effect among Nigerians on the internet. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyse the comic effect of memes in trending issues on twitter by randomly selecting sixteen memes, four memes per section which are politics, entertainment, sports and bomboclaat trends. The selected memes were analysed in line with common ground theory of presupposition. Delogu (2009). The application of common ground theory of presupposition in humour foreground that the shared knowledge between the participants of a conversation helps in decoding the joke been cracked by the speaker. In addition, the paper found out that memes are shared among tweeps with the use of captions that convey the message of the writer and the common knowledge that exists among users on the internet to achieve comic effect.
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