Humor and social media: a linguistic analysis of some Egyptian coronavirus memes

الملخص EN

The paper aims at investigating verbal humor in some selected Egyptian web memes about Corona Virus.

It also aims at identifying the different strategies and techniques used by memes' producers to create humor.

In order to carry out these goals, Attardo's (2014) General Theory of Verbal Humor is used as a methodology of this research.

General Theory of Verbal Humour consists of six knowledge resources which are called (KRs): a) script opposition, b) logical mechanism, c) situation, d) target, e) narrative strategy and f) language.

Results show that "possible/impossible" and "normal/abnormal" oppositions are the two major types of script opposition in the corpus.

Analogy and exaggeration, on the other hand, are the most common logical mechanisms to create humor in memes.