Laughter and Loathing Analysing Anti-Immigration Memes from 9gag.com

Abstract

This thesis is an analysis of memes with anti-immigration messages from the Internet forum 9gag.com. It seeks to uncover the racist discourses within the memes, and to seek further understanding of how the inherent humour in memes are used to reproduce the racism. Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis is applied, which contains of analysis of three dimensions. In this thesis, the first dimension is text analysis which in this thesis is multimodal, the second dimension an analysis of the discursive practices, and the third dimension an analysis of how whether the discursive practices affect how people communicate and understand migration and humour. Through the three-dimensional analysis different types of racist discourses along with instances of othering, de- and infrahumanisation, and right-wing populism are detected. These discourses are shown to be enhanced by the incongruous elements and superior/inferior dichotomy which are used to generate the humorous aspect that memes are known for. The analysis also shows that the humour may be used as a veil to spread racism more easily, and celebration of the drowning of refugees in some of the memes indicate that this allows for more extreme and violent discourses to be reproduced as well. The thesis adds onto the literature about racist humour and the public discourse on the Internet.