DECODING HUMOR AND CULTURE IN PAKISTANI MEMES: A LINGUISTIC AND DISCURSIVE ANALYSIS
Keywords:
Attardo, Cultural Conceptualizations, Discourse Analysis, Fairclough, Humour, Ideology, Pakistani Memes, SharifianAbstract
Internet memes have become a central mode of humor and cultural expression in Pakistan, offering multimodal spaces where users share commentary through the brief and replicable content. While memes are widely conceptualized as cultural units circulating through imitation and variation (Dawkins, 1976; Shifman, 2014), their linguistic and discursive functions in Pakistani digital contexts remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap by examining how humor is structurally constructed, culturally interpreted, and ideologically circulated in political, cricket-related, and gender-based memes. Drawing on Attardo’s General Theory of Verbal Humor GVTH, Sharifian’s Cultural Linguistics, and Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional discourse model, a purposive sample of fifty Facebook memes was analyzed for script oppositions, logical mechanisms, narrative strategies, and language use. Findings show that oppositions such as Normal vs. Abnormal and Expectation vs. Reality, realized through irony, exaggeration, and Urdu–English code-mixing, activate shared cultural schemas and encode layered ideological meanings. The study contributes a triangulated linguistic–discursive model for understanding Pakistani digital humor and highlights how memes function as structured humorous texts, culturally grounded cognitive prompts, and ideologically meaningful artifacts.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Tahmina Sardar, Dr. Rashid Mahmood (Author)
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