Humor in war times: the language of antimilitaristic memes on social media during the current war conflict

Abstract

The rift between Russian pro and anti-Putinist social groups after February 24, 2022, not only became more evident, but rather became an abyss. Many users of social media, such as Instagram and Twitter in the first place, who before the invasion did not manifest their affiliation, in these tragic circumstances started a political cross-bombardment. After the first days of total shock, the internet communities dedicated to ironic and humorous content found themselves facing a completely new challenge: that of making their audience laugh in the age of total dominance of fear and panic. This study consists of analyzing Russian Instagram accounts such as The Medieval Suffering and Peskov’s Mustache, whose specialty is the creation of memes, in order to see what kind of irony, language tools and discourses they chose in order to achieve the goal. In this case, we are interested not only in the verbal aspects, but also in the semiotics and visual language of these memes since each of these pages has a very particular aesthetic focus. Another issue that must be studied in this context is the phenomenon of memes targeting the same figure as Putin during the conflict and shortly before: for example, his famous meeting with Emmanuel Macron in Moscow two weeks before the Russian invasion, which produced endless memes and went viral.