The Faces and Forms of Pandemic Humor: Exploring Covid-19 Memes with Visual Machine Learning
Savvas Zannettou
The Covid-19 pandemic brought about an unprecedented cycle of digitally spread humor. This article analyzes a corpus of 12,337 humor items from 80+ countries, mainly in visual format, and mostly memes, collected during the first half of 2020, to understand the features and intended audiences of this “pandemic humor”. Employing visual machine-learning techniques and additional qualitative analysis, we ask which actors and which templates were most prominent in the pandemic humor, and how these ac