Anatomy of Social Media Humour: a multimodal approach

With engagement being a key driver of social media usage, more Ghanaians have taken diverse tools to interest and engage their audiences. One of such engagement mechanisms is humour. Most humour studies have concentrated on traditional texts like novels, drama and poetry with a focus on their linguistic perspective. This study examines humour discourse on social media, focusing on the different ways in which it is presented to elicit engagement using a multimodal approach. Data comprises 100 humorous posts selected from Facebook and WhatsApp from January to April, 2023. A qualitative approach was employed to describe how the posts were presented. The study adopted  Kress & van Leeuwen’s (2006) theory of Visual Grammar with a focus on the representational meaning to analyse the different modes that these humorous posts were presented in terms of texts, pictures, memes, colours, typography, font, etc. to attract the audience. Findings indicate that Ghanaian humour creators on Social Media space employed four modes i.e. (1) textual elements (linguistics) that combined emojis, (2) photographs, (3) memes and (4) cartoons with textual elements being the most used. It also found that English, Twi/English Codeswitching, Pidgin and Twi were the languages of engagement though English had an advantage over the others. The study also found that Ghanaian creators of humorous posts are mindful of the cultural and traditional norms that govern Ghanaian society and created contents around them to depict either the violation or otherwise of these norms. Again, it was observed that though some posts ridiculed characters as claimed by Ofori (2019) and Ofosu Marfo et. al (2021), most of the humorous posts revolved around concepts like relationships, cultural values, education, gender, etc.  Finally, the study revealed that verbal elements are crucial in making visual elements relevant contrary to Kress & van Leeuwen’s (2006) Visual Grammar that argues that the visual component of a text is independent  and does not depend on the verbal text to convey meaning.