The Humorous Construction of Time and Meaning: Memes and Temporal Sense-Making during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Many memes that emerged during the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) crisis were concerned with time and temporality. Understanding these memes as collective humorous sense-making of the uncertainty of the pandemic's first wave, we ask: how is temporality constructed in memes about the COVID-19 pandemic? Through a qualitative analysis of 117 memes from Brazil, Italy, the USA, and the UK, we identify four ways of constructing temporality. We call them temporal frames: Time Progression, Before and Now, Predictable Futures, and Future Gaze. Each frame uses humor to reflect on, and shape, meaning and experience in times of crisis, for instance by historical comparison or imagined futures. Given the centrality of memes in today's digital and popular culture, we argue that our findings contribute to discussions about how cultural practices (like humor) contribute to the cultural construction of time and how memetic internet culture structures reality construction (e.g. time construction) across the globe.