1. Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a lasting impact worldwide [
1,
2,
3]. Emotional and behavioral responses to this ongoing crisis are multifaceted [
4]. Humans experienced elevated fear and stress about SARS-CoV-2 [
5,
6]. The economic consequences of the pandemic have further deteriorated psychiatric states [
7,
8]. The experience of life-threatening and stressful events during a pandemic can modify individual behavior [
6,
9]. Moreover, the need to stay at home due to the perceived risk of COVID-19 limited not only the possibility of maintaining interpersonal contacts, but also reduced the possibility of engaging in entertainment, physical activity, and contact with nature, which negatively affects mental well-being [
10].
The most widely known consequence of exposure to prolonged traumatic and stressful events is post-traumatic stress disorder [
11,
12]. A study in Germany showed that the prevalence of mental disorders was much higher than usual, with 50.6% of investigated people expressing at least one mental disorder during the COVID-19 lockdown [
13]. The stress associated with the pandemic increased the level of cortisol, which has a significant negative effect on the survival of patients with COVID-19 [
14,
15]. Infection with SARS-CoV-2 also has acute and chronic neurological consequences [
16], which may deepen the trauma and stress associated with the infection. Thus, to successfully manage COVID-19 and its aftermath, it is necessary to provide a roadmap of health-protective behaviors that can ensure the mental health of individuals and communities [
4].
Clinical research indicates that the effects of traumatic events and chronic stress can be significantly buffered by humor [
17,
18]. Humor has been found to decrease negative emotions, increase positive feelings, and enhance distance from adversity [
19]. A review of the literature on the nature of humor revealed its ability to diffuse stressful situations and reactions [
20]. It is suggested that despite the fact that humor is often underappreciated and ignored in the therapeutic process, it can be a powerful healing tool [
20,
21]. People with a greater propensity for coping using humor in stressful situations show increased levels of salivary immunoglobulin A (S-IgA), a vital immune system protein, which is the body’s first line of defense against respiratory illnesses [
22]. In addition, trauma survivors’ humor can be used to assist them in mitigating the intensity of their traumatic stress reactions, which may be especially valuable during the pandemic and while coping with infection [
20,
23,
24,
25]. Indeed, several studies demonstrated that humor may be a method of coping with traumatic events and anxiety associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. A study in Turkey showed that COVID-19-related fear is a powerful predictor of increased hopelessness [
24]. However, this predictive relationship was partially buffered by humor, which may be a coping strategy [
24]. In addition, during the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy, healthcare workers who reported higher use of humor-based coping strategies perceived the situation as less stressful than those who reported less use of coping humor [
26]. Humor was associated with significantly lower anxiety levels in nursing students during the national lockdown in Israel [
27]. However, applying humor as a coping strategy has many caveats and requires good recognition of the characteristics (e.g., age and gender) of the target group because certain forms of humor, also related to COVID-19, may be more aversive than funny [
28,
29].
Humor may be shared and provided in various ways [
29,
30]. However, the Internet may play a key role in providing and spreading humorous content while in isolation and with reduced sociality, as in the lockdown [
31]. It has already been proven that users of social media (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, or TikTok) have spread and commented on different information about the pandemic [
32,
33], thus creating a social network for the topic [
34]. Moreover, social media on the Internet provides people with opportunities, as well as challenges, to co-construct entertainment and social environments tailored to their own needs, beliefs, and interests [
35,
36,
37]. One of the most interesting ways of commenting on reality is to depict it in the form of a meme.
The term
meme was coined by Dawkins [
38], who proposed an evolutionary model of cultural change and development grounded in the replication of ideas and knowledge through imitation and cultural transfer. The concept was later adopted by internet users, and it generally describes the rapid uptake and spread of particular ideas presented as images, written text, movies, or other media on the Internet that go viral [
39,
40,
41]. The creation of memes involves multimodal interactions between textual and visual elements [
40,
42]. Specifically, combinations of unexpected visual elements and semiotic extensions of a non-standard catchphrase, wordplay (e.g., paronymy), and establishing incongruity generate humorous meanings [
37,
42,
43,
44]. Relevance theory [
45] stresses that there is a gap between what is literally said (or written), i.e., what is coded, and what is intended and eventually interpreted [
44]. Thus, when faced with a meme, the user also has to make inferential hypotheses concerning the role of both the image and the text in the overall comprehension of the meme [
43,
46]. Memes are oriented to humor, but nonhumorous memes can also be found [
39,
40,
47]. Memes often burst onto the Internet as a response to current events that are important to society [
36,
48,
49]. Memes may diminish or augment the value of the commented phenomenon or authority [
49,
50]. The essential feature of memes is their ability to be replicated by user-induced mutations [
39,
49]. Some memes become viral and gain enormous popularity compared to other memes [
43,
51]. Viral memes usually differ by two or more orders of magnitude in popularity from non-viral memes [
51,
52]. Memes are, thus, similar to the spread of viral diseases [
53]. Therefore, the inflow of new memes and meme propagation can mirror the spread of real coronavirus data.
As COVID-19 erupted, memes related to the pandemic also became widespread on social media [
46,
52]. COVID-19 memes are often regarded as a kind of dark humor [
29] inspired by and produced in the context of grave events and topics, notably, death and illnesses [
54]. As memes may be a vehicle for social bonding [
36], they may also act as a collective coping strategy for alleviating the negative effects of the pandemic [
55,
56].
In this study, we tested the hypothesis that the COVID-19 pandemic, especially during the spring 2020 lockdown when the first worldwide measures for stopping the virus occurred, is associated with the rise in the number and interest in funny internet memes related to COVID-19. We used a definition of coronavirus memes: Digital images (often containing text) created for the purpose of communication about COVID-19. Furthermore, we tested the hypothesis that interest in coronavirus memes is a response to perceived risk of death from COVID-19. Thus, we expected interest in the coronavirus memes in different countries, measured using Google Trends, to be positively correlated with (1) interest in deaths due to COVID-19 and (2) pandemic statistics, such as the number of cases and deaths reported in a given country. Finally, we compared the image and text contents and valued the funniness of a random sample of coronavirus memes with a sample of internet memes unrelated to the pandemic. We expected that (3) coronavirus memes would be rated as being more humorous than random non-coronavirus memes, to be explained by differences in the image and text content.
4. Discussion
Social distancing, quarantine, isolation, and fear of death caused by COVID-19 can be overwhelming. Finding strategies to cope with stress is crucial and advised by the World Health Organization to protect people from stress, anxiety, and mental illness [
86]. Collective coping theory [
87] may provide a basis for managing negative emotions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic [
55]. Coping refers to thoughts and behaviors that people use to handle both internal and external stressful situations that are observed through emotional regulation and instrumental problem solving [
55,
87]. Our research identified a global-scale potential relationship between coping with stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and humor. We showed that people dealing with the effects of the pandemic have increased interest in the sociological phenomenon of amusing internet memes and have become exceptionally active in the creation of new memes, especially during the spring 2020 lockdown. This confirms theories and other research showing that turning to humor is one possible strategy for people when they face trauma and stress [
88,
89], including those associated with COVID-19 [
46,
55]. However, most previous studies were cohort-based or performed in a single country. The novelty of our research lies in the revealing global pattern of interest in coronavirus memes and explaining differences among countries using coronavirus statistics.
We found that interest in coronavirus memes was positively associated with a higher number of COVID-19 deaths and cases at the country level. The pandemic had different dynamics and trajectories in different countries [
90]. In addition, countries differ in culture and policy; thus, people may differentially perceive risk from COVID-19 [
91]. Despite these, the correlation between the prevalence of COVID-19 and interest in coronavirus memes was confirmed using different search strings in Google Trends. These interesting findings suggest that the response of societies to COVID-19 has a universal basis.
Why, therefore, are people interested in coronavirus memes? In 2020, COVID-19 was spreading in all countries of the world, which was a novel experience for all living generations, bearing fear, uncertainty, and societal isolation. All people had to face the pandemic, with unknown, potentially dangerous consequences [
92]. The unknown generates a fear that is considered a fundamental fear [
93]. During the pandemic, many people all over the world were stuck in their homes and transferred much of their lives to the Internet, using it to connect with other people who felt the same way and who were having a similar experience [
94,
95]. Indeed, internet activity and the use of social media increased during the pandemic [
96,
97]. Fright, uncertainty, anxiety, or isolation result in the expression of a range of adaptive or defensive behaviors, which are aimed at escaping the source of the danger [
98], or building of resilience to it [
21]. We believe that interest in coronavirus memes may be an adaptive response that limits the harmful effects of stress associated with the spread of the virus, diverts attention from the chaos of the pandemic, and changes negative emotions into positive ones related to humor. Several studies revealed that interest in memes and humor in general may have increased mental well-being during the pandemic [
55,
99]. Coronavirus memes also scored highest in funniness compared with other types of pandemic humor [
29]. It has been suggested that interactive campaigns (e.g., “post your most humorous covid meme”) may have increased the audience’s involvement and their happiness level during the pandemic [
100].
Coronavirus memes may create a realm that distracts from reality [
101] and impose different values on the pandemic compared to everyday news. Of course, we cannot exclude the possibility that interest in coronavirus memes was sometimes a side effect of searching for information on the coronavirus [
102]. The coronavirus memes may have helped people understand the required behavioral changes and adjustments to preventive routines during the pandemic, for example, wearing a face mask, hand washing, and maintaining social distance. This is unlikely, but memes may also diminish some scientific facts about COVID-19 and, thus, may add to misinformation spread, jeopardizing efforts to stop the pandemic [
103]. Anti-vaccination messaging presented in memes may undermine efforts to ensure the widespread uptake of various COVID-19 vaccines [
33]. However, the messages encouraging vaccination gained 50% of the total cumulative views, despite being much less abundant than discouraging messages [
33].
Although anxiety is a natural adaptive reaction, it can become pathological and interfere with the ability to cope successfully with various stressful events [
92,
98]. A century ago, during the deadly Spanish flu pandemic, newspapers published some cartoons poking fun at the deadly influenza [
104,
105]. Cartoons were also published in newspapers in the pre-Internet era during other disasters, such as the sinking of the Titanic [
106] or during world wars (e.g., [
107]), and they can be treated as prototypes of internet memes and were mentioned as traditional memes by Dawkins [
38]. Therefore, comic meme-like constructs were already in use over 100 years ago in a similarly stressful time. The function of these humorous instances was to help in coping with these disastrous conditions by addressing fear while convincing oneself that the danger is under control [
108,
109]. In addition, the function of this humor could be more complex; for example, humoristic content in newspapers on the sinking of the Titanic symbolically depicted the epic failure of modernity rather than a mere tragic disaster [
106]. In general, the use of humor reflects positivity in reframing, as well as active strategies for coping and planning [
110], and its duration is tied to its function [
111]. One of the responses to the anxiety and uncertainty experienced during the coronavirus pandemic may be people becoming immune to an excess of bad news due to the habituation phenomenon [
112]. People in the spring 2020 lockdown experienced difficult emotions about the coronavirus pandemic, such as feelings about becoming sick, government restrictions, or economic slumps [
92]. The newspapers on the front page, radio, TV, and social media were filled with stories about the coronavirus pandemic and the latest frightening death toll statistics [
113]. The inflow of data on the number of infected people does not make the same impression today as it did during the first lockdown. Despite the spread of coronavirus across the world, people have become fatigued and used to life in the changing circumstances of the global pandemic [
114,
115]. This could also be seen in the data from Google Trends, where interest in coronavirus memes and coronavirus itself dropped after the spring 2020 lockdown. This may also have positive consequences. It has long been recognized that alongside negative responses to trauma, there can also be positive changes [
116,
117]. In particular, some traumatized populations not only demonstrate resilience, but also report post-traumatic growth in response to extreme events [
117,
118]. Survivors value their sense of self-worth or their changed life trajectory following trauma [
119,
120]. It is not merely the restoration of a person’s pre-trauma state of functioning, but a positive change in previous ways of thinking, indicative of a reorientation of values or priorities in the wake of trauma [
117,
120,
121]. Thus, strategies mitigating the pandemic may rely on the maintenance of positive emotions (e.g., positive reappraisal, problem-focused coping, infusing ordinary events with positive meaning) that buffer against stress [
23] and depressed mood [
122]. These strategies would help individuals emerge from crises with new coping skills, enhancing psychological well-being [
121]. These problems should be studied thoroughly in further research on combating pandemics (e.g., [
123]).
Internet viral memes spread through replication on social networks, have a certain longevity, and mutate over time [
39,
124]. Our results indicate that coronavirus memes “behave” as typical memes. The memes in our study had short durations, and the highest intensity of creation and interest occurred during the relatively short period of the spring 2020 lockdown.
Interest in a particular meme type rarely extends for a longer time. One such example is the phenomenon of amusing internet memes with the proboscis monkey
Nasalis larvatus, whose popularity lasted for a few years [
41]. One possible explanation is that the COVID-19 pandemic was a novel phenomenon during the spring and then societies habituated to the presence of the virus and elevated levels of fear [
114,
115]. In addition, the diminished use of memes after the spring 2020 lockdown could be that people fully understood the harmful potential of the pandemic and changed their mindset to a more serious one.
We found that coronavirus memes and non-coronavirus memes differed in text content, despite feelings associated with words in the text being similar between the two types of memes. This difference in word content might be responsible for the higher funniness scores of coronavirus memes compared to non-coronavirus memes. Moreover, the distribution of scores given by questionnaire participants was right-skewed. The skewed distribution with predominance of low-rated memes is well known phenomenon because only few memes become viral [
125] and are perceived as being very funny [
126]. We used sample of randomly chosen memes that probably contained both viral and less funny memes and future studies should identify viral coronavirus memes and compare them with viral non-coronavirus ones. However, researchers are still trying to predict (with sophisticated analytical methods) which memes will become viral, with moderate success [
46,
51,
52]. The intended meaning of the meme is multimodal and needs to integrate text, context, and the current socioeconomic situation [
127]. Therefore, it is possible that our simple analysis of meme content might not have detected specific word connections with images or wordplay. Humor is a complex phenomenon, and detecting patterns in the interplay between image content and text may be especially difficult in memes. It is also probable that the pandemic affected participants in a manner that caused them to score coronavirus memes higher. Naturally, the pandemic is a core interest for most people [
128], and this may have transferred into interest in and valuing memes. In a broader sense, the slight differences between coronavirus and non-coronavirus memes show that memes evolve via “mutations,” which is a typical feature of a meme [
38,
101]. These “mutations” are linked with text rather than images. Indeed, both types of memes mostly use photos of actors, cartoon characters, and pets in similar amounts. It is known that movie actors are common subjects in memes [
129,
130,
131]. Our analysis also revealed that memes had higher scores than the reference images (non-memes). This is an expected result that increases trust in the respondents’ answers.
Of course, memes are not the only way to share humorous content. Pandemic humor can be spread simply as oral jokes during direct interpersonal contact, or via traditional media, such as television, newspapers, or live events, such as stand-up comedy shows [
95]. Bischetti, Canal and Bambini [
29] demonstrated that among analyzed humorous constructs, memes were scored as the funniest, although some were also assessed as aversive.
We found that scores of the coronavirus memes were dependent on the interaction between the age and gender of the participants. Older women were more likely to give lower scores and less likely to give higher scores on the questionnaire than younger women. Meanwhile, the probability of giving a specific score was independent of age in men. This result is similar to other findings [
28,
82]. Bischetti, Canal, and Bambini [
29] found that with increasing age and in women, COVID-19 humor was judged as more aversive, although among the considered types of humor, memes scored the highest. Older adults have greater difficulty with humor comprehension due to age-related cognitive decline compared to young adults [
28]. In addition, the older population does not seem to enjoy aggressive types of humor as much as the younger population, and the elderly are especially sensitive to jokes referring to old age [
81,
132]. Meanwhile, older adults may be better at emotional regulation than their younger counterparts, react to a crisis with less anger, and are better able to adapt their coping strategies to changing environments [
133,
134].
Study Limitations
Our study relied on data from webpages spread across the Internet. This imposed certain limitations on the data structure and interpretation of the results. The construction of the time-series (number of webpages with coronavirus memes) from Google searches was not perfect. For example, it was not possible to fully account for image repetition. Moreover, webpages with coronavirus memes appeared as early as October 2019. We scrutinized several of these webpages and found that they were built before the pandemic, but contained “suggestion links” to current new memes. Thus, the series used in this study reflected certain properties of the Google proprietary algorithms, which are impossible to fully control, introducing one more arbitrary aspect. We cannot exclude the possibility that memes on other coronaviruses (e.g., MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV) were built before the COVID-19 pandemic and were associated with the search terms. However, the time-series had a logical interpretation: Despite webpages with coronavirus memes being found in October-November 2019, the highest number of webpages was created during the spring 2020 lockdown. These limitations do not apply to Google Trends. Additionally, the webpages found via Google search included some social media e.g., Reddit but not Facebook or Twitter webpages, probably because of privacy setting in these media. This may create a large gap in the meme sharing behavior. However, Google’s search algorithm usually returns the most popular results first, thus perhaps those spread via social media.
Humor research suffers from an optimistic bias, meaning researchers focus on the positive aspects of the phenomenon, ignoring its darker, negative aspects [
135]. Very little attention has been paid to humor that somehow fails to achieve its perlocutionary goal, i.e., to elicit amusement [
136]. In the online questionnaire, there was no measure for the negative dimension of humor appreciation, namely aversiveness, quantifying the disturbing potential of some forms of COVID-19 humor [
29]. We assumed memes to be related to humor and, thus that they should generate positive emotions or, at worst, no emotions. This is a limitation, but we believe that including negative values would only deepen the differences between coronavirus memes and non-coronavirus memes. Category “1” in our questionnaire, meaning “not funny at all” probably encompassed all these negative judgments and was the most frequent in the non-coronavirus memes.
Most of our analyses were correlative. However, studies on a global scale rarely, if at all, are experiments. Our general and generalized linear models explained usually below 40% of variance. This indicates that we did not include some predictors or there is high random variance in the dependent variables. However, in non-experimental studies regression models usually explain less than 20% of variance in dependent variables [
60]. Nevertheless, our findings may provide a good basis for experiments using memes.
Our online questionnaire had a geographic bias, as 75% of respondents came from Poland. We intended to include more participants from other countries, however, without success, probably because we distributed the questionnaire using the snowball sampling technique: the survey was shared with a small pool of respondents who participate, and each of those participants shares the link with their network or pool of respondents [
137].
All our memes were in English. We decided to use them because searches in Polish resulted in English memes (many memes in English are simply published or shared on Polish websites). This is probably because the text in memes is just a graphic and Google search recognizes the origin of the website, but it does not recognize the content of the meme. We believe this is not a serious problem because over 60% of citizens in Poland (aged 20-50 years) possess at least basic proficiency in English, and Poland is ranked 16th among 112 countries in English proficiency [
138]. Moreover, the average scores of comicality were slightly lower in Poland than in other countries, but the difference was not statistically significant. Furthermore, statistical models built separately on all data and for Polish participants gave very similar results. Thus, we believe this bias probably had little impact on the results and inference.