From classic political cartoons to memes in Romanian satirical news

Abstract

This paper aims at showing how both classic political cartoons and memes are used by Romanian satirists to point out the social and political shortcomings within the Romanian society. This type of humour is equally used by satirists, along with satirical texts, to criticize politicians’ lack of responsibility, but also the lack of activism of their readers. This analysis of both classic cartoons and memes in three Romanian satirical news websites (timesnewroman.ro, academiacatavencu.ro and catavencii.ro) will be made following the six humour knowledge resources (Attardo 2001). This way, I will be able to show how humour gets created differently in political cartoons and memes, even though their final purpose is the same: criticize and make people laugh. I will be discussing about their differences in terms of their construction, the decontextualization and recontextualization process, the incongruity-resolution and nonsense humour and the use of texts, to maximize images’ message, in balloons, captions or titles.