2025/11/21 by Guillem Castañar-Rubio, Bai Zhimeng · 1 voice
Psychology · #Humor Studies and Applications #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition #Multisensory perception and integration
paper · doi:10.16995/olh.25294
openalex publication_date 2025/11/21 · openalex created_date 2025/11/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Catalan people have traditionally been one of the targets of ethnic joking in Spanish humour. In canned jokes, Catalans are the butts of slurs that depict them as thrifty, stingy and business oriented (Davies, 2009). Over the last decades, digital communication has brought changes to this type of humour worldwide (Boxman-Shabtai and Shifman, 2015; Laineste and Fiadotava, 2017), and jokes about Catalans are not an exception. Traditional canned jokes have been replaced by multimodal items that include images or video. Moreover, ethnic humour is also affected by social reality. The Catalan pro-independence movement, that gained momentum from 2009 and has caused since then upheaval in the Spanish society and political arena, has also generated lots of online ethnic humour about Catalans (Griale Observa, 2017). On some occasions, old joke scripts of canniness and stinginess are reused for this purpose. Nevertheless, humorous attacks on other aspects of the Catalan identity have also appeared. This paper undertakes a qualitative analysis of 102 memes. The goal is to determine how Catalans have been humorously visualised online during the Catalan self-determination process. It is argued that the new digital humour, although ethnic in essence, moves from the use of global ethnic scripts to more local, ethnically specific scripts.