Relational Humor and Identity Framing in the “Virgin vs. Chad” Meme Format

Extremist narratives construct a morally superior in-group threatened by a dangerous out-group, legitimizing defensive or hostile actions while dismissing opposing view-points. These narratives are also observable in internet humour, where memes take on a special protragonism. This article examines how the “Virgin vs. Chad” meme format, as an archetypal representation of the in-group and the out-group, operates as a mul-timodal vehicle for ideological expression within far-right digital cultures, with a focus on the Spanish case. The analysis is based on a dataset of seventeen memes collected from the platform X as part of the European HORIZON project ARENAS. Using a three-layered analytical framework—narrative ideology, semiotic-linguistic grammar, and humour dynam-ics—the study explores how political antagonisms are constructed, visualized, and af-fectively encoded through this meme format. The findings show that the meme format performs symbolic compression by staging binary oppositions between in-group and out-group identities, typically valorising fig-ures associated with nationalism, masculinity, and epistemic certainty, while delegiti-mizing those aligned with progressivism, pluralism, or emotional expressiveness. These meanings are stabilized through repeated visual and typographic conventions, including character archetypes, split-panel layouts, and indexical stylization. Humour operates not as a peripheral element but as a core logic: it licenses aggression, disci-plines ambiguity, and facilitates affective alignment through irony, reversal, and ridi-cule. By integrating insights from humour theory, narrative framing, and multimodal dis-course analysis, this article demonstrates how memes function as affective infrastruc-tures—mechanisms through which ideological content is rendered emotionally reso-nant and socially permissible. It contributes to scholarship on digital extremism and narrative studies by offering a methodological model for analysing how humour and visual stylization regulate stance, identity, and belonging in online political ecologies.