Black humour in Ukrainian war memes

This article investigates the cognitive foundations of Ukrainian war-related black humour memes through their conceptual modeling. Black humour is reinterpreted as a meme genre through the lens of fundamental humour theories. The study’s objectives include, first, exploring the cultural conceptual context of Ukrainian black humour memes, and, second explaining the cognitive nature of memetic black humour by decomposing it into successive mental operations involving concept DEATH. To achieve these objectives, a case study of 100 randomly selected black humour memes from Ukrainian Telegram chats draws on the theory of national construal of the world, conceptual integration, and Extended Metaphor Theory. Within these theoretical frameworks, I model a complex construal. First, the study demonstrates that black humour memes are seamlessly integrated into the national construal of the world, a conceptual structure rooted in national values. Unlike ordinary humour representations, black humour memes paradoxically contribute to the national construal of the world by incorporating concepts or values traditionally avoided in nation building. Second, the article deconstructs a meme into several input spaces, a generic space where metaphorical mapping occurs, and a blend that conveys the meme’s message. Metaphorical mapping is selective as only certain elements of input spaces are transformed. The remaining salient elements shift into the blend untransformed.