Recontextualization in multimodal humorous texts on social media

The new media environment has empowered users to engage in everyday commentary on social and political issues, taking advantage of affordances and resources to recontextualize existing material to create humorous memes. This article examines how these memes are created via recontextualization and the new meaning is generated in terms of the users’ intent, sociopragmatic functions, and the optimization of relevance through sociocultural contextual cues. The study of these memes collected from Facebook communal pages shows that recontextualization is a powerful tool of humor generation in multimodal rhetorical wholes (metaphor, exaggeration, irony, and parody), and that the new meanings resulting from recontextualization and its strategies of visual restaging, verbal rekeying, and re-appropriation were created in terms of the interplay of semiotic resources within the multimodal wholes.