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Memes, as humorous and visually captivating pieces of content, have revolutionized the way people communicate and express themselves on social media platforms. During times of academic unrest caused by the recurring ASUU strikes, these memes have played a pivotal role in providing a creative outlet for expressing frustrations, criticisms, and solidarity among students, educators, and concerned citizens. This paper, therefore, undertook a pragmatic analysis of selected 5 (five) ASUU strike memes sourced from WhatsApp, Facebook, Google, and Twitter aiming to unravel the underlying motivations behind their creation and dissemination, with a particular emphasis on the role of humor as a primary motivator. The used critical qualitative research and purposive sampling technique to select five ASUU memes. Acheoach's Pragma-crafting theory was adopted as the theoretical framework of the study. Findings reveal that the nuanced satirical techniques embedded within the memes, including the use of humorous images, wordplay, and linguistic ambiguities, capture and reflect the sentiments and experience of students and educators during the ASUU strikes. The study revealed the significance of communication acts and non-communication acts features such as indexicals (INDXL), shared macro-knowledge (SMK), shared contextual knowledge (SCK), shared knowledge of emergent context (SKEC), contextual presupposition (CP), geoimplicature (GI), behavioural implicature (BI), pragma-deviant (PD), object referred (OR), operative language (OL), and other discourse components were used by encoders (ENCs) of verbal elements (VEs) and non-verbal elements (NVEs) in understanding the interpretation of the sense of the act in ASUU strike memes. The study concludes that the humorous responses to the ASUU strike on social media shed light on the vigorous mix of words, images, and gestures.
Omolabi et al. (Sun,) studied this question.