While meme activity peaked on November 6 th and 7 th, a singular viral meme of Bernie Sanders emerged after Joe Biden’s inauguration, illustrating a different genre of meme as a response to a different political situation in which the political figure serves a wide variety of purposes in commenting upon popular culture.
Memes exaggerated events for comedic purposes, providing relief after a long time of tension, as well as possibly trivializing and distorting public perception of events. Central events – such as Donald Trump’s press conference in a Four Seasons Total Landscaping parking lot, Joe Biden’s victory and rumors about the Russian president Putin resigning – were commented upon both with broad references to widely popular franchises such as Star Wars and with multi-layered intertextual references to iconography of meme culture such as the Hockey mascot Gritty. I illustrate which events users engage with, how they frame them using the elements of American pop culture, and the different functions such memes served for different publics.
By further employing a qualitative discourse analysis and close readings of selected examples, this article explores the stances and intertextual references expressed in the memetic discourse. This article offers a thematic analysis of a corpus of memes published on Twitter between Novemand Januin relation to the U.S. An unprecedented number of memes emerged in response to the 2020 U.S.