funny essay on corona

Yes, Make Coronavirus Jokes

Humor helps us take back control and connect—two things we have lost in our fight against the pandemic.

My phone flashes bright. A new video’s appeared in the family WhatsApp group. Before I’ve even pressed play, I’m smiling—a roll of toilet paper is in the shot, so it must be good. Someone replies with a video of a naked man riding a bicycle. Mud’s spattered up his backside. Another toilet gag. A third video arrives of a toddler crying because the local McDonald’s has had to close as a result of the coronavirus lockdown, forcing her to eat her parent’s cooking. And on it goes.

The coronavirus pandemic has caused so many things to happen, some predictable, others not. European leaders have confined people at home and seen their approval ratings soar. Right-wing politicians have temporarily socialized their national economies. And as the world hunkers down, threatened by the worst global health crisis in 100 years, there’s been a mass outpouring of gags, memes, funny videos, and general silliness. We might be scared, but we seem determined to carry on laughing.

What is it about tragedy that is so funny? Why do I find myself flicking through Twitter in the evening, alternately looking at tables of COVID-19 death rates and bidet memes? How can I find something so scary one minute so funny the next? And what is it about this crisis in particular that has spawned such an industrial output of humor? Even as I wrote this piece, looking out my window on a locked-down London, a video arrived from a neighbor featuring a stack of empty beer cans singing “ Nessun dorma .” Is this some kind of hysteria?

Liz Neeley: How to talk about the coronavirus

The why of humor has long been a mystery. For ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, it was a dangerous phenomenon, something that had the potential to undermine authority and the good order of society. Laughing at those in charge was a serious issue then (and still remains the case in more autocratic parts of the world). Today, in democratic societies, we know the importance of mocking those with power, and we celebrate it, on Saturday Night Live in the United States and Have I Got News for You in Britain. On Sunday, after Boris Johnson—recently diagnosed with COVID-19—announced that he would send every household in Britain a letter urging people to follow social-distancing guidelines, I received a doctored picture of the prime minister, red-nosed with watery eyes, licking an envelope, captioned: “Whatever you do, don’t open the letter from Boris.” Johnson was being mocked, his authority undermined in a manner far more deadly than any his political opponents could manage. In a typically provocative essay for Vanity Fair, the late Christopher Hitchens expanded on the link between power and laughter by arguing that humor was “part of the armor-plate” of humanity, protecting us from life’s grim reality—that, ultimately, death wins out. How’s that for an LOL. We joke because if we didn’t, we’d cry.

But humor is more than thumbing our noses at power. It is slapstick as much as satire, a man hitting another man with a frying pan; Kevin McCallister terrorizing Harry and Marv; Ross, Rachel and Chandler struggling to get a sofa up the stairs to Ross’s apartment. The late Robert R. Provine, a professor at the University of Maryland who became one of the world’s leading experts on laughter, came to the conclusion, after a decade of studying how and why people laugh, that it was actually a way of bonding. “Most people think of laughter as a simple response to comedy, or a cathartic mood-lifter,” he wrote . “Instead … I concluded that laughter is primarily a social vocalization that binds people together.” We laugh with others to give us “the pleasure of acceptance,” Provine argued—to show that we are the same. Simon Stuart, a clinical psychologist in Britain, told me that, from an evolutionary perspective, laughter is rooted in this ability to connect. It is a shared social signal.

We laugh, then, to take back control and to connect—two things we have lost in our fight against the coronavirus. Not only are we unable to stop the tidal wave of infection washing over us, but we are being forced to endure this reality alone in our own home. Powerless and isolated, we’re finding that the joke is now our most reliable shield—and our warmest comfort blanket.

The British comedian and writer David Baddiel told me his experience has certainly been that people turn to comedy at times like this. In his most recent public stand-up tour, before Britain implemented restrictions on social gatherings, he opened with a coronavirus gag: "It's great to see you're prepared to congregate in such large numbers at this stage in the apocalypse.” It always got a laugh. In his final gig, before his tour had to be canceled, a man in the audience performatively coughed in response, which garnered an even bigger laugh. “People want jokes,” Baddiel told me. “Partly because jokes are a relief, and they take the edge off danger; partly because they are a way of processing the experience; and yes, partly because … this is a massive shared experience.” People are looking for the release of comedy—and the knowledge that they are not alone. If we’re all finding this experience of being forced to stay at home funny, it’s reassuring, a form of collective therapy. “We can't really do much about these things, but we can laugh in the face of them,” he said. “In a godless society, it's the one eternal victory we have.”

Tim Minchin, the British Australian comedian, actor, and composer, agreed. “We don’t laugh at scary things because we don’t understand their seriousness,” he told me. “We laugh because they’re serious. Making jokes gives us a sense of power over the threat.” Minchin, like Baddiel, rejected the notion that joking about serious issues was somehow inappropriate—those making that argument, he said, were actually reaching for the same thing: a sense of power over the scary. “Their weapon is signaling their moral purity,” Minchin explained. One isn’t necessarily better than the other, though. “Both the clowns and the virtuous can at times be bores or boors or bullies,” he said. Moralizing is not simply comedy’s opposite, but the flip side of the same coin. Both offer people hope or relief and the sense of a shared experience, and both have dark sides.

Reflecting on these strange couple of weeks of coronavirus house arrest, I realized I have had more funny videos sent to me from neighbors in 10 days than in the past four years that I’ve lived in this neighborhood. Perhaps this is also why when we receive jokes from friends, we often immediately forward them to others. We are reaching out, establishing a shared experience. And when all the jokes are about life in lockdown, we instinctively do so even more; because we have been banned from congregating in person, we congregate online—we are a congregation .

Read: The four possible timelines for life returning to normal

We laugh together to show we’re the same. Yet here we must detour to the darker side of humor. The corollary of inclusivity for some is often exclusivity for others. Jokes can be mean and derisive, picking on those who are different, establishing who is inside the group and who is not. We laugh with people to belong, and at others to exclude. This is why being laughed at feels so horrible. It is—returning to ancient Greece—why politicians would rather be feared or disliked than ridiculed.

In our current crisis, humor is everywhere because fear is too. Laughter binds us together against a common enemy. The jokes and memes being shared are not (yet) mean or exclusionary, partly because the threat is universal. But it is early days—in Britain, the lockdown began only last week. The jokes are mostly about the silliness of life locked away, the domestic farce and absurd concerns. They are about exercise routines and videoconferences, the challenges of working from home, and, of course, toilet paper. But perhaps we should be on guard in case the jokes turn, and they start to target the vulnerable or sick, or minorities who might be accused of causing the crisis.

Humor also does not reach some topics, even if they are part of our collective fear. The British comedian Matt Forde told me timing was important: “If you're joking about how boring self-isolation is when the death rate is relatively low, then that probably won't offend too many people.” This may change as more people die, and the national mood changes. The psychological scientists Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren have found that jokes poking fun at the ills of the world remain funny, usually, only if they are considered “benign.” Observations about people’s behavior can be funny if they poke fun at a social norm that is being broken in a relatively inoffensive way—such as hoarding toilet paper or binge-watching Netflix . If the joke is about other types of rule-breaking behavior seen as unappealing, or disgusting and upsetting, it is much harder for it to be funny. No one is making memes about people without respirators dying in agony. We don’t laugh at the fact that child abuse may increase during periods of enforced domestic isolation, though even now some “ joke ” about beating their wife.

Things, then, can be too serious to joke about. Humor can both bring people together and exclude. But it nevertheless remains part of human nature. We need it. We’re laughing now because we’re scared and because we’re being kept away from those we love.

Of course, we’re also laughing because we’re being kept with those we love. The video that has made me laugh the most isn’t about toilet paper or online spin classes, but forced family quarantine. It features a serious-sounding narrator describing a hypothetical conundrum. “Because of coronavirus, you are going to be quarantined,” the voice informs a man on camera. “But you have a choice: Do you (a) quarantine with your wife and child, or (b)—” Before the second option is read out, the man interjects: “B,” he says, definitively. “B. B.” Laughing, I showed the video to my wife, who proceeded, somewhat disconcertingly, to laugh even louder before sending it to all her friends. The more we watched it together, the more we laughed together . It made us feel better about the ordeal ahead. It felt a lot better than looking at death graphs.

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Quarantine Won’t Be Forever, but Pandemic Humor Is Timeless 

A century before tiktoks and memes, the 1918 flu inspired rhyming poetry and skeptical satire.

A typist wearing her influenza mask in 1918 New York. Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives .

by Katherine A. Foss | July 27, 2020

Early in the coronavirus pandemic, as society shut down and social distancing became the new norm, user-created media content about life during the pandemic exploded. Today’s technology makes it easy to produce and share such messages with the world. However, expressing what life is like in a pandemic through available media is nothing new. Writings about disease—poems, prose, songs, and quips—have long flourished during epidemics, as people have struggled to emotionally and physically adjust to isolation, sickness, and death. Sometimes such writings have been serious; just as often they reflect a darkly hopeful sense of humor. In the past this content was more difficult to distribute than uploading to Instagram or TikTok, but it too made its way into the media of its day—and the feelings it conveyed seem remarkably familiar.

Created by SusanKny. Courtesy of imgflip .

In 1918, a flu virus spread around the world in a matter of months and killed an estimated 50 million people before fizzling out in 1919. The few surviving photographs of the 1918-19 pandemic primarily feature rows of beds in makeshift hospitals and the masked faces of doctors, nurses, barbers and other workers. Documentaries, fictional films, stories, and images paint the Spanish Flu as a solemn crisis. But this collective memory of the Spanish Flu offers little insight into everyday life. We forget how people lived through the 1918 pandemic: through isolation, the temporary closure of schools and businesses, the proliferation of illness and death, the cancellation of sports. And we forget that levity can exist in even the most dire circumstances.

Take, as an example, poems everyday people wrote about the Spanish Flu, which were published widely in local and national newspapers. Media of the time labored under the close watch of World War I media censorship, which aimed to curb public dissent. However, newspapers did frequently publish poetry, providing an outlet for regular people to submit their work and vent their frustrations. Some papers contained specific pages for humorous pieces, “odd” facts, and anecdotes. Others placed poems in the midst of local or national news.

In 1918, like today, a lot of people thought the threat was overblown. A writer for the Vancouver Daily World , for example, published a poem that satirized widespread perceptions that influenza had been overhyped, interspersing lines such as “I think it is nothing but grippe—” and “But just a big scare” with onomatopoeic bouts of sneezing and coughing. During that pandemic, as today, health authorities asked people to combat the spread of the virus by wearing masks and avoiding crowds. And then, as now, people didn’t much like it.

As public health authorities encouraged, and sometimes required, people to cover their faces, mask humor emerged in print. Many of the jokes were highly gendered: The Bismarck Tribune printed , “Every woman secretly believes she would be fascinating in a harem veil. Wearing a flu mask is a good, safe way to try the effect.” Similarly, a writer for the Jasper Weekly Courier quipped , “‘Flu’ masks improve the appearance of many men, but when worn by women, they take much of the joy and beauty out of life.” While our collective memory of 1918’s Spanish Flu suggests that people universally cooperated with quarantines and mask-wearing, this poetry tells a different story.

“Social distancing” did not exist as a phrase, but manifested in concept as communities shut down public spaces. Many people writing about the flu took a personal approach, lamenting all the things they were missing. In “ Flu Bound ,” children’s author Edna Groff Diehl griped about this new reality:

The street crowd surged—but where to go? The bar? The concert? Movies? No! Old Influenza’s locked the door to Pleasure Land. Oh what a bore!

Similarly, Jesse Daniel Boone published his poem “ The Spanish Flu May Get You, Too ” in his own newspaper, the Carolina Mountaineer . He described the quarantine, “This old world is in the lurch; For we cannot go to church; And the children cannot roam, For they now are kept at home, And they’ve put a good, strong ban on the moving pictures, man,” In the Greenville News , the first stanza of the very relatable poem “ Spanish Flu ” read:

Oh, we are quarantined, I guess For ‘bout a million years But if we don’t get out of here We’ll burst right out in tears

One thing that the pandemic could alter, but not stop, was the First World War. As an October 23 “Wavelet” in the Evening Telegram stated, “The Kaiser and the Flu are running neck and neck in the world’s popularity contest.” The pandemic did not spare the military and many enlisted men became ill before ever leaving U.S. soil. A “local boy under quarantine at Naval Station” (John Culberson) began his poem, which also ran on October 25, in the Chattanooga News ,

There’s a war going on in Europe, So I’ve heard from newspaper talk; But the only one I’m having Is with influenza at the park

Culberson went on to contrast his expectation of combat with his reality of isolation at a naval training station in San Diego, concluding,

So, mother, take down the service flag— I’m quarantined at Balboa Park

In October 1918, the war and pandemic together had halted professional baseball and football. With nothing to report on for his “Looking ‘Em Over” column, Washington Times sportswriter Louis A. Dougher created a mock line-up, featuring disease-stopping tools as players: “Fresh Air” as “tackle” and “Quinine” as “quarterback,” with the team rounded out by Antiseptic, Ice Pack, Gargle, Alcohol Rub, Castor Oil, Mask, and Sleep. Dougher concluded, “It is not believed that any team would have stopped so many others as has Spanish ‘Flu’ within the past month … Its record will stand for years.”

Influenza impacted other social activities as well, including courtship and dating. Edgar Leslie, Bert Kalmar, and Pete Wendling’s song “Take Your Girlie to the Movies If You Can’t Make Love at Home” recommended the theater for courtship, that a couple should “Pick a cozy corner where it’s nice and dark. Don’t catch influenza kissing in the park.” In “ A Spanish Flu-Lay ,” a writer mourned for his lost romance when his desired woman became ill: “But soon perhaps the flu will go, And masks be put away, And all the bills Dan Cupid owes, On ruby lips he’ll pay.”

Like those of us who wonder if every throat tickle is COVID-19, individuals in 1918 always felt on the look-out for the first sign of disease. In “ The Last Wheeze ,” Edmund Vance Cooke laid out this paranoia in the Washington Herald : “When you have appendicitis, parenchymatous nephritis, laryngitis or gastritis, It’s the Flu.” Likewise, the Winnipeg Tribune printed this anonymous poem :

The toothpaste didn’t taste right— Spanish Flu! The bath soap burned my eyes— Spanish Flu! My beard seemed to have grown pretty fast and tough overnight— Spanish Flu!

“Everything’s Flu Now!” similarly concluded , “Have you stumped one of your toes? Have you just a bleeding nose? Or no matter what your woes—Spanish Flu.”

For those who did contract the virus, poetic prose conveyed the experience of having the disease, sometimes comically. Newspapers widely reprinted J. P. McEvoy’s “ The Flu ” from the Chicago Tribune , which began, “When your back is broke and your eyes are blurred, And your shin bones knock and your tongue is furred” and then wrapped up with “Some call it Flu—I call it hell.” Through couplets and various other rhyme schemes, people emphasized the painful persistent cough that “seems cutting like a knife,” as a September 11 Houston Post article “The Worst of It” detailed; a headache equal to “clamped screws on my cranium,” as C. Roy Miller wrote in the Miami Herald on October 24; as well as exhaustion, a lack of appetite, and the impact of fever—alternating between “burning” and “freezing,” according to one Walt Mason, writing in the Coffeyville Weekly Journal on November 21.

In December, when quarantines and mask requirements had been lifted, some people were still getting sick. “Lumberjack poet” Jack W. Yoes sorrowfully wrote in “Marooned,” which ran two days after Christmas in the Vancouver Sun , about missing out on the holiday festivities because he was hospitalized:

But our hearts are right, And on Christmas night We’ll jolly along with you, Despite the pains and aches that come In the trail of the gol-dinged “flu”

People were clever and creative in how they wrote about the pandemic. Plays on words were common: “What goes up the chimney? Flu!!!,” was published in the Evening Telegram on the October 23, while the Walnut Valley Times poem “Chop Suey,” which ran on November 26, read, “I flew from flu As you said to.” On October 23, the Evening Telegram also printed, “We are not wearing a flu mask, but now and then we meet a gent who makes us wish for a gas mask.”

Such jokes about the pandemic lightened the mood, much like today’s memes and tweets. Through the words influenza survivors left behind, we can relate our own conflicting feelings to theirs—demonstrating the transcending need for creative expression and taking permission to find the light during a dark time.

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Coronavirus Updates

The coronavirus crisis, memes about covid-19 helped us cope with life in a pandemic, a new study finds.

Sharon Pruitt-Young

Artist Jonas Never (@never1959) applies finishing touches to his mural of Sen. Bernie Sanders in Culver City, Calif., on Jan. 24. Standing out in a crowd of glamorously dressed guests, Sanders showed up for the presidential inauguration in a heavy winter jacket and patterned mittens — with an AFP photo of the veteran leftist spawning the first viral meme of the Biden era. Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Artist Jonas Never (@never1959) applies finishing touches to his mural of Sen. Bernie Sanders in Culver City, Calif., on Jan. 24. Standing out in a crowd of glamorously dressed guests, Sanders showed up for the presidential inauguration in a heavy winter jacket and patterned mittens — with an AFP photo of the veteran leftist spawning the first viral meme of the Biden era.

Does a meme a day keep the doctor away? Not quite, but it looks like it might help, according to one recent study.

Researchers with Pennsylvania State University and the University of California Santa Barbara found that memes helped people cope with life during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a study published this week in the Psychology of Popular Media journal. Researchers found that those who viewed memes — a type of humor they described as funny or cute pictures that reference pop culture — reported "higher levels of humor" and more positive feelings, according to a news release from the American Psychological Association, which publishes the journal.

Goats and Soda

Coronavirus faq: i'm vaccinated. is it ok to sing into a karaoke mic again.

They surveyed 748 people online last December: 72% of those who responded were white, 54% identified as women, 63% didn't hold a college degree, and their ages ranged from 18 to 88, the release states. They were shown a variety of meme types, with different kinds of photos and captions, and asked to rate the cuteness, humor and emotional responses prompted by the materials, as well as how much the memes in question made them think about COVID-19.

Those who viewed memes that specifically referenced the pandemic felt less stress than those who viewed non-pandemic-related memes. They also felt more capable of coping with the COVID-19 crisis and were better at processing information, according to the study. And they were also less likely to be stressed about the pandemic than those who didn't view memes related to COVID-19 at all, researchers concluded.

The type of meme matters, too: People who viewed memes featuring cute babies or baby animals were overall less likely to think about the pandemic or the effects it has had on them, regardless of the type of caption, according to this week's release. (And researchers also found that those who were surveyed found that memes with animals in them were cuter than those featuring humans, the APA said.)

The results of the study show that memes about stressful situations can potentially help the public deal with and process those situations, researchers said.

San Francisco shut down its In-N-Out for not checking patrons' vaccination status

"While the World Health Organization recommended that people avoid too much COVID-related media for the benefit of their mental health, our research reveals that memes about COVID-19 could help people feel more confident in their ability to deal with the pandemic," Jessica Gall Myrick, a lead author of the study and a professor at Pennsylvania State University, said in the APA release. "This suggests that not all media are uniformly bad for mental health and people should stop and take stock of what type of media they are consuming. If we are all more conscious of how our behaviors, including time spent scrolling, affect our emotional states, then we will better be able to use social media to help us when we need it and to take a break from it when we need that instead."

So the next time you worry that you're wasting time scrolling through memes, just think: It could be good for your health.

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Read these 12 moving essays about life during coronavirus

Artists, novelists, critics, and essayists are writing the first draft of history.

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The world is grappling with an invisible, deadly enemy, trying to understand how to live with the threat posed by a virus . For some writers, the only way forward is to put pen to paper, trying to conceptualize and document what it feels like to continue living as countries are under lockdown and regular life seems to have ground to a halt.

So as the coronavirus pandemic has stretched around the world, it’s sparked a crop of diary entries and essays that describe how life has changed. Novelists, critics, artists, and journalists have put words to the feelings many are experiencing. The result is a first draft of how we’ll someday remember this time, filled with uncertainty and pain and fear as well as small moments of hope and humanity.

At the New York Review of Books, Ali Bhutto writes that in Karachi, Pakistan, the government-imposed curfew due to the virus is “eerily reminiscent of past military clampdowns”:

Beneath the quiet calm lies a sense that society has been unhinged and that the usual rules no longer apply. Small groups of pedestrians look on from the shadows, like an audience watching a spectacle slowly unfolding. People pause on street corners and in the shade of trees, under the watchful gaze of the paramilitary forces and the police.

His essay concludes with the sobering note that “in the minds of many, Covid-19 is just another life-threatening hazard in a city that stumbles from one crisis to another.”

Writing from Chattanooga, novelist Jamie Quatro documents the mixed ways her neighbors have been responding to the threat, and the frustration of conflicting direction, or no direction at all, from local, state, and federal leaders:

Whiplash, trying to keep up with who’s ordering what. We’re already experiencing enough chaos without this back-and-forth. Why didn’t the federal government issue a nationwide shelter-in-place at the get-go, the way other countries did? What happens when one state’s shelter-in-place ends, while others continue? Do states still under quarantine close their borders? We are still one nation, not fifty individual countries. Right?

Award-winning photojournalist Alessio Mamo, quarantined with his partner Marta in Sicily after she tested positive for the virus, accompanies his photographs in the Guardian of their confinement with a reflection on being confined :

The doctors asked me to take a second test, but again I tested negative. Perhaps I’m immune? The days dragged on in my apartment, in black and white, like my photos. Sometimes we tried to smile, imagining that I was asymptomatic, because I was the virus. Our smiles seemed to bring good news. My mother left hospital, but I won’t be able to see her for weeks. Marta started breathing well again, and so did I. I would have liked to photograph my country in the midst of this emergency, the battles that the doctors wage on the frontline, the hospitals pushed to their limits, Italy on its knees fighting an invisible enemy. That enemy, a day in March, knocked on my door instead.

In the New York Times Magazine, deputy editor Jessica Lustig writes with devastating clarity about her family’s life in Brooklyn while her husband battled the virus, weeks before most people began taking the threat seriously:

At the door of the clinic, we stand looking out at two older women chatting outside the doorway, oblivious. Do I wave them away? Call out that they should get far away, go home, wash their hands, stay inside? Instead we just stand there, awkwardly, until they move on. Only then do we step outside to begin the long three-block walk home. I point out the early magnolia, the forsythia. T says he is cold. The untrimmed hairs on his neck, under his beard, are white. The few people walking past us on the sidewalk don’t know that we are visitors from the future. A vision, a premonition, a walking visitation. This will be them: Either T, in the mask, or — if they’re lucky — me, tending to him.

Essayist Leslie Jamison writes in the New York Review of Books about being shut away alone in her New York City apartment with her 2-year-old daughter since she became sick:

The virus. Its sinewy, intimate name. What does it feel like in my body today? Shivering under blankets. A hot itch behind the eyes. Three sweatshirts in the middle of the day. My daughter trying to pull another blanket over my body with her tiny arms. An ache in the muscles that somehow makes it hard to lie still. This loss of taste has become a kind of sensory quarantine. It’s as if the quarantine keeps inching closer and closer to my insides. First I lost the touch of other bodies; then I lost the air; now I’ve lost the taste of bananas. Nothing about any of these losses is particularly unique. I’ve made a schedule so I won’t go insane with the toddler. Five days ago, I wrote Walk/Adventure! on it, next to a cut-out illustration of a tiger—as if we’d see tigers on our walks. It was good to keep possibility alive.

At Literary Hub, novelist Heidi Pitlor writes about the elastic nature of time during her family’s quarantine in Massachusetts:

During a shutdown, the things that mark our days—commuting to work, sending our kids to school, having a drink with friends—vanish and time takes on a flat, seamless quality. Without some self-imposed structure, it’s easy to feel a little untethered. A friend recently posted on Facebook: “For those who have lost track, today is Blursday the fortyteenth of Maprilay.” ... Giving shape to time is especially important now, when the future is so shapeless. We do not know whether the virus will continue to rage for weeks or months or, lord help us, on and off for years. We do not know when we will feel safe again. And so many of us, minus those who are gifted at compartmentalization or denial, remain largely captive to fear. We may stay this way if we do not create at least the illusion of movement in our lives, our long days spent with ourselves or partners or families.

Novelist Lauren Groff writes at the New York Review of Books about trying to escape the prison of her fears while sequestered at home in Gainesville, Florida:

Some people have imaginations sparked only by what they can see; I blame this blinkered empiricism for the parks overwhelmed with people, the bars, until a few nights ago, thickly thronged. My imagination is the opposite. I fear everything invisible to me. From the enclosure of my house, I am afraid of the suffering that isn’t present before me, the people running out of money and food or drowning in the fluid in their lungs, the deaths of health-care workers now growing ill while performing their duties. I fear the federal government, which the right wing has so—intentionally—weakened that not only is it insufficient to help its people, it is actively standing in help’s way. I fear we won’t sufficiently punish the right. I fear leaving the house and spreading the disease. I fear what this time of fear is doing to my children, their imaginations, and their souls.

At ArtForum , Berlin-based critic and writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen reflects on martinis, melancholia, and Finnish artist Jaakko Pallasvuo’s 2018 graphic novel Retreat , in which three young people exile themselves in the woods:

In melancholia, the shape of what is ending, and its temporality, is sprawling and incomprehensible. The ambivalence makes it hard to bear. The world of Retreat is rendered in lush pink and purple watercolors, which dissolve into wild and messy abstractions. In apocalypse, the divisions established in genesis bleed back out. My own Corona-retreat is similarly soft, color-field like, each day a blurred succession of quarantinis, YouTube–yoga, and televized press conferences. As restrictions mount, so does abstraction. For now, I’m still rooting for love to save the world.

At the Paris Review , Matt Levin writes about reading Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves during quarantine:

A retreat, a quarantine, a sickness—they simultaneously distort and clarify, curtail and expand. It is an ideal state in which to read literature with a reputation for difficulty and inaccessibility, those hermetic books shorn of the handholds of conventional plot or characterization or description. A novel like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is perfect for the state of interiority induced by quarantine—a story of three men and three women, meeting after the death of a mutual friend, told entirely in the overlapping internal monologues of the six, interspersed only with sections of pure, achingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world, a day’s procession and recession of light and waves. The novel is, in my mind’s eye, a perfectly spherical object. It is translucent and shimmering and infinitely fragile, prone to shatter at the slightest disturbance. It is not a book that can be read in snatches on the subway—it demands total absorption. Though it revels in a stark emotional nakedness, the book remains aloof, remote in its own deep self-absorption.

In an essay for the Financial Times, novelist Arundhati Roy writes with anger about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s anemic response to the threat, but also offers a glimmer of hope for the future:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

From Boston, Nora Caplan-Bricker writes in The Point about the strange contraction of space under quarantine, in which a friend in Beirut is as close as the one around the corner in the same city:

It’s a nice illusion—nice to feel like we’re in it together, even if my real world has shrunk to one person, my husband, who sits with his laptop in the other room. It’s nice in the same way as reading those essays that reframe social distancing as solidarity. “We must begin to see the negative space as clearly as the positive, to know what we don’t do is also brilliant and full of love,” the poet Anne Boyer wrote on March 10th, the day that Massachusetts declared a state of emergency. If you squint, you could almost make sense of this quarantine as an effort to flatten, along with the curve, the distinctions we make between our bonds with others. Right now, I care for my neighbor in the same way I demonstrate love for my mother: in all instances, I stay away. And in moments this month, I have loved strangers with an intensity that is new to me. On March 14th, the Saturday night after the end of life as we knew it, I went out with my dog and found the street silent: no lines for restaurants, no children on bicycles, no couples strolling with little cups of ice cream. It had taken the combined will of thousands of people to deliver such a sudden and complete emptiness. I felt so grateful, and so bereft.

And on his own website, musician and artist David Byrne writes about rediscovering the value of working for collective good , saying that “what is happening now is an opportunity to learn how to change our behavior”:

In emergencies, citizens can suddenly cooperate and collaborate. Change can happen. We’re going to need to work together as the effects of climate change ramp up. In order for capitalism to survive in any form, we will have to be a little more socialist. Here is an opportunity for us to see things differently — to see that we really are all connected — and adjust our behavior accordingly. Are we willing to do this? Is this moment an opportunity to see how truly interdependent we all are? To live in a world that is different and better than the one we live in now? We might be too far down the road to test every asymptomatic person, but a change in our mindsets, in how we view our neighbors, could lay the groundwork for the collective action we’ll need to deal with other global crises. The time to see how connected we all are is now.

The portrait these writers paint of a world under quarantine is multifaceted. Our worlds have contracted to the confines of our homes, and yet in some ways we’re more connected than ever to one another. We feel fear and boredom, anger and gratitude, frustration and strange peace. Uncertainty drives us to find metaphors and images that will let us wrap our minds around what is happening.

Yet there’s no single “what” that is happening. Everyone is contending with the pandemic and its effects from different places and in different ways. Reading others’ experiences — even the most frightening ones — can help alleviate the loneliness and dread, a little, and remind us that what we’re going through is both unique and shared by all.

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Drawing on humor to spread the COVID-prevention message

A former ballerina, Maya Adam , MD, learned some valuable lessons on the stage that she is now applying in the global fight against COVID-19. She's incorporated those lessons into her six wildly popular videos that use music, animation and a bit of humor to entertain and enlighten audiences about the dreaded disease.

"As a performer, you realize that if you do not connect with your audience and take their heart into your hands, there's no way they are going to pay attention to what you have to say. Keeping that connection is something we can do in a video as well," said Adam, a clinical assistant professor of pediatrics and director of Health Media Innovation at Stanford Medicine .

Adam's short films have captured more than 8.2 million views on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, as well as the attention of notable individuals like Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization.

The videos -- including a new one that addresses vaccine hesitancy -- have been retweeted by the likes of Arianna Huffington, the social media influencer, and Jennifer Gates, the daughter of Bill and Melinda Gates. Most recently, YouTube/Google content strategist Mike Martin singled them out as "remarkable, brilliant, impactful work."

"In fact, we chose it specifically to serve as a 'best in class' inspiration and guide for other higher education institutions, so that they can see what is possible on YouTube and aspire to hit the heights your work does," Martin wrote in an email to Adam.

A fresh approach to health messaging

The videos do not take a traditional, didactic approach to education, but rather incorporate elements that entertain viewers and draw them in. Once they are hooked, she sneaks in the health message she wants to convey.

Her most recent video, " End the pandemic. Vaccines work ," for example, tackles the tough issue of vaccine hesitancy. It features a grandmother, with her family, marking off the days of COVID isolation on a calendar when a health worker offering vaccines knocks at the door.

The mother screams and slams the door, but the grandmother pushes her aside to get the vaccine. She then convinces other family members to be vaccinated by explaining the value of vaccines in protecting against disease, including polio and mumps. Since it posted a month ago, it has been viewed more than 61,000 times on the Stanford Medicine YouTube channel.

Adam's most popular video, called the " Global Race: A COVID-19 Story ," is about the importance of wearing masks. It has been viewed on the channel more than 3 million times. Set to the frenetic music of the "Flight of the Bumblebee" by Russian composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the video depicts a terrified, breathless globe -- a cartoon-like character -- charging frantically up a hill, pursued by an angry orange coronavirus.

At the top of the hill, the globe meets two stick-figure caregivers who drape the globe in a mask. The empowered globe then scampers down the hill, the coronavirus lagging as the hill gradually levels out -- a clever representation of the so-called "flattening of the curve."

It helps to make the audience laugh

Like her work, Adam's career trajectory has hardly been traditional. After 10 years with a German ballet company, she was 27 when she started her undergraduate education at Stanford. She went on to medical school at the University of British Columbia and became a lecturer at the School of Medicine in 2014.

One of her early tasks was to set up a digital education outpost for Stanford in South Africa, with the goal of educating the local population about good nutrition.

"We had to create content that was portable and small and would engage people with limited literacy and bandwidth," she said. "I had to become really streamlined in what we were actually trying to communicate and make it compelling for people who couldn't read or didn't really have time to watch."

She used a similar approach in engaging learners in classes about mindful eating, healthy cooking and environmentally sustainable cooking for Stanford University's online Coursera course platform. Those classes also incorporate music and animation and have become quite popular, with some of the classes reaching enrollments of 500,000 people worldwide, she said.

"Finding creative ways to get preventive health messages to the public means that we need to meet them where they already are -- on social media and entertainment platforms -- and give them something that fills a need beyond just providing information," Adam said.

"If we want to reach hard-to-reach audiences, we need to move them, inspire them, make them laugh. Then, when we have their attention, we can more effectively deliver health messages."

Taking on COVID around the globe

Her COVID work has been so successful that Adam gets requests from educational centers around the world -- from Poland to Oman to Indonesia -- that want to make use of her material.

She has been working with the Heidelberg Institute for Global Health in Germany in testing different approaches to COVID education in large-scale clinical trials. In their first two trials involving more than 10,000 participants, the researchers found that most people were engaged enough to watch the short films almost to the end, and gained significant knowledge about COVID, as well as an intention to change their behaviors, like staying home and washing their hands, she said.

"In many cases, there was a high baseline of knowledge. People already knew quite a bit. We still saw a significant increase in knowledge. That's a very exciting finding," Adam said.

Her team has produced three videos on vaccine hesitation that incorporate humor and emotion to see what resonates most with people. They will be testing the videos in audiences in the United States and China, and plan to publish their results in an academic journal to help validate their work.

"It can be an uphill battle to get people to accept this approach to education," said Adam, who said she has had "amazing" support from School of Medicine leaders. "We believe we can get messages out in a way that is both rigorous and enjoyable."

Click here to view Maya Adam's health COVID-education videos on Stanford Medicine's YouTube playlist ; and here for the link to the Global Child Health Media Initiative page.

Top image taken from the " End the pandemic: Vaccines work " video."

Related posts

Animated video helps kids weather the COVID-19 pandemic

Stanford project brings health education videos to mothers in South Africa

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• CAREER COLUMN
• 19 February 2021

Coronavirus diaries: Laughter is the best medicine

• John Tregoning 0

John Tregoning is a reader in respiratory infections in the Department of Infectious Disease, Imperial College London, UK. He runs a blog on academic life.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Sometimes, all that’s left to do is to laugh. Stories from the First World War are riddled with gallows humour. In one apocryphal tale from the trenches, a bagpiper starts to pipe to raise morale. Fearing that the skirling sound of the pipes signals an imminent attack, the enemy shoot from their own trench, forcing everyone to take cover and the piper to stop playing. Eventually, the shooting subsides and the piper starts again, triggering the same set of events. Undeterred, the piper prepares to start for a third time, when someone shouts: “For Heaven’s sake, play something they like!”

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00474-5

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97 Coronavirus Quotes That Show Human Beings Will Always Find The Funny Side, Even In A Crisis

The coronavirus (Covid-19) situation is dire, but the ability to make light of awful situations is an historic marker of British coping mechanisms, so here are the best coronavirus quotes and coronavirus jokes

The Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has been devastating, globally. Of that, we can all agree.

With the casualties rising, worrying press conferences, small businesses shuttering and an over-extended health service, there's not been a lot of positive news to come out of the health crisis over the last year, naturally.

And with news that a new Covid-19 variant, Omicron, has been identified in the likes of Scotland, South Africa, Austria and Israel, there are now concerns social distancing measures and restrictions will soon become stricter as the World Health Organisation designated Omicron a 'variant of concern'.

However, as the British are wont to do, making light of the situation is the first port of call defence mechanism, to soothe collective anxiety. So whether that's quasi-philosophical Coronavirus quotes or full-on Coronavirus jokes, here is a sample of what's out there, to give you a little light relief.

Some have used their time to try and write pithy, impactful statements, to offer some words of encouragement, while others are just here for the LOLs, with Coronavirus memes or parodies.

Funny Coronavirus Quotes And Coronavirus Jokes

Many people - the ones who aren't sick, obviously - are beginning to try and see the funny side of the self-isolation, keeping people's spirits up by laughing about new opportunities to drink more, work out less, text an ex and eat tonnes of snacks.

Serious or Moving Coronavirus Quotes

Others are here to offer you some words of motivation in this tough time, whether quoting their favourite author or coming up with a bespoke phrase to suit the coronavirus situation.

Coronavirus Quotes About New Domestic Life

Some people are finding domestic life is either ridiculous, unbearable, or - for the unsociable among us - remarkably similar to the way it was before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Christina Aguilera likened quarantine to her 1999 hit 'Genie in a bottle' and we are totally here for it. Posting a clip from the original video, the pop superstar captioned the Instagram with some of the song's most fitting lyrics:

'“I feel like I've been locked up tight for a century of lonely nights...waiting for someone to release me” #SoundOn . What day is it?! Haha. Thanks for making me laugh during this crazy time. Love you guys. Please stay home if you can and stay safe. ❤️'

Jokes About Louis C.K.'s Coronavirus Stand-Up Special

In a rather more NSFW moment, controversial American comedian Louis C.K. announced a new stand-up special 'for those who need to laugh' during these testing times. The announcement was met with a mixed response, considering the comedian's recent media trial, on counts of alleged sexual misconduct.

In 2017, the C.K. was accused of misconduct - which included allegations of him masturbating in front of people without their consent - by five different women. At first, he either refused to comment on, or denied the allegations, but the day after the New York Times released their exposé, Louis C.K. put out a statement admitting to many of the accusations levelled against him .

After the news that C.K. was planning a one-off comedy 'special' during lockdown, other comedians and writers took to Twitter to poke fun at the situation, imagining what jokes C.K. might be planning to use in his coronavirus-show.

Some are definitely too NSFW to share ( click here if you want to read the whole thread ), but here are a few:

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Humor and COVID-19: Is it Okay to Laugh During a Pandemic?

Using humor during a pandemic.

Posted May 8, 2020

I heard a great joke about coronavirus the other day, but you probably won't get it.

Did you hear that researchers have delayed the coronavirus vaccine until they figure out how to make it cause autism ?

These are just two examples of humor used in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. If you are anywhere on social media , you have seen the jokes and memes . According to an old adage , "comedy is tragedy plus time." This has been true for many terrible events when, after periods of shock and sadness, humor and laughter are restored.

But the current situation seems different. People haven't stopped joking about it. Memes and funny videos are all over social media, even while an ever-increasing number of people across the world get sick and die. So why is this happening? Why is there no gap between the disaster and the humor created around it?

One thing that makes the current situation unique is that it is not a single event in a specific place and time. It is a rolling and continuous crisis, spreading endlessly across continents with no end in sight. The shock factor is therefore reduced compared to a single terror attack, for example. This enables people to adjust more easily to what is happening—and humor may be one of the best ways to do just that.

Of course, many people will feel uncomfortable laughing in these dire times, especially if they know someone who has been directly affected. But for others, it is not only acceptable to use humor in the face of the pandemic—it may even be a necessity.

Obviously, we do not laugh at the tragedy itself, the victims of the virus, or the people who are suffering from it. But we can take aim at the seemingly absurd situation we are all in.

This is because, from a psychological point of view, humor is a great defense mechanism that helps us deal with emotionally challenging situations, especially ones that are overwhelming and unpredictable . Many cancer patients and their doctors, for example, routinely tell jokes and laugh about the disease in an attempt to cope and distract themselves from a serious situation.

Coping strategy

On top of this, the unique circumstances surrounding the pandemic may make humor more prevalent, not less.

First, many people now have an unusual amount of time on our hands. Being stuck at home with not much to do forces people to find ways to be more creative with their time. While the situation is serious, in our daily activities, we are mostly preoccupied with more mundane tasks, such as what to do all day, how to entertain children, how not to eat too much, and how to stay sane in general.

Second, being a bit scared, tense, and in a state of alert, it is actually a good thing for humor to develop. These states of physiological and emotional arousal serve as driving forces in creating and enjoying the humor.

Usually, intermediate levels of arousal are best. With too little, you are bored , and with too much, you are too excited to enjoy humor. Right in the middle is perfect. The laughter after hearing a good joke serves as a release of all the physiological and emotional energy that was built up, and that's what makes us feel good.

Another important element of humor that is prominent during the pandemic is what humor researchers call " incongruity ." For something to be funny, there needs to be something odd or surprising in the situation. The current situation reveals plenty of such oddities.

Here is a joke that illustrates this point: “All this time, I thought that the tumble dryer was shrinking my clothes. Turns out, it was actually the refrigerator.”

The joke is built on the unusual circumstances we live in, of being stuck at home. The setup is the common knowledge that the heat of a tumble dryer can shrink clothes, but then there is a surprise. It’s not the dryer at fault, but the refrigerator, where we store our food. We resolve this incongruity by realizing that we are getting fatter from eating too much when we are at home. This resolution gives us the "Aha!" moment that makes the joke funny. (And yes, analyzing a joke does ruin it.)

So, while humor may not get us out of this awful crisis, it can help us deal with it. We cannot change the reality of the disease or the economic impact, but we can try and change how we feel about it.

By creating and sharing humor, we can cope better and ease some of the tension due to the pandemic. That way, we can have at least some control of the situation. And what better way to do that than by having a good laugh?

Gil Greengross, Ph.D ., is an evolutionary psychologist from Aberystwyth University.

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84 Coronavirus Quotes That Show Human Beings Will Always Find The Funny Side, Even in a Crisis

The coronavirus (covid-19) situation is dire, but the ability to make light of awful situations can be a great coping mechanism, so here are the best coronavirus quotes and coronavirus jokes..

by : ELLE UK - Mar 24th, 2021

Instagram: @champagnetastehome @a_day_in_the_life_of_ann

This story originally appeared on ELLE UK

The  Coronav i rus (COVID-19) pandemic has been devastating, globally. Of that, we can all agree. With the casualties rising, worrying press conferences, small businesses shuttering for the foreseeable and an over-extended health service, there’s not been a lot of positive news to come out of the health crisis , naturally.

But making light of the situation is the first port of call defense mechanism, to soothe collective anxiety. So whether that’s quasi-philosophical Coronavirus quotes or full-on Coronavirus jokes, here is a sample of what’s out there, to give you a little light relief.

Some have used their time to try and write pithy, impactful statements, to offer some words of encouragement, while others are just here for the LOLs, with  Coronavirus memes  or parodies.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Pantiles (@thepantiles)

Funny Coronavirus Quotes and Coronavirus Jokes

Many people – the ones who aren’t sick, obviously – are beginning to try and see the funny side of self-isolation, keeping people’s spirits up by laughing about new opportunities to drink more, work out less, text an ex and eat tonnes of snacks.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Champagne Taste (@champagnetastehome)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Motherhood After IVF 🇬🇧 (@ivf.ninja)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by SomethingFunny (@somethingfunnyyyy)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Kaitlyn Murphy (@kaitkomedy)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by POSITIVITY PUNS (@youareawesome_co)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by 𝐈𝐍𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐌 𝐓𝐈𝐏𝐒 ✧ 𝐁𝐈𝐙 𝐁𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐈𝐍𝐆🧿 (@ct.agency)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by ELLE UK (@elleuk)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by The New Yorker (@newyorkermag)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Morgan | Poshmark Ambassador (@lookgradenthis)

Serious or Moving Coronavirus Quotes

Others are here to offer you some words of motivation in this tough time, whether quoting their favourite author or coming up with a bespoke phrase to suit the coronavirus situation.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Laura Powell (@wanderlustinglaura)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by L A U R E N S P↟N N E R (@laurenspinner)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by 🌟 Positive words of Wisdom 🌟 (@positivity_quotes__)

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View this post on Instagram A post shared by hey✨ (@thehappyquoters)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Love & Awareness (@spiritualmovement)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Quotes by Christie (@quotesbychristie)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Adam J. Kurtz (@adamjk)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by yung pueblo (@yung_pueblo)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Emily Ehlers (Em) (@ecowithem_)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Female Collective (@femalecollective)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by DANIELLE COKE (@ohhappydani)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by rupi kaur (@rupikaur_)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Matt Haig (@mattzhaig)

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View this post on Instagram A post shared by Annette Leaver (@netleaver)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Yorkville Mom (@yorkvillemom)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Claudia Althoen (@claudiaalthoen.writer)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Alert Thoughts (@alertthoughts)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Coffee, Quotes & Crochet (@mouse.made.crochet)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Poems to Share (@itspoemtalk)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Naomi (@naomipsychotherapy)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Positive & Motivational Quotes (@thegoodquote)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by A Spur of Emotions (@aspurofemotions)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Scarlett Curtis 🧙‍♀️ (@scarcurtis)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sina ♡ Happy Grey Lucky (@happygreylucky)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Moodbox by Sarah (@into_the_mood_by_sarah)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Prince Edward Island Directory (@thepeicollective)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nordic Moxie ✌🌊♒🏃🍺 (@nordicmoxie)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Boutique Poetry Community (@awritersbusiness)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by C a r l y ✨ (@carlys_confessions)

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View this post on Instagram A post shared by Alison Morgan (@appletreebookshop)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Claire Bayliss (@bigfamilybigfun)

Coronavirus Quotes About New Domestic Life

Some people are finding domestic life is either ridiculous, unbearable, or – for the unsociable among us – remarkably similar to the way it was before the COVID-19 pandemic.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Afsheen | Creative Coach (@whistlewhileyouwork.in)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Lisa | Play | Family Life (@stayhomeplay)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Female DJ Wedding DJ Event DJ (@spinsisters)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Deborah (@theedit_dh)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by RAKHI BEEKRUM ✨ PSYCHOLOGIST (@rakhibeekrum)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Heidi Abirached (@allergicfood_lover)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nina Cosford (@ninacosford)

Christina Aguilera likened quarantine to her 1999 hit ‘Genie in a bottle’ and we are totally here for it. Posting a clip from the original video, the pop superstar captioned the Instagram with some of the song’s most fitting lyrics:

“I feel like I’ve been locked up tight for a century of lonely nights…waiting for someone to release me” #SoundOn . What day is it?! Haha. Thanks for making me laugh during this crazy time. Love you guys. Please stay home if you can and stay safe. ❤️”

Jokes About Louis C.K.’s Coronavirus Stand-Up Special

In a rather more NSFW moment, controversial American comedian  Louis C.K. announced a new stand-up special  ‘for those who need to laugh’ during these testing times. The announcement was met with a mixed response, considering the comedian’s recent media trial, on counts of alleged sexual misconduct.

In 2017, the C.K. was accused of misconduct – which included allegations of him masturbating in front of people without their consent – by five different women. At first, he either refused to comment on, or denied the allegations, but the day after the New York Times released their exposé, Louis C.K.  put out a statement admitting to many of the accusations levelled against him .

After the news that C.K. was planning a one-off comedy ‘special’ during lockdown, other comedians and writers took to Twitter to poke fun at the situation, imagining what jokes C.K. might be planning to use in his coronavirus-show.

Some are definitely too NSFW to share ( click here if you want to read the whole thread ), but here are a few:

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Christina Aguilera (@xtina)

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Laughter in the time of a pandemic: why South Africans are joking about coronavirus

Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town

Disclosure statement

Herman Wasserman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Cape Town provides funding as a partner of The Conversation AFRICA.

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Almost immediately after the first case of COVID-19 was confirmed in South Africa, the jokes started. From memes featuring prominent politicians to bad puns, from TikTok video clips to pictures of people posing with silly home-made protective gear , South Africans took to Twitter , WhatsApp and Facebook to make fun of the virus.

It is not unusual for South Africans to make jokes about their many problems, from former President Jacob Zuma’s legacy of alleged grand corruption, known as state capture , to the regular power blackouts caused by ongoing crises at the national power utility Eskom. Cartoonists never seem to have a shortage of material.

Online jokes, memes and video clips are of course not peculiar to South Africa. The increased accessibility of a growing range of social media platforms and editing tools have made it possible for media users around the world to create and interact with news topics in ever more creative ways. Yet it is remarkable how, in a country like South Africa with its multitude of serious challenges, media users often take to jokes rather than despair when presented with a new problem.

Why is humour so often the first port of call when South African media users find themselves in stormy seas? There may be various socio-cultural, political and psychological reasons for this.

Socio-cultural reasons

There is an established body of academic literature about the important role of gossip, jokes, rumour and satire in African politics and societies.

In his landmark article , the historian and human rights activist Stephen Ellis described the phenomenon of “pavement radio”, or radio trottoir , that can be found across Africa. This phenomenon is underpinned by the widespread oral tradition characteristic of these societies.

Ellis defines this form of communication as

the popular and unofficial discussion of current affairs.

Unlike the press, television or radio, this

is not controlled by any identifiable individual, institution or group of people.

Pavement radio is not to be mistaken for ordinary, unverified rumours or gossip, but performs a social and political function. Its subject matter are issues of public interest about which there has not been an official announcement, or where official information cannot be trusted.

Humour also helps build community. For example, popular South African tabloids have established a fiercely loyal readership with their stories of the supernatural, the silly or the absurd alongside a strong commitment to the community interest. Tabloid readers integrate their newspaper reading practices with storytelling, sharing and communal interpretation of newspaper content.

These practices illustrate how the conviviality of African societies also influence their media use. Similarly, joking about the coronavirus may be a way for people to say ‘it is all very absurd, but we’re in this together’.

Political reasons

Pavement radio thrives when the mainstream media are tightly controlled by the authorities, or where there is widespread distrust in official narratives.

South Africans enjoy a much higher degree of media freedom than they used to. But during apartheid, alternative media and underground information networks often provided more trusted channels of communication than the compliant mainstream media, or propaganda issued on the state broadcaster.

Widespread corruption in post-apartheid South Africa has not done much to improve citrizens’ respect for official narratives. They know what it feels like to be lied to.

Research has shown that young South Africans in particular are distrustful of politicians and political institutions. And political disillusionment with the current government and feelings of frustration have also proven to be fertile ground for rumours and conspiracy theories that provide more plausible explanations of people’s current circumstances than political, economic or scientific authorities.

The “sceptical laughter” evoked by popular culture is a way of poking fun at authority, undermining the power of politicians or big corporates.

In some of the jokes about the coronavirus it’s clear that South Africans are laughing – perhaps nervously – at the government’s promises that it has everything under control. The news that the first confirmed patient returned to South Africa from a ski holiday unleashed jokes about the racial profile of the disease. Joking about rich jetsetters becoming infected or making fun of African remedies and responses, may be a way to take the sting out of racial inequality and economic hierarchies.

Psychological reasons

Laughter and humour could be used as a coping mechanism. Media coverage of COVID-19 can stoke fear and panic through their choice of words (“killer virus”) or images (scary microscopic virus pictures, empty shelves in supermarkets). The sheer stream of reporting and daily tally of the infected and the dead can also be overwhelming and confusing .

Given the various other risks that South Africans have to contend with on a daily basis, making jokes about this added thing to worry about may help to take the sting out of the new, unknown threat.

Several jokes on Twitter named these other threats, as a reminder that while COVID-19 is serious, the other concerns should not be lost from sight. For instance, a jibe about the coronavirus having to show its proof of residence at the port of entry hinted at the high levels of violent xenophobia in South Africa.

Humour in this context is a way of showing resilience and agency. Although some Twitter users remarked that the humorous tone might still change when the seriousness of the disease hits home , the jokes largely had an optimistic tone. As one person posted on Twitter :

We did it with Ebola, we did it with Listeriosis, we did it with Boko Haram, we definitely will did (sic) it with #CoronavirusinSA can I get an Amen!

Another was more fatalistic:

The Ronas is here to wipe us out but at least we will die laughing.

The downside

Unfortunately, the prevalence of jokes and satire can also spread misinformation, as audiences don’t always know what information to trust and what to just laugh about. Research in Africa shows very high levels of exposure to misinformation.

This is a cause for concern in the current COVID-19 epidemic.

And this is why it’s important to take popular culture seriously. If we understand how people use media in their everyday life, or how they use humour to allay their fears, it is easier to find appropriate responses to those concerns. The fight against the “infodemic” of misinformation cannot be won by only insisting on fact-checking and rational debate.

In Africa, the role of humour and jokes in everyday popular culture is deadly serious.

• Social media
• Public health
• Coronavirus
• Tabloid newspapers
• Racial inequality
• State capture
• Misinformation
• Tabloid media
• Science and innovation for development
• Journalism in Africa
• Academic literature

Program Manager, Teaching & Learning Initiatives

Lecturer/Senior Lecturer, Earth System Science (School of Science)

Sydney Horizon Educators (Identified)

Deputy Social Media Producer

Associate Professor, Occupational Therapy

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