Investigating the Internal Cohesion of Meme Cycles: How Many (Sub)cycles Can Be Generated by a Memetic Drift?

Joke/meme cycles are commonly understood as groups of humorous texts pertaining to a specific topic and exhibiting more similarities than differences. Hence, relevant research more often than not concentrates on the analysis of their similarities to account for the internal cohesion of joke cycles. The present study attempts to scrutinise the differences among memes belonging to the same cycle, namely how and why diverse topics emerge, which are more or less irrelevant to the one triggering the joke/meme cycle in the first place. The cycle examined here includes Greek memes originally referring to the translation of English loanwords into Greek, thus functioning as metapragmatic commentary. They are analysed using the Discourse Theory of Humour (Tsakona, Recontextualising Humour: Rethinking the Analysis and Teaching of Humour. De Gruyter Mouton, 2020a), which focuses on the contextual and semiotic particularities of humorous discourse, thus allowing for a sociopragmatic approach to humorous discourse. The analysis brings to the surface different subcycles whose memes refer to topics that are irrelevant to loanword translation, but exhibit certain semiotic similarities to the original memes on loanword translation. It is suggested that this kind of analysis could shed more light on the factors motivating mimetic drifts (Attardo, Memes, Memeiosis, and Memetic drift: Cheryl’s Chichier She Shed. Media Linguistics/Медиалингвистика, 7(2), 146–168, 2020).