Transmedial Strategies of Retextualisations of Multimodal Humorous Discourse. Turning Image-Macro Memes into Reels

This chapter investigates the strategies that are adopted for the transmedial reformulations of the humorous discourse of image-macro memes. The source versions resort to disparaging comedy, which is rooted in the stereotypical associations between Italians and the Mafia; in the connections between specific characters and rude behaviour; and in the conventional representation of some urban areas as dangerous places. The target versions are meant to be available as other viral text types in the field of online social networking, the short videos also known as reels. Twenty-two postgraduate students from the University of Salento were asked to produce the examined transmedial reformulations in the course of a workshop on the connotation of the production and rendering of humour as communicative processes. The analysis of the selected corpus of transmedial retextualisations will detail the multimodal strategies of adaptation that are expected to prompt equivalent effects on the envisaged viewers of reels, as well as to extend the original gist, as is typical of transmedial storytelling. This article will also enquire into the persistence of the culture-bound features of disparaging humour for the purpose of producing Internet-based comedy.