“Getting a laugh out of the Coronavirus while we still can”. Sick humor in digital story-telling on COVID-19

This article analyzes the digital storytelling about Corona in the biggest online meme community 9GAG. With an understanding of memes as a low-threshold, participatory medium of digital narration it tries to understand how the visual and narrative communication in online communities deals creatively and critically with the pandemic. By focusing on the characteristic sick humor of the internet and its polyvocal discourse, the article tries to reveal crucial fears and lines of social conflict with regards to COVID-19. The research is based on a documentation and qualitative coding of 700 memes, which were collected in the early stages of the pandemic in 2020.